In the past three weeks, at least four people have asked me if I’ve listened to the song “ADHD” by Paris Hilton. The single from her new album is a heavily auto-tuned account of her struggles with the disorder she was diagnosed with as an adult, including racing thoughts, inability to sleep, and feeling like her brain is on fire. The music video features Hilton in space buns and a gauzy dress gallivanting around a lavender-hued dreamscape next to dancers in lace Morphsuits. The song culminates with her learning to accept living with the condition: “My superpower was right inside, see / It was ADHD,” she sings. Of course, I’ve heard the song by now — it’s inescapable. But I have no idea what Hilton is talking about.
I was 13 when I was diagnosed with ADHD. My childhood was a whirlwind of lost hats and gloves and homework assignments, of appalling standardized-test scores and teachers’ assertions that I failed to “live up to my potential,” though what that potential actually was no one could say. I loathed school, and every time I tried to do something that didn’t immediately interest me, like long division or shoveling snow or learning the rules to board games, my brain would power down like an overheated iPhone. It was certainly frustrating to me, but not nearly as frustrating as it was to my parents and the other adults in my life, most of whom seemed to chalk up my symptoms to being lazy or stupid or defiant, even though I am none of those things.
This was the early 2000s, when most of the discourse surrounding ADHD was marked either by outright dismissal or concern about kids potentially using the diagnosis to game the system (insofar as getting an extra ten minutes to take a geometry test can be perceived as “gaming” the “system”). I didn’t tell anyone about my diagnosis. At the time, the risk of being viewed as defective outweighed the potential benefit of a teacher being slightly nicer to me when I forgot my homework.
Since then, I’ve watched the pendulum swing wildly in the other direction. Among educators and mental-health professionals, ADHD is now considered a common developmental disorder, thanks to a remarkably successful movement to increase screening for the condition. Celebrities like Adam Levine, Reneé Rapp, Barry Keoghan, Busy Philipps, and Simone Biles have made their diagnoses public. In the past 20 years, ADHD rates among adults and children have skyrocketed, and awareness campaigns on social-media platforms like TikTok have further contributed to people seeking out treatment.
It’s hard to overstate just how seismic this shift in public perception is. When I was a kid, ADHD was something to be concealed from teachers and employers. Now, thanks to celebrities like Hilton, some even see it as empowering or heroic. In a Teen Vogue op-ed pegged to the release of her song last month, Hilton attributed her career success to her neurodivergence, writing that ADHD “is the reason I’ve been able to anticipate trends,” “build an empire,” and “connect with people on a deeper level.”
It’s great that ADHD has been so destigmatized. No one should be made to feel ashamed of something outside their control, and adult diagnoses have proved to be helpful for many people who have struggled their whole lives without knowing why. But over the past few years, there’s also been a push on platforms like TikTok to reclassify neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD as some kind of extrasensory gift, like Spider-Man’s ability to shoot webs from his fingertips. This discourse has been accompanied by an onslaught of misinformation about the condition; scroll through TikTok or Instagram and you’ll find any number of videos full of claims that swaying while walking, being unable to cook, or cheating on a partner are all signs of ADHD. I’ve even seen videos claiming “random noise making and being competitive” are symptomatic of the condition, and that “individuals with ADHD lack ‘object permanence.’” (You know, the way babies do.)
This is, in part, because it’s genuinely difficult to make blanket generalizations about living with ADHD. The disorder is so wide-ranging, with so much variability in how symptoms present themselves, that one person’s experience can look totally dissimilar to another’s. But the characterization of ADHD as some sort of “superpower” also seems to be undergirded by the same impulse that drives people to speak at length about how debilitating the disorder can be for them. After years of being misunderstood, neurodivergent people understandably want their struggles to be taken seriously. Using this language seems to be an overcompensation of sorts, a way for people who struggle with the disorder to make their needs heard and accepted — though, ironically, it could run the risk of dismissing those whose symptoms are much more severe.
In my experience, ADHD is neither a life-ending disorder that gives you the cognitive ability of a literal infant nor a mind-bending skill that helps you sell your own trademarked fragrances. I irrefutably benefited from getting a diagnosis and going on medication, but it was not accompanied by the moment of clarity you hear from many adults who are newly diagnosed, where the clouds part and the angels sing on high and you see the world anew. Getting treated for ADHD did not instantaneously bring understanding or purpose to my life, so much as it brought me up to a level of baseline functionality. When I first started taking Adderall, I had an immediate sense of, “Oh, okay. So this is how normal people experience the world,” except with slightly more jaw clenching and pooping.
My ADHD pervades every corner of my life. But there’s no universe in which I would view it as an asset. It’s just a thing that I have to manage, like having a peanut allergy or an aversion to mouth sounds. I am grateful to those who have normalized the condition, so other children who lose their gloves and are bad at long division are not made to feel as deficient as I was.
But it’s also true that everyone has their own struggles in how they navigate the world, and ADHD is just one of a very long list of contributing factors. If we really want to normalize neurodivergence, as Hilton and those on TikTok say they do, there’s no benefit in viewing it through a lavender-hued sheen or with a sense of despondency. We should see it as what it is: a reality for a small yet sizable percentage of the population, one that can sometimes be good and sometimes be bad but is never just one thing for any one person. Is it a gift? Is it a curse? Or is it just something that makes you distracted and forgetful and prone to sending your friends lots of TikToks? Perhaps the answer is: All of the above.