ADHD Awareness Month 2025: Living the Seagull on Red Bull Reality
October is ADHD Awareness Month, and this one hits different.
On the eve of it starting, the paperwork finally came through for my mini. The start of her journey to diagnosis. The gateway to the support she needs and deserves.
I haven’t always owned my ADHD. But I do now. I don’t see it as a disorder. I don’t see it as something to hide or be ashamed of. And I’ll stand by that.
But when I saw it written in black and white about my child, I sobbed. Proper ugly cried.
Because ADHD isn’t some quirky little personality trait. It’s not a bloody superpower either. It’s not “just being forgetful” or “a bit easily distracted.” And for the love of f*ck, no… You don’t just grow out of it when you leave school!
I left school decades ago, and guess what? It’s still here, every single day.
It’s daily life. It’s constant curveballs. It’s relentless exhaustion that no amount of sleep fixes. It’s barriers chucked in your face over and over again. It’s the sh*tty side-eye glances and the even sh*ttier smirks.
And reading those words about my mini on that paperwork… that hit harder than anything I’ve ever felt about my own diagnosis.
The Reality of ADHD
ADHD is a neurodifference. A different wiring. A brain that doesn’t play by society’s made-up rules about neat boxes, productivity hacks, and nine-to-five schedules.
I call it living like a seagull on Red Bull.
On the outside, people see a flapping bird just about holding it together. Underneath, the feet are thrashing like the clappers. The brain’s running six marathons at once, while the world keeps shouting: “Why can’t you just sit still and concentrate?”
The reality:
Attention isn’t broken. It’s interest-based. An ADHD brain processes everything at once… every sound, every flicker, every thought. Which makes filtering a nightmare. Then, when something finally lands, the focus turns nuclear and hours vanish.
Deadlines aren’t dates on a planner. They’re chemical triggers. Without the dopamine kick of urgency, a task doesn’t even exist. With it, we’ll pull off a miracle overnight.
Motivation isn’t laziness. It’s brain chemistry. An ADHD brain doesn’t fire up for “shoulds.” It fires for novelty, urgency, passion, or danger.
And yet… people still cling to their lazy clichés. Outdated b*llocks that paint us as naughty kids, flaky adults, or work-shy time-wasters.
If I had a quid for every “just get organised,” “buy a diary,” “set an alarm,” or “you don’t look ADHD”, I’d be sitting on my own island with a chef, a trainer, and definitely someone doing all my washing, drying, ironing AND putting it away.
The truth? ADHD can be f*cking hard. It can knock you flat. It can be debilitating. And now with peri-menopause crashing the party uninvited, it’s like chucking petrol on an already raging fire.
What ADHD Awareness Month Should Actually Be About
We don’t need more “awareness.”
We’re clearly f*cking aware ADHD exists. It’s all over socials, telly, news and coming out of the mouths of political figures… 👀
The problem isn’t awareness anymore; it’s what comes after.
It’s not about picking another side in some binary TikTok reel, or buying the latest enamel pin badge in fashion-forward solidarity.
(Though let’s be honest, I do love a good enamel pin badge #obsessed).
It’s about honesty. About understanding. About actual acceptance, not the watered-down kind. But more so, it’s about authentic action that changes how people live, work, and show up every single day.
Let’s really cut through the bullsh*t now...
People with ADHD aren’t new.
We haven’t been lurking in the shadows, waiting for some grand unveiling. Spoiler: we’ve been here the whole damn time.
Just like the stars were always in the sky… They didn’t suddenly appear when the telescope was invented. You just couldn’t see them clearly until someone bothered to look properly.
We’re raising families. We’re running businesses. We’re doing the Aldi shop next to you. We’re serving our communities. We’re serving our country. We’re making bloody change happen. We’re right here, already living amongst you.
Oh, and we’re not doing it with so-called ADHD superpowers.
We’re not doing it despite ADHD either.
We’re doing it all with it.
Neuroinclusion Is Not Optional
Awareness on its own is a cop out. Inclusion is what matters.
Stop judging. Start listening.
Stop fixing. Start accepting.
Start including.
