I started this in 2014, and surprise surprise…I never finished. ADHD doesn’t ‘finish’, especially not when there’s another “Never Going Anywhere” business to obsess over. So, like everything else, it landed on the ‘Unlikely To See Again’ list. It was a full capitulation. With nothing left, I imposed a brutal sentence: “This year I change my life, or I end it.” It had to be drastic, as I only swing extreme. A year of solitude — just me and my everything, Millie. A malnourished one-eyed stray cat who appeared days into exile. We were in the same place; she was meant to find me. Sounds mental, but she saved my life — and for added craziness: not once, but twice.

I’ve lived years off-grid. I’ve done more solitary confinement than a supermax inmate, but this was the strictest yet. After a decade of cocaine, alcohol, and gambling, glossed over by a lame suicide attempt — another thing to add to the list of things ADHD failed to finish — I moved home with nothing but £100k debt and a destroyed septum, like me, hanging by a thread. One year turned to two. Slowly, I found myself and worked on becoming someone I wanted to be. It’s quite far off the person I should’ve been, but that poor fucker never stood a chance.

Recovery was dark. Quitting was the easy part compared to change — a fuck off difference. I didn’t think when I threw my last wrap in the toilet for the 897th time (remarkable coincidence: always nothing left), that habits, lies, and masks flushed away with it, but fuck… did I ever crack it?

I cautiously re-engaged, and many years later, the best came. Typically, the world was on fire with Covid, and I’d finally cracked it. 2021 was a good year, and 2022 was great. My blueprint fucking worked, well, it did — until it didn’t, because 2023 was a fucking nightmare. Obliterated. Not drugs or trauma. A woman. Not a broken heart. A broken mind. Dehumanised, used, abused— by someone I gave everything to. My biggest mistake was thinking I’d faced everything mental health had. In dark twisted fate, trying to protect her from an ex-fiancé, a classic narcissistic addict that even a textbook description can’t capture as precisely, I was destroyed.

It sums me up perfectly. My best-self years are ones I’m ashamed of most — not my low-life junkie ones. That I allowed myself to be treated that way, and I was responsible for it too – as she got worse, I gave more. She was like an addiction, a trauma bond I couldn’t extricate from. 

So….Did I ever crack it? Evidently not.

But it was so much more, I was re-living my 9-year-old self, making up for my failures then to save and protect. But this got more twisted, as the person I was trying to protect then became the danger. It brought complex issues back that had been buried for over 30 years.

And that’s how, in 2024, I ended back where I swore never to return. Same floor. Same wall. Same spot. Only with thoughts darker, louder, and more menacing. Everything I believed in and lived by was in shreds.

Mental health ruled me like a dictator: ADHD, trauma, anxiety, phobias, and addiction, to name a few. A “full diverse experience.” Yet amidst all that, a Law degree, a professional degree, psychology, and social care qualifications. So, where did it all lead me to? ……….Personal training… and that’s ADHD in a paragraph.

“You don’t see other kids doing that,” was a daily theme. I didn’t watch cartoons or play with toys; I watched TV upside down and never ran out of energy. ADHD was rampant but nameless. Not recognised. Insomnia was ever-present. Likewise, everything always bored me — evident as early as primary school. Before a race, I’d repeat, “If I don’t win, Mum will die.” Winning wasn’t exciting. I’d done that. It’s boring. Yeah, it is dark for a kid… but who won the race? It’s just how it was. When playing computer games with my hands reached boredom, I played with my feet.

And this was all ‘absent’ of trauma. Aged 9 and two years of it for a kid like me was the perfect storm, which must have defined me, but there’s no “Here’s What It Might Have Been” B-side to life’s album, so who knows the extent — enough to take my first toy to bed anyway. 

My first breakdown came in my teens, when mental health meant “Man up. Get up. Shut up.” Mental health issues were only for the “loonies in straitjackets”. There was no internet, no awareness, no discussion. It was silence and shame — you were on your own, in the pitch black, trying to find any way you could. Society determined the objectives: No one can ever know. It must be hidden – It was that simple. It wasn’t about getting better, the challenges faced, or the support needed. It was never let anyone find out you’re one of the looneys. Never humiliate yourself. From 15: I ran, avoided, hid, lied, didn’t go, didn’t do, and escaped.

