Choosing An Adult Evaluation

Oh, I'm finally gonna go through with it. I'm almost 40 years old and I'm finally getting evaluated for autism and ADHD. Why? Why now, you ask? Because, well, I'm kind of tired of trying to read something three times in a row and still not remember, you know, what the hell I just did. I'm tired of hearing my own voice narrating all my thoughts like a broken audiobook at two times speed. And I'm tired of feeling like uh, you know, like I'm smart enough to do the work, but never together enough to actually show it. Oh man. Earlier I bit into something really hot, and now like the roof of my mouth. It just it feels weird trying to talk, so I apologize. This is another little quick unbuffered here on the Tyler Woodward project, where I just kind of sit down and talk to you. And it's about deciding to get evaluated for autism and ADHD as an almost 40-year-old. And why it took me this long to stop pretending I could just try harder or try to push through it. So, you know, here's the thing. When I was in school, nobody really knew what ADHD or autism looked like in a kid who, you know, wasn't bouncing off the walls or melting down in a way that teachers typically would recognize, you know. There was no, hey, you might be neurodivergent. No, it was more like, hey, you're in this special class now. It's called SLD, Specific Learning Disability, which translated basically to me as we don't know what the fuck your problem is, but you're not uh fitting in the main box, so we're gonna put you in this this uh different box over here. I wasn't failing out in some spectacular way. I was just barely making it through. You know, enough to pass, not enough to feel like I understood how everyone else was doing it so easily. And because no one had a name for it at that time, the story I told myself was simple. I'm I'm bad at school, I suck at this. You know, I'm I'm the problem. I guess that the issue is me. And fast forward a couple decades, and now I've got a son who has autism in ADHD, and I sit there and I watch him and I see all the you know, all these little things, the way his attention zigzags, the way he locks on to certain interests, just hyper-focuses on something. The way school doesn't quite know what to do with him. And it's like watching old footage of myself that I didn't know anyone recorded. And if he's listening to this one day, sorry, dude, didn't really like didn't realize this stuff was hereditary. Um I'm sorry the world still isn't built for how your brain works. I'm sorry it took me this long to realize mine works kind of really the same way. But at least you get words for it. You get people who actually know what to do. I got SLD in a shrug. Now, layer on top of that, I'm trying to study for the for the C C A. Yeah, that Cisco stuff, which is already hard by itself. Like, nobody casually flips through subnetting and spanning tree protocols and says, Yeah, I just skimmed it on my lunch break. It's fine. But try doing that level of technical study with a brain that's running eight radio stations worth of noise at any given time. I sit down with the book or the video or the lab, and I swear, I swear, man, it's like, okay, focus. We're learning OSPF. We're adults, we can do this. We wait, did I pay that bill? Why is that one screw on the rack slightly crooked? I should reorganize my entire home lab. I wonder if I said something weird in that meeting three weeks ago. Oh crap, I probably did. Wait, wait, what were we doing? Oh right, OSPF. You do that enough times and it stops being funny and starts being really, really freaking exhausting. It starts to feel like less like I'm a little distracted and more like you know, there is actually something different about how my brain handles input and focus and memory and pretending it's just um, you know, a discipline issue. It's it's not cutting it anymore. The moment the moment it shifted for me was weirdly kind of quiet, if it, you know, if you think about it. It wasn't some rock bottom, nobody yelled at me, nothing blew up. I just hit this point finally where I I realized studying shouldn't feel this impossible. Not like this is, you know, a complex, yeah, like not like this is complex material impossible, more like I literally cannot hold the sentence I just read in work in memory long enough to connect it to the next sentence that I'm reading. It's not laziness, it's not a character flaw, that's that's a brain thing. And I thought about my son. I thought about how hard I will fight to make sure he gets what he needs the accommodations, the understanding, maybe the meds, if they're right for him, different teaching approaches, all of that. And then I looked at myself and I realized I'm not giving myself any of that. I'm just white knuckling through everything and calling it being an adult. So I did something. Incredibly, you know, unsexy and incredibly, I guess, grown up finally? I don't know. I messaged