I can’t quite agree. Though I am hardly a psychologist/psychiatrist, it seems to me than an inconvenient characteristic - though I would use stronger terms! - becomes a disorder if it’s irrational and severe enough. And that’s about what I have.
What I’m saying is, the characteristic is inconvenient enough to be indistinguishable from a disorder.
I mean, from the outside an alcoholic can seem identical to a social drinker. That is, you don’t need to be hitting the bottle every hour to be an alcoholic. Moreover, the only real difference - externally - between an alcoholic and someone taking a drink is how the drinking is affecting the person over time. It’s not really a problem if it’s not hurting a person, right?
It’s a little different with ADD, because you can chalk up the effects to other things. If I don’t finish a project on time, maybe I’m just lazy; maybe I didn’t do something because I feel I am “above” the task. Who knows! But whether it’s just a character trait or is an actual disorder is hard to tell, because they share the same symptoms.
But by analogy, maybe an alcoholic is just really thirsty - or not disciplined enough to get off the stuff - and if he’d just stop drinking he wouldn’t suffer. It’s easy to correct the problem: just put down the booze, right? So maybe the person is normal, but just taking their fondness for a drink too far. Maybe alcoholism isn’t really a disorder or all, but a love for the drink that got carried away.
This is kind of the feeling I’m getting here, but toward ADD - not from your view, but from where your view may lead. This is why I’m reluctant to call it a trait or characteristic - it makes the problem sound more negligible or easier to overcome than I personally feel it is. YMMV.
Unlike yourself, my attempts to develop a coping mechanism have all been unsuccessful. My condition tends to override any discipline, such that I actually have very little self discipline over time. On the grand scale, I can’t form the discpline that forms the discipline that … that forms the discpline to do what I need to do on a daily basis. I’ve tried.
It just seems to me that something is wrong - more than just an inconvenient characteristic - if it takes another person to keep me on track. That indicates to me that I’m lacking something this other person has.