If someone is always late, are they just rude? Or is it something else?

Time blindness has sparked a social media debate: Where is the line between a genuine condition and someone who is disorganized or just plain rude?

Even as a kid, Alice Lovatt was always getting in trouble for being late.

She was often embarrassed after letting down friends for her tardiness, and she was routinely stressed about arriving at school on time.

“I just don’t seem to have that clock that ticks by in my head,” said Lovatt, a musician and group-home worker in Liverpool, England.

It wasn’t until she was diagnosed with ADHD at 22 that she learned she was experiencing a symptom sometimes called “time blindness.”

Russell Barkley, a retired clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Massachusetts, is often credited with linking time impairment with people with ADHD or autism. In 1997, he called it “temporal myopia.”

But recently, time blindness has sparked a social media debate: Where is the line between a genuine condition and someone who is disorganized or just plain rude?

Time blindness is the inability to determine how long a task will take or conceptualize how much time has passed. It relates to executive function that occurs in the frontal lobes of the brain, and it is a well-documented characteristic of many people with ADHD, said Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist in Tampa Bay, Florida.

“Anyone can have issues with running late, just with ADHD there’s functional impairment,” said Sarkis, author of “10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD.”