Aspiring DM

I haven’t posted here in over a year.

If you’ve been following, you’ll have noticed the silence.

This is me explaining it.

The Short Version

I was diagnosed with ADHD. It explained a lot. And then it created a lot more to think about.

The Longer Version

I’m 47, today actually, happy birthday me.

For most of those years, probably all of them if I’m honest, I’ve been living with something I didn’t have a name for. I was just me, plodding along. The signs were always there. I just didn’t know what I was looking at.

As a chef, I thrived, I mean really thrived, under the pressure and organised chaos of a busy service. The noise, the pace, the heat, I didn’t just cope with it, I came alive in it. At the time I put that down to personality. Looking back, it was hyper focus. It was my brain finally getting the stimulation it needed. Reaching a state of flow where the work happened naturally, without thinking. Conducting an orchestra of ingredients with a knife in one hand and a frying pan in the other.

Even now, my wife knows better than to interrupt when I’m in that state: four burners blazing, every surface claimed by bowls of mise-en-place, me moving between them all with absolute purpose despite looking completely unhinged. 

There were other signs too. A restlessness between interests, switching from one thing to the next with intensity and then back again. Sleep that never quite worked properly, always feeling exhausted. Eating too much, especially when things got hard. I lived with relentless mental noise I couldn’t turn off.

My mind would pull the plug itself, shutting down entirely, when there was simply too much going on. Too much unprocessed noise, and I would lose the ability to speak or think clearly for myself. A complete shutdown. I’d always found those moments hard to explain. I had no framework for them. I just knew they happened and I carried on afterwards, never looked into it, it was just me, being me.

For a long time, most of my adult life, I put a lot of this down to depression. My mum passed away very suddenly when I was 19. Grief seemed a reasonable explanation for a great many things, and I leaned on it for nearly three decades without questioning it much, including nearly ten years of therapy. It is only now I wonder whether grief had been covering for something else all along.

How It Actually Happened

I didn’t seek the diagnosis out myself. That, in retrospect, is very on brand. I had absolutely no idea at all.

A friend of mine went through an assessment. He thought he had autism. It turned out to be combined autism and ADHD, AuDHD. Somewhere in hearing him talk about his experience,  something clicked. Probably when he said, quite bluntly, ‘you have ADHD’.

I’ve thought about this a lot since. So much of my life has moved forward because someone else saw something in me first. All of the jobs I have ever done, someone recommended me. The idea of becoming a Delivery Manager, a friend suggested and kept pushing until I listened. Even this blog exists because of an external nudge, not an internal one.

That pattern makes a lot more sense to me now than it did before. One of the quieter, less-talked-about aspects of ADHD, particularly in adults who’ve gone undiagnosed, is a kind of future myopia. Difficulty imagining yourself in a future you’ve chosen for yourself. Never quite knowing what you actually want. Not pushing for things. Not because of lack of ambition, but because the mechanism that connects “I want this” to “I will pursue this” doesn’t fire the way it does for other people, at least, not for me. As well as the fact that quite a lot of the time it can be such an exhausting battle just getting through the day to day.

I never chose to go on holiday unless someone else suggested it. I never pushed for a job. I never really asked for much of anything for myself.

Which, when I think about it, makes aspiringdm.com quietly significant. This blog is me wanting and pursuing, something for myself. Possibly one of the first times I’ve done that deliberately.

What the Diagnosis Felt Like

It certainly wasn’t a big lightning bolt moment. There was no dramatic before and after.

I went to my GP and arranged a referral under the Right to Choose programme. Several months later, 4 in fact, which is considerably quick, I had a consultation and was subsequently diagnosed with inattentive ADHD. I actually only got half way through my list of ‘any additional symptoms’ before the consultant stopped me. Okay, okay, that’s more than enough she said….

My first thought was ‘Ah, shit, so that’s what’s going on….’ Finally having something to attribute it to. Decades of experiences that had felt like personal failings, the shutdowns, the scattered and frenetic energy, the sleep, the eating, allowing life to just happen instead of driving it, suddenly had a different explanation.

Reality followed immediately, a diagnosis isn’t a resolution. It’s a starting point. And I could feel, almost immediately, that there was going to be a lot of work to do. I chose to try medication, just to see if anything would happen, and it did. It’s only now, almost a year after the diagnosis and months of titration, that I feel more consistently balanced and able to start rebuilding. I’ll write about that separately.

That work is ongoing. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. This is only just scratching the surface, I will write more in depth about it elsewhere at some point, for the sake of catharsis.

So, what have I been doing in the meantime? 

The blog went quiet but the journey didn’t stop. There will be posts about each to follow but the highlights are:

I’ve been volunteering as a Delivery Manager for ADHD Pathfinding UK, a volunteer initiative redesigning ADHD care navigation. Practical hands on experience and learning for which I am extremely grateful. This also gave me some great connections and opportunities. Which led to some brilliant DM coaching sessions and conversations.

I attended DeliverCon, the biannual unconference for delivery managers in and around the public sector. It certainly gave me a lot to think about as well as motivation, inspiration and positively reinforcing some observations and assumptions. There will be dedicated posts coming about the experience and some of the discussions in detail over the coming weeks, including one on the careers that lead people into delivery management, and another on what actually makes a good DM. Both hit differently when you’re sitting in the room as a ‘practice’ one.

And I’m actively looking for my first paid DM role. That journey is going to be part of this blog going forward.

If any of this resonates with you, the late diagnosis, the circuitous route, the feeling of finally moving toward something you’ve chosen despite the setbacks, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.

It turns out I’m getting better at wanting things for myself. This is one of them.