Could this be me?

It usually starts with a question. Something quiet. A wondering you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s not dramatic, and it’s not even fully formed. Just a quiet thought that keeps coming back. What if?

For me, it started in a pub. I was having a conversation with a longtime friend over a beer. He had just been diagnosed with ADHD. As he described his experience, I started mentally ticking the boxes. Everything he said sounded like me. By the time I got home that night, I couldn’t let it go. I took an online screening test. The result came back with a high likelihood of combined type ADHD.

The test I took was the Wender Utah Rating Scale. It’s a screening tool designed to identify whether ADHD symptoms that began in childhood might still be present in adulthood. It’s widely used as a first step and is available online. Like most self-assessments, it’s not diagnostic. But it was enough to shift something in me. It made a pattern visible.

Another commonly used tool is the ASRS (Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale), developed by the World Health Organization. It focuses more on current symptoms and daily impact. Both of these tools are simple to complete and widely available. For many people, they’re the first place the question begins to take shape.

These tests won’t give you a yes or no. But they can give you a starting point. A step along the way. They’re designed to identify patterns that strongly correlate with formal diagnoses. In many cases, they are remarkably accurate at predicting how someone might score in a clinical setting. We’ll come back to that in a later article in this series.

For now, what they offer is something quieter but just as important. A moment of reflection. A sense that what you’ve been struggling with has a shape. And that maybe, just maybe, it’s not about effort after all.

Looking back, the signs had always been there. I just didn’t recognise them for what they were. For a long time, I thought everyone was either lazy and not getting anything done, or they were pushing themselves to the brink like I was. Working late. Overthinking everything. Putting absolutely everything into their jobs, relationships, families, and still feeling like it was never quite enough. I didn’t realise there was a middle ground. I thought burnout was just life. And honestly, I didn’t even know burnout was a real thing.

I’ve always prided myself on being calm in a crisis. When everyone else was panicking, I was the steady one. It felt like a strength. And in some ways, it was. But I didn’t realise that I was only calm because my nervous system was always operating in emergency mode. I was always on. Always scanning the horizon. Always one step ahead. The crisis felt familiar, and that made it manageable. It was the quiet that undid me. The ordinary days, the slow ones, the tasks that required structure and pacing. That was where things fell apart.

What I didn’t understand then is that this kind of hyper-responsiveness is common in ADHD and autism. We get used to running on stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. When those drop and there’s no urgency, it can feel disorienting or even unsafe. The brain doesn’t know how to downshift. I wasn’t thriving under pressure. I was surviving.

Interoception and alexithymia weren’t words I had ever heard. I didn’t realise I had trouble reading my own body. I just knew that sometimes I forgot to eat until I was shaky, or I would stay up far too late without noticing how tired I was. I didn’t know how I felt half the time. I just knew when I’d hit a wall. And even then, I often blamed myself for it. I thought I needed more discipline, or more caffeine, not more understanding.

Poor interoception, the ability to sense internal states like hunger, fatigue, or stress, is common in both ADHD and autism. So is alexithymia, the difficulty identifying or naming emotions. When you can’t tell what your body or mind needs, you can’t meet that need in time. You miss meals. You miss rest. You miss warning signs. And eventually, your system crashes.

Work gave me plenty of opportunities to internalise those messages. I’ve spent my whole career in finance tech roles, always trying to prove I could be more structured, more organised, more “together.” For five years in a row, I had the same goal on my annual objectives: get better at project management. And for five years, I failed it. I was putting in the effort. I just couldn’t make it stick. Eventually, I changed the objective. I wrote, “Find a good project manager to work with.” That shift was small on the surface, but it was a turning point. It was the first time I gave myself permission to stop trying to fix what wasn’t broken. I didn’t want to be a project manager. I wasn’t wired for it. But I was good at what I did, and I worked well with people who had strengths I didn’t. That wasn’t failure. It felt like an important turning point.

Executive dysfunction isn’t about disinterest or laziness. It’s a neurological difficulty in planning, prioritising, initiating, and completing tasks, especially ones that require sustained attention or structure. Once I understood that, it reframed everything. I hadn’t failed at project management. I had simply been trying to force my brain to work in a way that it didn’t, and never would.

Still, for a long time, I thought I was just bad at life admin. Or too sensitive. Or too distracted. There were so many small moments that didn’t register as signs. The emotional crashes after meetings. The avoidance of certain tasks. The relationships that quietly faded. The constant guilt over things I hadn’t done, even though I’d been busy all day.

