Why I do not routinely act like a knob even though I have ADHD

Like many people with ADHD, I wasn’t diagnosed until I was a grown adult. There I was, out in the world: setting several dozen alarms in my phone to remind me to clean; leaving the supermarket without the one thing I went there for; replying to emails in the first 30 seconds or never. Every day I looked at my list of tasks and thought, yes, that seems doable. And every day I found myself knee-deep in the etymology of “binomial nomenclature”, at which I had arrived because of an urgent need to remind myself of the relationship of Richard III to Richard “Warwick the Kingmaker” Neville, via, by the way, a man called Władysław I Łokietek, who was the King of Poland from 1320 to 1333 and known as “the Elbow-high” (an epithet, like “the Kingmaker” (what would mine be? Is there a word like “inebriated” but for eating all the chocolate you had bought for the entire week? I had a brief debate on Twitter earlier about whether UK or Australian chocolate is better — the latter needs more stabilising agents (like soy lecithin, which, by the way, is reported to dampen psychological distress[1] and anxiety (both symptoms of developmental disorders like ADHD which

Oh yes, I see

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was in my late 30s. Melbourne’s Covid lockdown and remote school learning had made it clear that my children — who are…