I’ve been reading a lot of fiction that deals with the “wages of immortality.” You know, the whole existential malaise and weltsmerz (sp) that comes with living forever. Most fiction says that immortality would suck because humans “aren’t built for it.” I actually disagree.

Neurotypical humans aren’t built for it. Let me pause here and note that I’m speaking of neurotypicality in the mode of a social assumption of a “baseline” humanity where everyone else is deficient or deviant and must be brought back in line with the baseline “norm.”

Given this, and thinking through the work that @Wolven and @ashleyshoo have done with disability in space, it stands to reason for me (and my disability) that immortality would not be the same, would not have the same “drawbacks” given the unique ways that I experience the world.

Consider the following: the inattentiveness and time blindness of my flavor of ADHD, not to mention the dozens of simultaneous projects I have going, and the unique ways I learn, would all become less problematic without the limitations of time, which is what immortality is.

If I had enough time to accomplish tasks, if there was no external immediacy for the completion of tasks, I think I’d function a bit better. There’s the whole “how do you process a millenia of memories” question that seems to drive narratives where the immortal loses their mind.

I should note that these narratives usually result in a person becoming functionally disabled, and that this depiction of “losing oneself” via immortality is problematic for a variety of reasons, but let’s put that aside.

One of the things that is often noted is that immortal humans lose themselves because past, present, and future blur together. Because they can’t sort their memories out to keep them useful and to maintain their skills. But this also relies on a specific understanding of recall.

More specifically, I don’t think my recall works like that. I’d have to give it more thought, but my thinking (lol) is that how the memories are organized and experienced through my ADHD might mitigate some of that experience because of the ways that they are experienced.

Which is a complicated way of saying that perhaps the issues of recall that immortals in fiction experience are only issues because they, as previously neurotypical humans, did not bother to engage with humans whose whole experience is plagued with recall issues.

This is to say that I read these narratives and think to myself that all of the memory exercises, all the recall exercises I do when not using medical adaptations for my disability could remedy many of the most basic issues described by characters in these narratives.

So, I read these fictional accounts and think to myself “this seems like an average unmediated Tuesday for me,” which tracks insofar as the experiences from which narratives of immortality’s readers written, are not my own. Which is kind of the point.

Basically, we should diversify our narratives about immortality and the experience of it.