I’ve worked in a lot of industries. Like, a lot of industries.

Hollywood Video. My dad’s real estate office. Commercial diving — I literally went to school to be a deep sea diver in California, which is a sentence I still can’t say without feeling like I’m making it up. Entertainment. Hospice care. Activities directing. Marketing. Whatever the hell you’d call the job where you’re technically in charge of enrichment programming for elderly people but also sometimes you’re fixing the printer.

And here’s the thing — I liked most of them. I genuinely did. I’m the kind of person who gets fascinated by whatever is in front of me. Put me in a room with a new industry and I will learn everything about it in three days and then pitch you a better way to run it by Friday. That’s the ADHD superpower nobody talks about — when the interest hits, it hits. I can hyperfocus on something so hard that I forget to eat, forget to sleep, forget that I have a body at all.

The problem is what happens after Friday.

Because the thing about ADHD — and I mean the real, clinical, medicated-since-2017 version of it, not the “oh I’m so random” internet version — is that it doesn’t just affect your hobbies. It affects your ability to sustain anything. Jobs included. Especially jobs. I would get hired somewhere, be incredible for six months, and then slowly unravel as the novelty wore off and the executive dysfunction kicked in. Not because I was lazy. Not because I didn’t care. Because my brain literally could not maintain interest in something that had become routine. The tabs would start closing one by one until the only thing left open was the anxiety about why I couldn’t just be normal about this.

I have worked in just about every industry you can name and enjoyed most of them. And none of them worked.

None of them worked with how my brain actually operates.

In March 2020, I had a mental breakdown.

I’m not being dramatic. I’m not using that as a euphemism for “I had a bad week.” I mean I broke. The accumulated weight of years of trying to force my brain into shapes it wasn’t built for — combined with, you know, gestures vaguely at March 2020 — just snapped something. The version of myself that could white-knuckle through another day of performing normalcy stopped being available. I went on FMLA. I sat on my couch. I stared at walls. Sarah drove me to appointments and made sure I ate and did all the things that partners do when the person they love has hit a wall they can’t climb over.

I don’t talk about this much. Or I haven’t, historically. It’s easier to write the funny posts. The ones about geese and e-readers and how my ankle is being a jerk. But this one needs to be honest because the rest of the story doesn’t make sense without it.

My brother Harper called me during the worst of it. Harper is one of those people who sees around corners — he was CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign and he’s perpetually operating on a level that makes me feel like I’m still trying to figure out the VCR. But he’s also my brother, and he knows me better than almost anyone, and what he said was essentially: you need to stop trying to fit yourself into other people’s businesses and build something that fits you.

Which sounds like the kind of advice you’d find on a motivational poster in a dentist’s office. Except Harper meant it specifically. He wasn’t saying “follow your dreams” in the abstract. He was saying: your brain works differently, and instead of treating that as a disability in someone else’s system, what if you built a system where it’s an advantage?

So I did. Eventually. Not immediately — I was still a mess for a while — but the seed was there.

I started nervous.net with my business partner Steve. We started in the NFT space (sorry not sorry). We now build SaaS tools and Discord bots for small businesses. And I realize that sounds like the most boring sentence in the world, but here’s what it actually means: every day is different. Every project is new. The hyperfocus that torpedoed me in traditional jobs is now the thing that lets me build an entire feature in a weekend. The novelty-seeking that made me “unreliable” in corporate settings is now the thing that helps me spot opportunities other people miss. The 400 browser tabs aren’t a symptom anymore — they’re market research.

Steve handles the stuff my brain can’t. The sustained follow-through. The “we committed to this timeline and we need to actually hit it” part. He uses what I have lovingly described as “authorized deception” about deadlines because he knows that if I think something is due Thursday my brain will treat Wednesday night like a starting pistol. This isn’t a workaround. It’s a feature of how we work together. He knows my brain. I know my brain. We’ve stopped pretending my brain is going to change and started building around the brain I actually have.

Sarah watches all of this with the particular expression of someone who has been watching me cycle through obsessions for over twenty years and is cautiously optimistic that this one might stick. And here’s the thing — it has. We’re coming up on years of this. Real years. Not the six-month honeymoon period before the executive dysfunction kicks in. Actual sustained years of building something.

It works because it works with my ADHD instead of against it.

I can’t overstate how different that feels. For my entire adult life, I have experienced work as a thing I do despite my brain. A constant negotiation between what needs to happen and what my neurochemistry will allow. Every job was a translation exercise — converting the way I naturally think into whatever format that particular workplace demanded. And it was exhausting. Not the work itself, but the translation. The pretending. The performance of being a person whose brain has a normal number of tabs open.

I don’t have to do that anymore. Not because I found some magical cure for ADHD — I still take my medication, I still have days where I can’t focus on anything and days where I focus on the wrong thing for nine hours. But the difference between “I can’t focus and my boss needs this report” and “I can’t focus so let me switch to one of the twelve other projects I’m excited about” is the difference between drowning and surfing. Same ocean. Different relationship to the waves.

I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect. Some days the browser crashes entirely. Some days I spend four hours on something that turns out to be a dead end and Steve has to gently redirect me. Some days the ADHD wins and I end up researching synthesizers instead of writing code, and I have to forgive myself for that and try again tomorrow.

But it’s mine. The business is mine. The chaos is mine. The 400 tabs are mine. And for the first time in my professional life, that’s not a problem to be managed — it’s the whole point.

If you’ve got a brain like mine and you’re reading this from a job that makes you feel broken — you’re not broken. You’re running the wrong operating system for the hardware. That’s not the same thing. And I know that’s easy for me to say now, from the other side of a breakdown and a brother’s phone call and a business partner who gets it. I know not everyone has a Harper or a Steve or a Sarah. I know the path from “I am falling apart” to “I built something that works” is not a straight line and it’s not available to everyone and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But I wanted to write this down. Because in March 2020 I was sitting on my couch unable to function, and now I run a business. Not despite my ADHD. With it. Alongside it. Because of it, in ways I’m still figuring out.

My brain is a browser with 400 tabs open. It always has been. I just finally stopped trying to close them.