For most of my adult life I assumed I was just bad at being a grown-up. Specifically, bad at the parts everyone else seemed to manage without thinking about it.
I lose things that were in my hand ninety seconds ago. I can read a fourteen-page report cover to cover if it interests me, then fail to reply to a two-line email I’ve had open in a tab for a week. Deadlines are the only functioning alarm system I have. Three weeks out, nothing happens. Three hours out, suddenly I am the most productive person alive, which is not a system, it’s a hostage situation.
I built organisational systems the way other people start diets — with total conviction, on a Sunday, abandoned by Thursday. Colour-coded folders. An app for that. A different app for that. A notebook I wrote in twice.
Got assessed properly at 41, mostly because a friend, very gently, suggested it after watching me miss the same appointment for the third time in a year. It didn’t magically fix anything. But a few things that used to feel like personal failures started looking more like a pattern with a name, which is a strange kind of relief — not an excuse, just less mystery to it.
Now I try to build my life around how I actually operate instead of how I think I’m supposed to. Things I need live in my line of sight, not in a drawer, because a drawer might as well be another country. Reminders for stuff that should be obvious. Occasionally I ask someone to just sit near me while I do a boring task, which sounds absurd and works embarrassingly well.
None of it is impressive to look at from outside. It just quietly works, most days, which is more than I could say before.
Discussion prompt: If you got diagnosed later in life too, did it change how you looked back at your younger self, or mostly just explain the present?
— squirrel41