Two sides of a coin
I regularly think that ADHD is two sides of a coin, one side of it can show up in a socially acceptable form, the other can be deemed as negative. What do I mean by this, well, let me explain.
Take time blindness for example, if you experience this you can go two ways, you are either always early to appointments as you have a fear of being late, or you have so little idea about time you are late for everything. One of these behaviours is applauded, one is frowned on, but in reality, the person experiencing them is likely to be stressed, regardless of which side you fall on.
If you are an early bird, you are constantly on edge to ensure you aren’t late, often finding yourself unable to concentrate so you don’t forget your appointment, if you are running behind you feel shame and guilt at letting people down again. But society sees punctuality as a good thing, so the early person is not seen as having a problem with time blindness, although it also impacts them in a negative way.
Another ADHD symptom can be perfectionism. An example of this can be clutter, on one side you have a person whose house is spotless (big social thumbs up) or you have someone who has clutter everywhere and their house looks like they have been burgled (social sad face). Both of these behaviours have the same root but manifest in different ways.
The tidy person pours all their energy into maintaining their home, and gains the status of an immaculate house, but is so caught up in doing so they don’t rest enough, are constantly stressed about keeping it tidy and might miss out on doing fun things with family or friends. The clutter bug probably wants the tidy house, but the inability to maintain the perfection or not finding the perfect way to keep the house in that condition pushes them to give up and let the chaos take over. They are not quite as exhausted as the neat person, but they have guilt and shame at an untidy home and may not want people to visit because of it, so again, missing out on having people over and having fun.
I have so many examples of where one side of ADHD is socially acceptable, but it’s flip side is not. Take Hyperfocus, if the source of your focus is a work task, then it’s a big hip, hip, hurray when you ace it, you are utterly burned out by the effort, but socially you are awesome. If the focus is on gaming for 6 hours with friends to relieve your stress, people may look down at this as a waste of time when you ‘should’ be doing more productive things, but you are relaxing and filling you bucket to cope with another week ahead.
This is a paradox of ADHD, do the socially acceptable thing and you will get praise, but you could end up stressed, exhausted and burned out. Alternatively, if you be yourself and stop worrying about the ‘should’ side of life, you will be more relaxed, but neurotypical people won’t understand why you are doing that and judge you on it.
I’m not sure what the answer is to this, but I’m veering towards being myself more and more. I’d rather be more relaxed than on edge or burned out trying to meet the needs of a neurotypical society who has a different way of doing things to me. So, if you have a friend who is on the spicy side of things and you feel the need to mention how cluttered their living room is or how they spend their time, either be prepared to offer to help them clean up, or sit down and join in the game, because we don’t need to change.