I’m a Fish!

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein

Loaded with apprehension, I opened my laptop lid at exactly eight in the morning on August 18, 2025. After taking a deep breath, I clicked a Zoom link in an email from my neuropsychologist. The message on the screen told me the organizer had not yet started the meeting, so as I sat in silence I used the spare moment to reflect on why I’m sitting here about to speak with her.

I thought about the bad stutter that I eventually overcame thanks to a few years of speech therapy in elementary school. I’ve never overcome the subconscious habits of bouncing my leg, tapping my fingers, or any of my other numerous repetitive movements. Speaking of repetition, I have what I thought was an imperceptible routine of wearing a specific shirt for each day of the week—until my work team dressed up as me for Halloween, with each of them wearing a respective day’s shirt. We all had a good laugh out of it. I do love my routines—so much that sometimes I can get cranky if they get unexpectedly disrupted.

I have the world class social distancing skills of Big Foot. I often struggle with small talk, so I steal and use movie lines or song lyrics. Not just funny one liners, but random short phrases because they are much better than anything I could come up with on my own. And important conversations, the ones you have with your boss or spouse and don’t want to forget any details—I script those out and rehearse them. The more important the conversation, the more rehearsals. I’m not exactly quick on my feet when it comes to conversation. I pretty much have the processing speed of a dial-up modem, and so I’ve learned to do this over the years to help compensate. However, a skill I learned more quickly (in high school to be exact) is to make eye contact with people when you’re talking to them. Looking people in the eye was always intimidating to me, but being polite in conversation was more important than this social fear.

You may not have ever noticed or known about my little quirks. But they are important facets of who I am. Along the road of life, I learned one by one that they aren’t all that normal. But I’ve always had them and so they seemed normal to me. It was just recently that I learned these little quirks may be an indication that I have a significant undiagnosed condition.

My screen went black and my neuropsychologist flashed onto the screen. Her warm smile and calm demeanor did little to lessen my anxiety, not that it was her intention. She slowly talked me through my test results. Two weeks earlier, I had spent five and a half hours at her office taking a barrage of memory and cognitive tests. I solved puzzles, drew complex shapes from memory, tried recalling words from a verbal word bank, identified verbal and visual patterns, and completed a stack of questionnaires. I left exhausted and entirely unsure how my performance would translate into results.

She didn’t waste much time explaining how I demonstrated a clear pattern of ADHD. My working memory (the capacity for your brain to temporarily store a limited amount of information for immediate recall) is atrociously bad. Also, I couldn’t maintain concentration during particularly monotonous tests and my response times lagged significantly as the tests progressed. I took the news in stride. ADHD is a hell of a diagnosis, but I know a handful of people with it and while they have their share of challenges, they get along just fine. It’s a relatively common condition, affecting roughly 4-5% of the adult population. That is actually a statistically significant number, which translates to slightly more than ten million Americans. Michael Phelps has it, as does Sir Richard Branson, Michael Jordan, Simone Biles, and Gwyneth Paltrow. I’m in good company.

We continued to review my test results, with her adding commentary on patterns she noticed and how the tests collectively told a clear story about how my brain developed to process life experience in unique ways. The story the tests told her, she said, is that my brain demonstrates classic autistic traits. I am not borderline as I had thought I might be, which had prompted me to have all these tests done in the first place. Rather, I am solidly in the autism spectrum.

Silence filled the room as I processed. She asked me how I felt, breaking the silence. I had gone over this scenario in my head many times the past few weeks. Still, I wasn’t as prepared for this moment as I hoped I’d be. I told her I needed time to process. She nodded in understanding.

One of my favorite Albert Einstein quotes is “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.”

It’s official: I’m a fish. That quote is a vivid description of what it is like to live with autism. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is much less common than ADHD—less than 1% of the adult population. And the combination of autism and ADHD (called “AuDHD”) is even more rare. It is no wonder I have felt out of place my entire life, like no one understands me and I live in a world designed for someone else.

I consider my years in college the best time of my life. Still, there were many nights while driving home I felt the urge to miss my turn, point my hood west, and just keep going. I finally gave into the urge late one night my freshman year, and I kept driving into the night. I turned around after midnight at a little town called Kingman, 40 miles west of Wichita. I didn’t know where I was going; I just knew I was running from feeling so out of place. Such feelings were hatched by an underlying awareness I had from a very early age: I just didn’t belong.

I have learned these are regular feelings for neurodivergent folks, often generated by substantial differences from neurotypical folks in communication styles and mental processing methods. And as a result, about 60% of autistic adults are unemployed or underemployed. Around 87% struggle with mental illness. Autistic people are nine times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Our average life expectancy is just 54 years. The struggle is real.

Autism can present itself in ways that result in the diagnoses of autism’s consequences instead of the condition itself, such as depression, anxiety, relationship difficulties, burnout, and substance abuse. In fact, there is quite a bit of variance in how autism presents itself. There’s a popular saying: “If you have met one person with autism, you have met one person with autism.”

