The Scene

Last night at the Oscars, Diane Keaton was honored in the In Memoriam segment.

I met her once, when I worked at Vogue. She was exactly what you’d hope. Presence. Poise. The real thing.

So today I want to talk about a scene from one of her films that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Something’s Gotta Give — and if you haven’t seen it, first of all, go watch it, it’s a masterclass in a certain kind of woman finally being seen.

There’s a moment where her character Erica is talking to a younger woman named Marin, played by Amanda Peet…

Marin is waiting. Waiting for the right man. Waiting for the perfect moment. Waiting for everything to line up before she lets herself fall in love. And Erica, who has spent most of the movie waiting for Jack Nicholson’s character to figure out whether he deserves her, looks at this young, beautiful, vibrant woman and essentially says: What are you waiting for?

I think about that scene a lot. Because I’ve been Marin. And I’d bet most of you listening have been Marin too.

Waiting for the validation. The approval. The green light from someone — a boss, a partner, a parent, a peer — that says: yes, you’re allowed now. You’re enough now. You can go ahead and live your life now.

I’m here to tell you: that call is not coming.

And here’s the thing — the absolutely counterintuitive, slightly uncomfortable, deeply liberating thing — that is the best news I could possibly give you.

What the Research Actually Says About How Much People Think About You

Before we go any further, I want to hit you with something from social psychology research that stopped me cold when I first encountered it.

Studies on the ‘spotlight effect’ consistently show that people overestimate how much others notice and think about them — by a factor of roughly two to one.

Researchers Tom Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky at Cornell ran a series of experiments where participants were asked to walk into a room wearing an embarrassing t-shirt. They were certain everyone noticed. When they surveyed the room afterward? Half as many people had registered it as the wearer expected.

We are not the center of other people’s universes. We feel like we are. We are absolutely convinced we are. But we’re not.

And for those of us with ADHD — who are, as I’ll get to in a moment, running an almost constant background program of monitoring other people’s emotional states — this statistic is both a gut punch and a permission slip.

Because all that energy you’re spending managing other people’s perceptions of you? They’re largely not registering it.

Which means you can stop. Or at least — you can start to.

What’s Actually Happening in the ADHD Brain

First, let’s dismantle the myth.

There’s a persistent narrative about ADHD — that we’re self-absorbed. Scattered. Too in our own heads to really pay attention to the people around us. I want to challenge that directly, because in my experience, and in emerging research, the opposite is often true.

Many people with ADHD are running an extraordinary background program. Not about themselves. About everyone else.

Are they okay? Did I say something that landed wrong? Is my boss frustrated today — not with me necessarily, but is something off? My college roommate from fifteen years ago posted something vague — is she alright? My ex is going through something, I can feel it.

This is not anxiety in the conventional sense, though it can look like it. And it’s not the social anxiety of “what do they think of ME?” — though that’s part of it too. It’s something deeper and more altruistic and frankly more exhausting: a genuine, almost compulsive care for other people’s wellbeing.

And then — and this is the heartbreaking part — many of us don’t act on it. We don’t reach out. We don’t check in. Because we don’t want to disrupt their equilibrium. We don’t want to be a burden. We don’t want to make it weird.

So we’re sitting there, caring deeply, in silence. While they have absolutely no idea.

The science behind this: Hyperempathy

Researchers are increasingly identifying hyperempathy as a significant trait in ADHD. This is different from the emotional dysregulation you may have read about — this is an acute sensitivity to the emotional states of people around you, sometimes before those people are even consciously aware of their own emotional states.

You walk into a room and you read it. Immediately. Who’s tense. Who’s checked out. Who’s performing okay but isn’t okay. It’s almost involuntary.

Dr. Ned Hallowell, one of the foremost ADHD researchers and clinicians, has spoken extensively about this dimension — the profound empathy that many ADHD individuals experience, which often goes entirely unacknowledged because the dominant cultural narrative is focused on deficits.

And then there’s RSD.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. If you haven’t heard this term, sit with it for a moment, because it may explain more of your inner life than almost anything else.

Dr. William Dodson, who has done landmark work in this area, estimates that RSD affects the vast majority of people with ADHD. It’s a neurological phenomenon — not a personality flaw, not a character weakness — in which the fear of rejection, criticism, or disapproval is felt with an intensity that is physiologically disproportionate to the situation.

Dodson describes RSD as ‘an extreme emotional sensitivity triggered by the perception of rejection, criticism, or failure’ — and crucially, it doesn’t have to be real rejection. The anticipation alone is enough.

So think about what this means. You’re someone who genuinely cares about other people — deeply, constantly, often invisibly. And you’re also someone whose nervous system is wired to feel the potential of rejection more acutely than most people feel actual rejection.

