Not Faster Than Normal...

How I unlearned the myth of ADHD as a superpower to be mined for capitalism

Being diagnosed with ADHD in midlife was like being handed a mirror, only to watch it shatter the moment I looked in. Where many people (if you believe Guardian articles, that is) find immediate peace in medical diagnosis—an understanding of why they are the way they are—I found only the sharp edges of a disability I couldn’t reconcile with. And then the lights went out, for quite some time.

What followed was one of the worst depressive periods of my life. Like many with ADHD, I was no stranger to curling up in the dark. It was part of a lifelong pattern of falling after repeated failure, after which I would pick myself up, dust myself down, and come out fighting again. But this time was different. It took me much longer to resurface than usual, simply because I couldn’t see the point. There was no coming back. Nothing could be fixed. I would always be like this: a broken, misshapen thing, barely capable of making a living beyond a string of mundane, low-paid, low-skilled jobs.

What’s more, I wasn’t fit for public consumption: too loud, too messy, too scruffy, and way too disagreeable for someone of my sex. So, that was that. What was the point in holding on to ambition if I couldn’t even function?

The Gospel of Speed: According to Our Lord, and Saviour: Peter Shankman

Until I came across Faster Than Normal by Peter Shankman: the book that became my bible for living with ADHD over the next several years. The book I recommended (soz fam) to other newly diagnosed people in my circle, like an evangelist convert, whilst I was in the chokehold of its potent spell. The book I now passionately hate with every fibre of my being. Not particularly for how it’s written (although I’m a grown-ass woman who doesn’t need squirrel alerts page-by-page), or for who wrote it, but for the fact it is the ADHD manual equivalent of the trickster, selling you greasy snake oil to serve up as an offering at the altar of the capitalist ideal.

That this oil is made of your own ground-up bones isn’t exactly clear from the “turbo-charging” tagline though, and it’s a key point I missed in my initial takeaway. As I would find out, to my own detriment.

ADHD, Shankman tells us, isn’t a diagnosis: “it’s a gift.” A gift which, if hacked correctly, like one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, can give you a competitive edge in business and career. Rather than a disability, ADHD hyperfocus makes us faster, sharper, more creative, more innovative. We just need to follow the rules, eliminate distractions, and harness the untapped power of the ADHD “super-brain.” We’ve been doing it all wrong … but Peter Shankman is here to show us how to do ADHD right (just buy the book, visit his website, subscribe to his podcast— you know the drill…)

So here’s the recipe for success as outlined in the book, many of the key points of which I willingly overlooked in service of the wider myth it was selling. The very fact that I was so reluctant to acknowledge just how impractical and unrelatable many of these hacks were, perhaps shows how deeply invested I was in clinging to the archetypal promise the book seemed to offer me. I could finally be the hero in my own quest for financial stability: unbroken, a fully fledged superhero. The author lays down his framing of ADHD in the first few pages as such:

“ADHD is not a flaw; it’s a bonus. ADHD isn’t a diagnosis, it’s a gift.”
— Page 5

This statement is then bolstered by a follow-up on the next page:

“The great part of all of this is that during the time your brain is ‘supercharged,’ you can accomplish things better, faster, and more creatively than ‘regular’ people. It’s the equivalent of running a race with a human being when you’re Superman.”

I mean, who doesn’t want to be Superman next to boring old “regular people”, right?

I was also told ADHD could be the gateway to untold riches, as the author outlined his own extremely lucrative career in tech and keynote business speaking—the success of which he entirely credited ADHD for.

All I needed to do was the following:

• Outsource all my domestic tasks to women whom I paid.

• Outsource organising my life, my calendar, to women whom I paid.

• Delegate everything else that involved any form of executive function to people whom I paid.

• Pay for apps—lots of apps—which a PA would then manage.

• Digitise my photos.

• Take long-haul flights to Asia if I wanted to focus on writing books or catch up with Netflix.

• Have a woman that I paid literally turn off the wi-fi router any time she heard me in the process of sounding off in the comments section on the internet.

The fact that none of this was remotely relatable to a low-paid, low-skilled, single mother of five—someone barely making rent, with none of the class privilege, education, or career opportunities available to someone like Shankman—seemed to completely pass me by. I clung to the central message: you’re not broken, you’re actually exceptional.

Even when I didn’t feel remotely exceptional, it never occurred to me that I might not seem so dysfunctional if I (like the author) could simply pay other people to do the things my brain just isn’t built for. But I didn’t have that kind of advantage. ADHD wasn’t something I could pay my way out of, so I resigned myself to living with its more disabling challenges, whilst entirely blaming myself for what I saw as my own failings in not being able to “hack” my ADHD. (As a sidenote: I would quite like to put Mr Shankman to a superpower test, managing five neurodivergent kids as a single mother with no family support, on a low income, with several menial jobs to attend to, housework, parenting, no PA, not even a car, just a bog standard to-do list and limited budget, and see how he’d manage being “superman” with that bag of tricks).

