The weirdness of ADHD symptoms is not so much in what the symptoms are. Everybody has occasional ADHD symptoms. No matter what symptom you describe anybody will be able to say, "oh yeah, that happens to me all the time." It makes it easy to dismiss ADHD as a quirk of personality or an occasional inconvenience.

The weird thing about ADHD is that the symptoms dog you until they ruin your life. The distractibility or hyper focus, the forgetfulness, the foggy thinking, the impulsiveness and all of the other symptoms DON'T LET UP. They keep happening and keep making you ineffective in your life so that your boss doesn't trust you to do the job, your wife decides she can't count on you to carry your half of the relationship, your children get used to you only being half there when they need you, and eventually the world begins to feed back to you that you are a screw up. Eventually you realize that the symptoms that seem so typical to other people have eaten you alive.

We who suffer from ADHD need to stop focusing on our symptoms and start focusing on our lives. Why can we not get a grip on our lives? Why do the opportunities seem to be passing us by? Why don't we have any friends? Why do the friends we have get upset with us so frequently? Why haven't we made better progress in our careers? Why do our finances seem to be so out of control? Why do I feel like such a screw up?

The thing that makes ADHD a disorder is one symptom - impairment. We live impaired lives. We have impaired relationships. We have impaired careers. Focus on the impairment and let the symptoms explain to you why it's happening. But don't try to explain your disorder by describing symptoms. It won't work. Nobody will believe you.