So It Turns Out I Do Have ADHD

In September, at the age of 26, I was finally diagnosed with ADHD.

It’s certainly been a struggle, but I have finally gotten medication, and I wrote this to document my experience with it, and to put together some thoughts.

Backstory

There were a lot of things I struggled with in my life. If I had to pick one that was the most frustrating, it was my executive dysfunction. Even if I really enjoyed doing it, it was incredibly difficult to get started.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know it was that at the time. And looking back, there were so many signs that went unnoticed. And that’s not even counting the signs that I was trans! Or autistic! But that’s a topic for another day.

I would sometimes do things in less than a few hours. Sometimes it would take a month. My ability to work would be on a rollercoaster that’s mainly just going up (boring) with a few loop de loops (very rare but exciting times).

Anyway, fast forward to this year (2024), I moved with my wife to Portland, OR, I got a therapist and on our very first consultation call she asked me if I was diagnosed with ADHD or autism, because I was showing symptoms.

Let me tell ya, this was the very first time that it truly hit me that I might actually have ADHD. And I have had a few people in the past telling me I give off “ADHD vibes”.

Before the only things that therapists were telling me I had were just depression and anxiety. Once I came out and transitioned, a lot of that has gone away and it let me actually think about things and try to figure out how I can improve my well-being.

And you know what, I really cannot stress this enough, it was transitioning that made me want to live and improve my life. I only wish I had known it back when I was a little kid. But now that I know and I got my identity mostly sorted out, I can actually focus on just getting better!

My hope for the future is that we can get gender affirming care and knowledge available to anyone that needs it, cis or trans, young or adult, because it does save lives and makes things better for everyone. And if you’re reading this in the first place, then I don’t think I gotta convince you that gender affirming healthcare and surgeries have a way lower regret rate than basically every other medical treatment. There is literally no other treatment that has such a low regret rate.

Where was I? Oh yeah, ADHD.

The first few days

When I first got my medication, I decided to write down everything that I did that day. I didn’t stick to it after that first week, but those first few days were still really important for me to put into perspective just how much the medication has been helping me. I decided to leave these unedited.

Saturday - September 14th

Was the day I first got Ritalin. I went to get it as soon as I woke up and took my first pill that day.
That day, I have already done so much that it felt really impressive.

I was struggling with a Switch-specific issue in Unreal, and I figured out what was the problem, and then quickly fixed it! I have also done some quick meshes and particles for a new level for my game.

Sunday

I did some coworking with Lalla. She made and gave me a simple enemy character that just roams from the starting location, and chases the player when they get close enough. That was also the time I thought “I really should try State Trees because what she did is exactly the kind of problem State Trees are perfect for”. I fixed a bug with my swing grapple FX, so now I don’t get this one frame lag that used to happen with it! Looks amazing!

Monday

I have completely recreated that enemy behavior with State Trees. It was a bit annoying to get it to work in the first place, but now I know what to look out for, and State Trees are an incredible tool for AI behaviors compared to Behavior Trees. I have also began work on exposing Root Motion Sources to BPs outside of the GameplayAbilitySystem.

This was also the day I got news I’d be showing off my game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with PIGSquad! Amazing news!

So I’ve began preparing for a marketing push. My wife helped with the website, and I have been talking with artists to commission some work!

Looking back as I’m writing this on Monday night, it is incredible just how much I’ve done in the past 3 days with the ADHD medication so far! I didn’t expect the results to be visible so soon, and even with the 4 hour duration of the meds, the dopamine from getting things done is carrying me towards the rest of the day.

So now I’m thinking. Just how quick am I going to be able to whip up a proper bossfight? Will I do it in the 12 days that remain until the showcase? Or will I do it before Thursday when PIGSquad has an event at the Autodesk office.

And if you asked me if I’d be able to do that before I took meds for ADHD, I’d scoff and say it’d take me a month, cause my ability to do those things was extremely unpredictable. There were way too many days where my brain just refused to let me work.

But now it feels doable, and I’m really excited about that. Let’s see how it goes!

Tuesday

I have migrated my boss fight work from a Behavior Tree to a State Tree and I have added some more Tasks I can use in the State Tree. I now have a boss character that moves and tries to attack the player! And when the boss gets damaged, he will jump up, and land in an area outside of reach.

I can’t believe I got this much done in so little time, I think I might actually have a playable prototype of the bossfight by the end of the day!

(It is now Tuesday night)

And I did it. Just wow. I even made an effect for a boss attack. It looks and plays great. In just those 4 days I did what I anticipated I’d do in a month.

Well, last month me, it went great!

Safe to say it has pretty much completely eradicated my imposter syndrome. I had a plan for the expo, and I fully completed it in just 4 days since I got the medication.

It doesn’t solve the “coming up with ideas” part, but it certainly helps with “writing down and executing on the ideas that come up”.

Technical challenges became easier to solve. After the expo I worked on improving some gameplay framework systems and tools I was working on and I wrote so much Unreal Slate code.

I reorganized my plugins into a nice categorized structure and put up a repo with them on GitHub so I could easily share them with folks. Even did some documentation! It was impressive how something I struggled with in the past just came to me.

It’s easier to form and describe my thoughts. And I’m very happy with it so far.

If you enjoy my writing, please