my doctor. I basically said, hey, I think I might have ADHD, maybe autism. I've thought, you know, I I thought this I've thought about this for a while. I'm struggling with focus, reading memory, you know, studying, my kids diagnosed. This feels familiar. You know, what what can we do about it? What you know, is this something I can get evaluated for and checked out? And instead of telling me to drink more water or download yet another focus app, she said, Yeah, let's send you to a psychiatrist and get you evaluated. That's it. No drama, no judgment, no you're too old for that. Just yeah, we can look into that. And that's simple we can look into it, flip the switch. Because now it's not just me banging around in my head, wondering if I'm making any of this up, wondering if I'm just being overly dramatic or lazy. Now it's on the calendar. Now there's an actual process happening. Now there's a chance that instead of silently fighting my own brain every single damn day, I might get some help. Am I nervous about it? Yeah, sure. Part of me worries they'll just say, nah, you're fine. You're just tired. And I'll walk out feeling like I wasted everyone's time. Another part of me worries they'll say, Yes, you have ADHD and maybe autism, and then I'll have to sit with the grief of cool. So I went almost 40 years thinking I was just broken for no reason. But here's the thing: both of those feelings are better than saying, you know, staying in this limbo where I know something's off and I keep pretending it's not. They say no, it's not ADHD or autism, then okay. We keep investigating, I guess. Maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's something else, but at least I'm not trying to self-diagnose in a vacuum. If they say, yes, it is, then I got options. Maybe meds, maybe different strategies for studying, maybe uh language to explain to other people why I am the way I am, instead of just blaming it on being scatterbrained or whatever. And honestly, maybe the biggest thing is just permission. Permission to stop beating myself up for not being built like the imaginary ideal student or employee or person, whatever. You know, that I've been chasing since elementary school. The wild part is realizing how much of my life has been shaped by not having this language being put in quote-unquote special classes. You know, you're special. Where the label didn't actually explain anything, it just separated me from the rest of the group, thinking I was lazy instead of overwhelmed, thinking I was stupid instead of unsupported, thinking I was undisciplined and instead of undiagnosed. And now I'm watching my oldest grow up in a world where, yeah, there's still a little bit of stigma, there's still misunderstanding, but there's also frameworks and specialists and actual words for this stuff now. He gets to know, hey, your brain, yeah, it's wired differently. Here's how we work with that. I didn't get that. Early 90s, nah, nobody nobody knew, or they were denying it, but I can retroactively, I guess, give it to myself now. This evaluation for me is partly about getting help in the present. Making that Cisco studying, that CCNA study possible without wanting to launch the book into orbit. You know, partly about I guess sort of, yeah, healing the past. It's me saying to my younger self, the kid in that SLD classroom, there was never anything wrong with you, man. The tools just weren't there yet for you. So, if any of this sounds familiar, if you've spent your life feeling like everyone else got the manual, and you're just kind of guessing, and you're thinking, am I too old to get this checked out? No, you're not. You're not too old to understand your own brain, you're not too old to ask for help, and you're not too old to decide that barely getting by isn't the bar you want to live at anymore. I'm almost 40, I'm finally getting evaluated, and yeah, I'm a little nervous, a little scared, but I'm also hopeful. Hopeful that maybe the next 40 years don't have to feel like the first 40 did. Hopeful that I can still learn some new things like CCNA, maybe Comtia Network Plus, like, you know, whatever's next, without fighting myself every second along the way. If you're struggling, make the move, man. Send the message, ask the question, book the appointment, not because a diagnosis magically fixes everything, but because you deserve to stop carrying this alone. And if I ever do a I don't know, fuller episode on this, maybe I'll talk about what the actual evaluation was like and what changed afterwards, med strategies, any of that. For now, this is me, almost 40, finally saying, I think my brain is different. I want to understand it. I'm gonna get some help. Follow me on Instagram and threads if you want at Tylerwoodward.me. Also visit Tylerwoodward.me for past episodes, show notes, all the links to all the things. That's where you can find everything about the Tyler Woodward project. I'll catch you next time.