what does ADHD masking look like in adults?
for years, I ate the exact same lunch at work. every single day. rice and tinned salmon.
people called me healthy. organised. so disciplined. privately, I thought I was just lazy ... too lazy to come up with anything else.
it took an ADHD diagnosis to see what I was actually doing. I was cutting down how many decisions I had to make, so I didn't burn through my energy before the workday had properly started.
that lunch was a mask. a quiet one, that looked a lot like having it all together. and that's exactly why ADHD masking is so easy to miss.
masking isn't only an autism thing
most of what gets written about masking is about autism. but ADHDers mask too ... it just tends to look different.
autistic masking often centres on social performance. ADHD masking often centres on hiding the gap between what we're expected to manage and what our brain can easily do. a lot of us are both, and the two blur together.
what it can look like
over-preparing. lists for the lists. rehearsing what we'll say in the meeting so we don't lose the thread halfway through.
overcompensating on time. early to everything, because being late once felt so shameful we built a whole system to never risk it.
hiding the fidget. jiggling a foot under the table instead of getting up. picking at a nail instead of moving.
laughing it off first. "classic me!" said fast, so the forgetting becomes a joke instead of a problem.
perfectionism as a safety net. if we check everything four times, nobody finds the mistake our attention slid past.
working twice as hard in private. catching up late at night on what looked easy for everyone else during the day.
the mask isn't looking calm. it's the effort it takes to look calm.
why it gets missed
because it works. people see the output, not the cost.
the report gets handed in. the birthday gets remembered (with four reminders). so the struggle stays invisible, sometimes even to us.
it's one of the reasons so many of us aren't diagnosed until adulthood. we were too "capable" to look like we needed help.
the cost
masking ADHD takes constant monitoring. checking we haven't forgotten, haven't interrupted, haven't drifted. that monitoring uses the same limited energy we need for everything else.
which is why so many of us look fine all day, then fall apart at home. it isn't laziness at 7pm. it's an empty tank.
where to start
not by dropping every system at once. some of those systems genuinely help.
start by noticing which ones are for us ... and which ones only exist so nobody sees us struggle. the second kind is where the mask lives.
before you go ... reclaiming our identity is a 22-page interactive workbook for working out which parts of us are ours, and which ones we built to stay safe.
written by Laura ... a speech pathologist and late-diagnosed ADHDer. read my story →