Life was never the same as I desperately tried to control my world, which of course led to disaster. Nothing was what it seemed. Everything had a hidden purpose. Exams weren’t about results. Gambling wasn’t about winning. Even something seemingly innocent as watching the news had an intentional, but different purpose.

By my mid-20s, I was like a Panini sticker album, but instead of collecting footballers, I collected disorders. Every appointment brought another one, and with no explanation of what it was, I’d look at it and casually conclude, “Well, at least this one isn’t serious, I’ve a long way to go yet. I’m only borderline.”

Even when the catalyst came, it wasn’t plain boring ADHD, but the deluxe edition: ADHD with autistic traits. Only years after it was recognised and diagnostic criteria were established, a 26-year-old man with two degrees and a formal diagnosis put me in a rare and somewhat unique group. By any reasonable estimate, likely a maximum of a few hundred people.

Racing brain, limited focus, electricity through my body… Surely hypnotherapy’s a terrible choice, but at age 15, somehow my first. “Be still, calm, and relax,” he says. Is he fucking serious? If I could do that, I wouldn’t be lying on this fucking leather recliner being tortured by the soothing sounds of singing dolphins. Apparently anyway. Because the CD might have been mixed up with the calming sounds of creaky floorboards.  

I was medicated by then too, and by my early twenties, the floodgates opened, peaking at eleven tablets daily. A cocktail of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and “anti-effectives.” Riding a chemical rollercoaster: uppers, downers, stabilisers, blockers. Clearly, something was missing. ADHD must have gotten bored, and anxiety needed more of a challenge, so the gambler in me decided to throw cocaine and alcohol into the mix.

I spent forty-two days in The Priory. The full shebang — traditional, contemporary, group, and individual sessions. Walking out a reformed man… chest up and proud.

You name it, I’ve done it. Inpatient, outpatient, meetings, individual, and group. Talked about it, read about it, even fucking drew it. I’ve followed flashing lights on a bar, and that wasn’t even a psychosis episode. I’ve tried. Not tried. Hoped. Lost hope. Failed and failed again and failed 500 times more. And then I stopped fighting. I surrendered and watched piece by piece go until there was nothing left to take. Everything was gone.  

So by the time anxiety and ADHD became fashionable, rabbits had PTSD, and people sold merch online for the updated versions of disorders, I was so far out of the loop, I assumed mine were discontinued with the Nokia 3310. Depression had become journaling in beige loungewear, drinking coconut water, and posting frowning selfies.

I’ve seen the full swing — from mental health being for “loonies” to everyone being neurodivergent and traumatised. From professionals to a tsunami of online “experts.” ADHD now multiplies like gremlins, narcissists rise faster than crypto, and everyone’s overwhelmed but strangely comfortable being a walking diagnosis.

We needed less stigma and greater understanding. We got a pandemic of confusion and self-diagnosis. People don’t know the difference between sadness and depression, or nerves and anxiety disorder. And behind most attention-seeking social media is someone confusing personality with pathology, or far worse, the dark end and narcissists profiting off vulnerabilities by selling the “changewithme” fantasy.  

My life’s not shiny. Been nowhere. Seen nothing. But it’s had drama, wacky episodes, extreme behaviours, and bizarre tactics. It’s raw, ugly, occasionally funny, and sadly for me, true. It proves you can always come back — not perfectly, not with all the answers, but enough to go again.

This book is ultimately for anyone, but mainly those living it, who are out of humour and energy because despite the dark, underlying everything is hope: the gritty, stubborn kind. It’s also for those living around it: the forgotten collateral of destruction, and sadly, the ones who seldom have any idea what they’re part of.  And finally, for those trying to understand it, to give a different perspective from textbooks, by taking complex terms like neuroplasticity and showing its meaning in practice

I’m no reformed messiah — just a guy with ADHD, too many words in his head, and not enough sense to keep them there. Maybe that’s why you’ll keep reading.

Let me guess... same shit? Probably what I’d think too. But this... this might just be different.