I remember once going eight years without visiting the dentist. Not because I was afraid of it. I didn’t mind going. I just couldn’t seem to call and make the appointment. I would forget, or put it off, or tell myself I’d do it tomorrow. It sounds minor, but it was constant. A thousand little things like that building up into a kind of background noise I thought everyone else just handled better.

That’s the thing about ADHD. You often intend to do something. You even care deeply about doing it. But the gap between intention and action is wide, and invisible. When you can’t explain why something didn’t get done, you start to believe the reason must be you.

Underneath it all was this quiet panic. I was always afraid I had missed something big. A tax return. A bill. A fine. And that one day someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I was in serious trouble.

I used to think about it in terms of what I called my toxic boxes. In my mind, these were mental storage units where I shoved everything I couldn’t deal with. Overdue paperwork. Dentist appointments. Health concerns. Bills. Each one was like a sealed drum of nuclear waste, glowing green and quietly leaking through the cracks. I could go months without looking at them. But eventually, one would tip over.

Usually it happened at two or three in the morning. I’d wake up gripped by panic, unable to breathe, convinced that everything was about to collapse. And oddly, the panic attack would sometimes relieve the pressure. Not because I fixed anything. But because the emotional spike seemed to burn through just enough energy to push the lid back down. The box would reseal. The waste would fester. And I’d carry on.

Over time, I did manage to get some of those things done. But only when the stakes became impossible to ignore. I’d file the tax return the day before it was due. I’d pay the bill when the red notice arrived. I’d go to the dentist when the pain made it unavoidable. It took a massive dose of fear to cut through the noise and spur me into action.

Looking back, I can see how hard my brain was working just to keep the lid on. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was that I couldn’t act without a crisis. And the cost of that pattern, emotionally, physically, and financially, was high. But at the time, it was the only way I knew how to function.

Friendships were affected too, though I didn’t realise it at the time. In my mind, people I hadn’t spoken to in months, sometimes even years, weren’t gone. They were just paused. Held in a kind of cryogenic stasis, ready to be defrosted whenever we picked things back up. I genuinely believed we’d carry on where we left off.

But that’s not how most people work. And I didn’t realise until much later that this wasn’t coldness or selfishness. It was an issue with relational object permanence. That affects many people with ADHD and autism. Out of sight really can mean out of mind. And when that’s combined with time blindness, social anxiety, and low interoceptive awareness, it’s easy to drift unintentionally. But the care is still there. It always was.

Even when I did remember people’s birthdays or milestones, it often didn’t help. I would get anxious about sending cards. Often I would buy them, or even write them, but still never post them. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t find the words that felt genuine, and I worried about sounding awkward or forced. So I put it off. And then it would feel too late. And then came the guilt.

I used to feel this particularly with family. Birthdays. Christmas. I’d remember the dates, think about them often, and still do nothing. Not because I didn’t care. But because I cared too much, and couldn’t get it out of my head and into action. That quiet shame sat in the background of so many otherwise normal days, shaping how I saw myself and how I believed others saw me too.

Even when I started wondering if ADHD or autism could explain some of it, I felt like a fraud. I wasn’t struggling enough, I thought. I had done well in school. I had built a career. I had a family. Surely that disqualified me. I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. I didn’t want to be someone chasing a label. That was the voice in my head. But underneath it, the question stayed. The list of ADHD features fit so well with my life…

It took time to quiet the shame long enough to do something about it. And when I did, everything started to shift. I wasn’t lazy. I wasn’t broken. I had been working against the grain of my own brain for decades. That realisation didn’t fix everything. But it did give me language. It gave me choice. And eventually, it gave me permission to stop surviving.

This article is not a checklist. It’s a reflection. If you are reading this and hearing echoes of your own experience, I want you to know that you’re not alone. Many of us reach adulthood carrying a story that never quite fit. The first step isn’t certainty. It’s curiosity. It’s giving yourself permission to ask the question. And maybe, finally, to stop asking what’s wrong with you.

Because it might turn out there’s nothing wrong at all. Just a different way of being. One that was always there. One that is finally ready to be seen.

If this resonated with you, or reminded you of something you carried without a name, I’d love to hear about it.

Sharing these moments helps others recognise themselves sooner. And for those still quietly wondering, it might be the thing that helps the question take shape.

Feel free to comment, reply privately, or pass this on to someone who might be asking the same question.