ASRS is a screening test for adults to see if it's worth pursuing an ADHD diagnosis. It is 18 questions, written by neurotypical people who assume their external observations of ADHD are accurate representations of what it's like to have it, so needs to be translated into "actual person with ADHD" before you fill it in.

That's why it includes stupid shit like, "do you feel driven by a motor?" No, I do not. Things driven by a motor spin round and round and I do not spin.

And, "Do you have problems remembering appointments" to which everyone responds, "It's 2026 and I have a fucking SMARTPHONE".

So that being the case, I have often thought one written BY ADHDers, FOR ADHDers would be better.

It would include questions like:
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"Do you think your friends all dislike you and that you annoy them?"
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"Is there a song on repeat in your head? Is it the same 3 bars over and over? It is, isn't it?"
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"Your partner says, 'we need to talk'. Do you flee to Antarctica? If not, is that because you got distracted by TVTropes when trying to find out how to flee to Antarctica?"
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"Do you do the thing with candles? You know the one. Yes you do, stop playing dumb."
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"'Right, but you need to show your working' - how much homicide do you want to commit when you read this?"
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"How many bottles of ketchup are there in your fridge? Did you have to get up to count?"
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"How many are expired?"
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"By more than a year?"
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"You left the fridge open, didn't you?"
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"Which leg is bouncing and why is it always the same one?"
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"Do you rehearse conversations in your head before having them?"
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"And then get annoyed when the other person doesn't say their correct lines?"
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"How long have you managed to lie in bed desperate for a pee without getting up to pee and why is it six hours?"
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"Cleaning your teeth twice a day is easy|common|aspirational|not happening|I own a toothbrush?|I own five toothbrushes?|And don't know where any of them are? (delete as applicable)"
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"You notice a scab on an easily accessible body part. How many seconds is its life expectancy?"
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"Where did you get those bruises? The ones on your legs? You don't know, do you?"
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"Rock climbing, knitting, or both?"
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"How long have the clothes in the washing machine been there?"
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"And is Indiana Jones getting excited about the early Mesopotamian sock layer at the bottom of the pile on your chair?"
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"Ikea Skadis. I know, right?"

April 16, 2025. One year ago today. Zoe and I took speed (Elvanse) for the first time.

Less than an hour later - “oh”.

The profundity of that one word; when everything changed. Everything.

Because suddenly you KNOW.

The thing that was there your entire life. The thing that trapped you. Hurt you. Turned you into an alien amongst your own species. The thing you could never understand. Could never know WHY.

Suddenly you know.

All of it.

The force of the revelation was like a supernova.

Fifty one years after they formed, for the first time ever my synapses worked properly.

And they did what they should have done all along.

I’m still processing the grief.

But it’s not just grief. I’m also furious about the revolting way people treat us. The advantage they have over us and neurological power imbalance is immense.

And most of them use that imbalance to use us as convenient receptacles for their own frustration, knowing somehow that we are incapable of fighting back, and apparently revelling in the ease with which we can be made to experience unbearable emotional distress.

One thing that really seems to confuse people is when it just … stops working.

And for the first time in your life you assert boundaries.

Every day now I take four times the amount of amphetamine than was in that starting dose.

And I hope I will for the rest of my life.

Because if I ever stop, I will be what I was again, within days. I will KNOW, all of it, and I will know WHY; and I will know what’s coming, and I will be utterly powerless to stop it.

It’s not something I like to contemplate.

Knowing is a cursed gift.

But it’s still a gift.

Amphetamine not only saved my life; it started it. I woke up for the first time ever a year ago today, at the age of 51.

I’ve recently learned there’s a name for a thing I have encountered all my life and been actually quite traumatised by: The Double Empathy Problem.

In a nutshell, if you’re a neurodivergent person you start from a very young age, before you can even speak maybe, trying to work out how to interact with pretty much everyone else using a system of rules and procedures which nobody ever explains to you and which seem Byzantine and inconsistent. The amount of effort you put into this is exhausting, and yet no matter how hard you try to behave exactly the same way everyone else does, and try to clarify things when you don’t understand, or try to join in with “smalltalk”, most of your interactions are judged as malicious and get you yelled at.

Then you eventually get diagnosed and work out that you basically have complex post traumatic stress from decades of this.

And so you find your people and you limit interaction with people who hurt you. You still have to exist in their world because you have to buy things and pay taxes, but otherwise … you back off for your own sanity because it seems no amount of effort to try and accommodate them will ever be acceptable to neurotypical people.

Meanwhile when neurotypical people encounter you they tell you that you are incapable of empathy, have no theory of mind, and are rude and annoying. They have tried nothing to understand you, and are all out of ideas.

Apparently I don’t understand their social rules, but unlike them I do understand irony.

I’m increasingly understanding why the idea that some of us with neurodevelopmental disorders are considered “high functioning” is basically crap.

Recently, by myself, I managed to unmask pretty much completely and … in that moment had anyone seen me they would not have considered me “high functioning”.

I speak two languages and yet I felt like speaking none. I gave up any pretence of trying to act like *them*, and it was liberating.

And it gave me a level of relaxation hitherto only achievable on amphetamine (I’d dropped into the unmedicated state when I did this).

And that’s when it hit me. There’s no difference in kind between me and a “rain man” stereotype. No. Some of us in infancy are pushed into masking as a necessary but ludicrously expensive survival mechanism and some are not.

And masking works, and they call us “high functioning”, but the cost is astronomical. I realise that now.

I think it’s where the idea of the “savant” comes from as well. As our NT peers develop the executive functioning that we never do, our differences increasingly paint a target on our backs.

And so we try to fina an acceptable way to escape. If adults were going to help us, we wouldn’t have had to start masking in the first place and one of the first lessons many of us learn is that indeed, the adults in our life are just as dangerous as our former friends.

But they mostly approve of book learning. And it gives us a way to keep ourselves apart.

And it hits our novelty and interest triggers.

And thus the path we are on reinforces itself. We spend the following decades using all of our intellectual and emotional capacity to bolster this survival mechanism and turn to things like alcohol or worse to manage the stress.

And then finally, some of us eventually find help. It took five decades in my case. I was exhausted.

To see me now, many would think me “regressing”.

I’m not. I’m just starting to live my truth. I deserve that. I need to rest. I’ve more than earned it.

Profoundly great therapy session. A realisation: have spent my entire life trying to hide who I really am from people who actually LIKE who I really am, and instead strive towards some neurotypical idea of what someone like me SHOULD be, and beating myself up for not reaching a standard I will never reach set by people who I don’t respect and who will never respect me anyway.

And being terrified that my constant failure to reach that standard means my actual loved ones will abandon me because I’m unable to be what I was always told I needed to be.

Simultaneously grossly overestimating my ability to mask myself from people I share my life and bed with, and actually being a bit insulting to them and myself for believing that I needed to do that, because nobody would ever actually want ME.

And I know why I did that. It was something I needed to do to survive a landscape where my synapses would hoard the neurotransmitters needed to prevent my own subconscious constantly whispering self hatred into my thoughts.

But I don’t need that any more. I’ve made them give up their precious monoamines.

And I can be me.

And stop apologising for it.

Because who I am is not only good enough; who I am is loved.

By people I love.