If you’ve ever had a moment where you snapped at everyone before the school runs while trying to keep your patience deeply. . .
Or maybe, you looked at the dentist cleaning five times during the morning, even fifteen minutes before and still forgot to go at 3pm…
Or perhaps, poured a glass of wine at 8 PM only to feel your emotional filter dissolve…

If you’ve ever stared at your perfectly organized calendar, but your passwords to everything are scattered throughout the pages and often you feel like you just wish you could pause time so you could catch up. . .

If the question quietly haunting you is:

“How can I be this smart, this capable… and still feel like I’m dropping threads I can’t even see?”

You’re not alone.
And you’re not broken.
And it may not be perimenopause.
It might be something else entirely — something millions of women just dealt with because they thought everyone felt this way.

So how do I know this is ADHD and not just normal Western Civilization Motherhood? My answer, you wouldn’t have googled yourself here if you thought you were just “complaining.” At some point something triggered you to say, enough! Something’s not quite right and its not peri-menopause.

The Misunderstood Side of ADHD (ehem, especially inattentive high-capacity subtype)

Most women who grew up in the ’80s, ’90s, or early 2000s have the same mental picture of ADHD:
A hyperactive boy causing constant commotion, bouncing off the walls, unable to sit still or to self-regulate.

So when a woman is not hyper…
When she can focus intently…
When she can solve impossible problems, run households, build careers, hit deadlines, hold families together…

She assumes ADHD can’t possibly apply to her.

But there’s another presentation — one that went underdiagnosed in girls and women for decades:

ADHD, Inattentive Subtype.

It does not look like hyperactivity.
It looks like brilliance with no off-switch.
Like a mind running on warp speed while the rest of the world assumes you’re “fine.”
Like a thousand browser tabs open, but other people only ever see the polished homepage.

The 3 AM Question: “What Is Wrong With Me?”

Women with inattentive ADHD ask this silently for years:

• Why can I manage everyone else’s life but not my own?
• Why do I function beautifully at work but fall apart in private?
• Why can I hyper-focus on creative projects but forget the most basic tasks?
• Why am I exhausted, overstimulated, and emotionally thin?
• Why do I now need a nap at 2:30pm every day and I’m only 46?

The truth is simple:

Inattentive ADHD hides behind competence.

It hides behind kindness, over-functioning, and “being the reliable one.”
For some, it hides behind straight-A report cards, high IQs, leadership roles, promotions, and motherhood.
It hides behind masking — the subtle, relentless performance of “I’m fine” even when you’re unraveling inside. ( I dive deeply about masking in another blog post)

My Story (One Chapter of Many)

I wasn’t diagnosed because I struggled in school or couldn’t focus. Although I was often called “lazy” or “out to lunch,” and “a daydreamer.”
I was diagnosed because I sat in a room listening to my son’s evaluation, hearing descriptions of behaviors and internal experiences…
and realizing, with a kind of electric clarity:

This is me. This has always been me.

People who don’t have ADHD often describe these patterns as overwhelm, rumination, anxiety and exhaustion, but for me from the inside it felt like boredom, resistance, duty and a general malaise for doing everyday things. I blamed myself for — the invisible exhaustion, the way I could do everything for everyone but not for myself. And then I discovered these patterns of frustration — suddenly had a name.

Not a flaw.
Not a failure.

Not a mental illness.
A neurological pattern.

One that had been quietly shaping my entire adult life.

What Inattentive ADHD Really Feels Like

It’s not chaos on the outside — it’s boredom and a low-grade restlessness on the inside. A quiet, chronic “is this really it?” Below you’ll see a list of common comments amongst this subtype of ADHD, I actually would slightly tweak some of them to be more exacting of my own experience but you’ll get the general idea and definitely identify with many of them, not all of the all the time, but most of them if you take a month-long snapshot of your life.

Clinicians will describe it like this:

• A mind that won’t turn off
• Constant mental overdrive
• Being “the responsible one,” but barely holding your own pieces together
• Feeling everything more intensely than other people seem to
• Looping and overthinking until you’re emotionally drained (this is the one I relate to the most.)
• Forgetting small things that make you feel ashamed or disorganized
• A disconnect between your capability and your capacity
• “Swiss cheese memory” — some things stick perfectly, others fall straight through

Here are some more words/phrases that ring true for late-diagnosed, high-masking, inattentive women who never felt frantic – just chronically under-stimulated and quietly desperate for something to match their horsepower:

• flat / numb / blank
• bored out of my skull
• restless in my own skin
• a low-grade electric hum
• running on a treadmill set to 7 when I needed 11
• background static
• dopamine starvation disguised as laziness
• white noise I mistook for ambition
• a constant low-level itch
• like my brain was chewing on cardboard
• emotionally homesick for a level of intensity no one else seemed to need
• perpetually waiting for the movie to start
• livat at 60% battery and assuming everyone else was too
• the sense that life was happening in the next room

t’s not a lack of discipline.
It’s not laziness.
It’s not a character flaw.

It’s your brain running without the dopamine it needs to regulate attention, emotion, and momentum.

Why Women Miss the Diagnosis for Decades

Because you’re smart.
Because you’re capable.
Because you’re kind.
Because you compensate.
Because you mask.
Because you over-function.
Because you assume the problem is you.

And the world rewards your ability to “keep it together,” even if it costs you everything behind the scenes.

ADHD in women hides so well that many don’t discover it until their 30s, 40s, 50s — often triggered by:

• Motherhood
• Career overload
• Hormonal shifts
• Grief
• Burnout
• The first time in life you can’t compensate anymore

That moment — the one that feels like falling apart — is often the beginning of clarity.

When You Finally Know the Truth

Something shifts.

The shame dissolves.
The confusion clears.
Your entire life story takes on a different — kinder — meaning.

You realize:

You weren’t failing.
You were fighting with the wrong manual.

And once you understand your brain…
once you stop blaming yourself…
once you learn how to work with your wiring instead of against it…

Life gets exponentially lighter.
Clearer.
More beautiful.
More you.

A New Beginning

If you’ve spent years feeling extraordinary and overwhelmed, brilliant and burnt out, capable and yet secretly unraveling…

If you’ve whispered the question — “When will my life begin again?”

You’re not alone. It’s the question that lives in the chest of every late diagnosed woman who finally understands why the last twently-five or forty or fifty years felt like running underwater with a smile plastered on.

The honest answer is: it begins the day you stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What does this brain actually need to fee alive again?”

For most of us its not a dramatic lightning-bolt moment.

It’s a quiet Tuesday when you:

• finally admit that “just push harder” is a lie that almost killed you
• give yourself permission to build a day that feeds the horsepower instead of starving it
• stop apologizing for needing intensity, novelty, beauty, depth and resin the exact ratios no one else seems to require
• let the boredome you felt for decades become the compass instead of the shame

Your life begins again the first time you design a single hour that feels like the volume finally got turned up where you can breath. It began for me the week I stopped calling my restlessness “laziness” and started calling it “under-stimulation.” Everything after that has just been turning the dial higher, one honest click at a time.

You’re not waiting for permission. You’re waiting for the first unapologetic yes to yourself.

Say it today, even in a whisper, “I don’t have to get it together, I just have to let it begin again.”

I’m right here when you’re ready for the next step.