ADHD has always been here. It’s not going anywhere. However, the stigma, the ignorance, the othering, the exclusion… well, they can all f*ck right off.
ADHD Awareness Month isn’t meant to be for hashtags, posters, or pity likes. It’s not a condescending nod while nothing actually changes either.
If you actually give a sh*t, prove it. Don’t tell me you’re “aware”… Show me you’re willing to do something with that awareness.
Have the conversations you’ve been avoiding. The messy ones. The awkward ones. The ones where you admit you’ve been wrong.
Because this isn’t about content calendars or comms strategies.
It’s about people.
Why This Year Hits Different
When I looked at those pages about my little legs, it all became undeniable. No ambiguity. No “maybe.”
It hit like a brick to the face.
Because it’s not just about me or running a business. It’s about her future.
It’s about making sure she grows up in a world that doesn’t feel like death by a thousand cuts. A world that doesn’t dim her light or make her feel less than.
It’s about her living, not just surviving.
And hey, I’ll own it… my sh*t is not always in a sock!
It was only last week that I went into a three-day spiral and had to declare “Pedal Back Friday” to make amends to the people caught in the wake.
I do not always get it right either. I’m winging the sh*t out of life like the rest of you.
Some days I’m smashing it and others… well, it feels like I’m banging the back of my head against a brick wall at the same time as being hit in the face with a baseball bat… but we move, reyt?
Because this is about more than just me as an individual.
It’s for kids like our Frank, who deserve more than a lifetime of compromise.
It’s for adults carrying scars so deep they’ll never be hidden, no matter how much paint the world tries to plaster over them.
It’s for every one of us who’s had to graft twice as hard just to be written off as “difficult,” “too much,” or “not the right fit.”
Neuroinclusion isn’t a nice-to-have. It isn’t a campaign slogan.
It’s survival. It’s the future.
Support should never be a fight.
Dignity should never come with conditions.
And nobody deserves to be left scraping for scraps just to exist.
Until that changes, I’ll keep advocating, pushing, designing, building… Whatever it takes…
For my mini, your mini, you…
Me.
Want more hints, tips, and straight-up insights like this?
Come join the IMHub Community… your one-stop shop for real talk, practical tools, and a growing crew who actually get it. It’s free, it’s flexible, and it’s built for ALL brains.
A Quick Word on Cognitive Currency
If time’s a prick (and it is), then energy is the bank account we never got taught how to manage.
That’s why I built the Cognitive Currency Workshop… a proper hands-on session where we stop pretending our brains can run on overdraft forever and actually learn to budget the mental energy we’ve got.
No buzzwords. No colour-coded planners.
Just real strategies for:
spotting what drains your headspace and what tops it back up
figuring out where you’re accidentally overspending (scrolling, overcommitting, people-pleasing, all of it)
learning to invest your energy where it actually pays off — work, relationships, and your own bloody sanity.
Because you don’t need to “manage time” — you need to understand your cognitive currency.
And once you do? You start living and working in a way that actually matches the brain you’ve got.
Want in?
Ria Jackson with short blond hair, large glasses, and a white IMUK t-shirt smiles at the camera. She wears a lanyard that reads “Making Neuroinclusion the Norm.”
Meet Ria Jackson: SHE-EO and Chief - Brewmaker of IMUK
Forget a closet full of clothes, Ria has a hat rack overflowing with experiences! Engineer, educator, mindset coach, NLP practitioner and coach, specialist study skills tutor for ADHD and Autism, trauma-informed practitioner, senior leader, and the list goes on!
She brings a wealth of experience, shaped by her journey as a neurodifferent woman, veteran, and Mum (her whole family is basically a full neurodiversity ad campaign in itself!)
Ria's life and career have been anything but linear!
Now, as the SHE-EO of IMUK, she brings a wealth of experiences and a unique perspective.
Sick of the same old, same old, and wanting to forge a better future for her neurodifferent daughter, Ria's here to disrupt the system!
With a background as diverse as her passions, she's on a quest to make neuroinclusion the new normal.
She believes in authenticity and leaving a positive impact, as evidenced by her closing quote:
"Always be yourself, cos everyone else is already taken!"
(Oscar Wilde, apparently).
