this rings so completely true to my experience of life that id never even considered examining just how contradictory and weird it really is until reading you describe my own experiences back to me hahaha  right off the bat two things jump out at me about this part of the experience  ive always been told im smart by people who get to know me i never claimed that title but whatever ill take their word for it at this point  i think this is just a reflection of how differently we experience the world with broadly 2 stand-out components 1 adhd gets   of information into our heads by pure virtue of the novelty-seeking nature of our attention were maybe not good at independently focusing our attention and the wealth of our knowledge but when someone else churns up that memory of something we read in an article in a magazine in a doctors office 20 years ago hooo boy do we look  an important piece of this is how people perceive being smart as in  we  that being smart is more than knowing facts but so much of our fundamental education structure is based around the memorization of facts and formulas that even when were well past that stage of life we still conflate the two like our internal 2nd grader goes wowwwww the longest word in an english dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and its a name for silicosis caused by the inhalation of ultra-fine silica particles found in and around volcanoes neat   fun fact i just learned while double-checking my spelling the president of some nerd club specifically coined this term for the sake of it being so long it literally exists for the express purpose of enabling nerds in the 1930s to circle-jerk about knowing the longest word  anyway  2 its not uncommon for us to have unorthodox novel creative solutions to problems i think its an adhd tendency that can be explained in a plethora of ways maybe a lifetime of experience of trying to use an adhd brain to navigate the world predisposes us to the creative solutions weve always had to use to come up with our own coping mechanisms maybe a history of being contrarian unruly little jerks makes us stubborn enough to work on a problem until we figure it out maybe we just like getting caught up in the raw euphoria of hyperfocus problem-solving whatever it is people see us come up with a solution by using a process that seems to us to be just the way we think but to them seems opaque and impressively clever and these come together to make people go huh that was really smart   so our life is made up of all these moments of us doing things that seem really smart but then also doing other things that people have been conditioned to perceive as stupid or lazy  super smart with imposter syndrome