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Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

Thank goodness for auto pay on bills and a NT wife. I don’t know how she puts up with where my brain has ended up some years, but we have done great together as a family :)

Also, I totally get that picking up random links thing. I always found I could sort of link together certain kinds of concepts together really quickly. Never super deeply, but like, learning new programming languages, I could just dive in, look at code, and things would just click together pretty often. I also get having a disaster of a house, spending money on hobbies and losing interest <glares angrily at his very expensive mill and lathe he uses only occasionally>. Some of the time I read tech people’s ADHD experience and I feel so… understood. Like, are you me? You could be me.

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> and a NT wife.

Partner and I have been together for 13 years now. She’s almost certainly on the ADHD spectrum but less severe than me. Things are great besides the fact that we both neglect a lot of stuff that NT folks don’t really struggle with.

But retrospectively, that’s one of the most interesting things for me. I think back to a lot of the previous relationships I had, and the vast majority of them failed due to conflict that I can now see was ADHD-induced. Impulse control and finances, house cleaning, new random hobby obsession, boredom, substance abuse… When I finally realized a year and a bit ago what ADHD actually was and how a lot of my behaviours weren’t typical, I had this very profound moment where it simultaneously felt like all the air was sucked out of the room and everything finally made sense.

Edit: > <glares angrily at his very expensive mill and lathe he uses only occasionally>.

I swear to god I’m going to get the mill running again this year.

Meh. Lathe is small potatoes. Get a pdp-11/70.

Thanks for the yak shave! I’m out of empty slots in the breaker panel, and, well, a couple of the rooms have two-prong outlets with no ground… guess I need to rewire the whole house and install a new panel! And since we’ll have to cut into the drywall, may as well upgrade the insulation and vapour barrier while we’re in there.

While you're doing insulation and vapor barrier might as well replace all the windows too. Think of the efficiency gains!

Oh! Definitely! Good catch, thanks for the design review :D

Good luck with the mill, heh. My wife is an almost perfect opposite to me. She is very patient, calm. I got super lucky. The only person I ever dated. She has an innate capacity for tolerating me. And my son, who is also deep with ADHD. She never judged me for all my bullshit over the years either. I think having kids younger was both terrible and great for me. It forces me to focus and take career seriously, but it was also really hard.

> Some of the time I read tech people’s ADHD experience and I feel so… understood. Like, are you me? You could be me.

Exactly what I thought reading this post :D

Strangely enough, I applied at your firm and we have traded emails.

Oh yeah! You are in the area even. Last year that time was pretty crazy because we had just finished up our transaction. Small world some days :)

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