I want to help people. I’m not the best at explaining things but I hope my story can help someone. I am currently in the middle of writing a testimony/life experiences with first generation immigrant and being ADD/Depression/Anxiety in the early 90-2000’s. I’ve had a lot of self growth and success and i was a negative Nancy for like 5 years. My life has completely changed thanks to diagnosis, meds and God. I just want there to be hope for people. I almost didn’t make it here. God bless.
CHAPTER NINE
The Diagnosis
I was not lazy.
I need you to understand that before anything else in this chapter. Because the story I carried for twenty-something years — the story I wrote about myself in second grade and kept adding chapters to — said that I was. Lazy. Undisciplined. A guy who couldn’t finish things. A guy who tried and quit and tried and quit and never quite got where he was going.
That story was wrong.
Getting diagnosed with ADD, depression, and anxiety was not a moment of weakness. It was the first time in my life that someone handed me a map and said — this is how your brain works. This is why the roads that are easy for other people feel like walls for you. This is not a character flaw. This is hardware.
The medication didn’t change who I was. I want to be clear about that too. I was always this person. Always this capable, this driven, this full of ideas and vision and hunger to build something real.
The medication just cleared the static.
Imagine trying to tune into a radio station for thirty years and hearing mostly noise with flashes of signal. That’s what it felt like. And then one day the noise drops and the music comes through clean and you realize — oh. That’s what it’s supposed to sound like. That’s what other people hear all the time.
That’s when everything started moving.
The system I built — the routine, the structure, the meds, the faith — it wasn’t magic. It was just finally having the right tools for a brain I’d been fighting against my whole life. And once I stopped fighting and started working with it, there was no ceiling.
230 pounds became 168.
Confusion became clarity.
Survival mode became purpose mode.
I looked in the mirror and for the first time since second grade I didn’t see the fat slow kid who crossed the finish line last.
I saw someone who ran out of his shoes and kept going.
And I finally understood what that meant.
Meds that helped: bupropion adderall Zoloft and lurasidone.