Diagnosed at 35

I could explain the next step in detail and then spend the entire day avoiding it.

For years, I treated that as evidence against myself. I knew what needed doing. I had the time. Sometimes I'd even built the tool that would make it easier. What explanation was left except that I wasn't disciplined enough?

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 35.

By then, I'd started more than twenty ventures in thirteen years. Prototypes, specs, half-built databases. Tools that solved my own problem beautifully and then sat there. Nothing shipped under my own name that strangers used.

I called this searching. The market was hard. Distribution was hard. The timing was wrong. Some of those explanations were true. They couldn't explain why such different projects kept ending at the same place.

I could do the work that rewarded me immediately. Build a tool. Set up a pipeline. Solve an interesting problem. The work with a distant payoff, or any chance of being judged, felt almost physically expensive. I'd reach the point where another person could see it and stop.

Knowing this about myself didn't make it easier to change. It gave me more material for the argument that I should know better.

What starting felt like

The diagnosis changed the explanation. Then treatment changed how starting felt.

During the first weeks, I wrote down a sentence: "None of the tasks now require me to generate internal motivation. If something is needed, I do it."

That was how striking the difference felt to me then. I could begin without first spending so much energy trying to make myself begin. A task could take the time the task required, without the hours of negotiation before it.

The relief was difficult to separate from grief. I kept thinking about the years I'd spent blaming myself. I wish I'd been assessed at 30. I can't know what those five years would have looked like. I know the explanation I was living with made them harder.

What still needed learning

There was another part I hadn't anticipated. Medication didn't give me the experience I'd missed. It didn't teach me how to ship, hear criticism, or stay with a project after the interesting part was over. The habit of hiding unfinished work was still there. So was the story I'd spent years telling about the person doing it.

Those things still need work. A better understanding of the difficulty gives me somewhere more useful to begin.

I run a company in metabolic health and I wanted to be able to speak openly about my own experience of diagnosis and treatment. This is what it felt like for me. I'm still learning how much of my life I organised around an explanation that never helped me change it.

For years, each unfinished task seemed to confirm something about who I was. I can look at the task itself now. What made it difficult? What would help me do it? I wish I'd had those questions sooner.