No wonder you’re waiting. No wonder you’re watching. No wonder the idea of acting without external validation feels like stepping off a cliff.

But here’s what I want you to understand: this is neurological. This is not who you are at your core. This is a feature of how your brain processes social information. And knowing that changes everything — because you can work with your neurology instead of being at its mercy.

The caring is happening in a vacuum.

Here’s the cruel irony I want to name explicitly: you care so much about other people, and they’re largely thinking about themselves. Not because they’re bad people. Because that’s what most human brains do. The spotlight effect is real. People are the stars of their own stories.

Which means you are pouring enormous emotional energy into a ledger where the other side is largely blank. You’re doing all the caring. You’re doing all the monitoring. You’re holding the entire rope. And nobody is holding the other end.

This is why building your own foundation isn’t selfish. It’s survival. It’s sanity. It’s the thing that lets you actually show up for other people in a way that’s sustainable.

Don’t Make It Easy for Them to Categorize You

I want to take a slight turn here, because I think this connects to something bigger that’s happening in the culture right now.

We are living in a moment of intense categorical pressure. Pick a side. Declare your allegiance. Are you this or that? You must be one or the other.

And I want to say to you — especially if you’re a high-achieving woman with ADHD who has spent her entire life being told she doesn’t fit the categories people have prepared for her — you don’t have to make it easy for them.

Don’t join a side. Be your own side.

Here’s why I think this is neurologically native to us: ADHD brains are, at their best, genuine systems thinkers. We see complexity where others see binaries. We see the exception, the edge case, the thing that doesn’t fit. We make connections across domains that other people don’t see because other people aren’t wired to look that way.

The refusal to categorize yourself isn’t avoidance. It isn’t fence-sitting. It’s intellectual honesty. It’s the anomaly being true to its nature.

And anomalies are what make the difference. They’re what move systems. They’re what change things. They’re what everyone looks back on later and says — how did we not see that?

You are the anomaly. Trust it.

Your Personal Principles Are Your Permission Slip

So if external validation isn’t coming — and we’ve established it isn’t, and we’ve established the science of why you’ve been waiting for it — what do you do instead?

You build your foundation.

By which I mean: you get very clear on your principles. Your actual values. The things you believe to be true about how to live, how to work, how to treat people, what matters. Not the values you’ve absorbed from other people. Not the values that are convenient or socially acceptable. Yours.

This matters for a very practical reason: once you have a foundation, you have something to make decisions against. You don’t have to re-evaluate from scratch every time something happens. You consult your foundation. You know what you stand for. The decision follows.

For ADHD brains in particular — and there’s a reason so many of us end up as entrepreneurs, which I’ll talk about more in a future episode — this is essential. Because our executive function sometimes fails us on the small procedural stuff. But our values? Our drive? Our sense of what matters and what doesn’t? That can be rock solid if we develop it consciously.

And here’s the other thing I want to say about letting yourself down: it’s actually the most workable failure available to you.

When you let someone else down, you’re at their mercy. Their forgiveness. Their timeline. Their capacity to move on. You have no control over any of that.

When you let yourself down? You’re in the room. You can have the conversation. You can make amends to yourself. You can set a new goal. You can measure progress. You can change.

The best and the worst person to disappoint is yourself. Because you’re the one person you can actually do something about.

What Are You Waiting For?

I want to come back to Marin. And to Erica. And to the question that sits underneath that scene.

What are you waiting for?

Not rhetorically. Actually. Specifically. If you could answer that question honestly right now — what is the thing you are waiting for before you let yourself go?

Because I’d guess it’s some version of permission. Validation. The right moment. The perfect conditions. The right person telling you that you’re ready.

And I’m telling you — as someone who waited a very long time, who got diagnosed at fifty, who spent decades being extraordinarily capable and quietly bewildered by her own life — nobody is going to give that to you.

Not because you don’t deserve it. You do. But because that’s not actually how it works. The validation you’re waiting for doesn’t live outside you. It never did.

Build your foundation. Know your principles. Trust your drive — because the drive to make a difference that I see in nearly every ADHD person I’ve ever spoken to is not random. It’s not a coping mechanism. It’s something real. Something that was put there for a reason.

Nobody cares as much as you think they do. And that’s not a sad thing. That’s a free thing.

You Can Here This Whole Blog Post in my Latest Podcast Episode Which you Can Listen to it here:

So Where do we go from here?

This is why I developed the CORE Method. Clarity. Ownership. Regulation. Edge. – A method for working with your ADHD diagnosis not against it. Stay tuned the course is coming soon. In the meantime please sign up for my weekly Newsletter where I introduce CORE Explore Workshops, Courses and Lifestyle skills that you can use every day. We’re in this together.

XO, Libby