I am neurodivergent.
There. That is not particularly dramatic.
It has taken me rather longer than it probably should have to become comfortable saying it that plainly, but these days I am.
ADHD is part of my life. So are autistic traits. Anxiety has been part of the picture too. I don't particularly want to turn this into an inventory of diagnoses, because that isn't really the point.
The point is that the way my brain works affects how I concentrate, how I process things, how I communicate, how I respond to pressure, how completely I can disappear into something that interests me, and how disproportionately difficult something apparently trivial can become when my brain simply refuses to engage with it.
It has affected my work, my relationships, my routines and my understanding of myself.
It has created genuine difficulties.
It has also shaped the way I think.
Neither of those statements cancels out the other.
And perhaps the biggest change for me has been realising that I do not need to be embarrassed by any of it.
Some things make more sense now
Looking backwards with a diagnosis is a peculiar experience.
Nothing in the past changes.
You do.
Or, more accurately, your explanation for yourself changes.
Things that once seemed like contradictions start to make rather more sense.
I can spend hours — sometimes considerably more than hours — reconstructing how a complicated technical system works.
Give me a network behaving strangely, a collection of machines accumulated over decades, a software architecture that needs pulling apart, an obscure fault nobody can quite explain, or millions of digital objects whose relationships need reconstructing, and I can become almost absurdly focused.
I genuinely enjoy complicated things.
Sometimes I enjoy them because they are complicated.
And then there are other tasks.
The administrative thing that should take ten minutes.
The badly explained request.
The telephone call at the wrong moment.
Something with six unclear steps and no obvious starting point.
An interruption when my head is already full.
A task that objectively ought to be much easier than whatever technical rabbit hole I have voluntarily disappeared into for the previous six hours.
And suddenly the supposedly easy thing is the difficult thing.
That can look ridiculous from the outside.
For a long time, it sometimes looked ridiculous to me too.
But the cognitive demands are different.
That distinction has become enormously important in understanding myself.
My CV probably should have been a clue
My working life does not look especially linear.
There has been music. Computing. IT support. Networking. VoIP. Field engineering. Infrastructure. Apple systems. Technical operations. Procurement. Software development. Independent projects. Creative technology.
There is no beautifully constructed corporate ladder running through it.
For years that could look like restlessness.
Perhaps some of it was.
But I think there is considerably more continuity there than the job titles suggest.
I move toward problems.
I want to understand what is actually happening.
Once I understand the system, I want to know why it behaves the way it does, which parts matter, which assumptions are wrong, and whether it can be made to work better.
The surface subject changes.
The behaviour underneath it really does not.
That might mean diagnosing a network.
It might mean understanding an old Mac that everybody else considers obsolete.
It might mean investigating millions of files and discovering that what initially looked like a storage problem is actually a problem of identity, provenance and history.
And, occasionally, it apparently means instrumenting repeated test runs of a 999-horsepower 1945 Willys Jeep in Gran Turismo because I have become dissatisfied with its rear differential behaviour.
I accept that the last one may require slightly more explanation.
The point is that the pattern is recognisable.
I investigate things.
I build models of them in my head.
I test assumptions.
I change something.
I observe what happened.
And then, usually, I change something else.
Eventually that became part of the way I write software too.
But I do not want to turn this into the “neurodivergence is a superpower” story
It isn't.
At least, that description has never felt particularly useful to me.
ADHD can be profoundly disabling.
Neurodivergence can make things harder that other people barely notice.
Attention can be difficult to control rather than simply absent. Working memory can disappear precisely when I need it. Too many simultaneous demands can stop being a list of things to do and become an impenetrable wall of noise.
Ambiguous expectations are difficult.
Constant interruptions are difficult.
Changes without enough context can be difficult.
Communication under pressure can become harder.
Starting something can occasionally require vastly more effort than the thing itself deserves.
And one of the stranger aspects of this is that capability in one situation does not necessarily predict capability in another.
I can be extremely capable and significantly disabled.
Those statements are not contradictory.
That took me a long time to understand.
Environment matters
This is probably one of the most important things I have learned.
The environment around a neurodivergent person can radically alter what that person is able to do.
Give me clear expectations.
Give me important information in writing.
Give me enough time to process something properly.
Let me understand why something matters rather than simply instructing me to perform an arbitrary sequence of actions.
Reduce unnecessary interruption.
Let me construct some order around the problem.
The difference can be enormous.
Put the same person into an environment dominated by ambiguity, constant context switching, social pressure, unexplained expectations and noise, and you can get a completely different result.
Same person.
Same intelligence.
Same skills.
Different environment.
That is not an excuse for everything.
It is something I wish more workplaces understood: environment changes what people are able to do.
I had one manager who really did understand
Across all the jobs I have had, one manager stands out to me.
It was while I was doing IT engineering work at Wipro.
He understood me.
