When I need to focus on something demanding I put my headphones on and start some thrash metal, at a volume any ENT doctor would probably advise against. I’ve tried white noise too, which is what everyone recommends, but it has never worked for me; thrash does, and it doesn’t even matter whether the track is instrumental or has vocals. My theory is that the tight, precise rhythms act as white noise in place of white noise, filling the space where my head would otherwise go looking for something else to do. If you want to try it, my suggestion is Metallica’s …And Justice for All, which is the album I put on when I need maximum focus, although, being a bass player, I usually listen to this version with the bass put back in the mix: I like the original, but I’d rather hear the bass.

For years I took this as one of my fixations, one of the many things that have always made me feel a bit different from everyone else. Last week I was diagnosed with combined-type ADHD, along with giftedness, and to be honest I still haven’t quite worked out what that changes; all I know is that quite a few of those things now have an explanation slightly more serious than “that’s just how I am”.

I’ve felt different from other people since I was a kid although back then, at least on the inside, it didn’t weigh on me; if anything, I simply felt smarter, I had interests other kids my age didn’t have, like science, the human body and space, and I was into video games at a time, the second half of the ’90s, when they weren’t yet the mainstream thing they are today. Above all I wanted to be a grown-up and that too has only found an explanation now because apparently that urge to be a grown-up was tied precisely to the giftedness.

Growing up, though, that feeling of being different turned into something less harmless, and in my teens it became a feeling of being better than others. I’d already been bullied in primary school in a way I don’t want to talk about here and I was bullied again in middle school, where it was mostly psychological; to this day I couldn’t say how much of it came from that sense of superiority and how much from the fact that I really was different, probably a bit of both.

Then came the inability to make friends or at least to have social interactions that actually fulfilled me; the few friendships I’d managed to build I lost anyway because I got bored quickly of people as much as of situations and I’d end up distancing myself by behaving like a jerk.

Then came the trouble concentrating: I’d drift off, procrastinate constantly, and I did it mostly with the activities that required the most mental effort, which, coming from someone who’s a developer for a living, sounds almost like a joke. It was while trying to understand what was wrong that I came across ADHD and at first I didn’t really see myself in it; only when I stopped watching TikTok and Instagram content and moved on to more serious sources I started to actually understand the subject: the books and videos of Dr Valerio Rosso and the work of various American psychologists and psychiatrists.

In there I started recognising myself in quite a few things: first of all the difficulty concentrating and getting constantly distracted by low-value things, but also feeling drained by context switching, which happens to me even when I’m not getting distracted at all; then the difficulty with relationships, which I’ve already talked about.

There were other things, though, that I never saw myself in: I don’t have the physical hyperactivity, the mental kind yes, and I’m not the type who loses things. Even the famous poor sense of time works differently in my case from how it’s usually described, because it’s not that I lose track of time during the day, it’s more of a long-term thing: I’m 37 and I don’t realise it, I feel much younger, as if I still had all the time in the world ahead of me.

About four years ago I had a first assessment at the public mental health centre in my city, with one of the psychiatrists there. I wasn’t given any specific test, and four things were enough to rule out ADHD: I did well at school, I’d taught myself to play bass, I’d taught myself English, and I’m in a long-term relationship with my partner. At the time I was puzzled, then I let it go and for a while I didn’t think about it any more. In hindsight, nearly all the things I’d been given as proof that I couldn’t have ADHD are exactly the ones giftedness makes possible, and which had therefore ended up hiding it.

The nagging doubt came back this year, in June, during a more exhausting period than usual, both for concentration and for organising my life, which is something I’ve always sucked at. This time I looked for a serious professional and found one almost by chance, among ADHD podcasts: Dr Stefano Bramante, a psychiatrist and the man behind the Brain on Fire podcast, who has also published a mock ADHD assessment on YouTube. He first referred me to one of his collaborators, Dr Daniele Tatano, a psychologist, who did an initial assessment that Dr Bramante then validated with his own; because of their availability, though, I had to wait until September.

It was a completely different experience from four years earlier. Over six weeks I had two sessions with Dr Tatano and one with Dr Bramante, cognitive tests, questionnaires to fill in myself and others for my partner and my mother to fill in, interviews, and they even wanted to see my primary and middle school reports. I liked the approach, structured and not superficial at all, but what surprised me most was seeing it confirmed in black and white, between the interviews and the school reports, that as a kid I really was very intelligent, and that the feeling of being different I talked about at the beginning wasn’t just in my head.

Then there’s work, where all of this shows up in fairly recognisable ways, at least now that I know what to look for. I need new problems to stay engaged with a project, and my brain switches on with urgency: I tend to put off difficult tasks, but when the deadline gets close and the pressure rises, hyperfocus kicks in almost automatically, and the thing I’d been putting off for days becomes the only thing I can think about. Then there’s documentation, which I struggle to find my way through, and there are long meetings where I only play a marginal role, which are by far the most tiring for me. It’s not all bad, though: I work well under pressure, even if it doesn’t do me much good; I think I’m good at lateral thinking, and I’m obsessed with clean, well-written code, which in a job like mine is hardly a flaw.

As for actual tools, apart from the thrash metal, I’ve never had many: I’ve always put events and appointments in Google Calendar, and since March I’ve been using a bullet journal. It’s not the first one I’ve started, I abandoned all the others, but this one is still going after seven months, and for me that’s already something. At first I mostly used it for tasks, work and otherwise, then I didn’t want to keep track of work by hand any more and did what for an engineer is almost an occupational hazard: I automated it.

I’ve instructed Claude to log every action, analysis, PR or comment I make or am asked for in my Logseq journal, with links to the PRs and comments, both on GitHub and in the issue tracker. The result is that I can now give much more structured feedback on my day-to-day work, and reconstructing what I did days or weeks later has become much easier. These days I use the bullet journal almost only for to-dos, and I’ve started, timidly, to push myself to write down a few thoughts in it too, a few emotions, that kind of thing.

If you ask me what I felt when I got the diagnosis, the honest answer is that I don’t know, and as I said at the beginning I’m not even sure what changes from here on. I know I’m planning to start therapy, partly to work on organising my life, which I really want to get better at.

And I know one more thing, which is maybe the only thing I’ve been clear about from the very first moment: I don’t want to use ADHD as an excuse, either for not doing things or for not organising my life.