For fifty years I thought something was wrong with me. Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet, grinding way where you notice that other people seem to run at a steady speed and you don’t, and you assume the difference is a character flaw you’ve failed to correct.
I’d disappear into a project for three days and come out the other side with a finished manuscript, dazed and exhausted and a little proud. Then a week later I’d sit down at the same desk, open the same kind of document, and produce nothing. Not because I didn’t want to. The words simply weren’t there, and no amount of discipline or coffee or positive self-talk would summon them. Everyone I knew treated productivity as a dial you could turn.
Mine was a switch that flipped on its own, and I didn’t have my hand anywhere near it.
The advice that never worked on me
I read the productivity books. All of them. Wake at five. Write a thousand words before breakfast. Build the habit, show up every day, treat it like a job. The people who wrote these books clearly believed every word, because for them it was true. They’d steady brains. They could decide to be productive and then be productive, and they assumed everyone else could too, and that the ones who couldn’t were simply weak.
I tried their systems for years. I’d build the morning routine, keep it for eleven days, feel the machinery seize up, and watch it collapse. Then I’d blame myself, because that’s what the books taught me to do. If the system works and you don’t, the problem is you. I carried that verdict around for decades. It was wrong, but it was the only explanation on offer.
What none of those books could account for was the other half of my life, the part where I’d produce more in a single weekend than their disciplined method produced in a month. If I was so undisciplined, where did that come from? The steady-brain model had no answer. It could explain the empty weeks by calling me lazy, but it couldn’t explain the volcanic ones at all.
The word that finally fit
The diagnosis came late, later than it should have. ADHD and autism, together, a combination that’s picked up the shorthand AuDHD. I sat with the paperwork and felt something I didn’t expect. That was relief so total it bordered on grief. Grief for the fifty years I’d spent believing I was a defective version of a normal person, when the truth was that I was a working version of a different kind of person, and nobody had told me the difference existed.
Every strange thing suddenly had a name. The hyperfocus that let me vanish into a book for days was a feature of how my attention works, a firehose that’s impossible to aim but tremendous once it’s pointed at something. The flat periods were what happens when the firehose is off and no act of will can turn it back on. The complete inability to care about tasks that didn’t interest me was wiring.
The diagnosis didn’t hand me a solution. It handed me an accurate map, and it turns out you can do a great deal with an accurate map that you can’t do with a wrong one.
I stopped fighting my brain
The first thing that changed was that I quit trying to be someone else. For fifty years I had been running a borrowed operating system, forcing a neurotypical routine onto hardware that was never built for it and then blaming the hardware when it crashed. Once I understood what I really had, I stopped installing the wrong software.
I stopped setting an alarm for five in the morning, because my brain does its best work between nine at night and two in the morning and always has.
I stopped pretending I could write a steady thousand words a day, because that’s not how my output arrives. It arrives in floods. And I stopped treating the empty stretches as failures to be corrected, because fighting them only made them longer.
None of that is resignation. It’s the opposite. When you stop spending your energy fighting your own machinery, you get all that energy back to spend on the work.
Then I started using it on purpose
The real shift came when I stopped merely accepting my brain and started operating it deliberately. The hyperfocus that used to feel like weather, something that happened to me, turned out to be something I could set up conditions for. I learned what triggers it. Genuine interest in the subject, first of all, because I can’t force my attention but I can bait it. A clear runway of uninterrupted time. The right hour of the night. A project that’s hooked the part of my mind that doesn’t know how to let go.
Arrange those conditions and the firehose comes on, and when it does, the output isn’t normal. Fifteen thousand words in a single sitting. A complete manuscript across one weekend. A book that a steady, disciplined writer would spend three months on, finished in a compressed burst that leaves me wrung out and grinning. I could never do that on command in the way the productivity books mean it. But I can build the conditions that invite it, and that’s close enough to command to have changed my entire career.
The empty periods still come. I’ve made peace with them, and more than that, I’ve learned to use them.
When the firehose is off, I do the work that doesn’t need it: editing, planning, research, the patient assembly that hyperfocus is bad at. The two modes are two different tools, and you build a career by knowing which one is in your hand.
Why this ended up in my writing
I didn’t plan to become someone who writes about how neurodivergent brains work. It happened because I couldn’t stand watching other people carry the verdict I carried for fifty years. There are writers out there right now who believe they’re lazy or broken because a book told them that discipline is a choice and they keep failing to make it. They’re not broken. They have a different kind of engine, and nobody handed them the manual for it.
So a real part of what I teach pays specific attention to the brains that don’t run on the neurotypical schedule. Not as a special-case afterthought, but because the standard advice is built on an assumption that simply isn’t true for a large number of people, and those people deserve methods designed for how they function instead of how someone else thinks they should.
The thirty-three years I spent in enterprise IT turn out to have prepared me for exactly this.
I spent a career diagnosing systems that were behaving in ways their operators couldn’t explain. You don’t fix a misbehaving system by insisting it should behave differently. You figure out how it really works, and then you work with that. My own brain was the last system I learned to debug, and it was the one that had been throwing errors the longest.
What I would tell the younger version of me
If I could get a message back to the man who spent decades believing he was a defective edition of everyone else, it would be short.
Nothing is wrong with you. You’re not a broken version of a normal brain. You’re a working version of a different one, and the day you stop trying to be the other kind is the day you start doing the work you were built for.
It took me fifty years and a diagnosis to learn that. I write it down now so that maybe someone else gets there a little faster, and spends a few less decades than I did believing the problem was them.