For most of my life, I believed I was lazy.
Not because I wanted to believe it, but because it was what I was told. I was messy. Disorganised. Forgetful. The one who couldn’t seem to stay on top of things no matter how hard she tried. People would tell me to just try harder, be more organised, pay more attention, stop being careless. Over time, those messages become part of the way you see yourself. Eventually, you stop hearing other people say them because you start saying them to yourself.
The strange thing is that my intention was always there.
When people think of laziness, they usually imagine somebody who doesn’t want to do something. That has never been my experience. I wanted to do the thing. I knew I should do the thing. I often spent more time thinking about doing the thing than it would actually have taken to do it. Yet somehow there always seemed to be a gap between knowing and doing, between intention and action.
One memory has stayed with me for years because it perfectly captures what that gap felt like.
I was tidying the living room. At the time, I didn’t know I had ADHD. I was simply trying, once again, to get on top of the mess. I was carrying toys from one side of the room to the stairs, taking them upstairs, coming back down, collecting more toys and repeating the process. As I walked backwards and forwards, there was a small toy duck lying on the floor. Every time I passed it, I noticed it. Every single time. As I approached it, my brain would immediately say, “Pick that up. You’re going to stand on it.” Then I would step over it and continue walking. The moment I had stepped over it, the thought disappeared completely. It wasn’t that I had chosen to ignore it. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It wasn’t even that I forgot in the way most people think of forgetting. The thought simply vanished the second it was no longer directly in front of me.
A few moments later I would walk back across the room and exactly the same thing would happen. I’d see the duck. I’d think, “Pick that up. You’re going to stand on it.” Then I’d step over it and the thought would disappear. Again and again this happened. If somebody had asked me whether I knew the duck was there, I would have said yes. If they had asked whether I intended to pick it up, I would have said yes. If they had asked whether I thought it needed moving, I would have said yes. Yet somehow, despite all of that, I never picked it up.
Eventually, exactly what I knew was going to happen happened.
I stood on it.
Hard.
It was one of those horrible little toys with a sharp edge that somehow manages to find exactly the wrong place on the sole of your foot. The pain was immediate, but what I remember more than the pain was the anger. I was furious with myself. I remember standing there thinking, “Why couldn’t you just pick it up? How many times did you walk past it? What is wrong with you?” I wasn’t making excuses for myself. I wasn’t laughing it off. I was genuinely upset. I had seen the duck countless times. I had reminded myself countless times. I had known exactly what would happen if I didn’t pick it up. Yet somehow I hadn’t been able to stop myself from stepping over it again and again.
What makes me sad when I look back on that memory is that it happened before I knew I had ADHD. At the time, I genuinely believed it was evidence that there was something wrong with me as a person. I thought it meant I was lazy. I thought it meant I wasn’t trying hard enough. I thought it meant I lacked discipline. Looking back now, I can see that the problem was never that I didn’t care. It wasn’t that I didn’t notice. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do the right thing. The problem was the gap between intention and action.
That understanding has completely changed the way I view children.
When a parent tells me their child walks past their shoes six times without putting them away, I don’t automatically think about behaviour. I think about the duck. When a parent tells me their child never seems to put their plate in the kitchen, never hangs their coat up, never tidies their room, I think about the duck. Not because every child is experiencing the same thing I experienced, but because I know what it feels like to desperately want to do something and somehow not be able to bridge the gap between knowing and doing.
The thing that people often miss is that by the time somebody else calls a child lazy, that child may already be calling themselves lazy. By the time somebody else becomes frustrated, that child may already be frustrated with themselves. By the time somebody says, “Why can’t you just do it?” the child may already have asked themselves that question a hundred times.
I think this is one of the reasons we see so many neurodivergent adults carrying shame into adulthood. We grow up being judged by our outcomes rather than our intentions. People see the shoes left by the door, the messy bedroom, the forgotten homework, the unfinished jobs and the clutter. They don’t see the internal battle that came before it. They don’t see the reminders, the intentions, the promises made to ourselves or the frustration that follows when we still can’t seem to make it happen.
I also think we need to acknowledge that the world our children are growing up in is very different from the world their great-grandparents grew up in. Human beings lived for thousands of years with relatively slow change. Then, over the last few hundred years, and particularly over the last hundred, life transformed at a pace that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. We have more possessions, more information, more decisions, more expectations and more demands on our attention than ever before.
People often ask, “What would they have done a hundred years ago?” as though that somehow proves today’s children should simply cope. But a hundred years ago many families owned very little. Children often shared rooms, shared toys and lived in environments with far fewer possessions to organise and manage. Mental health difficulties absolutely existed, but many of the daily demands of modern life simply didn’t. Today’s children are expected to manage bedrooms full of belongings, multiple pairs of shoes, school equipment, technology, schedules, homework, social expectations and endless streams of information. Every one of those things creates another opportunity to be told that they should be doing better.
For a neurodivergent child, those messages can become deafening.
When we repeatedly tell children that they are careless, lazy, unmotivated or not trying hard enough, those words don’t disappear. They become part of the story children tell themselves. Eventually, they stop hearing our voices and start hearing their own. They lie in bed at night wondering why everything seems harder for them. They wonder why everyone else appears to manage. They wonder why they keep disappointing the people they love.
I know that feeling because I lived it.
That’s why, when I look at a child who has walked past their shoes six times, I try to start with curiosity rather than judgement. I try to remember the duck. I try to remember that there is often a difference between not caring and not being able to turn intention into action. Most importantly, I try to remember that every time we assume a child is choosing to fail, there is a chance they are already carrying more shame than we realise.
Because there is a world of difference between a child growing up believing, “I find this difficult,” and a child growing up believing, “There is something wrong with me.”
One of those beliefs creates understanding.
The other creates shame.
And I think far too many neurodivergent adults can tell you exactly which one they grew up with.
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