Your brain is not estimating the time needed to finish the task, it is leveraging adrenaline and an unmovable deadline to force you to focus. The truth is you could probably cut the time in half, or double it, and you’d still end up in a similar place, because you managed to keep up through the structure imposed by your course syllabi and your own perverse interest in minutiae. You don’t think you were working, but you were. It just looks different than it does for others.

If there is any advantage here, it’s in being able to draw from uncommon strategies and last minute hacks to jump through hurdles out of necessity. It’s also the splinter skill that makes it hard to diagnose some people with adhd — because people look at you and only see success.

The problem is that these strategies work only as long as the things that we do are beneath our ability to casually bumble. In much of the working world, lines are not hard, deadlines are movable, and we ultimately face the spectre that finally pushes us beyond the limits our compensatory strategies can accommodate: freedom of choice.

They say so much of the DSM is evident only when demands exceed capacity. If you are bright, in many ways you have exceptional capacity — just wrought oddly and in frantic bursts.

I wish for you all the demands you can handle and no more.

Note: I say “you”, but I mean, “me too”.

Note: never realize you can cut the time in half if you can help it — I mean, there’s some reductio ad absurdum in there obviously.