Every once in a while, someone criticizes me for focusing too much on ADHD’s impairments. After all, some of the world’s most successful people have ADHD! Clearly it’s all about attitude, right? People like me, who pathologize neurodiversity, are part of the problem.
Except it’s not all about attitude. If you believe ADHD makes you special, or that people with ADHD can use it to become successful, you’re speaking from a place of privilege.
When I say privilege, I mean a class, family, cultural, or racial background that gives you room to make mistakes. Privilege doesn’t always hand you success for free. I know a lot of hard-working people who benefit from privilege. But having privilege means you get the benefit of the doubt. It means people expect you to do something with your life. You have a safety net when you screw up. In other words, privilege makes hard work more likely to pay off.
Many, many people with ADHD have less privilege than I do. I feel accountable to them when I talk about the ways ADHD can affect our lives — and what we can do about it. Not everyone has the options, the support, or the wiggle room to call ADHD a gift.
ADHD & creativity: your mileage may vary
People who celebrate ADHD’s gifts often point to famous entrepreneurs, rock stars, and artists as examples. I admit, Einstein’s academic struggles do make for a great Pass It On billboard. It’s easy to assume the world needs people with ADHD.
And some people with ADHD are highly intelligent, innovative, or creative. Some use their hyperfocus to get in the zone and produce great work.
But there’s no guarantee. Anyone can have ADHD. The disorder itself doesn’t supply us with bonus creativity or intelligence.
I want to be clear about this because some creative people feel anxiety about treating ADHD. I’ve heard from a few that ADHD medication made them “less creative.” That sounds more like the wrong treatment than evidence against any treatment at all.
Since I began treating my ADHD (with a variety of strategies, not just meds) I’ve finished two books. I’ve worked on this blog for four years. Before diagnosis and treatment, I finished zero books and presided over a massive graveyard of abandoned blog projects. Letting ADHD run free does not always mean letting your creativity run free. Sometimes it means just the opposite.
Protest is privilege
Claiming ADHD as a gift often means protesting treatment, or even the ADHD label itself. At the very least, it means celebrating traits that don’t conform to society’s expectations.
The problem with non-conformity is it’s not available to everyone. To see and appreciate the benefits of your ADHD, you first need the freedom to blaze your own path outside labels and treatment.
To protest the ADHD label, you must benefit sufficiently from ADHD and outside support. You must live the kind of life that’s not about to be ruined by lack of focus, poor impulse control, and intolerance for tedium. Not everyone has access to that life.
Privilege is freedom to make mistakes
Privilege shields us from the most devastating consequences of our actions. It gives us more latitude to make mistakes. It gives us the benefit of the doubt when we fail to do our best.
People with ADHD make a lot of mistakes. Behind any successful person singing their ADHD’s praises, I’d be willing to bet there’s a pillar of support. It might be parents with resources to offer a bailout when an ADHDer loses a job. Maybe’s it’s a paid assistant at the office, or a nanny, or a spouse who shoulders practical responsibilities. Even an education, skillset, or strong interest in a lucrative field can give us an advantage.
This is not to say successful ADHD-embracers don’t work hard. But if you reap any benefits from ADHD, you should honor the people and circumstances that insulate you from the downsides.
Support and expectations can reduce ADHD fallout
I recently listened to someone spend several minutes praising her children’s school, which “doesn’t believe in medication and all that.” She told me a familiar story about how lots of kids with ADHD go on to be successful entrepreneurs.
Here’s the part she glossed over: tuition and private tutoring cost her tens of thousands of dollars per year — per kid.
Kids born into wealthy families have more tools to mitigate ADHD’s negative effects. Even if they go to public schools and don’t receive private tutoring, expectations are high. Going to college is a given. Having a job as a teenager may be encouraged, but not necessary if it’s going to cut into study time.
For young people without these resources — whose family and community may already view higher education as frivolous and uppity — academic success is neither expected nor guaranteed. These students hear a constant stream of “You won’t become anything” or “Why would you want to spend all that money on college when you could be working to support your family?” It can be nearly impossible to find the strength to keep going.
The real world doesn’t always adapt to suit us
A child living in poverty and attending an inner-city public school doesn’t need to be told his ADHD is a gift. He doesn’t need a school principal who “doesn’t believe in medication and all that.” He needs whatever support it takes to help him make healthy choices and keep up academically.
Why? Because his school isn’t going to change to suit him, and neither is the real world.
