Sometimes I look up and it's dark outside.
Not evening dark. Night dark. I sat down after breakfast to fix something small, and now it's 9pm and I haven't eaten, haven't drunk water, haven't moved. My back hurts. My head hurts. But the thing is done. Not perfect — I don't do perfect. I do pragmatic. I do "this works, ship it, move on." But I've been doing five of these at once, and I forgot I was a body.
This is what they call hyperfocus. They call it a superpower. It doesn't feel like one.
Here's how it actually works:
I can juggle five projects at once. I can context-switch between clients, codebases, entire problem domains, and keep all of it moving. I can do in a day what takes some people a week — not because I'm smarter, but because my brain won't let me do it any other way.
But I can't do boring. I physically cannot do boring. My brain treats mundane tasks like an allergic reaction. The stable job, the predictable work, the slow climb up the corporate ladder — these aren't choices I'm declining. They're options that don't exist for me.
So I trade. I trade stability for intensity. I trade the £200k senior role at the top of someone else's pyramid for fifteen years of running my own thing, where every project is new and nothing is ever boring enough to break me.
Fifteen years. I've built AI systems for Rolls Royce. Healthcare platforms across Africa. Things I'm genuinely proud of. And I'm still here, still juggling, still unable to access the normal path that seems so easy for everyone else.
Here's the part I don't tell clients: I should charge more.
I know this. Everyone knows this. The work I do, the speed I do it at, the problems I solve — it's worth more than I ask for. But asking for more means risking rejection. And rejection, for me, isn't just uncomfortable. It's catastrophic.
They call it Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. It means the fear of "no" is so overwhelming that I'd rather undercharge than face it. So I take the lower rate. I tell myself I'll make it up in volume. I take on five projects instead of two, because five small yeses feel safer than one big ask.
And then I'm juggling five things, working constantly, and still somehow not getting ahead.
The money comes in and the money goes out. I spend badly — impulsive purchases, things that feel urgent in the moment, the dopamine hits that keep me functional. ADHD and financial planning don't mix. I know this too. Knowing doesn't help.
The thing about hyperfocus is that it's very useful to other people.
When you can deliver fast, people notice. They start to expect it. They build timelines around it. They come to you with the impossible stuff, the "we need this yesterday" stuff, because they know you'll get it done.
What they don't see is the cost.
They don't see the meals skipped, the water not drunk, the body ignored until it screams. They don't see the five other projects I'm also doing because I couldn't say no, couldn't ask for enough, couldn't risk the rejection. They don't see the crash afterwards, when the focus breaks and everything feels grey and impossible.
They see the output. They like the output. They want more of the output.
And because I can't ask for what I'm worth, because the alternative is hearing "no," I keep giving it to them at a discount.
There's medication that helps with this. I know because I've read the studies, talked to people who have it, seen what stable focus looks like for them.
I can't get it.
The NHS waiting list for adult ADHD assessment is years long. Years. And even when you get through, the system is designed for children, for the obvious cases, for people who fit the checklist in ways I apparently don't.
So I manage it myself. Caffeine and deadlines and the knowledge that if I don't hyperfocus, I don't eat. Not because I forget to, but because the work doesn't get done, and the work is how I survive.
This is the part that's hard to explain to people with normal brains: I'm not choosing to work this way. I'm not a workaholic who needs to learn boundaries. This is the only way my brain lets me work at all. The alternative isn't "healthy balance." The alternative is nothing getting done.
People like me get called mavericks. It sounds romantic. It isn't.
Being a maverick means never having the safety net. It means every project is a bet, every client relationship is fragile, every month is a question mark. It means watching people with half your output climb ladders you can't even see, because they can do the boring parts, the political parts, the showing-up-consistently parts.
It means fifteen years of proving yourself, over and over, because you can't accumulate the kind of institutional trust that comes from just... staying.
I don't want to be a maverick. I want to be boring. I want the stable job and the predictable income and the ability to take a sick day without the whole thing collapsing.
But that's not the deal I got.
I'm not writing this for sympathy. I'm writing it because I know I'm not the only one.
There are people reading this who know exactly what I mean. Who've felt the hyperfocus lock in and known they were going to pay for it later. Who've watched their bodies become afterthoughts while their brains solved problems nobody asked them to solve. Who've wondered why the "normal" path seems so impossible when they're clearly not stupid.
You're not broken. You're running different hardware. The software the world expects doesn't quite fit, and nobody gave you the adapter.
I keep hoping it gets easier. That someday I'll find the right medication, the right structure, the right way of working that doesn't feel like burning myself for fuel.
Fifteen years in, I'm still hoping.
But I'm also still here. Still building things. Still occasionally looking up to find it's dark outside and I forgot to eat again.
The thing is done, though. The thing is always done.
I just wish it cost less.