Paris Hilton is celebrating ADHD as a superpower. My diagnosis has made opening mail terrifying

I’m not sure whether everyone’s Instagram looks like this right now, or whether the algorithm has simply clocked that I’m a 41-year-old woman who talks openly about being diagnosed with ADHD later in life.

But suddenly, Paris Hilton is everywhere. More specifically, Paris Hilton is inviting people with ADHD to her house.

For the past few days, my feed has been full of creators sharing variations of the same, frankly quite fabulous, sentence: Paris Hilton invited me to her house in Beverly Hills for an ADHD summit.

Australian entrepreneur and creator Steph Claire Smith shared the message she received inviting her to Hilton’s UNSTOPPABLE ADHD Creator Summit. Other creators have posted about being invited after years of talking publicly about neurodiversity, with words like “limitless”, “unstoppable” and “what’s possible” splashed across my screen.

And I genuinely love it, because I spent nearly four decades not knowing I had ADHD.

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I knew I was impulsive. I knew I could become completely consumed by something that interested me, and strangely incapable of doing something that didn’t. I knew I could work at a pace that sometimes bewildered other people, start businesses, create campaigns, jump on planes and make enormous life decisions with surprisingly little fear.

I also knew I could leave a parking fine sitting unpaid until the consequences became considerably worse than simply paying the bloody parking fine.

I just didn’t know those things might be connected.

So watching one of the most recognisable women in the world put ADHD at the centre of a summit celebrating neurodivergent brains feels significant.

Hilton’s UNSTOPPABLE summit takes place at her Los Angeles home on October 15, bringing together neurodivergent creators alongside ADHD experts for conversations about everything from the science of ADHD to misinformation online.

The invitation shared by Smith says the day will celebrate “the way our minds work”, through conversations, wellness and creative experiences.

For someone diagnosed later in life, there is something genuinely moving about that.

But as I watched post after post celebrating what ADHD had made possible, another thought kept nagging at me.

What happens when your ADHD doesn’t feel particularly ‘unstoppable’?

A friend recently commented on one of my Facebook posts about executive dysfunction, and suggested perhaps I should call it “executive superpowers” instead.

I knew exactly what she meant. And I love that for anyone whose experience of ADHD feels predominantly like that.

But I replied that I think we have to be careful not to romanticise what living with ADHD can actually be like. Because mine can absolutely feel like a superpower – until it doesn’t.

My brain has helped me build businesses. It has allowed me to create entire campaigns at extraordinary speed because I can see connections between ideas almost instantly. When I care about something, I can disappear into it for hours.

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I can book a flight to another country with less emotional turmoil than it sometimes takes me to unload the dishwasher.

I can raise a child as a single mother, run a household and juggle multiple businesses and writing deadlines.

And then I can walk past the same pile of mail for a fortnight because something in my brain has decided opening an envelope is simply too much.

That contradiction can be incredibly difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t experience it.

If you can run a company, surely you can remember to pay the bill.

If you can organise an overseas trip, surely you can make the dentist appointment.

If you can meet a deadline for an editor, surely you can put the washing away.

Sometimes I ask myself those same questions.

It’s why a recent video from British TV personality Sam Thompson made me laugh. In a sketch titled “God creating ADHD”, he imagines ADHD being assembled from a particularly chaotic collection of ingredients. Autism gets thrown into the mix. So does rejection. Difficult relationships. Medication.

His caption underneath is even simpler: “God was on a weird one that day.”

Funny? Absolutely. But underneath the joke is something I recognise: ADHD is rarely one thing.

The same brain I credit with some of the best things about me can also make ordinary life disproportionately difficult. And I think that is the bit that can disappear when we force ADHD into one of two camps.

On one side is the disorder narrative: ADHD as something wrong with us that needs fixing.

On the other is the increasingly popular idea that ADHD is a superpower: a source of creativity, entrepreneurship, spontaneity and fearlessness.

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I don’t entirely recognise myself in either. I live somewhere messier in the middle, and being a single mother makes that middle particularly visible.

There isn’t another adult in my house quietly catching the things my executive function drops.

If I forget the form, nobody remembers it. If I avoid the bill, nobody pays it. If dinner needs making while I am hyperfocused on work, eventually a 10-year-old appears beside my laptop asking the very reasonable question of whether we intend to eat tonight.

That doesn’t negate everything I value about the way my brain works. It just means the story is more complicated.

Which is actually why I think Hilton’s summit matters.

It would be easy to look at a Beverly Hills mansion full of creators posting about being “unstoppable” and dismiss the whole thing as ADHD becoming another social-media identity. I don’t.

Visibility matters, particularly for women whose ADHD was missed when they were younger, and if people see successful, creative adults speaking openly about ADHD and recognise something in themselves, that can be enormously powerful.

But visibility should also leave room for complexity.

For the person smashing it at work whose electricity bill is sitting unopened on the kitchen bench.

For the entrepreneur who can build a company but cannot establish a morning routine.

For the mother holding everyone else’s life together while privately wondering why apparently simple things sometimes feel impossibly hard.

I don’t want Paris Hilton to stop telling people with ADHD they can be unstoppable. I just want there to be room in the conversation for the days when we’re not.