In an ideal world, maybe we could all celebrate ADHD as a gift. In the meantime, the vast majority of us have to conform to the current system. Most of us need to stay employed under the supervision of another person and do boring tasks we don’t want to do. Most of us must resist the impulse to do things that sabotage our long-term goals. And most of us are expected to be able to tell time, keep our commitments to other people, and regulate our emotional responses to common events.
As I articulate at greater length in my book Order from Chaos, these details create the fabric of a satisfying life. Without them, the average person can’t achieve the personal, social, and professional goals that make life feel worthwhile.
“Honor your ADHD gifts” can feel like a judgement
For those whose ADHD has been accommodated by others, or who find a job or school environment that’s a natural fit, it can be easy to say, “Let’s not rush to pathologize ADHD. We need ADHD! ADHD has given us so many great innovators!”
I don’t want to shoot that down. I also don’t want to ignore the large number of people who aren’t benefiting from their ADHD. Some people don’t experience it as a gift at all. They experience it as a debilitating disorder with the power to ruin careers, marriages, and lives.
For some of us, being asked to embrace our ADHD feels like being asked to embrace trauma. It feels like we should’ve figured out how to make the best of a situation that’s brought us nothing but grief.
Of course, many people do find value as they heal from trauma. I don’t begrudge anyone the right to say, “If I hadn’t experienced this traumatic event, I wouldn’t be who I am today.” But it’s insensitive to expect everyone else to do the same. We all process our experiences in our own way, on our own timeline.
Some of us feel like ADHD makes us fun, creative, and unique. And some of us can’t imagine having that luxury.
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I love all of this! This is what I was trying to say in my article but you did a better job. You named it – Privilege. And I still get annoyed when people called it a,”gift.”
Thank you for this. If I’m being honest, this post gave me a lot of trouble and I almost copped out and posted something about meal planning instead. But I’m glad we both posted about it, and that our posts come at it from slightly different angles. It’s an important perspective that needs more airtime than it gets.
Thank you. I’ve thought all of this, in parts, at one time or another but you pulled it all together so clearly! I get so frustrated when I read advice to ‘just hire or have your company hire an assistant’. My favorite recently is the ‘how to live in x city on $ a month’ that includes parents paying for insurance and student loans. Sometimes it’s all on our shoulders and we have to live in the inflexible world around us.
Oh I agree, that is ridiculous. Incidentally, I got a lot of tough love with the student loans: my parents refused to cosign on them, so I couldn’t get any. Was I ever pissed at the time because it meant transferring from the private university I so wanted to go to. Now, knowing what kind of loan payments are the norm for most people my age, I’m grateful. But student loans, that’s a whole separate rant 😉
It was so refreshing to read that. It’s so true. I work as a case manager with primarily African American homeless inner city high schoolers and a huge percentage of them have adhd, which is an interesting correlation.
I’ve found that there is limited acknowledgment and mercy from school staff for the impairment that it can cause them. I’m often surprised that they are not receiving their accommodations for their ADHD, I don’t think a lot of the teachers fully understand the toll ADHD takes, especially when you’re a homeless teen. There’s too much “tough love”. They don’t have the privilege of being considered “quirky” or simply “strong willed” like other students, because the environment they are surrounded by doesn’t expect much from them and they are easily passed off as lost causes and forgotten by their families as well as the system.
I’ve also worked in a wealthier school system where more severely impaired students are catered to like spoiled princes and can develop repugnant sense of entitlement and superiority because of their enabling family environments, and I was often forced to participate as the school submitted to their entitled demands.
It ache’s me to see such a chasm in the two experiences.
I have ADHD as well and as hard as life has been, and still is, I now see that I am so much more privileged and blessed to get treatment than many. I hope I can somehow share that privilege with them. I’m so glad you pointed this out so clearly and succinctly. I understand it so much better now. Your blog is great!
Thank you for this! I had a lot of trouble writing this post, and I’m always glad to hear that it has resonated with someone 🙂
Spot on, Jaclyn. I’m new to the blog, and, in typical fashion, have been happily going down the rabbit hole of posts – I’m one of those very late (nearing 60) diagnoses and one of those privileged humans of whom you speak. I had access to education, could pursue work in arts and higher ed, and had huge support along the way. Yes, there were failures and all that goes with ADHD, and yes I worked hard – and, especially yes, my successes were held up and supported by what Peggy McIntosh calls the invisible backpack. I can imagine writing this was a gripping challenge – with the myth of bootstrapping and meritocracy being touted more than ever, the complexity of privilege is huge to unpack. You’ve nailed it. I want to add that I’m finding so much practical (and philosophical) benefit from your take on all the ways ADHD impacts across so many spheres. Your voice and unique perceptions are needed – kudos and keep going!