I don't mean that he indulged me or expected less of me.
Quite the opposite.
He understood enough about how I worked to get the best from me.
That distinction has stayed with me.
Good support does not have to mean lowering expectations.
Sometimes it means removing the pointless friction that prevents somebody from meeting them.
Make the requirement explicit.
Put something important in writing.
Give structure without micromanaging.
Recognise that overload is not the same thing as unwillingness.
Do not automatically interpret an unusual communication style as a bad attitude.
Judge the work.
Those are not enormous concessions.
But when you are accustomed to spending a substantial proportion of your available capacity compensating for the environment around you, being understood can feel extraordinary.
And the frustrating thing is that it really shouldn't be extraordinary.
Diagnosis did not change who I was
It changed the model.
That distinction matters to me.
I did not suddenly become neurodivergent when somebody put language around it.
I had already lived an entire life with this brain.
What changed was my ability to reinterpret some of it.
For a long time, you compensate without necessarily knowing that compensation is what you are doing.
You construct systems.
You imitate things that appear to come naturally to everybody else.
You force yourself through situations.
You develop workarounds.
You try harder.
And when something apparently easy remains inexplicably difficult, you tend to assume the problem must be you.
That becomes especially confusing when you can also do things that other people find unusually difficult.
There is an unspoken question that follows you around:
If you can do that, why can't you do this?
I have asked myself that question plenty of times.
The answer is increasingly that the two things are simply not asking the same things of my brain.
Having a better explanation does not remove responsibility for my behaviour.
It does something considerably more useful.
It gives me a better model of the system I am operating.
I am, unsurprisingly, quite fond of better models of systems.
There is one part of my past I understand differently now
Not many people know that I was in the United States Coast Guard.
I joined because I had wanted for years to become an Aviation Survival Technician.
The six-year contract was not casual. Neither was the ambition behind it.
I entered basic training on 15 October 2002.
Eighteen days later, on 1 November, I was medically discharged.
The diagnosis recorded at the time was generalised anxiety disorder.
My memory of the end includes a cold, wet, windy parade field covered in goose shit, which perhaps isn't the heroic closing scene I had imagined for my Coast Guard career.
At the time, though, it wasn't funny.
Not long after signing the contract to join, I had also discovered that I was going to become a father.
My first daughter was on the way.
So there I was: trying to enter military service, trying to pursue a lifelong dream, and simultaneously beginning to understand that another human being was about to depend on me.
I could not cope with it.
That is the plain truth.
And for probably ten or fifteen years afterwards, I carried a surprising amount of shame about that.
I had not completed the training.
I had not become the Aviation Survival Technician I intended to become.
I had failed to do something I desperately wanted to do.
That was the story I told myself.
For years.
I do not think I need to tell myself that story anymore.
I am not going to retrospectively rewrite a medical decision made in 2002 and pretend that I now possess some perfect diagnostic explanation for everything that happened.
I don't.
But I understand myself differently now.
I understand much more about how I respond to extreme changes in environment, uncertainty, pressure, disrupted routines, loss of control and overwhelming demands arriving simultaneously.
And I can now look at an eighteen-day period in 2002 and see something more complicated than simply:
I failed.
I was twenty-something years old, in an utterly unfamiliar military environment, trying to adapt to basic training while also processing the fact that I was about to become a father.
I could not make all of that work.
That is different from being ashamed of myself for not making it work.
The strange thing is that the underlying dream did not disappear
This is one of the details I find interesting when I look back.
I never became an Aviation Survival Technician.
But years later I became a highly qualified scuba diver.
Then a cave diver.
I trained in rope access and rescue climbing.
I became comfortable working and training in environments where mistakes matter: underwater, underground, overhead, at height.
I took rescue seriously.
I enjoyed the drills.
I enjoyed the training.
I liked knowing that if something went badly wrong in an environment where getting out was difficult, I had the skills to help.
There is something in that which feels very continuous with the person who wanted to become an Aviation Survival Technician.
The route changed.
The underlying attraction did not.
Dangerous environments.
Technical competence.
Training.
Systems.
Responsibility.
Helping somebody when circumstances have gone wrong.
I am not suggesting this proves anything diagnostic.
It doesn't.
I just find it difficult now to look at those parts of my life as unrelated.
The thread is there.
And something good came from those eighteen days too
I met Joe Legakis in the Coast Guard.
We became close friends.
Life moved on, geography moved on, years passed, and we are not living in one another's pockets.
But we are still on each other's radar.
More than two decades later, that connection exists because for eighteen days in 2002 I went somewhere I desperately wanted to go and then left under circumstances I spent years wishing had been different.
Life is inconveniently resistant to simple classifications like success and failure.
Something can hurt.
Something can end badly.
Something can fail to become what you intended.
And it can still become part of the architecture of a life.
And there is a point at which hiding it stops being useful
I think that is where I am now.
