I have 10 alarms set on my phone right now. No exaggeration. They are staggered, mostly across the morning, little reminders to make sure I hit different checkpoints during my day. Wake up? Check. Respond to outstanding emails? Check check. And on and on. If you saw them, you’d probably think I was very organized.
I don’t really think of myself as organized, though. It’s more like I’ve built an elaborate framework to make sure everything doesn’t come tumbling down around me.
For as long as I can remember, my brain has run at roughly a million miles an hour. There is no off button. Ever. There never has been, which is a large part of why I’ve been a terrible sleeper my entire life. My body will lie down, but my brain just keeps on running circles. All that internal motion has to go somewhere, so it comes out as a compulsive need to go. To do. Busy little bee, that’s me.
Growing up, that often meant I’d struggle to finish one project before starting six more in the same breath. I could be easily distracted and flighty.
But I was also the eldest daughter and the middle child, and I needed to be the “responsible one.” Something inside of me knew, without being told, that the flighty, fidgety version of me would not fly. I wouldn’t get a pass like my little sister, who bore zero responsibility and got away with everything, or my older brother, who had one foot out the door.
So, I became what I needed to be.
My bedroom may have been a disaster at any given moment, but my schoolwork was immaculate. I was hyper-organized about anything outward-facing: assignments, chores, deadlines. I made lists constantly. I set the alarms. I hit every benchmark that needed hitting, most of them early.
The double-edged sword of it all is that this worked. It worked so well that no one in my formative years, from parents to teachers, suggested there might be something more at play. And, in their defense, why would they? I was fine. I was better than fine. I was the one you didn’t have to worry about.
It turns out that’s sort of the whole thing.
I asked Christal Castagnozzi, a clinical and school psychologist and clinical director of the Thrive Psychology Health Team, to help me better understand this type of pattern or behavior. She says that masking, although not a formal ADHD diagnostic criterion, typically refers to ways someone consciously or unconsciously suppresses, hides, or compensates for their ADHD traits in order to meet the expectations around them.
Some of those compensations are easy to spot: setting multiple alarms, writing everything down, or creating very rigid organizational systems. Other patterns, when they start early enough, can become “almost indistinguishable from someone’s sense of personality,” says Castagnozzi. “She doesn’t necessarily think, ‘I’m compensating for ADHD.’ She thinks, ‘I’m a perfectionist,’ ‘I’m an anxious person,’ or ‘I’ve always been a people-pleaser.’”
Caveat? “None of those traits automatically indicate ADHD. People can be perfectionistic or people-pleasing for many reasons,” she says. “Clinically, what we’re interested in is the function of the behavior: What is this strategy doing for the person? What happens when she doesn’t do it? What is she working so hard to prevent?”
And there’s a reason this is so prevalent in women. “Girls often receive very strong messages about being organized, responsible, agreeable, socially attuned, and easy to manage,” Castagnozzi explains. “A girl who repeatedly gets the message that she’s too loud, too emotional, too forgetful, too disorganized, or ‘too much’ may become very motivated to monitor and correct those behaviors.”
Instead of appearing disorganized, Castagnozzi says, she may become rigidly organized. Instead of risking disappointing anyone, she may become a people-pleaser. Instead of allowing herself to make mistakes, she may become a perfectionist.
Oof. Felt all that.
“The irony is that the more successfully she compensates, the easier her ADHD can be to miss,” says Castagnozzi.
I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my 40s. I knew a lot about ADHD by that point (perk of my job as a writer and editor; I’m always learning!), yet learning more about masking was a real epiphany for me. It helped me start to see that my work ethic wasn’t so much evidence that I was managing everything but evidence of how much there was to manage.
It’s a gap Castagnozzi sees often: the distance between what people observe and what’s actually happening.
“We see the person who gets excellent grades, never misses a deadline, has a successful career, and appears incredibly organized,” she says. “We don’t necessarily see the five alarms she uses to remember an appointment, the panic that drives her to meet every deadline, the work she couldn’t initiate until late at night, or the hours she spends checking something because she’s terrified she’s forgotten an important detail.”
For a lot of late-diagnosed women, Castagnozzi says, the systems work until they don’t. At some point, all of the things we’re juggling might outplace our capacity to compensate… and from the outside, that can look like ADHD appearing out of nowhere or like a woman who had her sh*t together suddenly falling apart. “Often, the underlying difficulties were there much earlier; what changed was the person’s ability to compensate for them.”
Which is why, Castagnozzi emphasizes, being good at things doesn’t rule ADHD out. “Achievement tells us what someone accomplished; it doesn’t tell us what it cost them to accomplish it.”
As for me, I have a successful career, a happy marriage, two teenagers… and I’m still masking.
I guess I assumed, somewhere in the back of my head, that getting a diagnosis and realizing I was masking would be the end of it. That once I understood what I was doing, I could just… stop doing it. But my mask has been with me for decades. It’s been welded on since elementary school.
Castagnozzi doesn’t think “stop masking” is another benchmark I need to hold over myself, though.
“I think we have to be careful with the idea that someone should simply ‘stop masking,’” she tells me. “The goal isn’t to abandon every strategy you’ve developed to manage ADHD. Many compensatory strategies are genuinely helpful. Calendars, alarms, routines, visual reminders, body doubling, asking for information in writing: these can all be excellent ways of externalizing executive functions.”
The question she asks instead: “Does this strategy support you, or does it primarily help you hide the fact that you’re struggling?”
According to Castagnozzi, unmasking can mean getting more honest about what you need. “Maybe you ask for instructions in writing instead of pretending you’ll remember them. Maybe you allow a task to be ‘good enough’ rather than spending three times as long making it perfect. Maybe you stop automatically saying yes when you’re already at capacity. Maybe you use an accommodation without feeling that you should be able to function without it,” she explains.
For a lot of us, diagnosis is what sort of kicks off that journey because we start to understand why we’ve needed these strategies. Burnout unfortunately brings a lot of women there, too.
And while there’s relief in the process, Castagnozzi cautions it can also come with grief. “People may look back at decades of believing they were lazy, scattered, difficult, too sensitive, or simply not trying hard enough and realize how much energy they spent trying to correct something they didn’t understand.”
If you’re reading this and thinking, Huh, that sounds like me, Castagnozzi’s advice is to get curious.
“Perfectionism, people-pleasing, procrastination, overwhelm, forgetfulness, and executive-function difficulties aren’t specific to ADHD,” she elaborates. “Anxiety, depression, trauma, sleep difficulties, autism, and other factors can create overlapping experiences, and they can also coexist with ADHD. That’s why a comprehensive assessment matters.”
Revisit those patterns of yours. What’s always been disproportionately hard for you? What happens when the systems you built aren’t available? How much energy goes into making this all look easy?
And, no, you don’t need to show up at an assessment convinced you have ADHD or ready to convince anyone else. As Castagnozzi puts it, you can just arrive with the question: “I’ve started recognizing these patterns in myself, they’ve been affecting my life, and I’d like to understand what’s going on.”
