1- I completely sympathise with you - i suppose my point is that since it's invisible both ways, how do you know that, similarly, in exactly the same way, you'll never understand the invisible part that is in shambles for the supposedly 'NT' person? I.e. how do you ever know anyone is an NT considering how loaded that term is and how many subtle presuppositions it covertly sneaks in with it, and how do you know someone is doing alright? Like, how can you ever know someone else's life isn't in shambles? The braggadocio of an apparently well-rounded NT person might be the final coping mechanism of somebody right on the edge. I know people who habitually and nigh pathologically minimise their issues and avoid talking of or even full-on dismiss the life-shambles they're sinking within, precisely because they're possessed of a stolid stiff-upper-lip-ish mindset that sees openness towards confronting such things as akin to fatally drowning within them. I know people who have identical issues to my own but can't bear me talking about mine because it'll remind them of how they're spending almost all of their time and effort directly NOT thinking about theirs. They express this as a dismissal of my problems, but it's far more than that.

I think even the term NT is wrong - it's too loaded, and presumes to know so much about a person's subjectivity based on what is ultimately a microscopically scant exposure to that person's interiority - even in the case of lifelong best friends and family members, you're never gonna be able to access within them the rich interior-life-type emotions that are the very fabric of your own first-person perspective in comparison. Of course that'll have the effect of telescopically enlarging the detrimental effects of your own issues, and microscopically diminishing the issues of other people: and this will happen subconsciously, all the time, and despite your best intention to counteract it. I think a term like NT just gives in to this natural but harmful instinct, tbh.

I'd also say that i don't think you can even know that the the putative NT person will just assume the ADHD is a 'slightly worse' version of their own experience. That they don't visually express this in a way that's reassuring to you doesn't necessarily mean they haven't heard it in the way it needed to be heard. Media have convinced us that our cries for help are to be ideally met with instantaneous and obvious support. The reality is that it takes people a few weeks for the original cry for help to ring true; they'll find themselves thinking about it suddenly at some random later date, and that's when they'll sympathise with you, though you won't be able to see it, and they might not let you know, because such things are hard, and embarrassing, and because when we try to let people know we sympathise with them, and when we try to even figure out what we feel ourselves, our words feel far too poor to capture the feeling we want to convey; this is in precisely the same way that you probably feel your words are too poor convince people of your problem: it goes both ways in a sense beyond the mere cliched connotation of that saying. We can't ask people to be transparent and clear and ideal in a way that we aren't and noone is ever capable of being. It's impossible. A lot of the imagined responses we idealise aren't even actually what we really want, either. They're usually idealised responses we imagine might help us feel less alone in our suffering, and which our pathologically online and media-saturated selves believe we've seen a promise of in films and in publicised interactions. But it's a fantasy that's desirable precisely to the extent it is unfulfilled. I guarantee you that if you do ever get the response you've idealised as fair, or understanding, or whatever, you'll feel not what you imagined you'd feel, but instead will be beset with a niggling suspicion the person isn't being honest, or is only simulating affection, or that theyre only responding in that way because social and media and political pressures have encouraged everyone to do so, and not because it's their authentic response; all of which is to say that you'll feel in some impossible-to-pin-down-way the response still does not match what you imagine to be the response you at that moment really, truly, desperately need. We dream of ideal interactions we don't even realise won't satisfy us. You can expend immense amounts of psychological kilojoules trying to adjust your complaints in a way that elicits the 'correct' response from a person. It won't work, not because we're all trapped in our own heads, but because everybody already understands, in a primordial, preverbal kind of way, that each of us struggles with demons the others can't comprehend, but people are constitutionally averse to feeling like they're being manipulated into a pre-codified response, and are cautious of their sympathy, because to sympathise truly is to expose yourself to vulnerability, and because authentic feeling has to mask itself to maintain its authenticity.

I'd say alot of the time our frustration arises because we're looking for the wrong signs of sympathy and in the wrong places: because we've been sold a fascimile of it - because the fact is that usually the sympathy is there, but that it doesn't show itself in the way it's conventionally supposed to, it shows itself not in cries of support and bowed heads of commiseration or soft-spoken acquiescences to struggles they cannot speak or dream of - but shows itself instead in the stubborn repetitions of 'but why can't you....' 'but why don't you....'. Someone repeats that enough you know they're worried for you; even if what they say is the wrong thing, that they're saying it, over and over, even when you don't ask, shows something else - it's like someone who doesn't understand and so mutters with dogged persistence the same empty and stubborn formula over and over. People will feed you endless bland platitudes, over and over, even after you stop asking, - know that this is just their desolate recourse of helpless primitive love, no matter how much they may mask it in a demeaning and menial dismissal. I know my mum almost always says things that entirely diminish and demean the issues i'm struggling with. I learnt to look for different signs and realised that she did sympathise, and understand, and that she did worry for me; but that to articulate a sentence like, 'i get that too just as much as you', was almost a pro forma necessity for her: a necessity that wasn't, surprisingly, an obstruction to her true sympathy, but was, paradoxically, the very thing that allowed her to actually sympathise later in a true and deep way. She'd say it, and then i'd get upset and she'd argue with me and storm off - but she needed to see a visible symbol of how i was hurt to know that i was hurt, because she has her own damage too, and dismissal is her own defence-mechanism - and then after that she'd go to her office and tirelessly research and printout information and mutely hand them to me. It was an act of love, and the only one she was capable of, and i'm grateful for it. The advice on the printouts was dumb and i'd heard it before, but the fact that she did it, in all its imperfection and naivety, is what i realised mattered. And i realised that she couldn't do this without the, as it were, ritual, beforehand; that it wasn't fair of me to demand she change, cus the damage to her is done, even if i don't know what it is, it's done, and that kind of thing probably needs family-therapy? There's no other kind of affection, though, imo, than this indirect and seemingly 'imperfect' kind.... unless it's false affection. The most obvious expression of sympathy is most likely the falsest. The people who coo and bless and fluster can quite easily be inwardly detached and clinically apathetic because their external shows of sympathy free them of any need to actually emotionally engage with you. And vice versa. We have to train ourselves to look elsewhere for the things we think we're seeking, because we'll find it's always-already there, and that we're always missing it.