What ADHD Really Looks Like - A Part of My Story

The parts we hide, the things we don't say, and the life behind the smile.

If you met me in person, you’d most likely say that I am very energetic, but you might not think I have ADHD. People describe me as organized, creative, productive, driven, and sometimes crazy… in the good way (well, at least it’s what they told me). I've built programs and managed teams, taught thousands of students, started businesses. I have more ideas than there are hours in a lifetime. And people ask me, all the time, "How do you do it all?"

Every time they ask, part of me smiles and part of me wants to cry. Because what they're seeing is the finished puzzle. They aren't seeing the thousand pieces scattered across the floor.

For most of my life, I had no idea my brain worked differently. I just thought I wasn't trying hard enough, wasn't disciplined enough, wasn't organized enough. That I wasn't enough. When something simple for everyone else took me hours, I blamed myself. When I forgot something important, I blamed myself. When I interrupted someone, when I couldn't start a project I genuinely wanted to do, when my house became so overwhelming I couldn't look at it, when I talked too much and too fast and too passionately… I blamed myself. Looking back now, I can see it clearly: I spent decades apologizing for having a brain that nobody had ever explained to me.

Here is something a lot of people don't understand. ADHD isn't simply forgetting your keys.

🌻 Sometimes it's forgetting your keys while remembering, word for word, a conversation you had twelve years ago.

🌻 It's losing your phone in the middle of planning an entire business.

🌻 It's building a university-level course over a single weekend and then taking three weeks to answer one email.

Does any of that make sense? Not really. Does it happen? Every single day.

People tell me they wish they had my motivation, and I never quite know what to say. If only they knew how much of what looks like motivation is actually panic… deadlines, the fear of disappointing someone, the fear of letting people down, the quiet terror that somebody will finally discover I'm not as competent as they think I am. Sometimes what looks like confidence from the outside is just survival on the inside.

The hardest part of ADHD, for me, has never been the distraction. It's the contradiction. I can spend twenty straight hours on something I love without noticing I've forgotten to eat, and then spend three hours unable to begin loading the dishwasher.

Try explaining that to someone who has never lived it. You can't, because it sounds ridiculous. And if I'm honest, some days it feels ridiculous to me too.

People see the achievements. They don't see the recovery: me on the couch at the end of a day spent pretending everything was under control. They don't see the mental gymnastics it takes just to remember what I'm supposed to be doing, or the lists, the alarms, the sticky notes, the calendars, the colour coding, the whole invisible scaffolding holding my life upright.

And they don't hear the conversations replaying at two in the morning. Did I talk too much? Did I interrupt? Did I offend someone? Should I have stayed quiet? Why did I say that? Those questions don't visit for five minutes and then leave politely. Sometimes they stay for days.

"But you're so successful," people say, and I appreciate it, I really do. But success doesn't cancel struggle. You can have both at the same time. You can build a career while feeling like you're holding everything together with invisible tape. You can help hundreds of people while quietly wondering why your own brain feels impossible to manage. You can inspire someone in the morning and be completely hollowed out by the afternoon. Both things can be true at once.

Something I rarely talk about is the shame. Not shame about having ADHD, no I'm not ashamed of that. What I carry is shame for how many years I believed the lies I'd been told about myself: that I was lazy, that I lacked discipline, that I wasn't living up to my potential because I simply wasn't trying hard enough. Nobody is harder on themselves than a person who desperately wants to do something and cannot understand why they can't begin.

Executive dysfunction isn't laziness. It's wanting something with your whole heart while your brain seems to have forgotten how to open the door. If you've lived it, you know exactly what I mean.

And then there are relationships.

🤍 Have you ever loved someone so much that you'd do absolutely anything for them, and still forgotten to answer their text?

🤍 Have you forgotten the birthday of someone you adore?

🤍 Have you walked into a room to tell your partner something important and lost it halfway across the floor?

🤍 Have you ever felt guilty because your brain made it look like you didn't care, when the truth is you cared more than anyone realized?

That guilt is heavy. And it lingers.

Then there's rejection. Most people have never heard of rejection sensitivity. For me, it feels like someone gently closing a door and my brain reporting that the entire house has collapsed. One sentence. One facial expression. One message left unanswered. One piece of well-meant feedback. My logical mind can know perfectly well that everything is fine, and another part of me will still whisper that they're disappointed, that they're annoyed, that I've let them down. And suddenly I'm reviewing every interaction of the past week, hunting for evidence that I'm too much. Too emotional, too intense, too loud, too passionate, too sensitive. Too everything. And it hurts. It physically hurts.

But here's what surprises people most. ADHD isn't only about struggle. It's also about feeling… deeply, too deeply, and all the time. Wonder, curiosity, joy, compassion, excitement, empathy. When I care about something, I care with my whole heart. When I teach, I don't just want people to pass an exam; I want them to believe in themselves again. When someone tells me they finally passed, I'm probably as excited as they are. Maybe more. Because I know what it costs to carry the belief that you aren't enough.

Being diagnosed as an adult was one of the strangest experiences of my life. I wasn't relieved, at least not right away. First, I grieved. I grieved for the little girl who thought she was broken, for the teenager who couldn't understand why everything seemed harder for her than for everyone around her, for the young woman who kept trying harder and harder and never understood why "harder" was never enough. I grieved for every version of myself who believed she simply wasn't trying.

And then something beautiful happened, slowly, in small pieces. Compassion arrived. Instead of asking what was wrong with me, I started asking what my brain needed. That one question changed my life.

I still lose my keys. I still interrupt people. I still have days when my brain refuses to cooperate (like today), still overthink conversations, still start new projects before finishing the last ones, still forget why I walked into a room, still get flattened by things that look small from the outside.

ADHD didn't disappear. I just stopped believing it made me broken.

If you've read this far and you've been quietly nodding, can I tell you something? You are not lazy. You are not weak. You are not stupid. You are not failing because you don't care enough. You are not too much. And you are not alone; there are thousands of us. Doctors, teachers, parents, students, executives, artists, entrepreneurs, friends. People who smile in meetings and laugh at dinner and look like they have everything together, and who go home at night wondering why living seems so much harder for them than it appears to be for everybody else.

Maybe you've spent years hiding. Maybe you're exhausted from pretending. Maybe you've convinced yourself that nobody could possibly understand. I hope this changes that, even a little, because here is the truth I wish someone had told me a long time ago: you don't have to earn the right to be kind to yourself. You don't have to wait until the house is organized, the inbox is empty, the projects are finished, or your brain finally works the way you think it should. You deserve compassion now, exactly as you are.

So this is me. Not the polished version, not the professional version, not the one with the colour-coded calendar and the completed projects and the reassuring smile.

Just me. A woman with ADHD. A woman who spent years believing she had to become someone else before she would be enough, and who is finally learning that she never had to become anyone else at all… she only had to meet herself with the same compassion she has always given everyone else.

And to everyone quietly carrying the same invisible weight: I see you. I believe you. And I hope that one day you'll be able to say, without apologizing for it, "This is how my brain works." Because that isn't a confession. It's the beginning of freedom.

Martine 🦄 💟