Unmasked: Notes from a Lesbian Mom and Therapist with ADHD
No matter how many degrees I earn, there’s still a part of me that feels defective when I open my car door and a small avalanche spills out — water bottles, notebooks, receipts, an unmatched sandal. My bag is a rotating archeological dig of my life: pens, mascara, hair ties, old snacks, enlightenment half-written on a crumpled Post-it.
As Sari Solden writes in Women with Attention Deficit Disorder, “Healing begins when a woman stops trying to be who she isn’t and starts celebrating who she is.” I come back to that line often. Because even with a doctorate, even with years of meditation, yoga, therapy, and teaching, I can still feel the sting of not being “enough.” Not organized enough, not domestic enough — all the invisible expectations of “femininity” that my brain refuses to comply with.
My particular form of ADHD makes me exceptional at abstract reasoning and intellectual work. I can hyperfocus for twelve hours straight on writing — skip meals, forget to pee, lose all sense of time — and produce a dissertation, or even turn that dissertation into a full book in a matter of months. But ask me to pack a lunch that meets one of my daughter’s specific preferences and my attention scatters like confetti. I can build theories of the psyche, but I can’t find the scissors.
I used to believe that someday I would learn to organize like a “normal” person, that I’d eventually settle into some smooth, heteronormative, and neurotypical version of adulthood. Instead, I’ve learned that my mind, like my heart, is not built for conventional.
My dissertation was on queer shame — the quiet, corrosive belief that being who you are makes you unworthy of love. I studied it academically for years, tracing its psychological roots and embodied cost. But lately, I’ve been looking at another kind of shame — the shame of being a woman with extreme ADHD. It’s quieter, harder to name, and just as pervasive.
As a woman, that gap between intellect and execution can feel like failure. The world rewards intellectual achievement, but it still judges women by domestic order — the tidy home, the well-packed lunch, the Pinterest calm.
Now I’m raising eleven-year-old twins — radiant, creative, and full of their own rhythms. One has ADHD like me, and watching her mind move feels like seeing my own from the outside. The same wild creativity, the same uneven bursts of brilliance and frustration. I try to remind her (and myself) that there’s no moral hierarchy between order and chaos. Some of us just live closer to the edge of creation.
Every day, I work with people who are learning to unmask in one way or another, to show up as and for who they really are. Because after half a lifetime of trying to be smaller, less complex, and more linear, I’ve finally stopped mistaking my own authenticity for a flaw.
