ADHD has made my life really hard. When I was a boy, my mom told me she thought I was possessed by the devil. I screamed. I cursed. I broke things. I threw explosive tantrums that nobody could control. And for years, that was the story. That I was bad. Disturbed. Broken in some moral way. It took me 28 years, and getting to a clinical psychology program, to finally learn what had actually been happening. I had ADHD. At its core, ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder. That means the brain develops and functions differently than it does in a neurotypical person. The name itself — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — points to a deficit in the brain’s ability to regulate attention and behavior. But what people often miss is that ADHD is not just about being distracted. It is also about emotional dysregulation, impulsivity, time blindness, shame, and the cumulative trauma of living your life in a way that other people do not understand. As a preschooler, I had explosive emotional reactions and I couldn’t calm down once I was upset. My brother would provoke me, call me a crybaby, and I would cry almost every day. I cursed at him. I knocked things over. Seeing a four-year-old screaming profanity was shocking. So my mom concluded that I must be possessed. What was really happening was that I had a brain that could not regulate emotion the way other kids could. I was also developmentally behind. Parts of my brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, were literally slower to develop. But my parents had no map for what they were dealing with, and they had developmental issues of their own. So instead of understanding the underlying problem, they reached for convenient band-aid fixes, and those fixes compounded the difficulties in my life. I couldn’t sit still during meals, so my dad put me in a high chair until I was seven. I was underweight, so he gave me baby formula until I was six. I wet the bed, so I wore pull-ups until I was six. I didn’t want to brush my teeth, so I ended up with cavities and abscesses and they gave me antibiotics. At the dentist, I screamed so violently that they had to sedate me with injections, which is unusual in dentistry. My life was already being organized around my dysregulation before anyone had words for what it was. And these struggles didn’t stay at home. They followed me into school. I got in trouble regularly from the age of four. I talked when I was supposed to be working. I didn’t follow directions. Teachers labeled me as off-task, impulsive, lacking self-control. They chided me for blurting out answers in class. In first grade I called a kid gay for sitting on another boy’s lap, and when confronted I lied badly and said I meant “happy gay.” In second grade I touched a girl’s butt and that got brought up at the parent-teacher conference too. From age 8 to 13, I got suspended six times for scuffling with other boys. People with ADHD are not inherently violent. But I grew up with an aggressive father who had anger issues. I did not have a model for emotional regulation or healthy conflict resolution. So when distress came up in me, the only way my ADHD brain knew how to resolve it was by acting out. And I didn’t anticipate consequences well. Worse, I had been conditioned not to care because I usually got away with things. The only reason I was not expelled was because I was extremely intelligent and people liked me. That intelligence hid a lot. I was in the 99th percentile in math, science, and writing. But reading was hard unless something truly captured my attention. My mind would wander off the page. Then in third grade I discovered Roald Dahl, and for the first time I could actually read books. That was one of the first clues about how my mind worked: I could only concentrate if I was hooked, if I got into a flow state. Later, when I took the SAT, my mom gave me Adderall and my performance jumped to the 99th percentile. For years I didn’t understand why my brain worked this way. If ADHD means hyperactivity, why do stimulants help? Because they increase activity in the brain systems responsible for self-control and attention. ADHD brains struggle to stay engaged with tasks that are not immediately rewarding. Boredom feels unbearable. Urgency and anxiety become the only reliable motivators. Stimulants normalize dopamine transmission and strengthen systems like the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for reward regulation and self-control. But before I understood any of that, the explanation people gave me was much simpler. They said I was lazy. My dad told me I was just like my mother. Lazy. The truth is that my mother and I are not lazy. We just have brains that are wired differently. If you have a parent with ADHD, there is a significant chance that you also have some neurodevelopmental difference, such as ADHD or autism. But because I was smart, no one thought to look deeper. In 2018, when I first suspected I might have