[pseudonamed]

For me, it's knowing what you want to do but being unable to do it.

That's expressed quite poorly, I know, let me try harder. "...knowing what you want to do..." is not at any point in time or in any specific dimension. It is literally what I write and can be as simple as "pick up the leaf off the floor", it doesn't need to be valuable, expected, novel, easy, hard, etc. "...being unable to do it..." is not unable to reify an ideal or perfection. It's being unable to consistently "do", to however you define "do", to whatever you set out to do no matter how small, simple, easy you make it.

What made that hard for me was before the diagnosis I didn't have enough language to make sense of that in a way that wasn't damaging to some aspect of myself. And in me that created an early bias to the shutting down of expression. A retreat into my mind, as the stuff of minds is not as limited by the doing.

The diagnosis is a shortcut, a way to tap into the work others have done. And that work is so easily applicable because what I thought was a problem unique to me is shared so strikingly by other people in the ADHD/autism cohort. It took me a long time to find that out.

And just as a minor counterpoint to some comments, the pressure never came from my parents or teachers or... (well it did come from needing to exist materially in the world) but from myself. So while it may be convenient to think that the problem with ADHD is the 'system', it's not required. It's not required because in the mind, the system and the I are the same thing and cannot be separated.