Being gifted as a kid masked my ADHD — until it didn’t

“She can’t have ADHD — she’s not stupid.”

This was the response a family member of mine heard from one of her parents after she was diagnosed with ADHD. It echoes the words and concepts that I’ve often seen and encountered when it comes to ADHD. “People with ADHD are underperformers and underachievers.” Right? Wrong.

While I disagree with the idea that academic performance is an indicator of intelligence, it was this thought of ADHD equaling poor grades that created a blind spot for me with my own ADHD.

I did well in grade school. I was tapped for gifted programs in kindergarten, and I remained in gifted and honors programs well into college.

For years, I placed the thought of ADHD into a box that I believed I didn’t belong in. I didn’t struggle in grade school, and ADHD symptoms are typically present from childhood. This wasn’t the case for me. So, I couldn’t have ADHD. Right?

The thing about struggling is that it isn’t a “one size fits all” box. If you define struggling by “drowning,” then you’ll miss a lot of people who are still barely treading water.

There’s one memory that turned the tide for me on how I viewed my “gifted kid” status and my ADHD. I can’t remember the year, but I can remember sitting at the table in the cafeteria at lunch hastily writing an essay.

The essay was due just minutes later, and I had procrastinated — as I so often did — because I either couldn’t get myself to begin a task (a standard ADHD symptom) or forgot about the task altogether (which is — you guessed it — another symptom of ADHD).

It was this memory that unlocked many more. I remember a long-term project in high school that should have led to me failing a class (and probably would have in a school that wasn’t as small as mine). Only one person in that entire class actually completed the project in the end, so the teacher gave him extra credit and removed the assignment from our grades. A lucky break.

There was another assignment in AP Physics where we were supposed to build a working Rube Goldberg machine. Ours didn’t work because we’d thrown it together at the last minute. And fortunately, a lot of other people’s machines didn’t work either. See, even when my grades didn’t reflect how close I’d actually been to failure, I was still struggling.

When I reassessed everything — near misses, last-minute homework marathons, deadline-mode hyperfocus at the lunchroom table — I came away with a new view of my childhood. I had barely made it. And, in a lot of cases, I had been just plain lucky. (Privileged too, I imagine.)

Those lucky breaks could only carry me so far as I got older. Bigger workloads demanded that I be better at structuring my time, at dividing assignments into smaller chunks, and at essentially being someone I had never been before.

After so many years of swimming, I was finally being pulled under the waves. I was finally fitting into that box of what it truly meant to struggle. And I was doing it at a time when the impact was a lot more devastating.

In my opinion, a late ADHD diagnosis like I got (I was 30) comes with reflection and regret. It’s hard not to feel like a lot of time was lost, especially after seeing the drastic difference proper treatment makes.

I think there’s also something that happens to a lot of so-called “twice-gifted” kids — a term used to talk about those of us with ADHD who were labeled gifted as kids. It happened to me. For all that you do well, you never stop hearing about how much better you could do if you only applied yourself.

If someone had looked closer at my need to “apply myself more,” would I have been thrown a life preserver much sooner?