Day 1 – ADHD Diagnosis and Puzzle of My Life

I was diagnosed with ADHD today.

Suddenly, a lot of things in my life started to make sense. For example, I have almost been fired from every job that I have ever had.

By “almost” I mean, either forced to resign or put into a position where I felt like the only choice was for me to leave. All of these are white-collar jobs with pay increasing each time. I have not really been dedicated to any specific role or function throughout my career and I feel like it is now starting to hurt me. I saw this train coming but I thought I would be able to correct the mistakes I had made in the past so that I could finally progress like a normal person.

Nope. Not this time.

START ADHD MOMENT

** Got glued to YouTube shorts (~1 hr)

** Kid walked into my office and kept wanting to show his lego creations to me (~15 min)

** Ran away to put son down for a nap, talk to wife for a bit, start making fried rice for dinner later that day, and wash the dishes (~45 min – 1 hr)

END ADHD MOMENT

Truthfully, I am not writing this on the day I was diagnosed. I am writing this about 3-4 weeks afterwards. When the thought first struck me to…

START ADHD MOMENT

** Looking for creative banners to highlight my ADHD moments. Realized it was taking too much time so I scrapped it in lieu of text (5 – 10 min)

END ADHD MOMENT

… create a blog, I was really excited by the concept. I figured I could share my story and journey with others, hopefully create a record of my own journey for my own purposes and others if they found it useful, and heck, since I’m out of a job again, maybe some extra money to help pay the bills. You know, the multiple streams of income thing because I most likely am not going to be the person that can consistently work a single job with a single source of income, buy a house, raise a family, and make it all the way to retirement. Going to need money coming in from many sources so I’m not so vulnerable and can achieve all of the things that are expected of me as a father, husband, and provider.

Anyways, back to my job history but an abridged version of things I have heard about me…

• Manager to my coworker in a different role – “Oh no. You have the same personality type results as [my name]”.
• Manager’s manager to my manager – “[My name] just doesn’t have any drive”.
• My manager to me – “You’re like the hardest working person here but in terms of team improvement, I just haven’t seen it”.
  • Context: I was responsible for making the engineering team more efficient and clean up their sprint completion rates.
• My manager to me – “There is a pattern of you not responding to emails in a timely manner and it creates a burden on me to keep up with whether or not you are being responsive”.
  • Context: I was doing fine previously however after a merger, we become a new company and I had a new manager, This new group had a mandate to respond to all email, messages, and communications within 24 hours. Somewhat unrealistic given that I managed an enterprise platform and there are about 5 different communications channels.

START ADHD MOMENT

** Reliving the last moment as it is the most recent. Not in a happy place. (5 min)

END ADHD MOMENT

Given all of these statements plus many others, my diagnosis makes sense. I am not a lazy person. I have moments of heightened focus and where I’ve completed 5 hours of work in a couple of hours, accomplished truly impressive things where I had no prior experience (ex. furniture building), and generally have had really productive days. The problem is that I can’t sit and focus on ONE thing for any extended period of time – hence, I haven’t been able to hone a single career path.

For now, I’ll stop here. But per my ADHD advisor, medication is an option. As much as I don’t like the thought of taking medication, I’ve heard the horror stories, I’ll do whatever it takes to fix me.

Until Next Time,

Lost Millennial