Someone said it to you at a work thing. "Oh you must be high functioning." They said it like a compliment. They meant it like a compliment. They thought they were being kind.
You smiled. You said thanks. You went home. You did not sleep for an hour because the word was doing laps in your head and you couldn't work out why it felt like an insult dressed up as praise.
It's because the word is a tax. The tax is paid in private. The tax is exactly why you got labelled high functioning in the first place.
What the Word Actually Means
Let's be honest about what high functioning means in practice. It means you have learned, through years of humiliating public failures, to hide the cost. It means your house is a wreck but your inbox is clean. It means you deliver at work and collapse on the drive home. It means you have developed such an elaborate masking system that strangers can't tell anything is different about you, and the only people who see the true scope of it are the people who live with you.
It does not mean you are doing fine. It means you are doing a very convincing impression of someone who is doing fine.
The Tax Is Paid Weekly
The rent on the high functioning label comes due every Sunday evening. It comes due when you cancel plans because you have nothing left. It comes due when you look at the pile of personal admin that has accumulated because work had first claim on all your executive function. It comes due when your partner asks if you're okay and you can't answer because the question is too big.
Every hour of looking fine at work is an hour you are not available to yourself, or to anyone outside work, or to the dentist appointment you have rescheduled four times.
The bill is real. You just don't let anyone see the statement.
Who Gets Left Out
The other problem with high functioning as a shorthand is who it erases. When high functioning becomes the face of ADHD — the witty tweet about having forty tabs open, the article about a CEO who credits it for their creativity — the people who can't hold a job, can't finish a degree, can't get off the couch, get rendered invisible. Or worse, they get told they must not really have it. They must just not be trying.
Same brain. Different circumstances. Different support. Different mask. The functioning is not the diagnosis. The functioning is the performance. And the performance costs money most people don't have.
The Functioning Isn't Even Consistent
You are high functioning on Tuesday. You are catatonic by Friday. You are, over the course of a single day, three different versions of a person. The high functioning label flattens all of that into one word that implies a steady state, when the reality is a chart that looks like seismograph readings of a small earthquake.
Every ADHD person reading this has had the experience of absolutely destroying a task on a good day and then, on a bad day, being unable to open an envelope. Same task. Same brain. Different day. The functioning isn't a property of you. It's a property of the weather.
The Shirt Does the Quiet Work
This is part of why the shirts exist. Not as a flag. Not as an announcement. More like a small crack in the mask that lets a bit of truth through. 40 Tabs Open, Closing None is not a diagnostic tool. It's a way of walking into the supermarket with a slightly more accurate version of your inside state visible on the outside. For one afternoon, the mask gets to breathe.
Worn with jeans. Not worn with a speech.
What We'd Actually Prefer
Not a new label. The label industry is already at capacity. Just a bit less weight placed on the word functioning. A bit less congratulation for the performance. A bit more curiosity about what it costs.
Ask what's hard. Ask what's easy. Ask where the blanks are. Don't grade the brain on how well it passes as a non-ADHD brain under office lighting.
The high functioning compliment, kindly meant, is still a small instruction. Keep it up. Keep hiding it. Keep making it look effortless. Nobody needs that instruction. Everybody's already doing it.
Not a movement. Not a rebrand. Just a note that the word isn't as nice as it sounds, and the people wearing it are mostly very tired.