The ADHD Tax

ADHD. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I know, it’s all the rage these days; it seems like everybody and their dog says they have it in one way or another. I’m not going to be the judge or jury on anyone’s actual or self diagnosis, but I’d like to share what it has meant for me and those closest to me.

There’s a common understanding in the ADHD sphere that is best summed up by the phrase: “ADHD tax”. The costs of this condition are high for those of us who have been doing our best to operate in a world built for people without it. Let me give you some examples of what this actually means:

It means having a graveyard of ideas the size of a small city and a laundry list of failed attempts to make those ideas real. It means endless guilt & shame because you can’t seem to make anything stick.

It means a resume with an absurdly long work history. It means the cost of that in real terms when potential employers rightly question your ability to stick around. It means missed deadlines and bad debt and poor credit. It means shuffling money from one account to another, constantly wondering why you just can’t get ahead.

It means one moment feeling like a god where everything makes sense in the most profound ways and the next moment wondering what the hell that even was. It means the crystallization of complex thoughts into a cohesive whole that simultaneously brings both elation and frustration because you know that the understanding might disappear tomorrow.

It means that moving through simple transitions from task to task feels like a mental car crash; flipping end over end and finally stopping long enough to move in the next direction. It means the debilitating shame you feel because you’re locked in a neurotypical world’s ‘should’s’ that you continue to fail miserably at maintaining.

It means basic life tasks never being accomplished because there is no interest or inherent urgency: payments get missed, or forgotten subscriptions quietly diminish your bank account: services or apps that were signed up for and you’ve long since moved on from after the moment of “THIS TOOL WILL DEFINITELY HELP ME” loses its lustre.

It means opening up your phone to get something done, then tapping on an unrelated notification while believing in the back of your mind that you can’t possibly forget your original intent. It means waking back up after a 20 minute deep dive and three opened apps to find out that once again, yes, you’ve forgotten why you picked up your phone in the first place.

It means retelling stories and ideas that you’ve told before like they are brand new. It means believing something with the utmost conviction, telling everybody about it and then completely forgetting that you had that conviction a month later while the people around you watch and wonder what the hell is coming next.

It means every day is like Groundhog Day where the past becomes an indiscernible fog of what once was. It means leaving a trail of amazing friendships and connections that you walked away from like they never even existed because they no longer aligned with your path and it was too goddamned hard to keep the old thread alive.

It means pushing yourself beyond your limits long before you realize that you have, and then dealing with the inevitable burnout for days afterwards.

It means always second-guessing what you’re doing, always feeling like you’re missing out on something, always wondering if you’ve made the right choice.

It means thousands of dollars spent on hobbies that you swore were going to be the ones that stuck and now every one of them is collecting dust in a forgotten closet. Or they’re sitting in your driveway like a physical manifestation of guilt that you know needs to be dealt with, but you can’t because doing so would take precious time away from whatever new thing has you in its grips.

It means desperately trying to finish something before the next thing needs doing while you watch in horror as the time slips; actively witnessing the failure of what should be the following task play out before your eyes before it even begins, helpless to prevent it from happening because you just can’t stop what you were already doing…

This is the tip of the iceberg. Our brains are like Ferrari’s with bicycle brakes. We can’t help the fact that most of us have never been taught how to install the right brakes… and we are prone to beat the shit out of ourselves for it every day.

But when the good stuff comes out, when it works for us and those around us: by god, when we set our minds to something, when the fire gets lit and holds because it means that much to us, NO ONE can hold a candle to what we do. You want multi-tasking? Hold my beer.

With that in mind, the more we understand how real and impactful this condition is, the more we can understand how to implement strategies to manage it and turn it into something that helps more than hinders.

To be clear, ADHD can’t be fixed, but we can learn how to rewrite how we operate within its framework. It’s not easy, in fact sometimes it requires a top to bottom excavation and reevaluation of all of our most tightly held belief systems. It requires us to unpack and deconstruct coping mechanisms we put in place due to the immense challenges we faced growing up in a world that didn’t ‘get’ us.

One of the main reasons I am in the coaching business is because I’ve discovered it provides the kind of framework I need to flourish within my own neurodivergence. The cherry on top is that I get to help others like me. I get to channel my hard-won knowledge and specialized tools into helping others develop strategies to mitigate its negative impacts and truly flourish within the framework of their condition.