Last month, I took my car in to get it serviced. When I handed my keys over to the man behind the counter, he chuckled and held up my keychain. It’s one of those kitschy plastic ones that looks like it came from an old roadside motel. It was a gift from my brother, and I really appreciate it.

“Oh yeah,” I said to the man. “It’s appropriate because it answers the question I’m usually yelling to no one.”

Instead of a room number, my keychain says: “Here are my f-ing keys.”

Then, because I’m me, I immediately began to pepper him with questions about the kinds of keychains he sees on the job. He told me about some of his favorites: pictures of cute kids — or better, pets—and the zippy long chains favored by letter carriers. And then he told me to go wait while men in jumpsuits made zoop-zoop noises on my Honda for about an hour.

I should note that I rarely fully lose my keys — as in leave them somewhere (although that did happen recently, but that’s because of an unfortunate coat pocket situation). I’m not one of those people whose keys are so lost that they can’t do what they need to do. Instead, my keys (and my phone, and my headphones, and my coffee cup, and my cap, and my sanity) are typically what I call “soft lost,” which is to say that they’re wherever I last had them and I just don’t remember where that is.

In public and when I’m traveling, I develop a near-pathological triple-tapping routine of checking for my keys/wallet/phone. But at home? Where I live? And spend conservatively 96% of my time? Nope. Home is where I can let go of my constant terror of losing things and, you know, lose them. Softly.

Places I’ve lost my keys in the house include:

• The bathroom counter
• The bedside table
• The ledge of one of my raised garden beds
• The guest bedroom
• The laundry room

There’s a reason, of course, why each of these locations became a temporary resting spot for my keys. I took my keys out of my pocket while in the bathroom so they wouldn’t fall in the toilet. I left them in the laundry room because I found them in a pocket. You get it.

I’m reasonably sure that a “regular” — read: neurotypical — person wouldn’t get into these little situations to begin with. A regular person, like my sweet wonderful partner, would just put his keys on the key hook by the front door immediately upon entering the house. He wouldn’t stuff them into whichever pocket is closest just to get a free hand and then forget until one of them is jabbing him in the leg while he’s trying to pull wood sorrels out of the soil.

I can’t be bothered to put my keys back where they belong, though, because by the time I’m in the front door, they’ve fallen so far from the front of my mind that they may as well have melted into the floor.

This is what my ADHD looks like.

It looks like constantly misplacing my stuff because there are other things drawing my attention. It looks like having to wander in and out of rooms three times before completing the initial task that put me into motion in the first place. And it looks like always paying the bills on time, but only because I scheduled them when I thought of it and completely forgot after that, so…no problem?

As I’ve learned in the last six-ish years, the symptoms most of us associate with ADHD are those that are typically seen in children. But for a grown human person, especially a grown woman, the condition looks a lot different (and harder to recognize).

I first learned about ADHD because I’m a millennial and our generation was, according to the scary local news stories of the 1990s, being medicated within an inch of our lives instead of (checks notes) being bullied into normalcy. We were the Ritalin Generation! We were all getting diagnosed! We were becoming zombies, strung out on Adderall!

I wasn’t. I didn’t get diagnosed until I was in my mid 20s, and only because my doctor was asking me about drug use and I admitted to using kind of a lot of stimulants to help me think. And he was like “Oh.”

My diagnosis came late for two primary reasons.

First, I was viewed as a smart kid, which meant any behavioral issues were mostly disregarded. My grades were good, and I was so afraid of sticking out or seeming like a “bad” kid that I would go above and beyond to perform. Interestingly, perfectionism has only somewhat recently been viewed as a symptom — in the 1990s, most educators were only looking for hyperactivity and difficulty focusing.

Second, and perhaps most critically, I’m female.

A wealth of recent research has shown that ADHD has been woefully underdiagnosed in women and girls. There are a lot of reasons behind this systematic underrepresentation, but the one that has always struck me as salient is the fact that most of the commonly reported symptoms of ADHD are not universal. Instead, they are the symptoms most often seen in boys.

What most of us understand about ADHD and how it manifests has been largely colored by skewed reporting, bias in research, and the incredible gift that women have (or have been socially conditioned to have) for keeping a lid on their private struggles.