Instead of questioning the framework, I blamed myself. I galvanised, and re-galvanised, after every successive failure, convincing myself I just needed to try harder, work smarter, find a way to kick my “superpower” up a notch. In essence: I used that book as just another stick to beat myself with because I so desperately wanted to believe the lies it was telling.

Cool Story, Bro

I also managed to miss the glaring “cool story, bro” energy radiating from every page—a vibe not unlike a man posting his inflated Bitcoin stats on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Shankman represents a particular kind of hyper-successful business and tech-bro archetype: the hero rebranded for a decidedly postmodern hyper-masculine (aggressive, massively competitive) late stage capitalist myth. I have absolutely no emotional connection to that myth whatsoever, but I was too busy listening through the muddy, distorted channels of my own yet-to-be-identified, insidious internalised ableism to notice it wasn’t even written for me in the first place.

What’s more, I was approaching my ADHD diagnosis in exactly the same way I had approached myself before I had one: by continuing to buy into the prevailing myth of late-stage capitalism: that career success and financial worth equate to total worth.

The Crash

And of course, unlike Shankman’s tidy happily-ever-after (the book, after all, has only added to his untold wealth), I crashed—further and harder than I’d ever crashed before, even post-diagnosis. Successive cycles of burnout eventually led to a full year of agoraphobia. I shut myself away in my bedroom—still working freelance, but barely able to summon the energy for anything else. I was gifted instead with twenty panic attacks a day, relentless insomnia, and disturbing intrusive thoughts and ruminations, all triggered by a complete collapse: in mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual terms.

If I can thank Shankman for anything, though, it’s that Faster Than Normal accelerated my crash: a crash that was always going to come if I kept buying into the capitalist myth to do more, work harder, be better and faster. It was from that crash, the psychic descent that followed, as painful as it was, that I was finally able to gain the clarity I needed to move into a new myth. A different (brighter) future, where I could find an acceptance that in this current world there are many aspects of ADHD which are disabling—and that’s actually okay. If I learn to listen, respect, and live in a way that is far more aligned with my own particular way of being, as well as my feminine, cyclical nature.

Another Kind of Gift

Despite what Shankman would like us to believe, we aren’t supercomputers ingesting information like Johnny 5 in the film Short Circuit, reading entire novels in a matter of seconds. It’s an abuse of our bodies, our minds, our spirits and souls, to even suggest this is the case.

If we continue to abuse hyperfocus—something the author conveniently leaves out of his text—we don’t eat properly, we don’t sleep properly, we neglect our need for connection, intimacy, relaxation, self-care, time in the outside world, joy, and all manner of other wonderful things we actually need to live. All so we can do more work?

At this time in my life, I feel this is far too much of a price to pay—and it’s a price I’ve paid over and over, leading me to issues with my spine, issues with my weight, and a former pattern of burnout and crash that wasn’t just entirely unsustainable, but literally dangerous (especially to my mental health). I have no idea how many hours, days, weeks, or even years I lost paying for that shit. It’s a cycle, a belief system, and a myth, I had to stop paying sacrifice to: especially in terms of my own blood.

My shift also gave me space to start asking questions; if not that, then what? And it led me to ask: what if hyperfocus isn’t built for speed at all? What if, instead, it’s actually a gift of another kind altogether: one that, if not rushed, pushed, or forcefully managed, allows us to take the scenic route? Allows us a deeper, slower, more profound engagement with the things that matter to us?

And how about we honour that—as something that could be quite exceptional, as an emotional and spiritual gift—when it’s not so flagrantly abused in service to the money-train and being “faster than normal”.

Three Things to Reflect On…

So, how about we choose our own tempo, one that doesn’t run on panic, pressure, or performance, and one that doesn’t insist income/career= worth?

Here are three things to sit with over the next week. Just note and listen to what comes up for you:

1. What have I been taught about what it means to be “functional”—and who does that definition really serve?

2. What might my hyperfocus be trying to show me, if I stopped trying to control it and started listening instead?

3. If I honoured my natural rhythm—truly honoured it—what would I let go of? What would I reclaim?

On that note, I did indeed honour my own rhythms, without guilt, and spent most of today napping instead of killing myself for deadlines. It was gloriously indulgent and I refuse to take it back.

Until next time, stay wild,
Kat.