ADHD and shared that with one of my high school teachers, she said, “If you had ADHD, you would not have been able to get into UC Berkeley.” She had worked with special education students and jumped to the wrong conclusion. People assumed that if I could get good grades and ace tests, ADHD could be ruled out. But intelligence does not fix executive dysfunction. It only hides it until life becomes too complex to compensate. And eventually, life did become too complex. One of the main features of ADHD is time blindness. For someone with ADHD, there are really only two times: now and not now. Most people can feel the passage of time like a tide slowly coming in. A deadline gets closer, the pressure builds, and they adjust. For me, that feeling was absent. If something was happening right now — if a person was in front of me, if a deadline was today, if a crisis was unfolding — my brain turned on. But if something was happening next week or tomorrow, it carried almost no emotional weight. It felt theoretical. Not real. That is why ADHD procrastination looks like laziness from the outside but feels different on the inside. You do care. You care a lot. But you cannot make the future feel real enough to act on. So the brain solves this by relying on anxiety and panic. I used to delay week-long assignments and then somehow produce something passable in the final two hours before it was due. Once the deadline became now, my brain would finally agree to show up. For a long time, I thought procrastination was a time management problem. But for me, much of it was emotional avoidance. A task was never just a task. It was attached to anxiety about my future, shame about already having avoided it, fear that I was falling behind. And because my brain was already low on dopamine, it was always scanning for relief. The longer I avoided something, the more emotional weight it accumulated. A task I skipped on Monday became embarrassment by Wednesday and dread by Friday. Then by the time I needed to do it, I also had to overcome all the emotion that had attached itself to it. So I would avoid it even more, and the whole thing would keep growing. That is what ADHD looked like in my adult life. Not a kid bouncing off the walls, but a grown man sitting at a desk, watching his day dissolve in full awareness. I would wake up, shower, ignore the dishes, skip breakfast, go to work, sit down at my desk, and immediately start drifting. I would check stock prices, crypto prices, messages. I would watch YouTube videos. I would gamble by day trading. I would go to lunch, get distracted talking to coworkers, watch a TV show while eating, message friends, and suddenly it would be 1:30 p.m. and I had not started the tasks I was supposed to do that day. Then I would come home and do the same thing again with videos and reels and my phone for hours, telling myself I would fix it tomorrow. And then tomorrow would come and the cycle would repeat. Knowing was never the problem. I always knew when I opened YouTube or placed a trade or checked messages that I was not doing the right thing. The problem was not knowledge. The problem was behavior. As Russell Barkley put it, ADHD is not a disorder of not knowing what to do. It is a disorder of doing what you know. That sentence summarized my life. By my twenties, my life had become extremely chaotic. Your outer life becomes the manifestation of what is going on in your mind, and my mind was chaotic. I moved through jobs every one to two years. I had close calls with death. I swung wildly in net worth, going from zero to a hundred thousand, down to twenty thousand, up to two or three hundred thousand, then back down again. I started projects and abandoned them. I made huge decisions impulsively. I kept hoping the next thing would fix my life. So one year it was joining a Christian cult. One year it was trying to become a pastor. One year it was crypto trading. One year it was joining a startup. One year it was trying to launch my own startup. Then it was writing a book. Then switching to clinical psychology. Then trying desperately to find a girlfriend on dating apps. Then fantasizing about moving out of the country. And now trying to become a social media creator. None of those things were inherently stupid. Some of them I genuinely enjoyed. Some of them taught me a lot. But underneath all of them was the same pattern: I was switching because my brain craved novelty. Starting something new felt like progress, and that feeling was enough to satisfy a brain trying to avoid the boring, sustained effort of actual work. Underneath that was also hope — the hope that if I found the right thing, it would finally close the gap between who I was and who I imagined I was supposed to become. I wanted to become a different person without having to sit with the discomfort of being who I already was. That same pattern showed up in gambling. When I was 22, I had a job that most people would have killed for: good salary, good
