ADHD & Anxiety

For about a decade I thought I was lazy. Then I thought I was undisciplined. Then I thought I was self-sabotaging. Then I was forty-one and a psychiatrist asked me three questions and diagnosed me with ADHD in under ten minutes, and I cried in my car in the parking lot afterwards because of how much of my life I had spent trying to white-knuckle my way out of a neurological condition.

I take Vyvanse now. I take Guanfacine at night. I tried an SSRI for the anxiety, hated it, switched to Trintellix, which works better for me. I have a therapist I see weekly and another one I see when things get bad. None of this is medical advice. It's the public version of a private file I started keeping because the internet has approximately one million articles about ADHD and almost none of them tell you what it's actually like to be a forty-something founder trying to retrofit a treatment plan onto a life that was built around the condition.

The cornerstone here is I Wasted My Twenties, which has the long version of the diagnosis story and the operating-system rebuild that came after. Other pieces cover the medication tinkering, the supplements that do and don't help, and the meditation habit that finally stuck after about fifteen failed attempts.

If your brain is loud and you're tired of being told to "just focus," the marriage and family writing covers the relational fallout from years of an undiagnosed brain.