Why ADHDers feel terminally late to our own lives

You're not too late, I promise <3

If you’re looking for more ADHD support, join the waitlist for the Dopamine Den, a community for ADHDers to learn about effective ADHD strategies and systems, connect and body double with other ADHDers, and design a life that’s aligned with your brain’s needs.

There’s this feeling a lot of ADHDers experience where we feel terminally late to our own lives. Like we missed the window to become who we’re supposed to be.

This often comes from the quiet, accumulating grief of feeling out of sync with the people around us. We might be watching our friends hit milestone after milestone while we struggle to open the mail or renew our driver’s license. Or maybe we see someone get a promotion and instantly feel shame because our inbox looks like a dumpster fire.

Or perhaps, we’re also hitting milestone after milestone, but our ADHD brain, which often minimizes our accomplishments, refuses to see it. Instead, it amplifies the few missteps we took, or how we should’ve accomplished the thing sooner, faster, better, more perfectly.

These feelings are often compounded by the way ADHD distorts our sense of time.

Time slips past us in bursts of hyperfocus or avoidance. We'll blink and lose three hours to researching medieval armor or book-binding, then spend two weeks staring at a simple email we can't bring ourselves to send.

This makes us feel like we're always living in the wrong moment, mourning time we "wasted" or panicking about time we don't have. Desperate for answers, we become archaeologists of our own failings, constantly excavating evidence of how we could have done things faster, better, and sooner.

So even when we accomplish something meaningful, we don’t celebrate it. All we see is the chaos it took to get there—the weeks of avoidance and last-minute panic, and the way it felt like moving heaven and earth to do what seems simple to everyone else.

Chasing the ghost version of ourselves

Fueled by this shame and self-criticism, our brains often create a perfectionistic ghost version of ourselves that we’re always racing to catch up to. This phantom self is five steps ahead, haunting us with messages like:

• “You’re so behind!!”

• “Why can’t you just…?”

• “Everyone else is doing it, hurry up!!”

So we end up people-pleasing and saying yes to things we don’t have the capacity for. Or working ourselves into the ground, rest be damned, to prove that we can catch up and “do it like everyone else”.

And the more we chase this ghost and its impossible standards, the more fixated we become on who we think we should be versus who we actually are: someone who's survived difficult things, figured out creative solutions, and shown up in ways that mattered.

But the ghost isn’t really the villain; it’s just our brain’s way of trying to keep up with a script we were never meant to follow.

Breaking up with the ghost

So much of this pain comes from measuring ourselves against a garbage one-size-fits-all life script that assumes everyone moves through the world at the same pace, facing the same obstacles, with the same priorities.

This made-up life script leaves no room for the parent with anxiety who’s drowning in childcare responsibilities, or the person with chronic illness who needs more recovery time. It doesn't consider grief, trauma, financial instability, mental and physical health, or the thousand other factors that make life messier and more complex than any timeline can capture.

But it’s easy to see why we do this given that the script receives constant reinforcement. From LinkedIn humble brags and Pinterest-perfect productivity set-ups to carefully curated Instagram stories that make everyone else's life look effortless, social media has turned life milestones into a competitive sport, where we're constantly measuring our chaos against everyone else's highlight reel.

And what a fucking disservice this is everyone—not just ADHDers—because it creates a culture where we’re all carrying secret shame about not being enough.

Millions of us are apologizing for having limitations, needing support, and not being lightning-fast, efficient machines. Somehow, we’re left feeling like we’re the only ones who can't keep up with a pace that was never sustainable to begin with.

Honoring your natural rhythms

There’s such relief that comes once we stop measuring ourselves against this made-up pace and start noticing the rhythm that’s naturally ours.

Your rhythm might mean taking longer to make decisions because your brain needs to process all the possibilities that others can’t see, or working in intense bursts followed by lots of recovery time rather than moving at a consistent daily pace. Maybe you learn best by jumping right in, messing up, and figuring it out mid-fall. Maybe your systems look like chaos to everyone else, but they’re what keep you tethered.

ADHDers deviate by design. We take detours that teach us essential skills. We might achieve something incredible at 45 that others did at 25, but our version comes with hard-won wisdom and a depth of understanding that the earlier version couldn't have had. Perhaps, the timing that felt "late" actually gave you something really valuable, like space to grow and heal, or a perspective you couldn't have had without the detour.

The more you’re able to accept and honor your natural rhythms without resisting, the less energy you waste on wishing you were someone else and the more energy you can put into building a life that works for you.

If you’re looking for more ADHD support, join the waitlist for the Dopamine Den, a community for ADHDers to learn about effective ADHD strategies and systems, connect and body double with other ADHDers, and design a life that’s aligned with your brain’s needs.