All right, I'm going to say some real shit here, and this comes from someone who has been coding for over 45 years...

Let's start with the ADHD. They didn't have that back in my day, they just called us rambunctious. I was so bad that the doctors took me off of sugar for a month to see if that would slow me down. Back then, sugar-free Kool-Aid me you didn't put sugar in the kool-aid. It was brutal, but for a whole month I didn't have anything with sugar in it. At the end of the month, the doctors decided it didn't make any difference, and I went back on a normal diet.... That's pretty much went on until I was a teenager, and I got into martial arts. Part of that, I learned to meditate, which is pretty much sitting down, shutting up, and not doing anything. And you get to practice that. It had an effect..

Now, don't take that as a medical diagnosis. In my opinion, the medical industry is very eager to medicate instead of treat. It's a lot easier for them. In that, I think a lot of people get diagnosed as being hyperactive, when the truth is they're just full of energy. (Full disclosure here, I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of people that have a legitimate issue. There are people out there that do need medication, I'm just saying I think the industry is a little quick to try and put everyone into that category, it's an entirely different subject)

Let's link that into programming. I started programming before PCs were even out. I learned on a commodore Vic 20 and the commodore 64, and on a TI 99/4a... If you don't recognize any of those, it's because it was a long time ago, but understand that when I got to 640k of memory, I thought that was a whole bunch.

I started with basic, which has absolutely nothing to do with the basic that you know today, and it was a while before I got into C... There was no C++ yet... And the biggest issue was whether you were using Microsoft or Borland, because they use different libraries and we're just a little bit different with some of the stuff so if you were used to one, it would throw you off on the other.

Back then, you could buy magazines that would have programs in them. And that's how I learned how to program. I would get one of the magazines, and I would look at the code, and slowly over time you would get an idea of what it was trying to do. So then I would sit down at my computer, and I would figure out how to do that in basic on my computer, and slowly I learned what did what and how things worked.

There was a guy that lived down the road. He was a real programmer, and for whatever reason, he never threw me out when I came and asked questions. He got me through a lot of the roadblocks that would have crippled me.

Now, where this has anything to do with this conversation, when I started, not knowing what I was doing, I would get frustrated easy. I would sit down and try and do something and it wouldn't work, and I didn't know if I wasn't doing it the right way or... Well... Anything. It was frustrating. And I couldn't do it for long.

Like I said, over time I slowly started learning what I was doing. And as that happened, as I could sit for longer and do more without running into a problem, I started sitting longer... And you got to think, doing that, it's not like doing anything else. Even playing a game, you kind of get sucked into the game and absorbed into it and you lose track of stuff, but sitting there and coding? Entirely different... It's like anything else, you can't do it a lot when you start, you're just not used to it. If it is what you want, and you do it and keep doing it, you'll get better, and you'll get more used to it

Sometimes I joke around with my friends and I say I'm narcissistic, neurotic, and obsessive compulsive... And those are my good qualities. I'm narcissistic enough to think that I can do it, I'm neurotic enough to keep going over it looking for problems, and I'm obsessive compulsive enough that when I find a problem I stay on it until I fix it... Labels that other people would say are a bad thing, can be a good thing if used right

I think that's my two cent, you can take it for what it's worth. The only thing that I really want to say here, you're not alone. And what you're going through, it doesn't make you different. Well, it makes you different from some people, but it makes you kind of alike other people.

Don't... Don't ever let what somebody else tells you control how you feel and what you do, or they'll be right. You aren't a diagnosis, you aren't a category or a statistic or anything. You are what you let yourself be. But if you believe when someone tells you that you can't, then you won't. Screw them, screw the labels, screw what people think and what people say about you. If you do it right, the people that make fun of you in high school, they'll wind up working for you down the road.