"The To Do List" is a semi-monthly column by Sumit Singla on ADHD, parenting, life, animals, and other distractions.
As a first-person essay, this does not require review by our team of Reviewers. Barring minor changes for grammar and sentence structure, we have kept the voice of the author intact.Six years ago, I took a leap of faith and left my job to work for myself. It was only then that I discovered how much faith it takes to answer an email.
For ~40 years, I had lived a neurotypical life. I would have told you I worked best under pressure, needed variety in my tasks, and couldn’t be bothered with the small stuff. I had worked in large companies, surrounded by people and processes that sorted my days in roughly the right order. There were people who ran my calendar. Colleagues reminded me of things, sometimes twice. I had meetings I had to show up for, and people followed up when I didn’t.
Things got done, and I took this as evidence that I was great at getting things done. I was, fairly often. I just hadn’t paid much attention to the fact that it did take a village to get me to a point where I could do them.
The HR bit makes it weird. I spent two decades assessing other people’s focus, follow-through, and attention to detail. I wrote those words in appraisals, a typical man fueled by the unpaid labor people performed to keep him on track. All those assessments weren’t wrong. But I wonder what I knew about the effort on the other side of the table, given how little I understood my own.
When I left to work for myself, I realized no one was working for me. In the excitement of becoming independent, I had overlooked what made my previous life possible. All of a sudden, I became responsible for both having the ideas and remembering what I had agreed to do about them.
My first conference room was my car, with a laptop, a power socket and a fold-out table. I’ve told that story often as a piece of scrappy founder history, and I’m fond of it. There is something pleasing about having started in a car; it improves considerably in the telling once you no longer have to work in one (and you can tell tales about the view). Lately, though, I’ve wondered whether the smallness helped.
Perhaps having fewer things within reach made it easier to stay with the thing in front of me. Or perhaps it was simply the space I had. So earlier this year, a friend suggested I take an ADHD assessment, and my world bottomed out a bit.
NEURODIVERGENT. ND. INATTENTION.
I felt like I had been marked, a calf subjected to a hot brand. What I had been proud of as a unique way of working suddenly felt like something I ought to have disclosed. By then, the people and processes that had helped me function were gone, and I was relying increasingly on my closest ally.
Panic.
Always reliable, always present deep in my gut, wrenching.
My editor asked for this column at 12:57 in the afternoon and wanted it by 5 pm. Normally, this would be a dastardly, demanding deadline for a ‘regular’ human. Not me, though. The fact that I owed a client a 78-page policy document made writing the column suddenly very appealing.
There wasn’t enough time to spend several days thinking about writing it, feel guilty about not writing it, and then need a little rest from the strain of it all. I had to simply sit down and write. So much of my working life has happened like this that I trust the rush. Born from sheer panic, focus would arrive and bail me out. I’d brag about my superhuman abilities, neglecting to mention the bargaining, the avoidance, the unpleasant awareness that I was perfectly capable of doing the thing and was somehow still not doing it. And the accompanying acid reflux.
“I work well under pressure” sounds considerably better.
But like space debris throwing a spacecraft off course, there is detritus that derails my mind. A call I missed a couple of years ago, half-finished ideas rotting away in notebooks, something I forgot that mattered to someone I love. But yes, my brain would’ve thoughtfully preserved a completely irrelevant conversation from years ago, should the nation ever need it.
I don’t quite know how to process all this. Yes, I understand memories differently post-diagnosis. But do I go back and expect someone to stop being hurt when they felt ghosted? I would, however, like to stop treating every failure to remember as proof that I didn’t care. Sometimes I cared enough to decide that a quick reply wouldn’t do. I owed them a proper response, which I would send when I could give it the attention it deserved. Meanwhile, from their end, I was simply not replying.
