Does ADHD medication make you completely "normal," or does it just make the symptoms less noticeable?

Closer to the second one, quieter and more manageable, not a full erasure of the underlying wiring. Medication doesn't cure ADHD or turn your brain into a neurotypical one, it adjusts the dopamine/norepinephrine activity that's contributing to the attention and executive function difficulties, which for most people meaningfully reduces symptom intensity and impairment, but the underlying way your brain is wired doesn't fundamentally change. What this looks like practically: most people describe it as having more access to the skills and follow-through they already had the capacity for, rather than gaining entirely new abilities they never had. Task initiation gets easier, distractibility goes down, working memory feels more reliable, but you're still you, with your same interests and quirks, not a different, 'fixed' person. This is actually a useful thing to know going in specifically because it sets realistic expectations, if you're expecting to wake up one day thinking and functioning exactly like someone who never had ADHD, that's setting yourself up for disappointment even if the medication is working well by any reasonable clinical measure. A lot of people also still benefit from non-medication strategies alongside medication, since it's addressing the neurochemical piece, not replacing every coping strategy you might still need. 'Better, more manageable, more consistent' is a more accurate goal than 'completely different person.'

This matches my experience exactly, still very much me, still lose my train of thought sometimes, just... way less catastrophically than before. Would've been disappointed early on if I'd gone in expecting total transformation instead of 'meaningfully better.'