I'm Tired of Explaining My Brain
The exhausting emotional labor of defending your brain to skeptical family members
Your mom leans across the dinner table. “Have you tried just making a list.” She says it like she’s handing you the secret to life. Like you haven’t bought 47 notebooks. Like the problem is that nobody told you lists exist.
Or it’s your brother-in-law explaining that everyone forgets things sometimes. Or your aunt saying kids are overmedicated these days, and you’re sitting there at 43 thinking she’s talking about you too.
You spend the next twenty minutes explaining executive function and dopamine regulation while they look at you like you’re being dramatic. Defending yourself when you shouldn’t have to. Using your limited energy to make someone understand something they’ve already decided isn’t real.
Why they can’t see it
ADHD is invisible until it’s catastrophic.
Your family watched you graduate, hold jobs, manage a household. You seem fine from the outside. So when you say your brain works differently, they compare it to their own experience of occasionally losing their keys.
They don’t see the 56 browser tabs open in your mind at all times. The mental effort it takes to start the dishes. The hours lying in bed, physically exhausted but mentally wired, replaying tomorrow’s conversations and last week’s mistakes. They see you showing up late. Forgetting to call back. Getting overwhelmed by things that seem simple. And because they can’t see the internal cost, they fill in the gap with their own explanation: you’re not trying hard enough.
This is what masking does. Years of compensating, overworking, white-knuckling through the day made your ADHD invisible to the people closest to you. Late-diagnosed adults often develop such effective compensatory strategies that their struggles become undetectable to others. The better you masked, the less anyone believes you now.
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The backfire
The more you explain, the worse it gets.
You list examples to prove it’s real. “I forgot this, and this, and remember when I...” You’re trying to build evidence. But they hear a list of failures. You’ve accidentally made the case against yourself.
Or you try the science route. Executive function. Working memory. Neurotransmitters. Their eyes glaze. You sound like you spent too much time on the internet.
And the whole time, there’s a quieter voice underneath. Theirs, now living in your head. Wondering if they’re right. If maybe you are just lazy. If everyone struggles like this and you’re not working hard enough.
That voice is louder for you than it would be for them. ADHD brains process criticism and perceived rejection with far greater emotional intensity than neurotypical brains. What someone else might shrug off can feel like a gut punch. So when your mom says "just try harder," your brain doesn't file it under unhelpful advice. It files it under proof. (Read our post on Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) by clicking on the orange text here.)
You can stop explaining
Every time you sit down to explain, you’re not just educating them. You’re asking for permission. Permission to have ADHD. Permission for your struggles to be real. Permission to stop blaming yourself for things your brain does without your consent.
