ADHD Is Not a Superpower. I’m Still Proud of What My Brain Can Do
- Lee C
- 5 days ago
- 11 min read
I have always found the whole “ADHD is a superpower” thing irritating, because there is nothing particularly super about being unable to make yourself answer an email, losing hours to something you never meant to start, feeling completely overwhelmed by a task everybody else seems to find simple, or knowing exactly what you need to do while somehow still being unable to make yourself do it.
ADHD can be debilitating, and I do not think pretending otherwise helps anybody.
There are days when my brain feels sharp, curious and fast, and there are other days when basic admin feels ridiculously hard. There are times when hyperfocus helps me learn something incredibly quickly, and there are times when it steals an entire evening and leaves everything else untouched. There are moments when I am full of ideas, and there are others when the number of ideas becomes the problem because I cannot work out which one deserves my attention.
That is the reality I recognise, which is why I have always been wary of people trying to repackage ADHD as some sort of hidden gift. It is not a gift. It is not something I would describe as a superpower, and there are plenty of parts of it I would happily do without.
What I have started to understand this year, though, is that rejecting that kind of positive spin does not mean I need to ignore the things my ADHD brain is genuinely good at.
ADHD makes parts of my life harder, sometimes significantly harder, and some of the same traits have also helped me learn, create, solve problems and achieve things I am genuinely proud of. I think this is the first year I have really allowed myself to hold both of those thoughts at the same time.
For most of my life, I have been much quicker to notice the ways my brain lets me down than the ways it helps me. I notice when I am late, when I forget something, when I lose track of time, when I start something and fail to finish it, when I become overwhelmed, or when I avoid a task for days even though the task itself might take ten minutes.
I have never struggled to find evidence that ADHD causes problems.
What I have been much worse at noticing is the other evidence, because there has been plenty of that too. The things I have learned, the problems I have solved, the skills I have picked up almost by accident because something caught my attention and I could not leave it alone until I understood it.
This year has been full of that.
3D printing is probably the most obvious example, because I could easily have bought a printer, downloaded some files and left it there, but that was never going to happen. Once I started printing things, I wanted to know why they looked the way they did, why some surfaces came out beautifully and others did not, why changing one setting improved one part of a print but made another worse, why a snap fit broke, why a colour join looked odd, why a slicer showed something I did not expect, and why one model behaved differently from another even when I thought the settings were the same.
Every little problem generated another question, and before long layer height had led me into tolerances, tolerances had led into design changes, surface quality had led into ironing, colour problems had led into thinking about print order and geometry, and filament behaviour had led into moisture, temperatures and materials. I started by wanting nicer prints and ended up learning how the whole process fitted together.
Then I decided I needed to learn Fusion 360, which has tested the limits of both my patience and my vocabulary.
There have been moments where I have been convinced the software was designed specifically to make me angry. I have fought with sketches, constraints, text, meshes, menus and little green lines that seemed to exist for no reason other than to irritate me, and there have also been moments where I looked at what I was trying to do and thought it was simply beyond me.
Then I kept going.
I did not sit down and formally study CAD, because that is not really how my brain works. I found a problem I wanted to solve and learned whatever I needed in order to solve it. I wanted to change a model, so I learned how bodies and faces worked. I wanted to add my own artwork, so I learned how to bring SVGs into the design. I wanted something to print cleanly face down, so I started thinking about orientation and surface design before the model ever reached the slicer. I wanted to modify awkward geometry, so I started dealing with meshes, converting geometry, creating flat faces and changing the model instead of assuming the downloaded file had to stay as it was.
The speed of that learning has surprised me. I am still a beginner in Fusion and there is still plenty I do not understand, but I am no longer looking at it as something only “technical people” understand. I am becoming one of the technical people, which is an odd thing to realise about yourself when you have spent plenty of your life assuming certain things were simply beyond you.
The same pattern has repeated across Illustrator, sublimation, stickers, badges, patches, NFC tags, laser work, product photography, Etsy, packaging, pricing and all the other things I have somehow collected along the way. I do not learn them as separate subjects either, because my brain seems to constantly make links between one thing and another.
Something I learn in Illustrator changes the way I approach 3D design. A problem with a sticker changes the way I design the object underneath it. A graphic becomes an SVG, then becomes geometry, then becomes part of a physical product. An NFC chip becomes something I need to design around rather than something I simply stick inside a case.
That kind of thinking has been useful because I rarely seem satisfied with making something exactly the way it already exists. I want to change it, improve it, personalise it, combine it with something else or work out whether there is another way to do it, and that curiosity has helped me become much more capable than I realised I was.
It has also helped me build a small business around the things I make, although even there the ADHD traits come with both benefits and problems.
Ideas arrive constantly, and when one feels good it immediately feels like something I should make, photograph, list, package, brand and somehow turn into an entire product range before lunch. This is where the creative part of my brain needs a bit of supervision, because I have learned this year that a good idea is not automatically a good product and a product I love is not automatically something anybody wants to buy.
That has forced me to get better at the less exciting parts of running a business, because I now think much more seriously about pricing, margins, postage, product photography, search intent, demand, materials, the time something takes to make and whether it is worth the effort in the first place. I have also become more willing to ask whether something needs to exist at all, which is still difficult because my instinct is normally yes, preferably in six colours.
There has been growth in learning when to push an idea and when to leave it alone.
I used to find abandoning an idea much harder because once I had invested attention into something, dropping it felt like failure, whereas now I am getting better at treating the result as information. Sometimes the material is wrong, sometimes the process is too fiddly, sometimes the product takes too long to make and sometimes people simply do not want it. None of those things mean the idea was worthless or that I am bad at this. They mean I learned something.
