I had horrible grades in college. I retook more classes than I would have liked, some for really stupid reasons. I felt like I was a complete phony doing phy

I had horrible grades in college. I retook more classes than I would have liked, some for really stupid reasons. I felt like I was a complete phony doing physics because, for some fucked up reason, it was what smart, cool people did, and that I didn't belong there at all, I was just a poseur who had some bright flukes along the way. More importantly, I almost worked entirely alone along the way. In my last year, I was taking Analytical Mechanics, Q&M, Advanced Electrodynamics, and Nuclear and Particle physics. I had the second highest score in the class on the first test, which included 10 grad students. I still wrote it off as a fluke, and I didn't do so good on the next test. Then I did it again, the next semester, and I still couldn't believe it. Everyone had better homework scores than I did... how could I beat them on the test? Then the same thing happened in Nuclear and Particle physics with an oral examination because my grades were low. I sat through 5 other students who had much better grades and were doing the oral examination for the A instead of an A- (I was fighting for a B-) They weren't doing so well for the most part. At the end, the professor, who knew I could do it, started going above and beyond what we hard learned into Solid State physics, just to see what I knew. I screwed up a bit on the paper final, getting stuck on weird problem that involved some hand waving for some radiative losses for an electron near relativistic energies. I knew I was below the curve. I went in to say bye to the professor on the last day, and he asked what grade I thought I deserved, and I told him a B- (I was in C territory before the oral exam and final exam). He ended up giving me an B+. The last year was weird. It was really the first time I thought I could really, truly do physics. I worked with other students, and I realized that a large portion of the students who I thought were better students were better focused and better working in groups. These same students even thought of me as really smart (and still tell me that). Overall, I don't think I'm smarter than they are, but I do think we have different strengths. To this day, I still feel like I got lucky, and that my bosses didn't bother to check my GPA because of my enthusiasm for the position (and writing skills) I do have ADHD, and I know for a fact that's a driving force in this because I have a hard time focusing on many tasks. I've gotten much better at it, especially after having a regular job with a regular schedule, but I still have a hard time believing where I'm at.