Welcome! So glad the blog is resonating with you 🙂
And yes, not only the myths of bootstrapping and meritocracy, but also the pervasive calls for us to celebrate neurodiversity. Not an inherently bad sentiment, but at the same time we need to realize not everyone has the freedom to celebrate their foibles 🙃
Thank you, Jaclyn, for calling out the silly notion that having ADHD automatically means you somehow have a gift or a superpower. In my experience, at least, even in spite of the things I’ve learned and achieved in life, that’s complete horseshit. For every advantage that I’ve supposedly gained from my ADHD, it feels like there’s always been a sufficiently crippling disadvantage to counteract that. When it gets in the way, it feels like I’m forced to take the stairs to reach the 100th floor while others get to take the VIP elevator, and then I get yelled at or belittled for showing up late when I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter (no matter how freaking fast I bolted up the proverbial towering stairwell). It’s been the bane of my existence for my entire life, and the fact that I feel I can’t openly share it with others who don’t really understand it (particularly in scenarios where I feel it would appropriate to let others know what I’m dealing with) without it getting dismissed as some silly made-up pop culture fad is immensely frustrating, hurtful, and demoralizing. In spite of my many failures, especially at times when I would see others succeed and feel I also should have succeeded as well (that’s always a kick in the throat…=P), I remind myself of the few successes I’ve had and keep soldiering on nonetheless. It feels good to know I’m not alone in saying that, in many cases, ADHD can be one hell of a frustrating obstacle to get past with not many upsides.
👆🏼Yes. Many of those who call it a gift also have people or resources to insulate themselves from those “crippling disadvantages.”
Thank you for this. Our prisons and drug rehabs are full of so many people with undiagnosed and debilitating ADHD.
My partner works in a day care centre in the poorest part of town, many of the kids there have ADHD or other conditions, some diagnosed, others not. Many of them come from dysfunctional homes with generations of disadvantage. The reality is many of those kids will repeat the cycle. And of course ADHD is genetic so may explain part of their own families struggles.
I was a low income single parent after the end of my abusive marriage. My kids both graduated university this year and are living happy productive lives and I’m now on a better income but I doubt we would have got there without strong family support especially since my ADD was only diagnosed last year and I suffered a couple bouts of major depression without getting any help. I suspect both my kids have inherited ADHD too.
Agree on all counts. I can’t imagine managing multi-generational ADHD while also struggling to meet basic survival needs and swimming upstream against all our society’s biases and judgements. I’m glad you had the support you needed to get through your own tough time and have come out the other side 💛
I agree. My ADHD comes with gifts, but those gifts are not always helpful in the absence of appropriate support. I have had the “gifts” of ADHD, GAD, and ASD hiding each other for four decades, which means that I have only had support for ONE of these conditions (and that for only half that time). I have amazing gifts of creativity and the ability to hyperfocus to produce amazing work with that creativity, but the areas in which I can usually do this are marketable on a VERY limited basis, so while it may ultimately benefit society, my work doesn’t do much to keep me from being a financial burden. Also, the duration for which I can keep my excitement up for a project can present a mismatch with others working on it with me. I need to do the work early, because later I may not be able to do the work… I will be DONE with that and working on something else, and I need to finish the something else before I can get back to the final reveal of the previous project.
I have to work 4 times as hard to get half the results from any interaction with other humans, and others find my intensity intimidating, my passion frightening, and my demands unreasonable. After all, THEY can take time to do things, can do things out of order, and can get back on track if a process has been derailed. I only have a certain number of options for how to get things done, and no one knows which complication or change will be the one which causes me to simply no longer be able to do the thing.
That’s a disability. A disability which can come with gifts, particularly when adequately supported, but a definitely a disability.
I can relate to this so much. From the outside it probably looks unreasonable, how rigid I am about my way of doing things, but I only do what is necessary to keep the wheels turning.
“When I say privilege, I mean a class, family, cultural, or racial background that gives you room to make mistakes.”
Someone deleted my reddit post for calling my own ADHD a gift recently. I assumed he meant in general, you shouldn’t talk about ADHD as if it were a gift, and I was dumbfounded because I thought after struggling with it my whole life and figuring out how I can get myself on track only recently, I would have the right to call my own ADHD whatever the hell I felt like it.
But apparently it offends people to know that I am not suffering day in and day out like they are. Why am I not allowed to express pride in my success in the way that I want to? ESPECIALLY when I’m in a minority group??