I was on the verge of losing my job and probably my family before getting diagnosed. Getting on medication was almost an overnight 180 on all the issues I was having... and a bunch more that I wasn't even close to ready to solve yet.

(The following is _my_ experience. So read it that way. I'm not going to prefix every sentence with "for me...".)

It's not some fun th--squirrel!--ing where you occasionally act a little quirky or get a little sidetracked.

Everything I tried to do every day felt like I was trying to break through a brick wall. Except if I _did_ manage to break through, there was just another brick wall. And another. And another. Getting _anything_ done was _exhausting_. Most days I could do _a_ thing, and then I was completely and utterly exhausted.

The thing is, it didn't matter _what_ that one thing was, how long it took, or anything else. Doing a load of laundry through to completion felt like about the same amount of effort as when the power went out for 8 days and I was trying to cobble together a solution to get the water (well + septic pumps) running again. The issue was not the task itself, but just the effort to force my brain into actually commanding my body to do it.

I want to really reiterate that... because it's not that "survival situation" comes easy to me. It's that simply trying to get a load of laundry through to completion felt the same to me as being in a situation where we my family and myself were lacking one of the basic requirements for human life.

Career-wise... people always note that when shit hits the fan I'm always the one that's calm and have my head screwed on straight. I'm pretty straightforward with everyone that it's because in my day-to-day life pretty much everything registers as a 9.5-10.0/10 on the stress scale, so this isn't anything new for me... navigating this situation is the same as trying to navigate basic life tasks for me.

The work impacts were fairly obvious as far as productivity due to inability to stay on task. The impacts in my personal life were much less obvious--it's not fair to my wife nor my kid that a simple thing like a day trip to a museum is eliciting basically a "someone has a gun pointed at me" response from me.

I'd fought through this for _decades_ before it finally caught up with me as far as my work and my wife getting fed up with my shit.

Got diagnosed by a psychiatrist. Got on an extremely low dose of Vyvanse. (Like, I'm a fully grown adult and started out at the dose they'd give to a child.)

Even just that though... Suddenly the layer after layer of brick wall I'd been dealing with turned to drywall. It was still something to push through, but after decades of banging my head against bricks... throwing myself through drywall felt like playing life on easy mode. I was happy in a way I don't remember ever being. My self control was through the roof not just in focus but in things like "not drinking excessively every night". I spent more than one consecutive night sober for the first time in decades.

After decades it finally became _very_ clear why I couldn't operate like other people. It wasn't a personal or moral failing, it was that I was playing the game on Death March difficulty and comparing my struggles with a lot of people playing on "Just the story!" mode. The decades of self-abuse and damage to my self-worth do not get undone easily.

In a sense I should be sad about the fact that I lived life so held back for so long. But bigger picture I'm grateful. Many people struggle more than I do or aren't quite as stubborn as I am and hit this point and have these epiphanies and have to look back at a life with little success or little happiness and wonder what could have been. I've done quite well for myself in spite of everything.

But I can tell you with a great deal of certainty that had this happened earlier I would have spent a lot of years much happier.