For most of my life, I had a simple explanation for the way my mind worked: I was lazy. I heard it early, and at some point I stopped arguing with it.
The first time I remember hearing it was about my handwriting. Somewhere in the middle of a word I’d get bored of finishing it. My head had already moved on to the next word, sometimes the next sentence, and my hand was left to trail off with whatever half-formed letters it could manage. Teachers couldn’t read the result, and I got told off for it a lot. Nobody, me included, saw it as anything other than not trying. If I could write the first half of a word properly, surely I could be bothered to write the second half.
The list I kept about myself
My mind wandered constantly. I’d sit down to do one thing and look up an hour later, deep in something else, with no idea how I got there. I couldn’t explain the detour to anyone, including myself.
The same thing happened with people, including ones I cared about a lot. When someone wasn’t around, they could drop out of my thoughts almost completely. That one hurt the most, because I took it as proof of something ugly: if I could forget about someone I loved that easily, maybe deep down I didn’t like them very much.
I grew up in the 90s, and none of this looked like ADHD to anyone around me. ADHD was the kid bouncing off the walls in class. I was the kid who didn’t finish things, and that kid just needed to try harder.
So that’s what I told myself for years: try harder, be more disciplined, stop being like this. It never worked, and every time it didn’t, it went on the list as more evidence for what I already believed. I got very good at being hard on myself, and none of it helped.
It didn’t go away when I started working. I’d open a PR, finish the interesting part, then a side-quest would come along and the PR would sit there, victim of context switching.
I felt like I was bad at whole parts of the job, and if I couldn’t follow through on my own work, maybe I wasn’t cut out for it.
I knew what ADHD was, I just didn’t think it meant me
When the medical diagnosis came, the first thing I felt was relief. The thing I’d been calling laziness for most of my life had a name. Right behind the relief came grief for all the years I’d spent treating it as a character flaw. It took a while for both to settle, and for medication to become part of my routine.
I’d love to say everything changed after that, but most of it didn’t. My brain didn’t start working differently the next morning. What changed is the voice in my head on the bad days.
These days, when I find a forgotten PR, I recognize the pattern before the old voice gets going. I know my brain won’t notice what it let slip, so I stopped asking it to. I set up tools that watch for the things I tend to drop and tell me when something has been sitting too long.
It isn’t a perfect system, and things still slip through, but when they do, I fix them instead of adding them to the list.