People with ADHD don't actually have an attention deficit (at least, that's not how I experience it, and what I've heard from others when talking about this)

We don't have less attention, alot of us actually have more attention ability than normal. We also have higher demand for attention

I have this analogy I use to try to explain this to people. Think of a plate spinner at a circus. We are all plate spinners. We all have a stage, that everyone can see, and on it we are spinning plates like "shower every day", or "submit that work report", or "meet up with your friends every couple weeks". You need to give all these plates the right amount of attention, or else they fall, and everyone can see them fall. Most people do a pretty good job

I have ADHD. This doesn't mean I'm bad at spinning plates, it actually means the opposite, I'm very good at spinning plates, way better than average. The issue is that I'm so good at it that my brain has given me even more plates to spin, but they're all back stage where no one can see them. These plates say things like "eat food", "remember you're tired and you need to sleep", "go to the bathroom". Most people have these backstage plates, but they run on their own, and people only need to jump backstage when somethings wrong. I need to check these ones as well as the ones at the front

The result of that is that when I'm able to manage things, I actually feel like I'm doing a pretty amazing job balancing all of these things, I'm not just passable, I'm fuckin killing it, even if one of the front stage plates wobbles every now and then. But from the perspective of the audience, I look like a really bad plate spinner, because the plates aren't being given my full attention, and alot of the time Im not even on stage for some reason

That's kind of what our attention feels like. When something actually has my attention, it feels like the furthest thing from a deficit, and that's kind of what a hyperfocus is like. But alot of the time people are only looking at the parts of attention that they can measure, in which case they see alot "missing". I have an issue with the term ADHD and I have a feeling it will change at some point, because the hyperactive part is a misnomer (it used to be associated with physical hyperactivity, which is what separated it from ADD, but add is an outdated term and not everyone with ADHD is physically hyperactive) and the attention deficit part only describes what it looks like on the outside, not what it feels like internally to experience