The Diagnosis I Found Looking For Someone Else

In my primary school years (5-12 here in The Netherlands) I was a smart and social kid. In general school was fun. I had a nice class with nice friends, we played outside as much as we could. My friends and I all were fans of the “Tour of Duty” (an American series about the Vietnam war) series, which we would reenact in the woods with guns we would make ourselves from scraps of wood and PVC tubes.

The days that we didn’t go outside were much less fun, especially on the days I could not meet up with friends for whatever reason. But those I filled mostly with reading, playing with Legos, or just messing around outside by myself.

I scored very high on the ‘CITO’ test, so going to the highest level of high school was expected. The first year there I did fine too. The second year however, I didn’t. I had more freedom to schedule my work, but that led to me procrastinating on everything I found uninteresting. I enjoyed classes like physics, biology and chemistry. Learning French and German however I kept postponing. My grades dropped, I got overwhelmed and ashamed of my bad grades (I was used to scoring very high), and pretended I didn’t care. By the time my parents found out, it was much too late to repair. I had to both repeat the year, and drop a level. It was rare for kids to have to do either. Having to do both was extremely shameful.

This pattern continued during my studies; I did a bachelor in CS, and loved all the programming classes. Math and statistics however? Absolutely could not motivate myself and always scored extremely low. And later when I got an internship and later a developer job? Same things again. The things I enjoyed I got really good at. The things I disliked I postponed until well after they became problematic. Every year this resulted in performance reviews from managers where the focus was on all the things I did poorly, instead of my successes.

I started out as a developer for a small search engine company. Here I had quite a lot of freedom in how I approached the problem solving aspect of my job, and the work I did was generally new and challenging.

Even so, boring tasks were a struggle. I already mentioned time writing, but I often had a backlog of months of receipts I had to put in a spreadsheet to get my money back for parking, or lunch at customers.

Emotions were another big struggle; they flare up instantly sometimes. When I feel attacked, or when I feel a situation is unjust or unfair. Some people were a real struggle for me to keep my cool with in my 20s. Especially people who talk slow; it almost feels physically painful to let people finish their sentences. Most days I did fine; I of course did not want to be unprofessional. But every now and then it would slip out, especially when I was tired or already not feeling well.

I grew older and wiser, and less hot headed. I managed these emotions better, but they never went away. I just got better at pretending they weren’t there. But even in my forties, I kept running into the same walls. Over time one thing became clear to me; there’s something wrong with me.

I’m a very proud and happy dad of two wonderful daughters. Both are smart and funny. Both have completely different personalities. The youngest especially is extremely energetic. While both are very intelligent, the eldest is the “student" type, the youngest is much more emotionally intelligent.

As an example; when she was eight her grandmother died. Both she and her older sister were devastated. Where her older sister basically shut down, the youngest wrote a small story about her grandmother, in the evening before the cremation ceremony. She then asked if she could read it in front of the crowd; 200 adults. And a small girl who had to stand on a box in front of the pulpit because she was too small. She plainly and bravely read her story about her grandmother to 200 crying adults.

This was at the time she was having problems in school with her grades. Sometimes she did extremely well, other times extremely poorly. She showed every indication of being very smart, but also her grades often put her at the lowest end of the spectrum. We began looking into different explanations, one of them being that she had something like ADHD.

As usual; when I research something, I hyperfocus and it becomes my ‘thing’ for a week or two until I feel I understand it. Normally it’s a new hobby I lose interest in after a month, or I figure out I want to be the best at cooking Indonesian food. But this time it was research into my daughter’s suspected ADHD.

What I did not expect, however, was that most of the ‘signs’ I read about, were ones I recognized in myself at least as much as in her.

What most people think as the stereotypical person with ADHD is just that; a stereotype. The majority of people with ADHD are not outwardly hyperactive. You don’t immediately ‘see’ someone has it. So as it turns out; all the stuff that’s constantly buzzing around in my head, is not what neurotypical people experience.

I started the process of getting diagnosed in ‘24, and got the diagnosis in ‘25 at the ripe old age of 45. We went really deep into my youth, since the diagnosis programs put a lot of weight on your primary school years. Which is pretty tough when you’re born in 1980, raised in a strict family, and forgot most of what school was like back then.

My psychologist, Lyssa, was amazing. She managed to challenge me constantly to dig deeper to get to the actual root of things. For example when she asked me whether I often misplaced things, my initial answer was “no, not really”. She could’ve just left it at that and marked ‘no’ on the form. But when she asked me about what I do with my keys (“always in the same spot”) and what happens if I don’t put them in that same spot (“my mind blacks out and I don’t have a clue”), it became clear that over the years I developed patterns to manage these things. Things like keys and my phone have to be in a certain spot. Not because of some kind of compulsion (which people have accused me of), but simply because otherwise my brain has no way to know where they are.

If I go out in Utrecht and do not deliberately memorize where I put my bike, I have to more or less search the entire city centre for the damn thing. And yes, that happened to me. Twice.

With an ADHD diagnosis often also comes a sense of grief. Not for the diagnosis itself, that felt freeing to me. But grief for the little kid who got to redo the year and drop a level, and was told it was all his fault for being lazy.

I’m very happy with my diagnosis. Some people consider it almost a ‘brand’, something you never get rid of. A completely outdated notion in my opinion. My brain is creative, fast, a powerful problem solver, that works better under pressure. Sure; sometimes I interrupt people mid-sentence because I know what they’re going to say after 3 words, but 9 times out of 10 I manage to let them finish.

And while I am very sensitive to others’ emotions, I have decades of experience with masking, and spotting people who are faking or lying about something, is almost instinctive. I’m almost never wrong with my gut-feeling about someone.

Software Engineering is a great fit for someone with ADHD. Motivating myself to explore new technology or approaches excites me; I often manage to hyperfocus my way through weeks of work in just a few days. Abstractions come naturally to me, since I enjoy finding patterns in things.

I also love other people’s ADHD. They’re interesting, exciting, creative and they move fast. When shit hits the fan, they’re the calm and collected ones. Like my daughter was calm and collected in front of 200 crying adults.