> I am in the later half of an adventurous and successful career. I continue to grow, have a long-term stable marriage, good savings, great life.
This passage could describe me as well, but as I look back on high school and college I've become convinced that if I'd been born 10-15 years later I would have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD (I don't know if the 'hyperactivity' part is a distinction psychologists make anymore.) I struggled in school but in an unusual way: I got As in some classes and Cs (or worse!) in others.
In school balancing my attention between more than three different classes was an impossible and mystifying task, but generating very intent focus on a few very interesting things was easy (e.g. programming, playing guitar). In college, I found myself dropping down to the minimum full-time course load often, and I envied my friends at schools on the quarter system who took only three classes at a time over shorter terms.
When I started working as a programmer, I found things much easier, had fewer things to divide my focus between, and could arrange my work (mostly) as I pleased, and I had a lot of success. I also discovered coffee, and looking at my coffee consumption over the years, one might reasonably conclude I'm self-medicating with stimulants. Even now, this XKCD resonates with me: https://xkcd.com/1106/
I'm moderately curious about whether I would be diagnosed, in the spirit of self-knowledge, but I don't feel the need to engage professional help to figure it out.
> I am in the later half of an adventurous and successful career. I continue to grow, have a long-term stable marriage, good savings, great life.
This passage could describe me as well, but as I look back on high school and college I've become convinced that if I'd been born 10-15 years later I would have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD (I don't know if the 'hyperactivity' part is a distinction psychologists make anymore.) I struggled in school but in an unusual way: I got As in some classes and Cs (or worse!) in others.
In school balancing my attention between more than three different classes was an impossible and mystifying task, but generating very intent focus on a few very interesting things was easy (e.g. programming, playing guitar). In college, I found myself dropping down to the minimum full-time course load often, and I envied my friends at schools on the quarter system who took only three classes at a time over shorter terms.
When I started working as a programmer, I found things much easier, had fewer things to divide my focus between, and could arrange my work (mostly) as I pleased, and I had a lot of success. I also discovered coffee, and looking at my coffee consumption over the years, one might reasonably conclude I'm self-medicating with stimulants. Even now, this XKCD resonates with me: https://xkcd.com/1106/
I'm moderately curious about whether I would be diagnosed, in the spirit of self-knowledge, but I don't feel the need to engage professional help to figure it out.