One of the analogies i like to give my clients with ADHD, or ADHD symptoms, is that you are a high-performance vehicle stuck in a suburb.
Everyone around you is a Toyota Corolla.
You can pour sugar into their gas tank and they’ll still run (they’ll just smell like caramel for a week).
You’ll throw them off a cliff and they’ll reassemble themselves at the bottom.
But they are also boring.
You, meanwhile, are a Bughatti Chiron.
You are painted bright blue, need a very specific type of gasoline, and have a 4″ clearance from the ground, which means you’re constantly scraping over potholes and speed bumps.
Trying to get to work in the sports car that you are makes no sense.
Judging your capabilities based around your inability to drive to an office makes no sense, either.
If you want to shine, you need to go to a very specific racetrack, or a very specific highway, where you’ll blow the competition out of the water, leaving them in a trail of dust, or, just as likely, glitter.
I’m not saying it’s easy, or it’s fair.
You will probably always need more maintenance work, have a mechanic on speed-dial, and despite all this you still might have more frequent breakdowns (this one isn’t even a metaphor).
It can be really annoying to have 95% of the world feel totally incompatible to your needs and preferences.
It’s frustrating to have to constantly be figuring out what that remaining 5% even looks like.
It’s not fair that you need to drive through a helluva lot of potholes and back streets before you hit that magical highway.
It’s not fair that no one taught you to handle this precision-crafted piece of machinery, and worse, probably judged you along the way.
I don’t have an answer to that.
By my invitation to you is to realize that when things don’t work out, it’s because you’re different, not worse.
And that when you do hit your stride, you’ll find yourself zooming along at 200 miles an hour, in a way that feels effortless, in a way that leaves everyone else’s jaw on the ground.