That shift has been important because I think one of the biggest changes this year has been moving away from turning every problem into a judgement about myself.
When something went wrong before, my instinct was often to think I was shit at it. Now I am much more likely to ask why it is behaving the way it is. Those two thoughts are completely different, because one turns the problem into a judgement about me while the other turns it into something I can investigate.
I have become much better at asking the second question.
I have also become much more honest about how I learn. I do not respond well to ten abstract instructions thrown at me in one go, because I lose the thread, get frustrated and end up feeling more confused than when I started. If I get one clear step, do it, see the result and then move on to the next one, I learn completely differently.
I need to understand why I am doing something and I need enough feedback to know whether what I am doing is working. I also need the space to stop and question something when what I am seeing does not match what I was told to expect, which is why I have become much more willing to say when something is too much information at once, when an instruction does not make sense or when I need something explaining another way.
I used to see needing that kind of structure as evidence that I was bad at learning. Now I see it as understanding how I learn, which is a much healthier place to start from.
The same applies to consistency.
My brain is not consistent, and that used to bother me more than it does now. There are days when I feel capable of solving almost anything, and there are other days when something completely ordinary feels disproportionately difficult. I used to let that inconsistency make me question whether the capable version of me was somehow fake, because if I could do something brilliantly yesterday, why could I not make myself do it today?
I understand that better now.
Capability and consistency are not the same thing, and the fact that I struggle with something on a bad day does not erase the things I have learned or the things I have achieved. Equally, being highly productive on a good day does not mean the difficult days are imaginary.
Both are part of the same brain.
I think I spent years judging myself by the worst version of how my brain functioned, and this year I have started paying more attention to the rest of the evidence. I have learned technical software that I once thought was beyond me, turned ideas into physical products, learned how to troubleshoot machines instead of treating every problem as something I need somebody else to fix, and picked up more knowledge about manufacturing, materials, design and production than I ever expected to have.
I have built products people have bought, built a website and a small business around things I have made myself, and become much more confident in my ability to take something from a vague idea in my head to an actual object I can hold.
There has been growth in work too, because I have become more willing to trust my judgement, question processes, manage change and recognise that experience has given me knowledge worth listening to. There has also been growth in my personal life because I am better at recognising my limits, noticing where I am carrying too much, understanding what I need from relationships and being clearer about my boundaries.
I am also better at noticing when I am automatically taking responsibility for something simply because I always have, and I am more willing to question whether the way something has always been done is the way it should continue to be done.
None of this means ADHD has stopped being difficult, because it has not.
Hyperfocus still has a cost, because it is useful when it helps me learn a new piece of software or solve a design problem, but it is far less useful when I look at the clock and realise I have lost six hours to something that should never have mattered that much. Curiosity helps me understand things, but it also sends me down research holes I did not need to enter. Creativity gives me ideas, but it gives me far more ideas than I have time to execute, and persistence gets me through difficult problems while also sometimes making me waste time fighting the wrong solution because I have decided walking away would count as losing.
Even the traits I am proud of have edges.
That is exactly why I do not want to call ADHD a superpower.
A superpower sounds uncomplicated. It sounds like something you would choose, something that exists primarily to help you, and something where the benefits are supposed to outweigh the cost.
ADHD does not feel like that to me.
It has cost me time, sleep, energy and confidence, and money. It has made simple things difficult, made me angry with myself and made me feel lazy when I was not lazy, unreliable when I was trying desperately to be reliable, and incapable when the problem was often that my brain simply did not respond to the way I was trying to make it work.
I do not want to erase any of that in order to tell a nicer story, but I also do not want to keep erasing the good bits.
I am allowed to recognise that my curiosity is useful, that I am good at connecting ideas and that the intensity I bring to something when it matters to me has helped me learn things quickly and solve problems I once would have assumed were beyond me. I am allowed to be proud of the fact that when something genuinely interests me, I keep asking questions until I understand it.
None of that means I am pretending the difficult parts do not exist. It means I am giving myself a more complete picture.
The challenge now is learning how to direct the useful parts without letting them run everything. I need to know when hyperfocus is helping and when it is stealing the night, when persistence is solving a problem and when I am refusing to abandon the wrong approach, and which ideas deserve turning into projects rather than being written down and left alone.
I also need to keep reminding myself that being interested in something does not automatically make it urgent, which is harder than it sounds when my brain decides a tiny print defect has become the only meaningful problem in existence.
I am still learning all of that, and I suspect I always will be. There are dozens of unfinished projects near me while I am writing this, and I would be astonished if I did not think of another one before the end of the day.
The difference is that I am starting to look at my brain with more respect than I used to, not because ADHD is secretly wonderful and not because the difficult parts are gifts in disguise, but because I have started noticing what my brain can do as well as what it struggles to do.
For years I paid attention to every forgotten task, every missed deadline, every late arrival, every unfinished project and every moment when my brain refused to cooperate. This year I have started paying more attention to the things I have learned, the things I have made, the problems I have solved and the moments where I have surprised myself.
That feels important.
I do not need ADHD to be a superpower in order to be proud of myself, and I do not need to pretend it is easy in order to recognise that some of the traits wrapped up in it have helped me become creative, curious, persistent and capable.
I do not need to choose between saying that ADHD is disabling and saying that my brain also does some brilliant things, because both of those things are true.
After spending a lot of my life focusing on the ways my brain makes things harder, I think I am finally allowed to be proud of what it has helped me do.
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