[To take with a grain of salt, naturally. I'm not in any capacity a medical professional. If you think you have the signs, ask a specialist.]

When people ask me how it feels to me to have ADHD, I want to say : "It's like walking in an ever changing fog covered jungle with a century old map while having to cooperate with a tiger on a leash."

-The fog represents the extend at which I can safely go. -The jungle represents the numerous ever changing obstacles that I can make me trip and fall or force me to reroute. -The century old map represents the lack of understanding, recognition of my brain. It’s also the idea that what I’ve learned so far about myself needs to be reconsidered. -The tiger on a leash represents my executive function, what makes me do things. It’s not built to be tamed and will go wherever it wants to go especially if you ask it to go somewhere else. You might get somewhere by being hard on it, but it will always come back to bite you.

But all isn’t so dark, medication can get rid of the fog, the jungle can become more hospitable with therapy, the map can be updated to a GPS with all the tools now available and while the tiger might not believe there lies water, if you befriend it, it will trust you with it (sometimes).

First and foremost: While it's often labelled as a disease, I can't stress enough how this is the result of societal pressure. Truly, it falls in the "neuro divergence" umbrella term to describe brains that fall outside the norms. They have their flaws and strengths in equal proportions to a neuro typical brain but often with a configuration that isn't optimal to answer modern society's expectations. Changing society... While it's gonna happen, in the meantime you have to adapt. That why it's important to get help.

ADHD or, Attention Deficit with or without Hyperactivity Disorder is a chronic condition. It’s how your brain is formed at birth and while it can get better over the years, it never leaves you. It’s something you learn to live with by developing an array of tactics to keep your behaviour in check. It’s necessary to function, but paired with a self deprecating mindset and no recognition, it’s often taken to unhealthy extends. It becomes mentally taxing and prevents us to do the things that relieve stress from our system. This attitude is better known as “Masking”, masking all visible signs of a condition in an attempt to fit in.

To determine if someone has ADHD, nowadays we evaluate if they struggle at high frequency/intensity on points like these (non-exhaustive list):

