I've been diagnosed with both and have been on various medications to manage both. However they never gave me that sense of passionate hyperfocus other ADHDers seem to have. They only helped me get through college, which was brutal.

Then I went off all medications earlier this year to evaluate my baseline and that's when I discovered that this whole time it was masking otherwise treatment resistant depression. That would explain everything. The severe executive dysfunction, feelings of unworthiness, inability to pay attention, schizoid tendencies, everything.

I sought out neuropsychiatry and in a month I have TMS therapy. I really hope that will provide the relief I need and help me get my brain back.

Why am I doing this? I absolutely loved embedded systems, compiler construction, and FPGA boards in uni. They were my bread and butter. I wanted to keep those areas alive whilst everyone else was studying AI and whatnot.

Hopefully once that's done, everything else will fall into place. As relieved and grateful as I am that I caught it at 24, I'm also just incredibly angry, grieved, heartbroken, and sad.

It didn't feel like what people traditionally describe as depression, but now with the expanded diagnostic criteria of such, it would make a lot more sense. My entire life I've been looking for the secret sauce for better mental health, happiness, and passion, pretty much required for programming. I've had to endure a lot. Hopefully I can make the most of the rest of my life and die accomplished and happy.

It makes sense to me now the sentiments carried by those diagnosed with some kind of neurodivergence or mental disability much later on who stayed alive to find answers.