me, a person with really bad adhd, and barely 5'2" is easy to lose track of

i smol

and you cannot easily find me over displays

what does my 5'8" autistic wife do when she can't find me and because her social anxiety kicked in real bad with sensory overload starting?

she shouts "MARCO" in a crowded toy isle

what does my idiot self do?

take three second and scream back "POLO" without thinking about it

and hilariously enough, the two store reps that looked around like "wtf???" eventually "eeeyyyy" bc tbh i think they get it

am i embarrassed about our "marco/polo rule"? nope

it gets an automatic response out of my without me thinking about it when she loses track of me, and it's a simple way for her to get my attention when she's starting to go nonverbal

i'm not saying people should be disruptive all the time, but sometimes you just have to make a lot of noise when you have to

i’ve done marco polo to find someone before, it can be really effective

it really can! like i won't always respond to my own name when i've hyper focused on something

i can't help that sometimes, but i will always respond "polo" for whatever reason and i just don't question it anymore

i've also reached a point where i've stopped trying to do things in a way that the majority of people find "acceptable"

sometimes the way we do things is funny. my wife and i have different things going on, and it can be entertaining

and other times it can be considered disruptive

but i've reached a point where i'm done apologizing for taking up space-- i'll apologize if i genuinely disrupt people

like we surprised some people and apologized for that

but we're not apologizing for having to do things the way we have to do them anymore

i wanted to share because i think a lot of people can relate to it for a lot of different reasons and because i thought it was both funny and a way to maybe start normalizing "do things they way you need to do them within reason"

also finding funny ways to do things helps doing them

hence the marco/polo rule

it makes us laugh and usually everyone else will find it amusing too

hey it works

< adhd here

exactly