Why an ADHD Diagnosis Matters

As an adult with a kid and 2 careers under my belt — four if you count making art and community wrangling — many people reacted to my announcement of having a formal diagnosis of ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) with every combination of skepticism, fear, and misguided new agey wokeness.

“You shouldn’t want to label yourself,” some said.

“Stimulants have side effects!” said others.

Many of the louder set seem not to have considered the idea that the diagnosis, much like a university degree, has value on its own. (And for the record, I barely even take the stimulants I’ve been prescribed. I have a huge stack of coping strategies that usually work better. And when they don’t, it’s really comforting to know I have a fallback plan.)

Far from being a pointless label at my age, the knowledge that at least one psychiatric professional has evaluated my brain and found it to be “neurodivergent” eases a great deal of my personal growth and development work. With an ADHD diagnosis in hand, I’m able to recolor a lot of really troubling work-based traumas.

A story from my early career as an engineer

Back in 2006, when people still employed “system administrators”, I was a full-time Sr. System Administrator at KEI — Mitch Kapor’s umbrella corp where we housed Foxmarks and the Creative Commons and some other nonprofits.

My boss, Dave, was an apparently-high-performing engineer whose position as department head arose from the fact that we were a 2-person department.

This job should have been fun. I got myself up at 7:45am every morning, jumped rope for 10 minutes, then hopped on BART from my apartment on Mission St. across from El Rio to get to this office every day at the same time or earlier than my boss, who was the type to notice such things.

Dave wanted me to do things precisely as he would do them. Dave wanted me to prioritize work precisely as he would prioritize it. Dave did not particularly care for time spent understanding my coworkers or finding out ways to improve things of my own volition. Dave did not want to ever see me figuring things out on my own; to him, exploration was a waste of time. He had all the answers; finding things out for myself was implicit insubordination.

So within about 2 months of being intensely micromanaged, I began to experience what I now know to be signs of burnout. I thought, “I should be grateful, this job is at the nexus point of all the cool nonprofit open source things I care about, and it’s system administration, not knocking out widgets.” All the while, I was experiencing more and more brain fog and boredom, even for tasks I would normally enjoy completing.

I knew, at least, that micromanagement was killing me. I didn’t know at the time how many ADHD symptoms were also mixed in with my issues.

For example, as time wore on, I started finding that standing at my desk (I have always preferred a standing desk) in that open floor plan with Dave made me feel anxious, to the point where I couldn’t get anything done. I would just stand there staring at something, like a terminal, or the RT system where we processed IT support requests, and feel unable to take any kind of action.

Acting on instinct and really wanting to perform in earnest, I decided to take myself over to a cafeteria table with a stack of index cards to get some thoughts out with pen and paper.

Changing my physical environment really helped me think different thoughts. Using index cards started helping me organize my thoughts in physical space, a useful reframe for my kinesthetically-oriented brain.

Well, wouldn’t you know, I did this for maybe 2 days before Dave walked by and noticed what I was doing.

I told him with a smile that I was using the index cards to design the next system we needed to build, that using physical objects was helpful sometimes to get my thoughts in order.

Dave responded, frowning, that this was totally inefficient, that I should be doing this kind of thing on my computer — if at all! Dave indicated in word and tone that if he ever saw me doing this again, the only thought in his head would be that I was just sitting there wasting time.

By then I was more or less in a state of permanent numbness. I spent the next month just barely getting by there, not knowing who to talk to or how.

All the while I kept quasi-gaslighting myself in a way many nonprofit veterans know very well: “But it’s so cool to work here. You are lucky to have a senior-level position at your age. And you’re getting to help all the coolest open source projects.”

At one point I tried a little radical candor with Dave by writing down an emotional play-by-play of how it felt to stand at my desk from 9am to noon, knowing I was being subtly monitored, trying to force my brain to work under adverse conditions. I showed it to him. He read it, put it down, and went back to his desk without a word.

Somewhere around the 6 month mark, roughly December 2006, Dave thought I was doing so badly that he put me on a Performance Improvement Plan. (If you don’t already know: a PIP is generally what managers do to employees they’re already sick of dealing with, and simply want formal proof that they tried something concrete before firing them.)

This started about a week before KEI had its annual holiday dinner that everyone in the company was encouraged to attend.

I’ll never forget what happened on the day of the dinner. Some stupid thing happened to the Foxmarks server and the ticket was assigned to me that day. Dave more or less insisted that if I didn’t fix it that afternoon, I should stay and fix it while everybody else went to the holiday dinner.

Come 6pm, I went to the dinner. I saw Dave there. I also saw the Foxmarks guys there; I told them I hadn’t been able to fix their problem yet. They didn’t seem the least bit concerned.

This was, however, the last straw for me as far as Dave was concerned. The following Monday I quit, knowing that the sudden concern of KEI’s human resources consultant meant there was little hope for me in this position.

Anyway, that sucked.

At that time I let Dave make me feel bad about things like using index cards and seeking alternate places to sit down to work when my brain wouldn’t kick into gear.

In retrospect, Dave was not prepared to be a manager of any kind. He thought he was hiring someone to be his mini-me, or at best, a copy of his former Sr. System Administrator whom I was hired to replace. He was a perfectionist who, I think, kind of hated himself. He put on a decent facade at work with a smile and a confident speaking voice. Much later I found he had been battling crippling depression and had several other major health risks going on.

Shit like this has been rattling around in my head for a very long time. Having an ADHD diagnosis makes it much easier to go lighter on myself when I consider environments in which I just couldn’t function very well, where I blamed myself for just being “lazy” or unacceptably quirky.

Far from a limiting label, knowing I have ADHD frees me to look more objectively on my past and learn the right lessons.

Thanks for reading.