Totally agree it was a good starting point. I have made a lot of friends in the communities I gained access to via diagnoses and we're still good friends to this day. It's all part of a journey with multiple stages.

Think of it this way: The shape of a hammer compels you to hammer things down with it, but with sustained effort and creativity you can use it for chiseling marble instead.

To reach where I am now, I had to undo some amount of (but not all!) progress I'd made in one direction (since I had bought into the therapy circuit for treating ADHD already) and actively resist attempts to pathologize my own behaviors.

People say "don't treat ADHD like an identity" like it's easy, but the nature of a label compels you to treat it like an identity sometimes. Especially in the society I live in where awareness and destigmatization of conditions is pushed on social media all the time. And especially when your life lacks other meaning and you crave an identity to anchor yourself onto ("just don't make it your identity" sounded like "just don't be depressed" innumerable times to past depressed me, and I saw little reason not to take hold of a new identity for myself). This is a function of depression so I don't blame anyone for it, but I ultimately felt better served by other movements as far as making tangible gains in my mental health.

To use the metaphor again, the art of chiseling was unlikely to make itself known in my current state, but deep down inside I preferred to be there than where I was, so I had to deliberately seek out a teacher and undo the preconceived notions about myself in order to get there. In reality that was just finding another form of therapy that was more effective for solving my problems.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the "normal things have 'ADHD' translations" bit. It reads the same as trans to me - a counterculture subculture where you get to feel good about things you feel bad about.