Many people with ADHD are not diagnosed until adulthood.
When the diagnosis comes, it can bring relief for you. It explains so much about your experience.
But it can also elicit skepticism from others.
Especially if you never presented with the stereotype of a hyperactive 10-year-old boy.
As a child, you didn’t disrupt. You studied hard.
By the time you are diagnosed as an adult, you may have acquired a long list of achievements.
You earned advanced degrees. You achieved career success. You own a home. You have a family.
From the outside, your life looks like a neurotypical existence.
From the outside, nobody can see the ways you worked so much harder than your peers just to achieve the same things. They can’t see the hacks, the compensation strategies, the extra hours you put in to get the same results.
And that’s the problem.
The higher you perform, the less people can see the struggles that you masked so well.
The more you compensated, the less your struggle was visible. Even to yourself.
Your past achievements become the evidence against you.
When you become a master at compensating to sustain high performance, people don’t acknowledge or respect your difference.
You don’t always acknowledge your difference.
You don’t get the support you need.
You begin to believe that you can do things the “normal” way, if you just work hard enough.
The problem is that, to an extent, that can be true. But it comes at a high cost. The constant compensation leads to frequent dysregulation and burnout.
Because you’ve been successful this way in the past, it becomes the expectation. From others and from yourself.
Any struggle or challenge is chalked up to being “lazy” or “unmotivated” or “not caring.”
Failure to engage in conversation is viewed as “self-absorbed” rather than a nervous system in protection mode.
Failure to engage in perfunctory pleasantries like “good morning” is viewed as rudeness, not incapacity for small talk (especially in the morning, when you’re not yet fully online).
Failure to act with requisite speed is viewed as “heel dragging” or procrastination, instead of attuning to the pace of the nervous system.
So now it’s years later, and instead of learning how to accept your difference and give yourself what you need, you’ve absorbed the judgments and assumptions others have made about you, and the skepticism about your diagnosis.
You look at your difference as a problem to fix, a flaw that can be improved with more self-improvement or by trying harder.
You stay stuck in the same compensation patterns.
But those hacks won’t work forever. The house of cards eventually falls.
Eventually, you must learn to accept your difference and work with it.
You cannot fight yourself forever.
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