My thoughts are foggy. Words swirl around my brain in an intangible mess. The second I triumphantly pin one down, the other floats away. I have to type furiously, capturing the ideas in a desperate attempt to solidify them before they are lost once more. The distant sound of my neighbor closing the door across the street seeps through my window, stealing my attention for a split second. That’s all it takes to completely derail my train of thought.

If I tell you not to think of a purple giraffe for one minute, your mind will inevitably return to the giraffe no matter your efforts. This seed, once planted in your mind, becomes impossible to not pay attention to. Now, imagine that you are reading a textbook or working on an assignment. Every single interrupting stimulus, such as a random thought, your neighbor’s whispering, a text on your phone, you name it, is a purple giraffe. They are giant, beautiful, colorful, distracting purple giraffes dancing all around your head. Of course you are going to transfer your attention to that instead. While a task is sitting directly in front of my eyes, my brain is on high alert for anything else I could give my attention to instead. It is difficult to not turn my focus towards these competing distractions.

However, this is a positive spin to this curse. Many people may not know this, but a common ability of those with ADHD is the power to hyper-focus. Once in a while, when something extremely interesting captures my attention or I am in a race against the clock, I can churn out a five-page research paper in two hours, and then be told by my professor that it was the best one he received.

Also, there is a negative side. I won’t claim to know that much about ADHD; I can speak only from experience. But what frustrates me deeply is when people deny someone’s diagnosis because what they have seen of that person does not line up neatly with society’s archetypal notions of what a person with ADHD acts like. The predominant assumption that ADHD has to include hyperactivity makes ADHD in girls difficult to identify for the average person.

Many disorders are expressed differently across the sexes, and ADHD is no exception. Since boys with ADHD present with the hyperactive, attention-grabbing phenotype more often than not, ADHD in girls tends to manifest as spaciness and forgetfulness. Of course, the girls get overlooked.

Lots of women do not receive a diagnosis until adulthood because their problems do not surface enough to be noticed. Think of it as an iceberg, with a greater percentage of the disorder hidden from sight.

I’ve seen this in real life. A male friend who was off his medication for one day suddenly was extremely talkative, entertaining and silly. Meanwhile, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell whether or not I was on medication unless you were inside my head, if I spaced out in the middle of a conversation, or if I went on a tangent about purple giraffes. But I digress…

We all function differently, and that is the beauty of humankind’s diversity. In reality, there really is no “normal” to speak of. The best policy is to appreciate everyone’s uniqueness, and not invalidate their struggles just because you cannot see them with your own eyes.