ADHD

Diagnosed as an adult. Reframed everything since.

I spent childhood and most of my early adult life with undiagnosed ADHD, and it caused real problems: the kind that are obvious in hindsight and confusing at the time. Getting a diagnosis later in life didn't erase any of that history, but it did explain it, and once I understood what was actually going on I could start using the same traits differently.

The curiosity that used to scatter my attention now drives fast learning across disciplines. The deep-focus streaks that used to swallow whole evenings now get pointed at problems that are worth that kind of attention. The compulsion to fix clumsy systems (the thing that used to just be mildly irritating to everyone around me) turned out to be a genuinely useful professional habit once I had somewhere proper to aim it. Unusual connections between things that shouldn't obviously relate are, more often than not, where the interesting fixes come from.

I'm not going to romanticise it or turn it into a personality gimmick: it caused real difficulty for a long time, and I'd rather be straightforward about that than package it as a quirky superpower origin story. But with the diagnosis and the understanding that came with it, it now feels a lot more like an asset than a liability. It's also why I'm specifically looking for a role substantial enough to keep the brain engaged; under-stimulating work is where old problems tend to resurface.

Working Style

Practical, direct, careful.

I'd rather ship something small and correct than something large and half-finished. I take unglamorous problems seriously (the kind of infrastructure, compliance and observability work that nobody notices until it's missing), and I add complexity only where simplicity genuinely won't do. I'm currently a trusted escalation route at Cisco for problems that cross team or discipline boundaries, which is a fair summary of the kind of work I gravitate toward generally.