Both of those things are true.

I'm thirty-six. I got diagnosed with ADHD and autism in April, both at once, which the psychologist told me is pretty common for women my age.

I don't know how to describe the years before that without it sounding like a complaint. Nothing bad happened to me. My parents were fine. I did well in school through about fourth grade and after that I did well in the subjects I liked and poorly in everything else, and every report card said I wasn't applying myself. My mother kept them. She showed me the folder at Christmas a few years ago like it was a nice thing.

The word was inconsistent

I could do the hard version of something and not the easy version. I wrote a forty-page thing in two nights in college and also did not renew my license for two years after it expired. Both of those are true and I have never been able to make them fit together for anyone who asked.

I worked at a dental office for six years, front desk, and I was late maybe twice a week. I would leave early and still be late. I know how that sounds. I lost two other jobs before that, not by being fired, just by being scheduled less and less until there was nothing.

Some of it was physical. I stopped going to the grocery store after five because of the lights and the noise, and a few times I left a full cart in the aisle and went to the car. My ex thought I was doing it for attention. There was nobody there to see it, but that was the theory.

The drawer in the kitchen

Mail was the thing that scared me most. It piled up in a drawer in the kitchen. Parking tickets I didn't pay, then late fees, then a letter from the city I didn't open either. My grandmother sent me a check for my birthday and I found it eleven months later and it was no good by then and I never told her.

I want to be clear that I knew the drawer was there. I thought about it constantly. I just could not do it.

With people I was on or gone

I'm good at parties. I remember names, I ask questions, everybody thinks I'm friendly. Then I would not answer a text for two weeks. My friend Priya asked me once if she'd done something and I said no and then couldn't explain it any further than that. She's still my friend. Some of them aren't.

At night I would go through everything I said that day. That was just what nights were.

What made me finally go

What made me finally go was getting promoted. More money, office manager, and after about a month I couldn't open my email. I'd sit in the parking garage after work for an hour before driving home. My sister sent me an article and I got angry about it and then read it a lot of times.

The waitlist was over a year. The testing was expensive.

Having the answer didn't fix my life. The mail is still hard. But I've stopped assuming I'm the problem, and I didn't know how much of my day was going into that.

What helps now

A few things help, like putting timers I can hear from another room and eating the same breakfast every day. Julie and I get on a video call and don't talk and both work, and I can do things during that hour that I can't do otherwise. I take the day after a wedding off. I tell people ahead of time that I disappear sometimes and it isn't about them.

I'm still not caught up on any of it.