An article for Healthline outlines the differences.

“Research also suggests that undiagnosed ADHD can have a negative impact on girls’ self-esteem. It can even affect their mental health. Boys with ADHD typically externalize their frustrations. But girls with ADHD usually turn their pain and anger inward. This puts girls at an increased risk for depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. Girls with undiagnosed ADHD are also more likely to have problems in school, social settings, and personal relationships than other girls.”

Sure, if you were running around your house flailing like Kevin McCallister from Home Alone, someone might have thought “Hmm, this could be ADHD!”

But what about compulsive eating? Would that make you wonder? How about alcohol use?

Exactly.

When I talk to someone about my own ADHD symptoms, they’re usually surprised. I share things like “I never know how long it takes to complete a task, so sometimes I get behind.” They’re expecting to hear something like “I can’t stop fidgeting.”

Even when talking to male friends about ADHD, I find that the manifestation is surprisingly different. Sure, there are a lot of shared symptoms — a brain that won’t quit, interrupting, spaciness or a tendency to “check out,” especially when feeling unstimulated. But there are also a lot that show up more often in girls and persist into adulthood.

In general, there are three main recognized buckets of ADHD/ADD symptoms. Those are:

1. Inattention
2. Hyperactivity
3. Impulsivity

Those three areas, though, can cover a lot of ground. And different people may experience differing degrees of each. The exact symptoms can be hugely nuanced. You may find yourself wondering how, exactly, you fit into these buckets. Looking at specific symptoms can often provide a lot more clarity.

Here’s a snippet from ADDitude Magazine’s list of questions women should ask themselves if they think they have ADHD:

Do you feel overwhelmed in stores, at the office, or at parties? Is it impossible for you to shut out sounds and distractions that don’t bother others?

Do you often shut down in the middle of the day, feeling assaulted? Do requests for “one more thing” put you over the top emotionally?

Are you spending most of your time coping, looking for things, catching up, or covering up? Do you avoid people because of this?

Have you stopped having people over to your house because you’re ashamed of the mess?

Are you clueless as to how others manage to lead consistent, regular lives?

Are you “passing for normal”? Do you feel as if you are an impostor?

Is all your time and energy taken up with coping, staying organized, and holding it together, with no time for fun or relaxation?

As you can see, these aren’t exactly the kinds of things most of us think about when we think about ADHD, because they’re not the symptoms most often associated with boys.

It’s extremely important to point out the ways that ADHD creates seemingly incongruous personality tics, behaviors, and coping mechanisms. I’m a very organized and tidy person in many ways — it’s a way to have some kind of control over my chaotic brain. (I even co-host a podcast about cleaning and household stuff and its intersection with mental health!) I often find myself wiping down countertops just to calm myself and give me a feeling of accomplishment.

However, my home is a DISASTER in other (hidden) ways. My surfaces are all neat. The floor has nothing on it that shouldn’t be. But my clothing drawers? There’s not a folded garment in there. I just jam everything in because no one can see it but me. And that’s good enough.

I crave order and systems in the workplace and quickly become IRATE when things are untidy. As a contractor, I’m constantly swooping in with my type-A needs, implementing Trello boards and Google Drive folders. No naming conventions in your Dropbox? We can’t be friends. But my own data? It’s all over the place. I’ve got stashes of old files in weird folders across a number of systems.

ADHD — like everything else in this world—is unique to the person. No one’s symptoms are going to look just like mine. But they might sound similar.

They might sound like “soft losing” your keys and phone. They might sound like saying you’ll do something and then doing it a cool 18 hours later because you forgot. They might sound like living and dying by what’s in your iCal and Todoist apps. They might sound like setting alarms and alerts so you remember stuff — or turning off alarms and alerts because they’ll send you into an absolute spiral.

Regardless of how your ADHD manifests — even if you’re not sure that it is ADHD—it’s almost impossible to manage without help, whether from your partner, your doctor, or other people you trust. For me, my ADHD means that in addition to trying to find new and creative ways to remember where I set my keys, it also means learning how to ask for help. And accepting it when it comes.