u/GarryRunsTheNumbers

Diagnosed at 56. I was expecting relief, and I got that, but there was a second thing underneath it that nobody had mentioned.

It is not dramatic. It arrives while you are doing the washing up. You find yourself thinking about school reports, and the jobs that got harder exactly when they should have got easier, and every list you rewrote instead of doing.

I left school with no qualifications, completely certain I was thick. I taught myself to program at 30 and filed that under discipline. It was hyperfocus. Same brain, two labels, and I picked both of them wrong.

The annoying part is not the past. It is that I spent fifty odd years being fairly harsh with someone who was doing his best with equipment he did not know he had.

I am not in bits about it. Mildly annoyed covers most days. But if you have just been diagnosed and you are wondering why a good answer has left you feeling flat, that is what it is. It is not ingratitude. It is a lot of years arriving at once.

Did anyone else get this, and did it pass.

I left school with no qualifications at all. Not a single one. The general view, including mine, was that I was thick and a bit lazy, and I did not have much of an argument against it.

Then at 30, with two small kids in the house and a job I was not enjoying, I taught myself to program in the evenings. Books and a secondhand machine. It took months. I stayed up past two most nights and I was not tired, which should have told somebody something.

For about twenty five years I told that story as a discipline story. Man decides to better himself, applies himself, gets on. It is a good story and people nod at it.

I got diagnosed at 56 and it stopped being that story. It was hyperfocus. The same wiring that could not read a school textbook for nine minutes could read a programming manual for nine hours, because one of them was interesting and the other one was not, and I never got a vote in which was which.

What annoys me is not the school bit. It is the twenty five years of taking credit for the one thing my brain was doing for free, while taking the blame for everything it would not do. Both were the same thing. Nobody told me, so I split it into virtue and failing and carried them separately.

If you are sitting on a story like that, the good one you tell at work, it might be worth turning it over. Mine looked very different underneath.

At least twenty jobs. I have never sat down and counted them properly, but twenty is the safe end of it, and that is a lot of P45s for one man.

The exits were rarely dignified. One place I walked out at lunchtime and never went back. There was no decision in it. One minute I was at my desk and the next I was outside, and I could not have told you why. At another I got frustrated and emailed the entire company to explain exactly how angry I was. No thinking involved in that one either. That was rather the pattern.

It was never the big things. It was a misunderstanding, or a colleague who left me feeling undermined, and then I was overwhelmed, then angry, then gone. For a long stretch I was also quietly certain that people in the office were plotting against me. There was never any evidence for it. Therapy eventually helped me see that one for what it was, though it still turns up now and again, just quieter.

The noise did more damage than I ever gave it credit for. Not rows or shouting. The hum of an open plan office, conversations I was not part of, arriving anyway.

I was 56 when I got the diagnosis. The bit that actually rearranged things was not the label, it was a sentence I ended up with a few weeks later. I had not failed in every environment. I had failed in the ones I did not control.

I have worked from home for twenty years now, and these days I do a managerial job at a bank, which the man who walked out at lunchtime would find hilarious. I still keep the camera off on calls, not out of shyness, but because I cannot sit still that long and I would rather not pretend to. I run meetings through transcription because my attention wanders off halfway and I would rather it left a record behind.

For most of my life those twenty jobs sat in my head as twenty separate failures. It was one thing, filed twenty times under the wrong name. I have no idea what anyone else's number means. I only wish someone had told me mine was worth a question.

Diagnosed at 56, after a lifetime of assuming everyone else had a manual I never got. Medication finally started last month. I work at a bank, which sounds organised. It is not. It is a man held together by calendar reminders and last minute adrenaline.

One month in, a few notes, in no particular order. Order was never really my thing.

Nobody warned me about the quiet. Everyone talks about focus. The bit that got me was the noise going down, the radio between stations hiss I had assumed was just what having a brain felt like. Sat in the kitchen a few days in, trying to work out what was different. It was nothing. Nothing was happening in my head. I can recommend nothing.

The grief arrives quietly and nobody warns you about that either. Not weeping. More standing at the sink thinking about school reports, every job that got harder exactly when it should have got easier, every list rewritten instead of done. I left school with no qualifications, convinced I was stupid. Taught myself programming at 30, evenings and weekends with two young kids. Fifty odd years assuming I was lazy or thick when the wiring was just different. I am not devastated. Mildly annoyed covers most of it.

It is not a personality transplant. The tablets do not do the task. They shorten the run up. Starting still takes a push, the push is smaller.

What I would tell the 26 year old version of me. That manual everyone else seems to have for just doing the thing, it exists, and you were not being dramatic about not having it. Get assessed. Do not leave it thirty years like some people I could mention.

Anyway. One month in. If you are 50 something and wondering whether it is worth the queue, the queue moves whether you are in it or not.