ADHD Is Having a Moment. I Have Conflicting Feelings About That.

Everybody has a little ADHD now. Haven't you heard?

Your coworker who forgot one meeting. Your friend who's bad at texting back. The guy who can't sit through a movie without his phone. All of it, apparently, ADHD — diagnosed by a thirty-second video and a knowing nod. There's a meme for every symptom and a comment section full of omg this is literally me.

And a bunch of it makes me wince.

Not because I'm gatekeeping. Because when a real pattern of wiring gets flattened into a personality quirk, two things happen. The people who are genuinely struggling start to look like they're doing a bit. And a few people talk themselves into a label off a video, skip the actual assessment, and end up further from an answer instead of closer to one. That's not nothing. When something becomes a punchline, the truth inside it gets harder to say out loud.

So yes — the trend is a little exhausting.

But here's the part I can't wave away. When researchers asked, roughly one in four adults now suspect they might have ADHD. Among women, new diagnoses in the 23-to-49 range nearly doubled in just a couple of years. You don't get numbers like that from a fad. Fads don't run that deep, and they don't run that quiet. What you're likely looking at isn't a sudden outbreak — it's a very large group of people finally finding a word for something they've been carrying their whole lives.

I know, because I was one of them. Diagnosed late, after decades of assuming I was just the problem. And the word, when it finally arrived, wasn't an excuse. It was an explanation. There's a whole ocean between those two things.

Because the story was never really about broken brains. It's that somebody, at some point, built the scoreboard around one kind of brain — sits still, works in a straight line, peaks at 9am, delivers on a steady hum — and called everyone who couldn't a failure of character. Not a different design. A defect. And a lot of us spent years believing it, apologizing for it, white-knuckling our way through a test that was never written with our wiring in mind.

That's what the trend is actually pointing at, underneath the memes. It isn't people wanting to be special. It's people asking to be counted. Asking the definition of competent, of successful, of worthy, of grown-up — to widen enough to fit the way they're actually built.

That's not asking to lower the bar. It's asking to widen the door.

Because it's a difference, not a defect. And once you really believe that, something shifts. You stop defending it. You get to decide about it — keep what serves you, work on what doesn't — not out of shame, but because it's smart. That's a completely different starting line than the one most of us were handed.

The trend will pass, the way trends do. The need underneath it won't. That need — to be seen, understood, and included in what the world calls a life well lived — has been here the whole time. It just finally got loud enough to hear.

That's what I'm talking about tonight. Come find me if it's for you.

Conversations Unbound · Wired Differently

Mondays, 8pm ET,

live on Zoomhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/5579076744

Come if it's for you. No slides to survive, no pitch waiting at the end — just an hour of thinking out loud together about brains, worth, and where those two things got tangled up.

See you at 8.

Tara