The Distance Between Potential and Performance

Maggie Wong calls it the pressure cooker incident.

After a game of squash, she invited her fiancé, cousin and his girlfriend home for dinner. The pasta was ready and only needed reheating, but the pressure cooker was set for 25 minutes, and everyone was hungry.

Maggie released the visible steam. When the lid still would not open, she persuaded her fiancé to help her force it.

Seconds later, pasta sauce covered the walls, the sink, her fiancé and Maggie’s arm. Some reached the plug socket, and the electricity went out.

Standing in the kitchen, she remembers thinking: “Surely this isn’t how most people’s brains work.”

The incident was dangerous, but it also gave shape to something she had been recognising for years: ideas could arrive quickly and move into action before the part of her brain responsible for slowing down and assessing the risk had caught up.

Maggie is an occupational therapist at The Bridge School in Lonehill. Through her work with neurodivergent children and through hearing other people describe their experiences of ADHD, she began to understand her own life differently.

As a child, she did not fit the familiar picture of ADHD. She was not failing, disruptive or bouncing around the classroom. Her marks sat consistently in the 70s.

What followed her instead were the comments many capable girls hear: she had potential, made careless mistakes and could do better.

Her parents responded by finding more support. Maggie attended extra English, maths and Afrikaans lessons, Kumon and Chinese school.

None of it addressed the difficulty underneath.

“I always felt I had the potential, but I could never show for it,” she says. “I spent my childhood feeling like there was a gap between what I knew I could do and what I actually produced.”

In an earlier Dainfern Precinct article, Dr Moray Shirley explored why ADHD in women is so often missed until adulthood or midlife. Public understanding has long been shaped by the more visible presentation commonly associated with boys. A girl who is not disruptive, achieves reasonable marks and works hard to compensate can pass through school without anyone questioning what it takes for her to keep up.

For Dr Shirley, outward achievement is a poor measure of whether a child is struggling.

A bright girl may rely on intelligence, anxiety, adult prompting or last-minute pressure to produce acceptable results. The mark shows what she handed in. It does not show how much support held the process together, or what it cost her emotionally.

For Maggie, attention was never simply absent.

“I can’t always control what I pay attention to,” she says.

She could delay studying until the final possible moment, but wake at 3 am as a Grade 4 child and teach herself to make sushi because her father had mentioned that he felt like eating it.

As an adult, she could lose belongings throughout the day, then develop a business idea, build an investor pitch and present it within a week.

This inconsistency is one of the aspects of ADHD that other people often find hardest to understand. If someone can focus intensely on one task, why can she not begin another that she knows is important?

Dr Shirley explains that ADHD affects the regulation and direction of attention. Interest, novelty, urgency and immediate consequence may engage the brain more effectively than importance alone.

That is why a looming deadline can produce hours of intense work after weeks of being unable to start.

“Give me six months to do something, and I might struggle to get started,” Maggie says. “Give me six hours, and suddenly I become remarkably efficient.”

From the outside, this may look like working well under pressure. From the inside, it can mean relying on panic to create focus, often at the cost of sleep, confidence and calm.

Over time, inconsistency begins to feel like a character flaw. Women describe themselves as lazy, careless or undisciplined because they cannot understand why they can perform brilliantly one day and struggle to begin the next.

Dr Shirley sees this self-judgement as one of the less visible consequences of late recognition. By adulthood, many women are carrying more than the practical effects of ADHD. They are also carrying years of explanations about who they are.

A later understanding can bring relief, but it can also reopen old questions.

“Perhaps I would have understood myself better,” Maggie says. “Perhaps I would have been kinder to myself. Perhaps I would have spent less time wondering why I couldn’t get my potential to match my performance.”

Her story also asks parents and teachers to look beyond the final result.

A child may understand the work but struggle to begin it. She may explain a complex idea beautifully, then lose marks because she missed one instruction. She may complete an excellent project in a frantic final night and appear to have proved that she could have done it sooner.

The more useful question is often not simply whether the child can do the work, but how she is managing to do it.

Dr Shirley believes the wider picture matters: sleep, fatigue, anxiety, emotional regulation, confidence, family conflict and the amount of prompting required. A child can be succeeding on paper while the system supporting that success is becoming unsustainable.

Maggie has also begun to see the qualities connected to the way she thinks.

As an occupational therapist, she understands creativity as practical problem-solving: noticing connections, finding another route and asking what else might work. Her curiosity can carry her deeply into a subject, while her own experience of being misunderstood has shaped the way she sees struggling children.

“You notice the child who is trying but not succeeding,” she says. “You notice the person who feels overlooked.”

This does not make ADHD a simple strengths story. The same quick, possibility-driven thinking that supports creativity can also lead to distraction, unfinished work or an unsafe decision involving a pressure cooker.

Dr Shirley cautions against reducing ADHD to either a deficit or a gift. The difficulties are real, but so are the abilities. Understanding needs to make room for both. For parents and teachers, that may mean recognising that more tutoring or more pressure is not always the answer.

A child who knows the content may need help starting, sequencing, estimating time or managing several instructions at once.

Recognition does not remove responsibility or expectations. It makes support more accurate.

Maggie no longer sees ADHD as something that needs to be fixed. She sees it as something that needs to be understood.

“If there is one thing I wish someone had told younger me,” she says, “it is that there was never anything wrong with me. My brain was working differently.”

That understanding now follows her into her work with children.

“The goal isn’t to create a different child. The goal is to help that child become the best version of who they already are.”

This article draws on Maggie Wong's personal account. Her full story is available here



Personal stories like Maggie's help us understand how ADHD presents beyond the textbook. No two people experience it in exactly the same way, but recognising these patterns can help more women and girls seek appropriate assessment and support." — Dr Moray Shirley