I don’t argue with people who say ADHD isn’t real. Not because I doubt my diagnosis, but because I spent the first thirty years of my life learning that erasing myself was safer than voicing my opinion.
Every few years someone takes aim at the validity of ADHD; below I share how self-trust emerged from decades of lived experience, how higher stakes forced a reckoning, and why I no longer lend my energy to re-litigating more than a century of ADHD documentation.
Blending in at all costs
As someone who grew up as the only mixed girl for miles in an all-white community in the middle of the midwest, I swallowed a lot of micro-aggressions. That wasn’t the term back then, the ‘80s. It was a lot of pretending not to hear and learning to ignore bait. It was not being invited to birthday parties and hangouts. And because neither of my parents was from the U.S., both had foreign accents; one more thing where difference felt costly.
Suffice it to say, having an unpopular, unwelcome, and unstated opinion launched my early mental framework for navigating life; it meant a fair amount of self-abandonment of said perspectives to fit in where I could because, like all little girls, tweens, and teens, I wanted friends.
Disagreement felt more dangerous than disappearing
Being accepted meant my peers needed to be comfortable with me; and that meant remaining pleasantly neutral in order to remain safely in the margins of the social landscape. Open disagreement risked being quickly dismissed and isolated, a high price to pay when options were severely limited.
So, I set out to minimize anything distinctive about me. I deeply disliked looking different, having frizzy hair, different style clothes, and strict parents. I cringed at any attention on being bilingual. I wanted to either disappear or fit in. I could do neither so I shed what I could: my identity, personality, opinions, and instincts. It didn’t feel right, but surviving girlhood appeared to call for it, and I didn’t have any evidence to the contrary.
Reliably, life has chiseled away some of my reticence around silent disagreement, otherwise held intact by a smile intended to lower the barrier to entry for pleasantries and camaraderie and, dare I say, friendship. (I said SOME). A few of my stances have changed, some have softened, some have hardened.
My early thirties is when a formal ADHD diagnosis transformed the way I had thus far interpreted my life experience. True to form, I read every single thing I could get my hands on. Then, exhausted from processing the first three decades of my life through this new and unfamiliar lens, I gave up trying to understand my ADHD in favor of survival mode as I was contending with three new realities: being newly married, the realization that my job had no viable path for professional growth, and the anticipation of being flung over the cliff of motherhood.
In my mental exhaustion, I stumbled across some compelling content about how ADHD was essentially fabricated.
I couldn’t find it now if I tried but this “hard-truth-telling” opinion was convincing. I really didn’t know what to think and, if I’m being honest, I wanted it to be true because “deficit” and “disorder” were not words I wanted to keep in my catalog of reasons why I was different from everyone else. If ADHD wasn’t ‘real’, then I could go back to being ‘normal’ to the extent that I could fit in. Or at least, tell myself I did.
First, I wanted them to be right
This was the first time anyone gave me a reason to defend my diagnosis. I didn’t. I was relieved.
If ADHD wasn’t real, I could focus on building whatever skills all the self-help books talk about. I could distance myself from the stigma of ADHD and skip the part where I dissect the previous three decades. By the time I was diagnosed, I had embraced my cultural background which, decidedly, did not entertain such notions as ADHD. Medication was for the weak-willed and incompetent, not for those with the mental fortitude to reach their potential. Denying such a diagnosis as ADHD sounded like freedom. Like whatever the professionals had “interpreted” as ADHD was just a long series of temporary setbacks and I would soon find my footing.
Looking back, wishing it away was employing a well established childhood strategy: editing myself rather than risk being different.
I don’t know the exact moment when my view on my diagnosis changed but I do know it was precipitated by a gradual slide into desperation. I finally abandoned the effort to informally un-diagnose myself with online quizzes and accepted that my inner life of struggling to start, stop, or finish was not, in fact, the norm. Not only were those things not superhuman, they were distinctly human and I could reliably do exactly none of them. I begrudgingly accepted that, if ADHD medication worked for me, by giving me my first glimpses of an organized thought process, those doctors were probably onto something.
