If ADHD is Your Superpower, There’s Something Else You Need to Remember.
Let’s talk about the other parts of the superhero metaphor.
I am not a fan of the “ADHD is your superpower!” trope.
I wrote a whole article about it, and it resonated with more than a few people:
However, I’m not going to yuck somebody’s yum, especially if the yuck is being told your whole life that you could have done better if you’d just tried harder; when the truth is that the people and culture who shaped your environment were the ones who failed to understand the needs of your brain.
That’s not me saying it’s their fault; it’s nobody’s fault, there are simply contributing factors. But telling someone who needs glasses that they should just look harder when you could have large-print books available the whole time? Not cool.
The superpower metaphor for ADHD has resonance.
There are a few parallel allegories that come to mind when thinking of late-diagnosed ADHD and superhero stories:
Often they don’t realize they have the superpower — it “manifests”, often later in life (The Tale of the Ugly Duckling is a superpower story for the ducks), when someone finally explains that “there’s nothing actually wrong with you.”
Even after they realize they have the power, there is difficulty managing it. This is often glossed over in training montages or the appearance of a magical mentor/book/etc, but occasionally the journey from raw unskilled power to mastery is the entire subject of the story (or, in my case, the subject of a substack, a podcast, and many, many other articles).
The people responsible for the hero’s care either protected them or actively made their life worse. You all know the dialogue: ”Why didn’t you tell me [about this thing that makes me different from everyone else]?” “I was only trying to protect you [because I know that being different means getting hurt].”
Some things get left out of the “superpower” narrative.
Fine, I can grant you: I like my brain. I have more ideas than I ever could do things with, I have Odysseus-level problem-solving skills, and I can learn, teach, and innovate on just about any subject that catches my fancy in a ridiculously short time (probably because when I’m interested in something, time stops existing and I’m simply in a quantum state of information sponge until my bladder forces me to take a break).
But if we’re going with the superpower metaphor, we have to remember what comes with it: the manifestation of the hero’s power often instigates the manifestation of their nemesis.
It’s one of the main themes in post-modern comics: by declaring and claiming their power, superheroes draw to themselves (and those around them) the forces that want to deny or destroy that power. The things that the well-meaning parents/teachers/caretakers were trying to protect them from end up being quite real.
It may be as simple as a friend or family member denying that ADHD is even a thing because “everybody is a little ADHD” — and when you try to tell them otherwise, it ends up as a fight.
It may be the boss who suddenly decides to fire you after you tell someone at your work that you have ADHD. They can’t legally fire you for your brain, but in any right-to-work state, it is easy to come up with a reason to fire you — or to take the passive-aggressive tactic of making your job so miserable that you choose to leave.
Before I realized I had ADHD, I managed at least one person who had it to a debilitating degree. I’m happy to say that I didn’t do either of those things, and tried very hard to find accommodations for them — but I also know that as the Boss who was responsible for Making Sure Things Got Done, it was a frustrating experience for both me and the employee.
And then there’s the big principle of every superhero story:
Every Superman has their kryptonite.
Remember that for every superpower, there is some kind of tragic flaw. Achilles had his heel. Jessica Jones had the Purple Man. Put Misty Knight against any supervillain with a big magnet, she’s gonna run into trouble.
The ADHD superpower is no different. Except, since this is real life, not a comic book, it’s not just one thing.
But just like a comic book, you’ll probably discover it at the worst possible moment. Your tendency to be late will seem just like a quirky little character flaw — until you misunderestimate the time it’s going to take to get to the Really Important Interview, or worse, entirely miss it because you were busy doing something interesting.
You may seem somewhat forgetful, understandable in an entrepreneur with four kids, until your responsibility to pick up your youngest daughter from the mall completely escapes your brain, leaving her sitting crying on the curb at dusk in an empty parking lot.
Ahem. Hypothetically, of course. I would never have something like that happen in real —
Oh. Oops. For those who are TB/DR (too busy, didn’t read) it’s the story of how my brain convinced me that my car had been stolen, not misplaced, in the middle of one of the coldest nights in Wisconsin while my sister with a broken foot and nephew waited for me to give them a ride.
It wasn’t stolen. I had just forgotten where it was. And…well, you’ll have to read the article to find out the rest.
You need to find out what your kryptonite is.
After two and a half years of working on it, I think I’m close.
For me, it’s stress in transitions.
If I hurry out of the house to get to an appointment, I’ll forget something. If I am feeling sad, I’ll make the impulse decision to eat something sweet. If money is feeling tight at the end of a pay period, I’ll either make an impulse buy on credit, or they’ll compound: I might not make that impulse buy — and decide that bit of adulting means I get a donut, (see “feeling sad”). Or I’ll just deny both of those things and as a result get resentful of my past self for not doing a better job of being fiscally responsible — and since my past self isn’t around, take it out on the people who are, by being grumpy.
I’m supposed to now give you my solution. But that’s just it: there is no defense against kryptonite. If it’s there, Superman is affected by it — so the only thing he can do is avoid it. And avoiding stress in transitions is a very hard thing to cultivate for a former hustle-culture recovering workaholic.
But that’s my problem. If you’re reading this, and you have ADHD, you might have the same problem, but you might have something different. Maybe it’s social media. Maybe it’s time agnosia (aka “time blindness” without appropriating another category of disability).
The thing to remember is: focus on the cause, not the symptoms. I wasted a lot of time trying to find the perfect routine for leaving the house. Or the way to keep myself from eating a donut. Or the “correct” way to budget so that I wouldn’t end up on fumes at the end of the day.
None of that was going to help. All it would do is move the whole process to another transition point in my day, and manifest there.
I can’t actually stop transitions from happening, nor would I want to. What I can do is pay the ADHD tax of taking more time than neurotypical people would need to manage the transitions.
For example: I have to pick up my partner from the airport this afternoon. I have everything ready to go — there’s nothing really to pack. But my alarm is set for twenty minutes before I have to leave — at which time I will check again that everything is ready to go, and likely leave a few minutes early.
In a previous mindset, I would have worked on something — one more email, one more meeting scheduled, one more spreadsheet checked — until the very last minute, and then grabbed my stuff and gone out the door.
Instead, I move slowly, deliberately, and you know what? It’s still possible I’ll do something like take the wrong set of keys. I know that because that’s what happened yesterday — when I was trying the same strategy.
But I’m new to this. It’s ok to not be terribly good at it yet. The times I have succeeded in not rushing through transitions are proving that I’m on the right track.
So, what’s your kryptonite for your ADHD superpower? I would seriously love to know, and I’d love to know how you manage to avoid it (when you can).
Look! Up in my brain! Is it a squirrel? Is it a — oh! Hey! I just had an idea!”
Yep. It’s ADHD. Welcome to your superpower.