Why Being ADHD Often Means You Are the Right Person in the Wrong Place.

Last year I had to move one of my favorite plants in my garden.

It was a beautiful bamboo bush, and it was growing brilliantly.

In fact, it was growing so well that it had to be moved.

It was expanding to dominate the other plants around it and shooting under the fence into my neighbour’s garden.

There was nothing wrong with the plant itself.

It was just in the wrong place to flourish successfully.

I have had to move other plants because they are struggling to grow where they are, perhaps because they need more sun or more shade.

In every case, the plant was doing nothing wrong, and there was nothing wrong with the plant.

It was doing its best to grow as well as it could in the place where I had put it.

The same can apply to us, especially when we are different, such as being ADHD.

There is nothing wrong with being ADHD.

It is a difference not a deficit.

But because the world is designed for neurotypical brains, we often find that we do not fit in.

We may be too much for some situations, or we may not get the support we need in others.

But in all cases, we are not the problem – we are just not well suited to that particular situation.

Perhaps you are in a job which requires constant focus for long periods without getting distracted when you want to be bouncing your ideas around.

Or maybe you have to spend a lot of time in an environment that is too noisy or too bright for you.

Maybe you struggle to organise what you need to do, so you never get the chance to show how brilliantly you can do the tasks themselves.

In all of these cases, the problem is not you, it is the situation that you are in.

There is nothing wrong with you.

But because we are a minority, our needs are frequently not met, and we may have to fight for the adjustments and the support that we need to thrive.

In fact, ADHD often brings strengths that can and should be a huge asset to both us and our employers.

We may struggle to focus at first, but then be able to hyper focus for long periods and produce a huge amount of high quality work in that time.

When we are in a space that lets us think, we can solve problems that others are struggling with because we see things differently.

Because everything interests us and our brains never sit still, we may have a seemingly endless flow of ideas, a huge asset in creative work and beyond.

But none of this matters if we are a plant in the wrong part of the garden, starved of light and water, or exposed to strong winds that we cannot withstand.

The broken world around us needs new ways of thinking from different brains, like ours.

We just need to find the right place for ourselves to grow into the beautiful, flourishing people we can and should be.