As someone who has probably has severe ADHD, I've never felt like it's a disorder. It's just the way my brain works. It's the way it's always worked.
I was good at school, despite having a complete inability to study. I have a very successful career and just have a set of good and bad habits that work for me. I see the exact same behavior in my father and in my children. I just consider it part of my personality.
I don't understand why people are so obsessed with sticking labels on everything. It's really easy to draw a circle around any set of behaviors or attributes and give it a name.
I was given the exact same set of challenges as everybody else growing up. I was also given the freedom to solve them in my own way. And now I can solve the same set of problems as everyone else can, just in my own ways.
I don't know if my peers who received intervention faired any better. If anything, it seems like attempts of making their childhood easier through medication and special curriculums just left them blindsided by adulthood.
With support nets in place, it can feel like "superpower". Once those fall apart, it feels like "disorder".
By "support nets" I mean anything around you that's preselected to amplify your strengths rather than weaknesses. A successful person will have accrued those over many years - a job with enough novelty, profitable interests, an understanding partner, self-regulation routines, tons of "life hacks" around... but sometimes those fall apart and reveal the real difficulty. And, it turns out, you may not have as much time for rebuilding them available as an adult as you did growing up.
I was good at school, despite having a complete inability to study. I have a very successful career and just have a set of good and bad habits that work for me. I see the exact same behavior in my father and in my children. I just consider it part of my personality.
I don't understand why people are so obsessed with sticking labels on everything. It's really easy to draw a circle around any set of behaviors or attributes and give it a name.
I was given the exact same set of challenges as everybody else growing up. I was also given the freedom to solve them in my own way. And now I can solve the same set of problems as everyone else can, just in my own ways.
I don't know if my peers who received intervention faired any better. If anything, it seems like attempts of making their childhood easier through medication and special curriculums just left them blindsided by adulthood.