By Justin Fahmie · September 2026
A visual metaphor for better information about oneself, not a depiction of a diagnostic appointment.
In December 2024, at forty, I found out I was autistic and had ADHD.
By then I had already put a fairly substantial amount of wear on the equipment.
I had a business. I had a family. I had years of experience being sick and decades of experience being me. There was a whole life in progress when somebody finally supplied information that would have been useful near the beginning.
I spend a lot of time looking for the missing detail in a technical problem. The setting nobody mentioned. The part of the documentation that changes how you interpret everything else. It was a little strange to discover that I had been doing my own life with significant pages missing.
The assessment didn’t make the phone quieter. It didn’t make a vague instruction clear. It didn’t arrange all my interests into an orderly queue or give me the ability to begin every task as soon as I decided it mattered.
What it changed was the investigation.
Take communication. I prefer text. With text, the words stay where I can look at them. I can reread the question, check the detail, and answer the thing the person actually needs. A phone call asks me to process the information, the sound, the timing, and the interaction together. Those are different demands, even when the topic is identical.
Knowing that lets me ask for a different method. It gives the preference a practical purpose I can explain. The person still gets an answer. I have a better chance of giving a useful one without spending everything I have on the delivery mechanism.
Or take starting something. I can be deeply interested in a complicated technical question and still have trouble beginning an ordinary task. That looks ridiculous if the only scale you use runs from easy to difficult. It starts looking more understandable when you ask about clarity, interest, interruption, energy, and what the first action actually is.
I have a lot of ideas. An idea becoming a task does not automatically make its entrance obvious.
These are things I can work with. Make the next step concrete. Put the information somewhere I can retrieve it. Reduce unnecessary noise. Allow a thought enough room to become useful. Notice when the remaining problem is that I’m exhausted.
I wish I had been asking those questions sooner.
That wish comes with some anger. Forty is a long time to spend without a useful explanation for parts of your own experience. By the time I had one, I had already made decisions, struggled through things, and developed ways of coping without that information. I can be glad to have it and pissed off about when it arrived.
I also have to leave the alternate life alone. I don’t know who I would have been with an earlier diagnosis. I can imagine that some things might have been easier, but imagining it doesn’t turn it into a history I can verify. I’ve got enough work understanding the life that actually happened.
And there are plenty of things in that life that still require their own explanation. I have Crohn’s. I have migraines. I have ordinary responsibilities. Every difficult day isn’t a single diagnosis announcing itself in a different costume. Sometimes several things are happening together. Sometimes I don’t know which one is doing what.
The useful change is that uncertainty can lead to a question instead of another demand to try harder.
I’m still capable of making a bad plan. I still have to take responsibility for what I do. Better information gives me a better chance of making a plan that survives contact with me. That seems like a reasonable place to start.
There’s no untouched version of adulthood waiting for me to begin correctly. This is the one I’m in, with people I love and work I care about already attached.
So I’m making notes in the manual as I go. This helps. That costs more than I thought. Put the instruction in writing. Leave room for rest. Try the clearer question.
Some of the pages arrived late.
I’m still going to use them.
Source and edition note
Based on Still Building, chapters 3, 8–10. December 2024 assessment timing and diagnoses are drawn from Justin’s shared history as preserved in the memoir, not a new medical-record review. No alternate childhood or clinical causation is asserted.
Written with AI assistance in Justin’s requested voice from his shared history and the original Still Building memoir. Reflective prose is a reconstruction, not a verbatim interview. The illustration is an artistic interpretation; people, objects, rooms, and settings are not exact documentary depictions.