The Very Real, Totally Hidden, Costs of Being an Adult With ADHD

I have ADHD. I’m not embarrassed or ashamed by it (aside from perhaps the fact that I didn’t get diagnosed with it until I was 36 years old. Part of the reason my ADHD diagnosis wasn’t caught earlier is that I was successful, both at school and afterward, which goes against the stereotypical case. ADHD has never prevented me from creating clean, compelling content from my clients. I didn’t forget deadlines or sit restless in meetings. As a professional, if anything, my ADHD has made me better at my work—and if you’ve ever been a client of mine, you probably agree.

But I’m beginning to realize all the ways in which the world at large is not only not optimized for the way ADHD brains work, but might actively work against us:

As a kid, I loved nothing more than reading, which also turned into a love of writing—two things I can still hyperfocus on for an impressively long period of time. Lucky for me, most subjects in school involved one or both of those skills, so I was doing what I liked and I was therefore usually able to stick to the task at hand, or even work ahead. But in high school, math and science classes got more complicated and they ceased to hold my interest because I couldn’t just rely on my love of reading or my talent for writing, and my grades in those subjects began to slip. I still graduated with honors, through sheer force of will and some very patient tutors.

Read more here.