On the 17th of May I am running the Hackney Half for AuDHD UK, a small charity working to prevent autism and ADHD-related suicides in the UK. It is a cause close to me, one I have lived and one many people around me are living, with or without a name for it.

Two years ago, at thirty, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Before that there were more than twenty years of a life that looked, from the outside, like it was working. I had the privileges that let me mask: education, support, whiteness, being a man. Inside, it was torment, a mind I could not understand, arrhythmic, incessant, and the cost of those undiagnosed years was real: nervous and emotional exhaustion, regular burnouts, recurrent addictions, high-functioning surfaces with wreckage underneath. I read all of it as my responsibility. I built a self around the words other people had used on me, too much, too intense, difficult, erratic.

What helped me, long before the diagnosis, was my work. Being an artist, the long research into perception, individuation, emptiness, the body and the image, was not separate from this. It was the same question my nervous system had been asking since childhood, in a language I did not yet have. My practice has been, and still is, one of my deepest tools for navigating my mind, alongside re-embodiment through yoga, strength training, meditation, Mahāyāna Buddhist practice, the slow work of synchronising with the arrhythmia of my own thought. The body had been my best ally all along, the only thing capable of holding what the mind could not. The diagnosis arrived later, into a life that had already begun to shift, and what it gave me was not a cure but a doorway. Permission to stop blaming myself. The beginning of a long rerouting that, in my case, is still very much at its beginning. Late diagnosis is not a moment. It is a long cost, paid before the name arrives and continuing well after, in everything that has to be unlearned.

ADHD is, among other things, a difference in dopamine signalling, a neurodevelopmental condition with measurable biological correlates, not a moral failing. And the difficulty of living with it is amplified by a culture organised around hyper-productivity, image multiplication, dopamine loops the platforms have learned to exploit. The thing the culture rewards is the same thing that exhausts us most. After diagnosis the work continues: deconstructing the beliefs we built to survive inside that culture, finding others who recognise what we are describing, beginning to imagine what it could mean to be human inside nervous systems the world was not built for.

But arriving at the name at all is the thing most people like me do not get to do. ADHD doubles the lifetime risk of substance use disorder. Sixty-six percent of late-diagnosed autistic adults have contemplated suicide. NHS adult assessment waits in London run two to seven years. Private assessment costs up to £2,500. AuDHD UK funds assessments for people who cannot afford the private route and cannot survive the NHS one. They have had to pause new applications because demand has outrun what they can hold. Donations reopen the door.

If you can give, any amount, please do. If you cannot, share. You are not broken. Your brain is wired for a world that has not yet arrived.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​