Seeing Myself In Dawn: Netflix’s ‘Forever’ Quietly Mirrors Black Women With ADHD Desperate To Look ‘Normal’ [Op-Ed] - Page 2
Hyperfocus, Control, and the Fight to Be Present
One hallmark of my ADHD is something that surprises people: hyperfocus. When a task or passion grabs my attention, I can lose myself in it for hours. The rest of the world fades away. It’s the flip side of struggling to focus on things that don’t interest my brain. I saw hints of that in Dawn, who channeled a similar intensity into maintaining order and success. Whether it’s planning Justin’s college applications or managing the family’s day-to-day, she zeroes in with laser focus. The college argument with Justin, in which she shared that her way was going to be the way, was a sign of how controlling she feels she must be. Watching that, I flashed back to my color-coded high school planner and the way I micromanaged group projects in college. I was terrified something might go wrong if I didn’t oversee every detail. Control, in many ways, became my coping mechanism. If I could orchestrate my environment perfectly, maybe my brain wouldn’t betray me with forgotten deadlines or misplaced papers. Maybe I could prevent the kind of last-minute scrambles my ADHD so often created in my chaos.
Of course, the other side of that control is difficulty with flexibility. Any unexpected change or unplanned moment can feel destabilizing. Dawn’s need for things to go “according to plan” sometimes makes her come off as rigid or unfeeling, like in that first moment of the series, where she was unrelenting about Justin going out for New Year’s Eve. On this third watch, I empathized with her deeply here. ADHD doesn’t just impact attention; it often comes with challenges in emotional regulation. Emotions can run high and fast, and we can react in ways that look cold or overly anxious when we’re just overwhelmed. In that moment, Justin only felt that his mom was on his case. It’s a painfully accurate depiction of the kind of miscommunication that can happen when ADHD brains struggle to be present in real time. We’re often one step ahead (worrying about the future, imagining problems that haven’t happened) or one step behind (distracted by something we can’t let go of), and we miss the moment right in front of us. In Dawn, I see a woman who loves her son fiercely—she wouldn’t be so strict if she didn’t care—but who has a hard time emotionally connecting in certain moments because she’s caught up in her mental traffic jam. As ADHD experts note, heightened emotional sensitivity and frustration are common in those of us with the disorder. We feel so much, but expressing it at the right time, in the right way, can be a battle.
Seeing Dawn Was a Rare Moment of Validation
By the end of Forever, I realized that Dawn Edwards gave me something I didn’t know I needed: representation that validates the existence of Black women with ADHD, in the way many of us show up. Here was a character who, to all the world, looks like the archetypal “Strong Black Woman.” She’s accomplished, elegant, always on top of everything—yet her behaviors quietly screamed neurodivergent to me. Whether Mara Brock Akil (the show’s creator) intended it or not, Dawn reads as a Black mom who might very well share her son’s ADHD. The beauty of it is that Dawn is not a caricature or a punchline. She’s not the ditzy stereotype sometimes used for ADHD characters. Instead, she’s the one holding it all together…until the cracks quietly show. For me, a Black woman who has lived this double life of outward “perfection” and inner chaos, seeing Dawn felt like being seen. It was as if the show reached out and whispered, “You are not the only one. There are others like you, even if nobody has said it out loud.”
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That validation matters so much. Black women are rarely afforded the grace to be openly neurodivergent on screen. ​​In real life, countless Black women navigate undiagnosed ADHD or other mental health challenges while wearing the mask of having it all together. The cost of that invisibility is high: it’s loneliness; it’s burnout; it’s feeling like you’re failing even when you’re succeeding. That’s why a character like Dawn is revolutionary in a subtle way. Forever gave us a Black mother who is hyper-capable yet hyper-vigilant, loving yet occasionally lost in her own head. She doesn’t fit the one-dimensional trope of the “Angry Black Mom” or the “Strong Black Matriarch” who never bends. Instead, she’s nuanced—sometimes wrong, sometimes fragile, and possibly, quietly, neurodivergent.
It made me wish I’d seen someone like her when I was a little Black girl with an ADHD diagnosis feeling too…different. It made me hope that somewhere out there, another Black woman watching Forever had the same lightbulb moment I did and felt a little less alone.
More Nuanced Portrayals, Please
Dawn’s character opened the door to a long-overdue conversation about Black women and neurodivergence. We need more Dawns on screen. More characters who reflect the reality that ADHD (and autism, and anxiety, and so on) can and do exist in Black women, even those who seem to be “handling everything.” We need storylines that move beyond the tired trope of the overbearing Black mom or the superwoman who never cracks, and show the why behind those behaviors with compassion. Perhaps if we saw more of these nuanced portrayals, fewer Black girls would slip through the cracks undiagnosed. Perhaps the world would start to understand that when a Black woman is controlling or overly driven, she might be coping with something internally, not just fulfilling a stereotype.
As someone who has lived it, I’m grateful for the glimpse of it in Dawn. I’m hopeful that with continued representation, Black women with ADHD won’t have to hide in plain sight forever.
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