Overachieving. Overstimulated. Undiagnosed for 30 Years.

Third grade. Recess. I slipped out the side door while everyone filed back into the building, hid behind the fence, and waited to see if anyone would notice I was gone.

Nobody did.

I tell that story a lot now, because for most of my life I thought it just meant I was a weird kid. “Attention-seeking” is what my mom called it. Turns out it was ADHD. I would not get the actual diagnosis for another twenty-five years, ten months after my second son was born, sitting in a neurologist’s office and finally hearing a name for something I had been managing my entire life without one.

Here is the part that never makes it into the pamphlets: ADHD in women almost never looks hyperactive. There is no bouncing off the walls. What it actually feels like is a freight train doing a hundred miles an hour, all day, every day, while you get very, very good at hiding the noise. Psychologists call it masking. I call it a decade of being told to sit down, be quiet, and stop being “too much,” until too much just became a permanent inside voice.

The exhausting part was never the distraction. It’s that nobody sees the volume. A hundred half-finished thoughts running at once, and somewhere in there you’re also supposed to remember to eat lunch. That part I deal with clinically. Dopamine doesn’t just drive motivation, it drives appetite regulation too, which is why so many of the women I coach describe forgetting meals entirely and then crashing hard at four in the afternoon. Not a discipline problem. Wiring.

I’m not going to tell you ADHD is a superpower and leave it there. That framing gets thrown around a lot, and it can feel a little hollow mid-meltdown over a kitchen you cannot seem to keep clean no matter what you do. But I will say this: the same brain that can’t sit through a staff meeting is the one that built a business, hosts a podcast, and still shows up to coach a room full of women through their own version of this. Both things are true at once. That’s the whole deal.

you were never failing at something everyone else finds easy.

You were doing something harder than they were, without the instructions, and you were doing it anyway. That changes what the work is. It stops being about trying harder. It starts being about building around the brain you actually have.

The Weekly Win

Set one alarm this week. Not “eat lunch now,” just “have you eaten today?” A question, not a command. If the answer is no, that is your cue, not a failure.

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