Asklemmy

I'll begin to get a conversation going

Note: ADHD is very real and very hard on people who have it.

I know two people with diagnosed ADHD, and as with many disorders, it is common that people expect others without it to be completely lacking, or, this case, have only mild experiences of a similar kind.

Regular people absolutely get most of the common experiences of an ADHD individual: they can quickly get overwhelmed, struggle with motivation to do some basic everyday things and then get hyperfocused on something and forget the rest completely, can have impulses they don't control. They, too, manage to develop a lot of tricks for maintaining motivation and going through the everyday issues.

What matters for diagnosis is the severity of these events and how often they occur. With ADHD, all those events happen so often that it gets impossible or strikingly hard to pursue what you need without using techniques/medication to manage your behavior.

This is why many regular people may not understand or not accept ADHD as something valid and why it may not help to list to them the kind of limitations you have - they have all the same experiences, it's just that they are less common and severe, and so they manage to force through them while you may get overwhelmed.

A more helpful approach could probably be to come from the fact it's a real diagnosis, and outlining just what it means exactly to have ADHD, to talk about the severity of the episodes and how they are not only experienced by you personally, but also described in the medical literature. This still probably won't change the mind of some bigots, but it might help other people to understand it better.

Hope there is some insight in here.