I’ve been thinking this week about competence, and particularly about how little it tells us about the amount of effort somebody is using.
There are lots of things I do well. I can stand in front of a room and teach, run a business, design learning, manage complicated projects, write, solve problems and hold quite a lot of information at once when my brain decides the information is interesting enough. From the outside, those things can make ADHD difficult to understand because we still carry a surprisingly narrow picture of what ADHD is supposed to look like.
If somebody is capable of doing complicated things, we sometimes assume the simple things must be easy too. They aren’t. One of the oddest parts of my ADHD is the enormous difference between the apparent complexity of a task and how difficult my brain finds it to begin or sustain. I can spend hours untangling a complicated practice problem and then discover I’ve been walking past an envelope for four days because opening it has somehow failed to acquire sufficient momentum.
That isn’t because the complicated work matters more or because I’m deliberately ignoring the ordinary things. Difficulty isn’t distributed according to how objectively hard something is. Interest, urgency, novelty, emotional load, sensory environment, working memory and available capacity all seem to have a vote.
What people see, therefore, is often the finished performance rather than the machinery underneath it. They see the training session rather than the preparation systems. They see the project completed rather than the whiteboards, electronic notebooks, reminders and folders holding it together. They see somebody concentrating and don’t necessarily see the fidget in my hand helping that happen. They see me coping with a busy environment without knowing how much quieter the rest of the day may need to become afterwards.
None of those things make the competence fake. That’s important, because acknowledging effort shouldn’t become another way of undermining what neurodivergent people achieve. I did the work. The systems, adjustments and strategies don’t somehow invalidate it; they explain how I made it possible.
That’s why reasonable adjustment matters so much to me. An adjustment isn’t an unfair advantage bestowed upon somebody who would otherwise be incapable. Often it’s simply removing some of the unnecessary work happening underneath the work everybody actually cares about.
Barry would probably describe it as strengthening the web rather than congratulating the spider for hanging on while it collapses. I prefer that version too.