If someone asked me whether I could prepare a meal, I’d answer, “Yes.” And I’d be telling the truth. The problem is, it wouldn’t be the whole truth.
I know how to cook. I understand the basics of nutrition. I can follow a recipe (although I have been known to misread the occasional step!), and if you watched me preparing dinner on a good day, you might reasonably conclude that I have no difficulty at all.
But what if you saw me on a different day? A day when deciding what to eat feels impossible. When opening the fridge is overwhelming because there are too many choices. When the thought of writing a shopping list, going to the supermarket and then cooking a meal from scratch feels like climbing a mountain. A day when beans on toast, a bowl of soup or something straight from the freezer is the very best I can manage.
Am I capable of preparing a meal? Yes. Do I always have the capacity? No. And that distinction matters far more than many people realise.
One of the things I often talk about with my coaching clients is the difference between capability and capacity. Capability asks whether we can do something. Capacity asks whether we have the physical, cognitive and emotional resources available to do it today.
It’s a distinction that many neurodivergent people instinctively understand because we live it every day. Yet it’s also one that can be surprisingly difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced fluctuating executive functioning, autistic burnout or the cumulative effects of constantly navigating a world that wasn’t designed with neurodivergent brains in mind.
It’s also one of the reasons I believe so many people with ADHD and autism struggle when completing forms such as Personal Independence Payment (PIP) or answering questions during such assessments.
The questions themselves often sound deceptively simple.
“Can you prepare a meal?”
“Can you wash and dress yourself?”
“Can you manage your medication?”
Most of us instinctively answer those questions based on whether we’re capable of doing them. The real question is much more nuanced. Can you do them reliably?
Can you do them safely, to an acceptable standard, repeatedly and within a reasonable time? Can you do them most days, taking into account the reality of a condition that fluctuates? Those are the principles the PIP assessment is designed to consider, particularly for conditions whose impact changes over time. Yet for many people with invisible disabilities, describing that fluctuating reality is incredibly difficult.
As I reflected on all of this, I found myself thinking about my own family. My son is often vitamin D deficient. Not because he doesn’t understand the importance of getting outside, but because leaving the house can feel like an enormous undertaking. If he doesn’t have somewhere he absolutely has to be, days can pass without him stepping outdoors at all. Those same days are often the days he doesn’t shower, not because he doesn’t care about his hygiene, but because there isn’t an external reason to do so. For many people, that probably sounds difficult to understand. For us, it’s simply one example of how motivation, executive functioning and autistic inertia can quietly shape everyday life.
Food is another example. My son can cook. So can I – we all can – my husband and daughter included. We know how to prepare a meal, but knowing how to cook and having the cognitive and emotional resources to decide what to eat, check what’s in the cupboards, shop for ingredients, get started and see the whole process through to the end are two very different things. On the days when our capacity is low, convenience food or a takeaway often feels like the only realistic option. From the outside, that can look like laziness, poor planning or not caring enough about our health. From the inside, it’s simply the reality of living with fluctuating executive functioning.
My daughter and I have both been known to order a Whoosh delivery for one or two items. Again, I know there will be people reading this who wonder why we don’t simply walk to the local shop. On the surface, that probably seems like the easier, cheaper and more sensible option.
But everyday tasks don’t always feel everyday when you live with ADHD or autism. Getting dressed, finding your keys, leaving the house, navigating the sensory demands of a supermarket, making decisions, standing in queues, interacting with other people and then making your way home again all require energy. Sometimes paying for a delivery isn’t really about convenience at all. Sometimes it’s about preserving enough capacity to manage everything else that still has to happen that day.
The same is true of my weekly online supermarket shop. If you looked inside my basket, you probably wouldn’t find beautifully planned meals and baskets overflowing with fresh ingredients. More often than not, you’ll find convenience food, frozen vegetables, fruit, yoghurt, nuts and the sort of simple meals that allow me to feed myself without creating another layer of overwhelm.
Years ago, I would probably have judged myself for that. Now I don’t. Not because I’ve lowered my standards, but because I’ve changed them.
Of course, there are still things that make me sad. Like opening the fridge and finding food that’s gone past its use-by date because we’d all forgotten it was there. Like throwing away vegetables that were bought with the very best intentions but never made it onto anyone’s plate. Like knowing money has been wasted when the cost of living is already high.
None of those moments feel good. But they’re also real. And one of the reasons I want to write about them is because I know we’re not unusual.
After working with dozens of late-discovered neurodivergent women over the years, I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had about mouldy salad in the fridge, forgotten leftovers, abandoned meal plans, repeated supermarket trips because somebody forgot the one thing they went in for, and the enormous shame that so often accompanies those experiences.
We rarely talk about these things because they’re embarrassing. Instead, we quietly conclude that everyone else has somehow mastered adulthood while we’re still struggling with the basics. The truth is, I don’t think we’re struggling with the basics at all.