I do not particularly want to make neurodivergence my identity.
I don't want every piece of work I produce to come with an ADHD disclaimer.
I have no intention of turning my professional life into a neurodiversity brand.
But I also have no interest in pretending anymore.
Yes, I am neurodivergent.
Fine.
It explains some things.
It does not explain everything.
There are things about it that I would happily do without.
There are other characteristics so deeply integrated into the way I think that separating “me” from “the neurodivergence” seems almost meaningless.
It is part of the architecture.
And there is nothing I need to apologise for in saying that.
My life is considerably bigger than my work
This matters too.
When people talk about neurodivergence publicly, the conversation very quickly becomes about productivity.
How do we make neurodivergent employees more productive?
What unusual skills can they offer a company?
How can employers “unlock” neurodivergent talent?
There is value in some of that discussion.
But I am not a productivity mechanism.
I am a husband.
I am a father.
I love my wife.
I love my children.
My family matters to me more than any software project, career history or technical achievement ever will.
A surprising amount of my life seems to involve building, repairing, investigating, improving or worrying about something because somebody I love is affected by it.
Sometimes that means fixing a computer.
Sometimes it means working out how something in the house should function.
Sometimes it means researching something far beyond the level any reasonable person would consider necessary.
Sometimes it means making everyone tolerate yet another explanation of something I have just discovered.
And sometimes I get things wrong.
Being neurodivergent does not make me uniquely virtuous, uniquely intelligent or uniquely difficult.
It makes me me, along with several thousand other things.
But one pattern I recognise in myself is a strong desire to leave things better than I found them.
Machines.
Systems.
Information.
Projects.
And, when I can, circumstances for people.
That is one reason technical systems matter to me so much.
Systems affect people.
When badly designed systems fail, somebody eventually has to live with the consequences.
Understanding changes what becomes possible
That, more than anything, is what I think is worth saying.
Not:
ADHD gave me superpowers.
It didn't.
Not:
Autism made me brilliant at systems.
Life is not that simple.
What I believe is much more ordinary and, perhaps, more important.
When neurodivergent people understand themselves, and when the people around them understand them too, less energy has to be spent on shame, masking and completely avoidable friction.
That energy becomes available for something else.
Sometimes that means excellent work.
Sometimes it means creating something.
Sometimes it means maintaining a relationship better.
Sometimes it means being a better parent or partner because you understand what is happening inside your own head.
Sometimes it means simply getting through a difficult day without concluding that you have somehow failed an invisible examination everybody else knew they were taking.
All of those things count.
In my case it can occasionally manifest as developing Cleverfeets while simultaneously reconstructing my own twenty-year digital history, maintaining an assortment of ageing computers that sensible people would probably have recycled, rebuilding my personal website, and trying to determine whether one incremental differential adjustment will finally stop a ludicrous Willys Jeep from killing me at Tsukuba.
Apparently my brain contains multitudes.
I am increasingly all right with that.
I wish understanding had come earlier
There are things in my life that might have been easier if I had understood all of this sooner.
There are working environments I might have navigated differently.
There are times when I might have been kinder to myself.
There are situations where somebody else understanding what was happening might have changed the outcome considerably.
And there are things — the Coast Guard among them — that I might not have spent years interpreting primarily as personal failure.
I cannot retrospectively fix any of that.
Nor do I particularly want to spend the rest of my life conducting an archaeological investigation into every difficult event and assigning it to a diagnostic category.
The more useful direction is forward.
I understand myself better now.
My family understands me better.
I know more about the conditions under which I function well and the conditions under which things start to fall apart.
I am better able to explain what I need.
And I am considerably less interested in spending energy hiding something that was never particularly well hidden in the first place.
Anyone who spends enough time around me is going to notice that I am wired a little differently.
They may notice the intense interests.
The wandering career.
The systems everywhere.
The tendency to ask seventeen additional questions when everybody else was satisfied after three.
The fact that I can become extremely animated about storage provenance, twenty-year-old Apple hardware, software architecture or a tiny adjustment to a fictional Jeep.
They might as well have the correct explanation.
So yes, I am neurodivergent
I don't say that as a confession.
I don't say it as a boast.
And I don't think it needs a dramatic reveal.
It is simply true.
There are difficult parts.
There are useful parts.
There are parts I am still learning to understand.
But understanding it has changed what I think is possible — at work, at home, in the things I build and in the expectations I place on myself.
Perhaps that is what I would most like other people to understand too.
A neurodivergent person does not necessarily need to be fixed.
Sometimes they need to be understood.
Sometimes they need an environment in which they can function.
Sometimes they need the language to understand themselves.
And sometimes, when those things finally line up, something that looked like inconsistency begins to reveal a pattern that was there all along.
I know mine considerably better now.
And I am no longer ashamed of it.
C. Matt Fletcher
27 September 2026