Living with mental illness is a challenge, and living with ADHD was no exception to that. As a child with ADHD, you were likely the student who teachers told parents in meetings that they were always staring out the window. Or perhaps you were a constant distraction in class to your peers because of all of your pent-up energy.

It is an illness that has an effect on you from a very young age and continues to do so into adulthood. That being said, there are some struggles that only people who have ADHD get.

1. Everything is a distraction

You know that six-page paper you need to write? Well, watching your dog lick his paws for 20 minutes is way more interesting than getting it done. How about the ticking sound of the clock on the wall that you’ve never noticed until you started to focus on a project that has to get done?

When you have ADHD, basically anything can serve as a distraction that keeps you from completing important tasks. The worst part is, a lot of the time, you’re completely aware of the fact that what you’re so focused on is just a distraction — but it doesn’t stop you from thinking about it!

2. Reading, and rereading, and rereading…

Trying to read a book when you have ADHD can be a total nightmare. After all, a page of a textbook that might take the average student five minutes to read can take someone with ADHD 45 minutes. You try really hard to stay focused on the text in front of you, but no matter what you do your eyes glaze over the words and your mind drifts off.

You may still be scanning the paragraph, but by the time you get to the end of it you realize that you don’t remember any of what you read.

Thus, that leads to the vicious cycle of reading again, and again, and again, until it sticks at least a little.

3. Kids ruined fidget toys

If you don’t know what a fidget spinner is, then you’ve probably been living under a rock. A year ago, the small toys you could spin between your fingers took the country by storm. Soon enough, kids were using them as a common toy on the playground and stores were completely sold out of them. The craze got so bad that some schools even banned them.

But a less commonly known fact are those fidget spinners, fidget cubes, and any other kind of fidget toys were originally developed to help people with attention troubles like ADHD stay focused when working on tasks. It can be hard to sit still and focus for long periods of time when you have ADHD, so the toys gave a way to release any energy while remaining focused. What was once a tool that gave relief to people struggling is now just seen as a childish plaything instead.

4. Can you say that again?

You’re talking to your boss about an important task he wants you to accomplish, or you’re listening to a friend tell you about their weekend, or you’re even just attempting to listen to a professor in a lecture hall.

However, what goes into one ear just flies out of the other for people with ADHD. Listening to conversations is a task, and it requires a lot of discipline not to get distracted by your own thoughts. That being said, there’s no feeling quite like that sinking dread you feel when a professor calls on you while you were busy thinking about the weather.

5. I’ll do it later

If people with ADHD could major in procrastination then you can bet they would be able to get a doctorate degree without any issues. Procrastination is something that gives people with ADHD a lot of stress and anxiety, because no matter how big the project or no matter how much time you’re given to work on it, you know that you’re inevitably going to put it off until the last second.

It’s easy to say to just get ahead on the work so you don’t need to deal with that last minute stress, but actually doing it when having ADHD is far more difficult than it may seem.

6. Mountains of unfinished projects

You get an idea for a piece of writing you feel incredibly passionate about and get to work on it straight away. But then, three days later, you get a different idea—so you put your previous idea aside to work on that instead. It goes on and on and on until absolutely nothing gets done.

Before you know it, you have piles of projects that you started, but never completed because you were too busy being distracted by new ideas. You desperately want to get something done, but you find it very difficult to get invested in a project you already dropped.

There are so many more struggles that people with ADHD deal with on a daily basis, but these few are certainly understandable to those who live with it.