Growing Up With Undiagnosed ADHD: Why It Might Have Been the Best Thing

When I was a kid, I went to see a reading specialist after school.

Don't even really remember at what age this was...

But I do remember she had me read a passage from a book. I read the entire thing silently to myself.

Then she asked me what it was about.

I had nothing.

You see... It wasn't that I didn't understand the words. I understood them fine. I just wasn't in the room. While my eyes read the page, my head was in a hundred other places, bored, gone. I didn't know she'd ask, so I never stayed with it.

I still re-read things today. Same brain. It took me until I was an adult to find out what that actually was.

What's Inside

THE INSIGHT

Last week we looked at the words you say to your kid, and how the picture inside a sentence is the one they reach for.

This week is a little different. We're going to discuss labels and the stories we tell around them.

Here's my story.

Growing up, I never thought anything was wrong with me. And here's the thing... nothing was.

I did well in school, mostly. Math and science came easy. English and grammar, less so.

But hand me a language to learn, Spanish, and later Indonesian and Khmer (Cambodian) in the military, and I'd go all in.

I also waited until the last possible second to do my homework. Sometimes I finished it in the very class I was supposed to hand it in.

And I always knew I saw things a little differently. Learning. Society. The universe. Sometimes that helped me. A lot of the time, it hurt.

I could sit alone for hours, happily, because that was time to learn what I actually wanted to learn instead of what I was told I was supposed to.

None of that felt like a problem. Because it wasn't one.

And from the outside, no one could tell. By every measure, I was a well-functioning kid.

But deep down, I knew something was different.

The racing mind.

The way I couldn't lock onto certain things the way other kids seemed to.

How I'd throw myself into one thing to learn, then immediately dive deep into the next, almost like I couldn't stop.

Even my social cues were a little rough around the edges at times.

I'd reverse things, too. Letters, words, sometimes whole concepts I understood perfectly on the inside, but flipped on the way out. Someone would say, "Didn't you mean the opposite?" And I'd say, "Yeah, of course... why, what did I say?"

It was a quiet kind of different. Nothing you could name. Just a sense, always there, that I ran on a different wavelength than the room around me.

Then, years later, as an adult, I got tested. The result...

I was diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) and dyslexia.

And honestly? I feel lucky it came that late.

Here's something most people miss about ADHD. It isn't only hyperactivity. A lot of us run on hyperfocus instead, the way I did, able to lock onto one thing and lose whole afternoons to it.

My hyperactivity was on the inside.

Outside, I was calm, quiet, the "obedient" one. So no one thought to look.

Plenty of kids weren't so lucky. The ones who got the label young, they called it ADD (attention deficit disorder) back then, ADHD now, often got sorted into special classes and put on medication before anyone asked what their mind was actually built for.

I tried medication once, briefly, as an adult. I didn't like the way it made me feel, so I never took it again. I had that choice. A lot of those kids never got it.

My own diagnosis could have gone two ways.

As an explanation, finally, for why my mind works the way it does.

Or as a verdict.

For a while, I let it be the verdict. I looked at the same mind that had carried me my whole life and, for the first time, wondered if it was broken.

Then I chose a different story. The truer one.

The mind that couldn't be bothered with busywork is the same one that would disappear into something it loved for hours. The attention that wandered off during that reading test is the same one that ties together things other people keep separate. The reading that never came easy runs on the part of me that thinks in pictures, emotions and stories. Which is what I do now.

Same mind. A different meaning. And the meaning is the whole thing.

Here's what I want you to sit with.

When a kid's mind works differently, our first instinct, as schools, as parents, as a whole society, is to fit them back into the same box as everyone else. And when they don't fit the box, we reach for a label. A disorder. A name for what's supposedly off.

Why?

Some of the best minds in history supposedly struggled with school and traditional learning / social norms.

Albert Einstein was known for being disorganized, forgetful and could become deeper fixated on complex problems.

Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell both struggled with traditional schooling before focusing their restless energy into some of the most history changing inventions.

Events are neutral until someone decides what they mean. A label is just a label.

What a kid does with it depends on the story that gets told about it, first by us, then by them. So instead of forcing a different mind into the same box, what if we embraced the way it actually works. The way they actually want to learn.

Some people call the way my mind works a superpower. That's how I see it now.

I didn't always.

And the difference between those two versions of me was never the diagnosis. It was the story I decided to tell about it.

Your kid is writing that story right now. About why school is hard, why they can't sit still, why they're "the difficult one." You get to offer a different draft before the "broken" one sets.

One thing to be aware of.

This isn't "labels are bad," and it isn't "just think positive." Real struggles are real. Some kids need real support, and a diagnosis can be the door that opens it.

I'm not waving any of that away.

I'm saying the label was never the thing that would make me or break me.

The story I told myself about it was. And that part, I had a say in.

So does your kid. So do you, on their behalf.

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

Listen this week for the moment your kid tells you who they are. It hides inside small complaints. "I'm bad at reading." "I can't sit still." "I'm the dumb one." That's not a mood. That's a kid assigning a meaning, out loud.

Don't argue with it. "You're not dumb" just hands them the word again and sounds like a parent being nice. Instead, separate the trait from the worth, and give the trait a different job. "Your brain runs fast. That's why sitting still is hard, and it's the same reason you built that whole Lego city while I wasn't looking." Same trait. Different story.

Then hand them a character who has it. This is where a story does what a lecture can't. A lecture argues with the belief. A character just shows a different one. Tell them about someone whose brain works like theirs and wins because of it, not in spite of it. The kid who couldn't sit through class but could take the bike apart and rebuild it better. The one who read slow but saw the whole shape of the thing first. Let them borrow that character's meaning before they finish writing their own.

If your kid's older, skip the story and say the true thing straight, once, without making a speech of it. "That thing teachers keep calling a problem? I've watched it be your best feature." Then let it sit. Older kids reject the sales pitch and keep the seed.

Pro tip: Run it on yourself first. Most of us carry a story about our own brain that we wrote as a kid and never questioned. "I'm not a details person." "I've always been scattered." Pick one and ask whether it's actually true, or just the meaning you assigned before you had a say. Your kid learns how to talk about their own brain by listening to how you talk about yours.

PICKS

🎥 Watch: Dr. Edward Hallowell on ADHD: a Ferrari in Your Brain - one of the leading voices on ADHD, reframing the whole thing in a few minutes. Not a deficit, a powerful engine that needs the right brakes. It's the explanation I wish someone had handed me at nine.

📚 First Read: The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald D. Davis - the title alone is the reframe. The same wiring that makes reading hard comes bundled with a way of thinking, in pictures, in whole systems, that turns into a real advantage once you know how to work with it.

📚 Second Read: Fire Child, Water Child by Dr. Stephen Cowan - a pediatrician's take that treats ADHD as a temperament to understand, not a defect to medicate. It helped me see the whole thing as a kind of mind, not a disorder. The other book that changed how I look at all of this.

❤️ Quote: "Having ADHD is like having a Ferrari engine for a brain with bicycle brakes." - Dr. Edward Hallowell

CHALLENGE

This week, take one thing your kid thinks they're bad at, and hand them a different reason for it. Not a compliment. A truer explanation of how their brain actually works.

Reply and tell me the story you offered.

PAST NEWSLETTERS

Last week: The “Don't” Trap: Say the Thing You Actually Want

July 24: The As-If Frame: Talk to the Kid Who's Already There

July 17: The Cue You Didn't Know You Built: How Kids Get Anchored to a Feeling