I understand that, and I sympathize with it. In fact, that is probably the majority opinion, the popular position. It was also my position until recently--some of it still is my position.
You are right about much of what you're saying here. Please know that I'm not trying to be glib or sarcastic. If I was being short with my reply, it was because I was in the exam room of a doctor typing on my phone while waiting on her to get back and resume our interview and examination for prescribing medication for my new diagnosis of ADHD. So in a way this discussion is serendipitous for me.
Let me offer a difference of opinion on a few small points in what you've said here.
First, unless you're doing it wrong (pardon the meme), then you will not be wrapping up problems and tucking them away. Not into a diagnosis, not anywhere. But to discount the diagnosis would be an equally problematic mistake to embracing it as a catch-all. If you're diagnosed as having rotten roots beneath a tooth of yours, that doesn't wrap the problem of a toothache up in that diagnosis so that you can then go about ignoring it. It ascribes a cause and a probable form of treatment to your situation.
If you have ADHD, it is a part of who you are, absolutely. It's a part of your strengths as well as your struggles. But your question here was, "What am I doing wrong?" and if you've been diagnosed as ADHD, there's an excellent change you can find good answers that encompass and respect the totality of your person by going further down that trail.
As for the lack of a litmus test, I strongly empathize with that idea as well. While I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, I have been paying attention to this issue, trying to go deeper into those reservations.
In fact, there are some good tests for ADHD that don't just rely on an interview with a psychiatrist (though I would argue that that interview has more validity to it than you might be willing to grant it). There are brainwave scans that can be done. There are functional tests. There are eye-tracking tests.
That last bit about bad habits is the one that I think is most doggedly pernicious, at least based on my experience. My thinking went along these lines: I'm lazy. I'm undisciplined. These things are hard for everyone. These are behavioral problems, not biological problems--matters of willpower, not matters of capability.
The thing about psychological disorders is that they can all be dismissed as bad behavior, as moral issues, if you are prepped to see it that way, especially for the layman. We've gotten better as a society at acknowledging naturalistic, deterministic causes to these things in order of severity. Things like schizophrenia or dissociative disorder or mania--that stuff we look at and say, "Yeah, there's probably something off with the chemistry or structure of that person's brain." With something like dysthymia or ADHD, though, we still are more inclined to discount the physiological, the neurological components of that cycle of behaviors.
To an extent, you're right. These are learned behaviors. Cognitive-behavioral therapy can do a world of good in undoing them. Heck, even just adapting through self-management can do a lot of good. At the same time, the two worlds, that of mind and body, are inexorably linked. They determine one another in either a vicious or virtuous circle.
Proper treatment for ADHD addresses both aspects of that reality. It addresses your personhood and your physicality, your learned behaviors as well as your proclivities.
I'm not trying to be overbearing here. Please excuse me, and I certainly don't presume to know much about you or your condition. But I hope you're open at least to reconsidering your views on ADHD, or maybe not even reconsidering, just broadening and deepening.
I see so much of myself in what you've described here, and when I saw that you've been diagnosed as ADHD, it lined up with the self-discovery I am in the process of. Your reply here does that even more so, and while I don't want to diminish your individuality and your uniqueness, I think we may be a lot alike and can help one another by having this discussion. I'm open to having my mind changed--I'm not singularly focused on getting you to take meds or anything; other than maybe validating my decision, I have no motive for doing so. That said, validating, or invalidating, each of our positions only stands to bring more light to the situation for each of us and may be of some benefit to other observers as well.
In short, I understand if you disagree with me, and that's certainly your right, but if you'd be willing, I'd love to go back and forth a little more, for our mutual benefit. This reply is my effort to that end, and I hope it doesn't come across as arrogant or rude or dismissive in any way. It's just a topic I care a lot about right now, and in my opinion, it may be one that could yield the type of breakthroughs that you opened this post in hopes of finding.
Sorry for the length!