Autism can also be difficult to detect thanks to a concept called “masking.” Masking is the conscious (and often a subconscious) habit of concealing autistic behaviors and traits in an attempt to present as neurotypical. After 47 years of practice, I think I’m pretty damn good at it.

We are flooded with misinformation about autism these days, and unfortunately now more than ever from institutions that until early 2025 had immense credibility. There is no valid scientific evidence that even suggests ASD is caused by vaccines (feel free to read this and this and this and this and this). Just in the last few weeks, there was an announcement from notoriously unreliable and irresponsible parties that autism may be caused by Tylenol. However, the correlation between autism and Tylenol is much like the correlation between increases in shark attacks and ice cream sales (hint: ice cream sales spike in summer months, which just so happens to be when most people go to the beach). Tying Tylenol to autism is like saying pickles are lethal because every single person who ate a pickle in 1876 is now dead. Besides, autism diagnoses predate Tylenol usage by several decades. It is true diagnosis rates have increased substantially in the past thirty years, but that is due to changes in criteria, better diagnostic tools, a more robust understanding of the condition, and a steadily reducing stigma that has encouraged more folks like me to pursue a diagnosis later in life. We are still not sure what causes ASD (friendly reminder, again, that vaccines and Tylenol do not), but science is narrowing it down to a mixture of genetic factors with indications that environmental factors can also play a role.

But I digress.

I keep in my journal a picture taken of me when I was in 6^th grade. Not one of those corny Lifetouch portraits the schools extort mothers to buy, but a candid polaroid. I use it to remind me to be kind to myself when I’m reflecting on the day’s challenges and mistakes. This is a much easier process now. The kid in that photo didn’t ask for this.

I am immensely proud of how I have navigated through life over the past 47 years with no guidance or resources. It goes without saying that virtually everything in life is more difficult and exhausting for an autistic individual. Time management, communication, socializing, prioritizing—these behaviors we undertake in fundamentally different ways than neurotypical folks, yet we are held to their standards.

I understand that I am sharing this information at some risk. There’s quite a bit of misunderstanding and misinformation in the world surrounding autism, which may lead to stigma and discrimination. Some people may take me less seriously after learning this about me—though it may be a reach to assume they took me seriously to begin with. However, I also feel like this is an essential part of who I am and that I have no reason to hide it. I hope I can help others who have had a diagnosis like mine, or who suspect they would receive one, to gain some insight and understand themselves better. Eventually, I’d like to coach others—more on that in due time.

I appreciate that I can share this journey with my son. Denali took a neuropsychological exam earlier this year. When his positive results were presented to us I felt a pit in my stomach. Like a dam had broken in my soul. Knowing what neuropsychologists were looking for and the criteria they use, I strongly suspected that I would receive a similar diagnosis. At the same time, I was relieved to know that we would learn together and help each other when we’re struggling. He is not alone and neither am I.

There are a few folks I want to thank for their help and contributions the last few months. My wife Liza for being incredibly supportive and the one who initially suggested that I may be autistic. My brother Dave, who took the time to speak to my neuropsychologist and provide his insight into my childhood. My friend Tabitha who has been a well of insightful knowledge and has patiently answered multitudes of my questions. My boss Rick who was the only supervisor I ever had who I felt understood me (or at least cared enough to try). And finally, Dr. Meghan Lee at Horizon Neuropsychological Services, who gave me the gift of being able to understand myself for the first time in my life.

I will blog more in the future about my ASD and ADHD journey. Coming shortly will be an update on how this has impacted my occupational goals. Neurodivergent folks often have a difficult time navigating the working world—our brains are not wired in ways that the neurotypical world wants or expects. Yet we have many skills and strengths that are often overlooked and underappreciated. Companies may say they want diversity, but diversity in neurology has been slow to come in our workplaces.

Over a month later, I still don’t have words to describe my feelings as my meeting with Dr. Lee ended and I closed my laptop lid. I think it was a messy soup of feelings that will take me awhile to boil off. I’m sure somewhere in there was validation, peace, and a great deal of anxiety. However, what has risen to the top in the last month or so is hope. Throughout life, understanding myself has felt like putting together a puzzle without all the pieces. My diagnosis has given me the missing pieces and a guidebook to explore the mystery that is me. For so long I thought I was just weird. I found out on August 18^th that I am simply different in a very fundamental way. This may sound strange, but I consider my diagnosis a gift. All the challenges and struggles I have faced now have a name. It is empowering and helps me understand my unique wiring, my strengths, and the challenges that all felt inexplicable before. It also explains my nearly constant battle with occupational burnout for the past 25 years. I was on a fruitless quest to be something I am not. Now I know what I am. AuDHD has become a fuel that will power my life through the years ahead.

Steve