By Neal Glendenning

I didn’t know I was grieving until I found myself crying over a to-do list. Not because it was long, but because it was short — and I still couldn’t do it. There it was: “Pick up prescription. Call Mum. Reply to email.” Three simple things. I stared at them for hours, paralysed. When I finally closed my notebook in defeat, an old, familiar shame washed over me — but underneath it, something deeper stirred: grief.

For so many of us with ADHD, shame is the air we breathe. It permeates every missed deadline, every forgotten appointment, every half-finished sentence and impulse-driven decision. But that shame is not born in a vacuum. It grows from something raw and heartbreaking: the quiet mourning of the person we feel we were supposed to be.

I grieve the version of myself I imagined before I understood my brain. The straight-A student who would turn in assignments on time. The friend who never flaked. The adult who returned phone calls and kept a tidy kitchen. The person who didn’t have to try so hard to do things that seemed effortless for everyone else.

And the worst part? I believed that person was real. That he existed inside me — just lazy, distracted, or undisciplined. Every time I failed to “be him,” I thought I was betraying myself. That’s the cruelest trick ADHD plays: it hides your disability behind a mask of potential. You’re told you’re smart, creative, capable — and you are. But none of it seems to translate into consistent action. And the gap between who you are and what you do becomes a wound you live in.

I grieve the childhood marked by punishments I didn’t understand. The adult years clouded by underachievement and overexertion. The jobs lost, the relationships strained, the potential left unexplored. I grieve the thousand tiny moments of self-betrayal that weren’t really betrayals at all — just missed signals between my nervous system and the world.

And this grief? It feeds shame like kindling feeds fire.

Because grief without understanding becomes self-blame. When society doesn’t see your struggle, you internalise it. You start to believe you are broken, lazy, selfish. You don’t see your symptoms — you see your character flaws. Even after diagnosis, the grief can grow louder. Now you know why you struggled, but not how to fix it. You carry the weight of a label without the map to self-compassion.

But here’s the thing: this grief is not weakness. It’s love. It’s love for the life you dreamed of living, the person you longed to be. It’s love for the moments you showed up anyway. For the time you did remember. For the resilience it took to keep going, day after day, in a world not built for brains like yours.

And when we name the grief — really name it — we begin to soften the shame. Because you cannot hate yourself into healing. You cannot shame yourself into functioning. But you can grieve. And in that grief, you can find a deeper truth: you are not a failure. You are not broken. You are not late to your life — you are arriving with wisdom carved from survival.

I’m still learning to sit with my grief. To honor it without letting it define me. Some days, I still cry over to-do lists. But more often now, I pause, breathe, and remind myself: this is hard because my brain works differently — not because I don’t care. I do care. So deeply. And that, too, is something to grieve — and something to celebrate.

If you’re reading this and you feel it in your bones, know this: your grief is real. Your shame is not your fault. And there is nothing wrong with you.

You are not grieving because you’re weak. You are grieving because you’ve had to be strong for far too long.

And you are not alone.