I think about an essay I wrote in 11th grade in my Shakespeare class. I had interpreted Hamlet as being an impulsive character, and had managed to write a fairly convincing essay about this being the case. I think I got a B+ on the paper.

I hold onto that experience still, because it tells me about perception. My brain can take the world and filter it so effectively that Hamlet will become impulsive.

I have ADHD, but like many high achieving women, I didn't get diagnosed until recently, when I finally found where the exhaustion hard-limit was (The boss who 'helped' me find exactly how hard to drive me into the ground before I could no longer get up 'left to pursue other opportunities.' Turns out sometimes HR does its job!) I never understood why it was so hard for me to keep myself focused on a task I found 'boring,' or why time didn't seem to have meaning, or why I tended to catastrophize so that I could blunt the blow of bad news so it didn't catch me off guard. Turns out executive dysfunction, time blindness, and rejection sensitive dysphoria are very common ADHD symptoms, and that I've been a star-shaped peg trying to fit into a square hole for most of my life.

Trying to keep myself from blurting out and interrupting others in conversations because I was excited.
Trying to keep myself still as my mind wandered because the subject matter was not activating my brain.
Setting alarms for each and every meeting I needed to attend because I was never able to tell the difference between fifteen minutes and three hours.

The alarms at least is an excellent example of disability aids, but the other two are called masking. For most of my life, I had been shoving my true self down as far as I could to try to fit in with how everyone else was acting. I look back on specific instances where the signs were definitely all there, but I got good grades and had decent manners, so they went ignored.

But being different on a neurochemical level from most of the people I interact with has a silver lining. Understanding the 'normal' was survival. If I couldn't pretend that my brain worked like that, I was socially punished. "Trial by fire" empathy if you will.

It's hard to describe vibes that flow out of people when you've become hyperattuned to them, how you just know those subtle cues that say they're bored or they're interested or they're annoyed, and usually I can walk myself through their mindsets to predict their behaviors, and have gotten really good at it. (Ask my spouse, who enjoys my mind-reading powers because it makes choosing what to eat for dinner a lot easier.) It's exhausting, and if I have to do it for a large group of people for an extended period of time, I'm usually so spent I don't want to talk to someone for at least the next twelve hours (that though is also due to the introversion.)

Yet, it also means that I can see characters clearly. I can ask about their motivations, their choices, their stakes, their flaws. I can do what I have learned to do in real life to navigate a neurotypical world with a neurospicy brain and map desires, personality traits, behaviors, and build the full person. I still ask myself the question, "did you make Hamlet impulsive?" when I do this, but more often than not, I didn't. More often than not, I did correctly surmise that the spouse was in the mood for pasta instead of sushi, because if I always made Hamlet impulsive, I think my ADHD-self would have outwardly struggled a lot more. (The constant social battery exhaustion was mostly internal.)

ADHD is a double-edged sword. Our mileage may vary too, and a lot of my struggles with it were internal, and were things that I managed to compensate for while I was growing up. Empathy is a great skill to have once you learn it, but we should never forget that empathy-for-survival usually cost the person who developed it blood, sweat, and most definitely tears.