It’s hard to argue with results
Medication helped. I didn’t get ahead with it, but I spun out less. I started more easily, I waited more patiently, I felt less scattered. As I settled into accepting ADHD as my foregone reality, I started in earnest to learn to live with it beyond simply taking medication and deluding myself into mastering a multitude of to-do lists. I sought out resources beyond the blogs and memes, and, as the mantle of motherhood settled, understanding how to live with ADHD was suddenly fueled by a deep desire to “be better” for my then-tiny daughters.
I wanted to be a better mother. Yes, this felt reasonable. Maybe even a little attainable. More attentive, less overwhelmed. More patient, less irritable. More organized, less jumbled. More on time, less rushed. More containers, fewer piles.
My fear was driven by the fact that I didn’t want my daughters to experience a mom who didn’t measure up. Who sucked at making mom friends which would limit their friendship experiences, the loneliness with which I was inextricably familiar. Learning about ADHD, I mean really understanding what it meant for me, meant I might be able to piece together a mom who sought out higher-friction experiences: going on trail walks instead of morning screens, facing down social anxiety instead of staying home, traveling and experiencing other places instead of waiting to finally be organized enough to deserve them.
Motherhood brought the cost of self-abandonment into sharp focus. The high price of anxiety, isolation, self-doubt, and depression became abundantly clear when looking back at my college years, dating, early career, and even marriage. I didn’t want my daughters to have to walk the long road of returning to themselves in their thirties. How I cultivated their childhood and nurtured their self-image became a high-stakes game of modeling how I treated myself and the efficacy with which I processed day-to-day struggles.
Then, I apologized
Now, I knew ADHD was real but I still wasn’t going to argue the point. I apologized for it instead.
ADHD was never something I had to defend. Mainly because my defense of it largely consisted of not mentioning it and apologizing profusely for whatever consequences came from forgetfulness, time blindness, and being overly sensitive.
I kept making my certainty smaller
Apologizing for my constant shortcomings became a way of justifying my existence; as long as the other person knew that I knew I had screwed up and was contrite, I could salvage the value of my presence. Sharing that I have ADHD always feels like a moot point; largely because, in the house I grew up in, I learned that why something happened mattered far less than the outcome. You are the sum of what you produce. That wiring runs deep and it manifests today by way of masking shame, embarrassment, and struggle with “everything’s fine”.
When people deny the existence of ADHD, I get what they’re getting at. Trust me. But I know too much to entertain a discussion about its validity; the decades of hollowing myself out for the benefit of those who are committed to misunderstanding a gigantic body of research now pale in comparison to the depth of my self-trust. Self-trust that I’ve cultivated in service of walking out the highest privilege of motherhood so that when I tell my daughters to trust themselves, it is not a platitude but a hard-won truth that came with a staggering price.
Now, it’s self-trust over self-erasure
I don’t defend the validity of ADHD.
Because, for me, this is about more than a manufactured—albeit compelling—distraction from the very deep, well documented, and globally accepted research. It’s about not justifying my diagnosis to someone who insists on deconstructing not only the diagnosis but, by extension, the support and resources that follow; effectively implying that the downstream consequences are worthwhile as long as they are satisfied with the semantics.
It’s one thing to pressure test the existing body of research in service of a more precise understanding, but it’s another to flatly deny it. The extremeness of the argument is what undermines it.
From that perspective, engaging in such a debate is not only unproductive, it drains precious time and energy to appease someone who does not have a stake in the outcome.
No one calls cancer research a myth, but neuroscience research is up for grabs if you’re willing to take some heat.
Strangers sensationalizing headlines to play on emotions are owed neither my lived experience, nor my consideration. In my view, they are the equivalent of tabloids in the checkout lane: there for a quick buck and not to be taken seriously.
Consensus isn’t needed to trust what I know
Self-trust is partly lived experience and partly epistemic. The “container” of ADHD explains too much of my life to be dismissed. And, separately, I trust my own ability to examine peer-reviewed evidence. Because the research is perfect? No. Never question it? Not what I said. Because there is a large enough body of evidence that it stands on its own, and I no longer need to abandon myself to fit a more palatable story.