A quiet disaster in four caffeinated acts
First, the coffee. Then the performance. It begins not with a task, but with the appearance of tasking. Open the laptop. Frown slightly. Click around. Stare with vague intensity at an Excel sheet you will not touch. The mouse becomes a talisman — proof that you are moving, navigating, executing.
This is what ADHD looks like when trained to mimic capitalism: a body at a desk, a brain in freefall.
You learn to perform focus the way some people perform grief at a distant uncle’s funeral. Enough to be believable. Not enough to be investigated.
What most employers call “working independently” is actually “failing in silence.” You forget things — not because you don’t care, but because your short-term memory has all the grip of a damp envelope. You start thirty things. You finish one. The other twenty-nine are suspended in the cloud like little corporate ghosts.
But no one sees the wreckage. They see your calendar — full. Your email — polite. Your face in the Teams meeting — smiling. You’ve mastered the craft of appearing to function while mentally dissolving like a bath bomb in fluorescent light.
Productivity is the religion of the office. Attention is its currency. But ADHD comes with a bankrupt wallet. Not because you’re lazy, but because the world insists you pay in a currency you never received.
Everyone else seems to have an internal project manager. You have… several radio stations, a browser with forty open tabs, and a limbic system that overreacts to the sound of Outlook notifications.
You do not “prioritize.” You spiral. You do not “delegate.” You disappear. You do not “time block.” You time bleed.
And yet — you care. More than most. You stay late to make up for what you forgot. You apologize too much. You rehearse every Slack message to sound both competent and nonchalant, like someone who definitely didn’t just take a 45-minute dopamine walk to the supermarket and forget what they went for.
Because if you don’t sound capable, you might sound crazy. And crazy doesn’t get promoted.
The corporate response to ADHD is the same as its response to Pride Month: decorate the symptoms, ignore the causes.
They’ll invite a speaker. Update the policy document. Add a slide about neurodiversity to the onboarding deck. Then return to a workload structure designed by someone who thinks time blindness is a moral failing and executive dysfunction is a lack of hydration.
You ask for flexibility. They give you a mindfulness app. You ask for clearer instructions. They suggest a color-coded planner. You ask for support. They invite you to a lunch & learn about “resilience.”
Resilience, here, means pretending that a brain wired for survival is “broken” because it cannot thrive under deadlines that contradict every natural rhythm it has.
But you play along. Because saying “I dissociated for three hours and now I’m panicking” is not on the list of acceptable workplace disclosures.
So you call it a rough morning. You joke about being chaotic. And you pray no one notices that you are answering emails from two weeks ago at 2:17 AM.
Eventually, you start fantasizing about a different kind of work. Not easier. Not softer. Just quieter. One where your mind doesn’t have to be lassoed into submission every morning.
You dream of a world where productivity is not measured in bullet points, but in moments of unforced clarity. Where slowness is not penalized. Where pausing is not a pathology.
But until then, you keep performing. Because the performance pays the rent.
And besides, you’re good at it now. So good, in fact, that no one suspects a thing.
You laugh in meetings. You hit “send” on reports you can’t remember writing. You smile with the eyes of someone who has rehearsed eye contact like a dance.
And inside, somewhere between the 38th tab and the 4th reheat of your coffee, you vanish again.
But hey — at least your webcam is on.
And that, they say, is commitment.