I think we’re living with invisible disabilities that profoundly affect the way we plan, prioritise, initiate and sustain everyday tasks. Those difficulties may not be obvious to the outside world, but they shape almost every decision we make. And that’s precisely why I believe they’re so important to talk about.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges for people with ADHD and autism isn’t simply living with these everyday difficulties; it’s finding the words to describe them. After all, many of us have spent a lifetime minimising our struggles. We learn to push through, to compare ourselves with those around us and to reassure ourselves that everybody finds life difficult. Over time, the strategies we’ve developed to compensate become so familiar that they no longer feel like adaptations at all. They simply become normal.
That’s why I think so many neurodivergent people unintentionally understate the impact of their disability. When we’ve lived this way for years, it’s surprisingly difficult to recognise which parts of our daily lives represent genuine functional difficulties and which parts other people might regard as unusual. We become so accustomed to compensating that we stop noticing the effort those compensations require.
That’s why, if you’re completing a PIP form, I’d gently encourage you not to think only about whether you can do something. Instead, think about what everyday life really looks like:
- the planning that happens before the task even begins
- the prompts, reminders and workarounds you’ve quietly put in place over the years
- the things that don’t happen because you’ve already used up your available energy somewhere else
- the days when your capacity is at its lowest, and ask yourself whether the answer you’re writing reflects the pattern of your life rather than the exception.
The aim isn’t to exaggerate, or to focus only on your worst days. It’s simply to tell the whole story. Because that’s the part I think so many of us unintentionally leave out. We’re so busy trying to demonstrate what we’re capable of that we forget to explain what it costs us.
And perhaps that’s the question I’ve really been exploring throughout this article. Not…“Can you do it?” But… “At what cost?”
That question has changed the way I think about far more than just cooking. It’s changed my views on work, friendships, socialising, exercise, household chores and, perhaps most importantly, the way I describe my own experiences.
If you’re completing a PIP form, or supporting somebody else to complete one, I think it’s worth pausing before answering each question and asking yourself whether you’re describing your life as you genuinely live it, or the version you’ve spent years trying so hard to present to the outside world. There’s an important difference.
Many neurodivergent people become exceptionally good at masking, compensating and finding ways around the difficulties they experience. We develop routines, reminders, workarounds and coping strategies that allow us to function, often without even recognising them for what they are. Over time, those adaptations become so normal that we stop seeing them as evidence of the effort we’re expending simply to get through an ordinary day.
That’s why I’d encourage you not to edit those details out. Don’t assume they’re irrelevant or dismiss them as “just the way I am.” Don’t overlook the prompts, the reminders, the abandoned shopping lists, the food that quietly goes out of date, the takeaway ordered because there simply wasn’t enough left in the tank, or the hours spent recovering after what other people might consider an ordinary task.
Those details aren’t weaknesses; they’re context. They’re the pieces of the puzzle that help somebody else understand what everyday life actually looks like, rather than making assumptions based solely on what they can see from the outside. The aim isn’t to make things sound worse than they are, but simply to resist the temptation to make them sound easier.
As I’ve been writing this article, I’ve realised something about myself that I hadn’t fully appreciated before. For years, I genuinely believed I was describing my life honestly, but what I was really describing was the version of my life that other people could see. They could see that I’d managed to prepare a meal, do the supermarket shop, have a shower, put on clean clothes or make it to an appointment. What they couldn’t see was everything that had happened before those moments, or everything that followed afterwards; the mental negotiations, the exhaustion, the recovery and the countless invisible decisions that quietly determined whether those things happened at all.
I don’t think I was deliberately leaving those parts out. The truth is, I’d lived with them for so long that I’d stopped recognising them myself. They had become so woven into the fabric of everyday life that they no longer felt like evidence of disability. They simply felt… normal.
Perhaps that’s why I wanted to write this article. I know, from years of coaching women who are only just beginning to understand themselves, how often these conversations happen behind closed doors. Someone will mention the mouldy vegetables in the fridge, the unopened letters on the side, the takeaway they ordered for the third time that week or the washing that’s been sitting in the machine for two days before quietly saying, almost apologetically, “I thought it was just me.” It never is.
Maybe that’s the real value of telling these stories. Not because they offer solutions, or change the reality of living with ADHD or autism, but because they remind us that the reality is shared.
There’s something deeply comforting about recognising ourselves in one another. Shame has a habit of convincing us we’re the only one, yet time and time again I’ve watched women breathe a sigh of relief as they realise that the things they’ve hidden for years are often shared by others sitting quietly in the same room.
And there is something deeply validating about finally finding the words for things we’ve lived with for years but never quite known how to explain.
If sharing these ordinary, everyday moments helps even one person realise they aren’t failing, they aren’t lazy and, perhaps most importantly, they aren’t alone, then writing this article will have been worth it.
