#142 🕊️ What I Learned from Wishing to Have Known Sooner

Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.

I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.

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Part 20 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series

Belief: Self-loathing is my central challenge, something I’ll cope with forever.

Reality: A feeling can be true without being my reality, so I don’t have to accept it as permanent.

Action: Accept yourself fully, traits and all, and treat your hard feelings as a passing moment, not your truth.

Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life. This is the series closer.

If you don’t know, I write this newsletter as a journal for myself. I choose topics and series based on what I want to process and learn about myself. When I started this series twenty-some weeks ago, I meant it to be a quick start guide for someone diagnosed late in life like me. However, after looking back on it, I can see now what it really was: a way to process the grief and disappointment of being diagnosed late in life.

I tried to write from a positive place. But looking back at the topics I chose and how I wrote about them, there was a lot of pain in here. A quiet ache that if I’d only known sooner, I could have been so much better, gotten further, and struggled less.

I was trying to make peace with the way my life had gone and quiet the “shoulds” of having known better. Instead, I learned to grieve the life I could have had and accept who I am today.

If you’d asked me a few months ago to explain my ADHD, I’d have told you it all traced back to self-loathing: I believe I suck, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to fix or mitigate that flaw.

I thought the best I could do was cope with the flaw. And since I was aware of it, I was more empowered to mitigate its impact. I assumed “acceptance” meant making peace with a permanent resident. Self-loathing would always live in me, and my job was to learn to share the house with it forever.

That’s the quiet trap in the word “acceptance”: we think it means resigning ourselves to the pain of it. Accept that it’s here, accept that it’s a challenge, accept that it always will be. Carry it, and call the carrying “peace”.

What I learned from this series is that I don’t have to accept self-loathing as a permanent challenge. I don’t have to accept that it’s a fixed part of me, or that it will always be there. Much of that weight was something I’d built and kept rebuilding. Think of it as an ADHD version of “I think suck, so therefore I suck”.

However, writing this series and working with my ADHD coach changed how I see myself. I can separate the feeling of being insecure and small from my reality. What I feel can be true, yet not be the truth about me. Some days I feel like my photography isn’t good enough. That feeling is real, but it doesn’t erase that my work has been published in books and magazines. The feeling visits. It doesn’t get to run the house.

Even the hardest one still comes around. Some part of me still wishes I could build a time machine, go back, and recapture what I lost. But I’ve learned to see that for what it is: a feeling, temporary, passing through. It’s no longer a belief I hold or a future I’m chasing. It shows up, and it leaves, and that’s okay.

Which led me to the biggest lesson of the whole series: I can accept who I am, as I am today.

You don’t earn self-acceptance by fixing yourself first. You practice it by taking the whole of who you are, the parts you’d brag about, and the parts you’d hide, as simply what is.

Separate the feeling from the fact.

• When the feeling of “not good enough” shows up, name it as a feeling, not a verdict. It can be true in the moment and still not be your reality.

• Let the evidence of your life count. The published photos, the finished work, the people who value you: those are facts, and a passing feeling doesn’t get a vote over them.

Stop treating your traits as things to overcome.

• I’m dyslexic, and I’m a professional writer. I have dyscalculia, a genuine disability with numbers, and I’ve been trusted with a nine-figure budget. Those aren’t contradictions.

• I’m not good at these things despite how my brain works. I’m often good because of it. My dyslexia makes me a more creative writer; my dyscalculia makes me see budgets differently. I may use accommodation tools to get them done differently from others. However, different isn’t bad. It’s just different.

Let acceptance be active, not resigned.

• Acceptance isn’t burying the feeling and carrying the resentment. Nor does it mean never having the bad feelings again. It’s taking yourself as you are, negatives, positives, all of it, and deciding what to make of it.

• I perform better, and I’m happier at work, not by beating my ADHD, but by accepting who I am, fully.

So here’s where twenty weeks landed me. I am not a person with a permanent flaw. I’m a person who sometimes feels hard things and has learned that those feelings are moments, not the truth of who I am. I have ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia. I have challenges that come with it. I have these disorders, but am not constrained by them.

I don’t wish I had known anything sooner anymore. I needed to go through my journey to get where I am today. I embrace and accept that.

Acceptance was never about resigning myself to what’s broken. It was about seeing there was far less broken than I believed, and far more that was simply, differently, mine.

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