• Focusing on demand: -Just the act of starting something and devoting your attention to it. People with ADHD often find a billion things to do before that required task, until there’s enough urgency. Staring with a blank expression, often forgetting the very task a moment before doing it. -There’s this struggle to bring an order that doesn’t have direct consequences for disobeying, into its rightful priority. Basically, the prospect alone that something has to be done because soon you will suffer the consequences makes it feel like it’s completely unimportant. -While negative feedback works at the beginning, you build a resistance over time, you get used to disappoint, the stakes lower themselves because you ’ve been already labelled lazy, distracted, etc. that it doesn't really matter anymore. Nothing you can do will make it right anyways.
• Ignoring distractions : -Because our brain is built to wander everywhere, we make good hunters, night guard, artists, waiters, etc. But that also means we cannot restrain our nature when we must only pay attention to one thing. Everything is potentially interesting, especially the things that you’re not supposed to pay attention to. -The brain’s negative space is like the most important thing for us, we are built to look at things in ways others don’t. You might think I have all my focus on you, meanwhile the buzzing of the lights is making me skip every two words.
• Being aware of time -Time is a like the weeping angels in Doctor who for us, it was midnight last time you looked, now it’s 2:30AM and it felt like a minute... But you wish it could send you back in time like those creatures do, because you always feel like you're late. -Because time is subjective and our appreciation of it is warped, we often feel like a decade has gone by on a project you just started, feeling like everyone is losing patience even though you started a month or two ago.
• Finding your way back: -You’ll fail to remember what you were talking about, but you still have the uneasy feeling you had to say something important. It happens all the time, you had something great in mind, but it’s gone. -It can be particularly difficult at work because it makes you lose all momentum. What were you doing ? You don’t know, there are so many tabs opened suddenly, so many apps opened and all you can think about is that specific new obsession.
• Holding information on demand: -Let’s say most people can hold about ... 4 distinct information blocks. You can only have 3, one of those being constantly swapped by random thoughts and distraction, another being held by reminding you not to act weird. But let’s say currently all three are available. A teacher reads a question to you (1) and suggests three possible answers A (2), B (3) and C (1). The answer C just replaced the question in your head and now you can only remember vaguely what it was about. -There’s only so much you can manage with, on the opposite side, you’re very good at jumping from topic to topic, brainstorming is a second nature, which comes handy for problems without definite answers. -It becomes a problem when the information you managed to retain is incomplete, it can lead you to make foolish mistakes.
• Accessing information on demand: -Since your brain is constantly growing forest, you rely heavily on maps to get you around. But sometimes what’s being asked and how it looks now are not shaped the same anymore. So people might tell you about something you should know about, but it does not compute. -Because you store information with a different method, different keywords and organisation, when requested data we can’t always connect it in time to what they meant. -Travelling from point A to B in our brain isn’t too difficult, but making a jump from A to H or 19 is extremely difficult. The further the information from your starting point is, the more likely you’ll get lost before reaching that point in your brain. -This is especially frustrating because you don’t have not an appropriate hierarchy in your table of contents. The value you associate to your memories is not in proportion with where people expect your priorities to be.
• **Working towards long term goals: *-*I like to describe the feeling of being in my brain as living in a gigantic ever growing forest with a fog so dense elements in the distance are nothing but blurred silhouettes. You cannot draw any hopes or excitement on the prospect alone something lies beyond this fog, in fact you’re more likely to be worried of what lies beyond. All the small obstacles in your way align to seem like one big mass of Eldritch horror. -You start on willpower alone because you can’t draw motivation from your brain. Quickly you exhaust yourself because nothing seemed to change, since you're walking in a fog, you have no means to appreciate your progress. -Your mind will find every excuses possible to force you to cut your losses. -Because you can't appreciate the distance, you don't know when to take a break, you either take too much or too little of those. -You try to take shortcuts, often making a collection of simple tasks into a big difficult mess.
• Being patient: -You struggle to find value in anything that requires to wait to get it. This is mainly because you know your brain is gonna jump to something else soon and that you will have lost that enthusiasm. -There also this fear of wasting time, hyperactivity doesn’t necessarily manifests in the most visible ways, but you can spot it if you’re often restless and can’t stand watching a full movie you don’t know anything about. (What if it’s bad! You’ll have wasted an hour or more!)
• Working on repetitive tasks: -To cope with this, we often try to reinvent the wheel over and over. You’ll notice we stubbornly try to take a shortcut, even if it means taking more time struggling than doing things methodically.
• Coping with boredom: -You are genuinely terrified of not doing anything that is highly stimulating. It’s often either all or nothing. You’ll so something crazy like dye your hair or do absolutely nothing with your day but scrolling through twitter. -Seeking distractions all the time, never able to enjoy silence or peace. -You’re incapable to stay in place because this feeling of having to do something creeps on you.
• Pacing ourselves: -You can be so obsessive that you forget everything around you. Hyperfocusing happens when your brain refuses to leave a state of mind. Like when you should sleep but you can only think of that cool OC’s tragic backstory.
• Organising your life: -Does it feel like chaos creeps up on your all the time? A moment ago you had cleaned this room and now you cannot even see the desk underneath the mess. You’re not necessarily bad at organising, the problem is that every other symptom encourages you to procrastinate. You might be really focused on what you’re doing, you’re eating as you’re working, you leave you tools lying around because you might need them. -You struggle moving on, giving up on a thought, on the prospect something could be. So you leave everything in place, in this limbo state. The problem is that so many options end up compromising your decision make process, you enter what’s called “analysis paralysis”, meaning you’re overwhelmed by the paths ahead, scared to pick one in favour of another. What if you make the wrong decision? What if you give up on something important? -Because you’re easily distracted, the simple act of trying to put things back where they should be makes you think of all you could do with them instead. You find interest especially in things that are dismissed by others, which means your priorities will differ greatly from others.
• Self-reflection: -All these symptoms reinforce each other, making them very hard to identify or isolate since they rarely strike one at a time. On top of that because we struggle to record and access information, we can't remember and explain on demand why we behaved poorly. It's easier for us to believe that we're just bad people because everyone point you towards that conclusion.
• Being active when it’s needed: -It connects to pacing ourselves but I wanted to make a specific note on the hyperactive part. -ADHD is about the difficulty to regulate attention, which often leads to working on instinct. Depending on your personality you’ll ignore all external requests to alter your behaviour because you have little to no dialogue with your executive function. It takes a long time for us to find way to tame ourselves, it can often feel like we’re not in control. -Being hyperactive is a symptom, but so is being hypoactive or completely absent. Because it’s out of control, our executive function, responsible for the actions with take, hence the “activity”, works on impulses, positive or negative. -It’s difficult to talk to someone with ADHD about their behaviour because their agency over it is heavily limited. Receiving an external request to do something may seem like you’re only asking a simple thing, meanwhile a we’re trying to tell the animal in us that it will get something if it can listen. It’s often why people think we’re acting like animals, unhinged, jumping on table, throwing tantrums, not paying attention, etc. We all are animals at heart, but while most have domesticated cats or dogs, we’re trying to tame a tiger or a wolf. -Following on that image, taming such a wild beast requires constant and complete confidence, because it will try to find a weakness to take over.

Now all of those symptoms, people must have felt at least sometimes. As I mentioned, the frequency and intensity are what makes it ADHD.