It goes undiagnosed because we aren't hyperactive problem kids in classrooms, and if we're lucky enough to be interested in the subjects we can excel in school
If you're anything like me you've been called lazy a lot in your life when really you're just too bored by stuff to engage with it?
The fact that you say "time stops" if it's something you want to, and the fact that you describe starting a task you don't want to do as painful to engage with and you procrastinate until you find some pressure to start…
I don't think this is necessarily everyone's experience at all.
And one of the problems with inattentive ADHD is that because it feels so intrinsic to us we assume it must be much like what everyone else must feel, and we don't ever question whether it is.
Another is that the IT world is absolutely rife with AuDHD and inattentive ADHD — people who canfind the puzzle in something complex, learn the hell out of it and then dive into it with unbroken focus until it is solved tend to earn a lot of money.
(How many tech people do you know who have three or four other talents or obscure hobbies that have huge potential value but remain to them underdeveloped while amazing others — playing an instrument they taught themselves, really good photography, woodworking, etc.; this is an ADHD pattern!)
And then when they begin to burn out in any given job, they confuse the burnout with structural failures of the job (it must have got worse) or with wanting a better job, so off they go to a new one, and unless you keep in touch with them over several job changes you never see the actual pattern.
The defining questions about a diagnosis are whether this pattern has negative impacts on the rest of your life. In my case… it definitely does. But I still have not sought a formal diagnosis because at this point it's just paying to be allowed to take medication I don't really want to take.
You know, I've been diagnosed for almost a decade now and working on my ADHD with counsellors and my doctor and medication and such
It still really cuts deep to see my struggles laid out so succinctly by someone who doesn't even know me and can't possibly know my struggle. It's agony knowing this pattern is "known" and yet I went so long just bashing against it fruitlessly
When I was finally diagnosed and started seeing a counsellor about it, I described it like a ticking time bomb in my head. I find something new. A new job, a new friend, a new hobby. I throw myself into it, burn out, blow it up for some reason, get depressed for a while, find something new
It's an agonizing way to live
I tended not to get "lazy" too much because I guess I found a way to be interested (my father was good at pointing me to the fascinating bits of homework etc.). Though looking at my school reports in retrospect it is clear that I did much worse at things I did not care about, and if I think about times I was shouted at for doing a poor job, disinterest was why.
I do, however, fall down intellectual rabbit holes a lot because I need to be interested to get stuff done.
I am now in my fifties and the biggest problem is that I have fully burned out — very severely — because I endured such high levels of stress (caused by trying to freelance while having ADHD), that I ultimately became deadline-dependent to organise myself.
I've spent two years recovering and in that process I have learned that much of the typical advice (cut out caffeine) is wrong for me. Indeed cutting out caffeine left me depressed and eating worse. It is sugar I have to manage, which seems like an overoptimisation (I am quite skinny at times and I can forget to eat)
