ADHD doesn't always look like fails. Sometimes it looks like competence, perfectionism, and exhaustion. Because the person holding everything together is also hiding how hard it is. I'm Cinnamon, and this is After the Tones Drop. We're diving into how ADHD shows up differently in men and women. It's a conversation about expectations and masking and what we've been taught to believe about ourselves. I had a conversation today with my oldest friend. She's known me my whole life. So if anyone has seen my ebbs and flows with my ADHD over the years, it would be her. And we talked about how difficult it is to not understand what you're doing wrong that is so repelling to people, which was a lot of my experience when I was younger. And you know, just not being able to figure out what it was about me that was so unlikable. Now I have a better perspective on it. But at the time as a kid, it was just really confusing. I was friendly, I was nice, I tried to be what I thought people were supposed to be to be able to make friends. And that was just a real struggle for me because I was just being myself. And what I learned then was that being myself was not acceptable. And that's when you create a genuine to the core people pleaser, and that takes a lot of work to get out from underneath. So I want to talk about those expectations and masking and how we've spent our lives looking at ourselves, feeling about ourselves, thinking about ourselves. So we're going to look at the seven major ADHD subtypes and talk about why women are often missed and men are often misunderstood, and unpack how culture and trauma and even childhood praise patterns shape what we show versus what we suppress. We all think that we know what ADHD looks like. The teenager that forgets their homework again and again. But the truth is that ADHD can look like the quiet girl in the back of the room zoning out. It can look like the firefighter who loses his temper at home, but not at work. The medic who double and triple checks everything, every supply bag, because if she forgets something, it'll spiral her out for hours. What we're really talking about here isn't a behavior, it's the brain pattern. So just quick sidebar, quick breakdown. Those seven subtypes. Number one, ring of fire, heightened activity all over the brain, emotionally intense and can swing fast. Number two, overfocused, trouble shifting attention, perfectionistic, and stuck in our thoughts. Number three, classic ADHD, destructible, impulsive, and fidgety. Then we have number four, the inattentive type. So zoned out, disorganized, often flying under the radar. There's the anxious type, so there's constant worry, and it can often be mislabeled as just anxiety. Then we have number six, limbic. So that's when we're going to see a low mood, low energy, and it can oftentimes be mistaken for dystymia or depression. And then lastly, we have temporal lobe. So we've got irritability, mood swings, poor memory, easily triggered. And then there are the moments where you feel like all of them are hitting you at once. So each of these shows up across genders, but how it gets read, rewarded, or rejected, that's where gender and trauma and socialization all come in. So socialization, a great mask. Let's talk about what happens even before a diagnosis. Boys are often allowed to be rowdy, they act out, and we respond. They throw a chair in second grade and someone calls for testing. They get flagged early, not always compassionately, but at least they get seen. Girls, on the other hand, are taught to be good, quiet, polite, helpful. So when they're anxious or overwhelmed or zoning out, it gets called sensitive or immature or lazy. They can learn early not to be a burden, don't make noise, don't make mistakes. And so they compensate. They build routines, get extra organized, overfunction until the system breaks, until burnout, anxiety, or depression just crashes the whole system. It could be overpreparing for small tasks, apologizing constantly for being a lot, and it can be mimicking how others work, even when it doesn't suit our brain. Masking leads to exhaustion and misdiagnosis and missed opportunities for support. And it happens more often in women because that's how society trains them to manage perception. So the biological differences, same system, different wiring. Okay, we're going to get a little nerdy for a second. So when it comes to hormones, estrogen and progesterone affect dopamine and norepinephrine. Key neurotransmitters and ADHD. That's why many women report worsening symptoms like during PMS or after childbirth or even in menopause. The neurological imaging, we're able to see that men with ADHD tend to show more underactivity in the prefrontal cortex, like impulse control and decision making, where women often show more heightened activity in the limbic system. So emotion and memory and mood. Ultimately, what that means is that men may act first and regret later, or as I hear commonly said, they may act first and apologize later, whereas women may overthink, overfeel, and second guess themselves for hours afterwards. So even if the condition is the same, the presenting symptoms differ enough that traditional diagnostic criteria, which were built on studies of white middle class boys, miss a ton of people. So what does it look like in real life? Especially for our first responders. Imagine you're a female dispatcher with ring of fire ADHD. You hold it together all day on the radio, thinking five steps ahead, but when you get home, the smallest noise makes you snap. You feel everything, you sense tension before others do. You are exhausted and no one sees it because you're really damn good at your job. Or picture a male medic with overfocused ADHD. He's fast, he's competent, and he knows every drug dosage by heart. But he obsesses over mistakes, replays them at night, can't move on until he fixes it, even if there's nothing left to fix. Or the guy who got in trouble at work for being moody or disrespectful turns out he's got temporal lobe ADHD and has a literal neurological reason for those mood shifts. So why does misdiagnosis happen and why does it matter? So many people get misdiagnosed with depression when it's limbic ADHD, generalized anxiety when it's overfocused and anxious, bipolar disorder when it's ring of fire, and borderline when it's trauma plus masking plus emotional reactivity. And here's the problem: they get treated with the wrong approach. And then they get told they're treatment resistant or too complex or non-compliant when really the treatment missed the whole root cause. If you grew up in chaos, you learned to be hyper-aware. If you were praised for being helpful, you internalize that being tired meant being lazy. Or if you're like me, you internalize that you're being lazy. If no one ever asked you how you learned, you assumed you were stupid, not different. That's the emotional toll of untreated or misread ADHD. And the longer you go without naming it, the deeper the self-doubt sets in. So here's your reframe. You're not crazy, you're not broken. We know how cinnamon feels about the phrase broken or the word broken. Not a fan. And like me, I am confident you are not lazy. You've just been running a high-powered system in a world built for standard issue processors. And if you're masking, you're not a liar, you're adaptive, you're brilliant, and you've survived. But masking shouldn't be your forever strategy. You deserve to function in alignment with your wiring, not in resistance to it. So take a moment and ask yourself, what parts of me are performative? What parts are protection? And what would it look like to be seen without the filter? I know for me, it has been so important to have a support system where I can take off the cinnamon as a therapist hat and just be cinnamon the hot mess. And it doesn't need to be a big circle, but it needs to be a deep one. And those are people that I've learned to trust and have proven that they are worthy of my trust. And it allows me to let it all down. Any part of this episode resonates with you, please don't sit on it. Tell someone, ask your therapist, explore assessment options, not because a label fixes everything, but because understanding yourself does. And if you're supporting someone with ADHD, listen with compassion and not correction. ADHD isn't just about distractability. If it was life for us ADHDers would be so much easier. And it's about finally making space for all the parts of you that you've had to hide. We just want to remind you it's really impressive that you've made it this far, operating in a world that is not built for you. Thanks for sticking with me in this sidebar conversation, and I'll catch you next time. After the tones drop is shared for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes. It does not provide therapy, medical advice, diagnoses, or treatment, and listening does not create a therapist-client relationship. The views expressed are those of the individual speaking. If you need support, please reach out to a qualified professional or emergency services in a crisis. Our theme music is intentioned by Abby Noise, licensed through update.