Growing up as a Gen-X latchkey kid on Lakeside Drive in Milledgeville, Georgia meant coming home to empty houses, cooking dinner at eleven, and figuring everything out alone. Frank reflects honestly on how that unsupervised childhood built real capability, resilience, and problem-solving instincts while also leaving lasting wounds around emotional regulation, isolation, and decades of undiagnosed AuDHD.

Somewhere along the way, the performance became the person. Or at least, that’s what I thought. The scariest part of the AuDHD diagnosis wasn’t what it explained, it was what it revealed about how thoroughly I’d hidden the evidence, even from myself.

At 55, Frank receives an AuDHD diagnosis that reframes decades of academic failure, sensory overwhelm, and social exhaustion he had blamed on laziness and poor character. From six quarters of academic exclusion to a 28-year self-taught IT career built on hyperfocus, he traces what working three times as hard as everyone else actually looked like, and what it means to finally have a name for it.

In 1969, Chicago Chevrolet dealer Fred Gibb used GM’s internal fleet ordering system to build 427 cubic inch Camaros that corporate policy explicitly prohibited. Frank draws a parallel between Gibb’s approach and navigating systems as a neurodivergent person, arguing that understanding what rules actually protect, rather than simply following them, is the difference between compliance and genuine reading comprehension.

A hobbyist reflects on maintaining an extensively over-engineered home server setup that far exceeds the demands of its nominal purpose, arguing that framing the project as infrastructure for something else…

Hyperfocus isn’t a superpower or a curse. It’s a fire hose. Sometimes you’re fighting a blaze. Sometimes you’re just wet and confused in your own kitchen.

Standard wellness advice is built for a nervous system that isn’t yours. Here’s what actually works when you’re AuDHD and already running at 90% capacity before the day even starts.

For decades I passed as a functional, competent adult. Turns out the energy cost of that performance was running a background process that never shut down, and I didn’t even know it was there.

William Robinson was a Baldwin County Sheriff’s Deputy, twenty-six years old, and my best friend. He’s been dead for thirty years and I still haven’t figured out what to do with that.

My brother William was a Baldwin County Deputy Sheriff. He was killed in the line of duty on December 17th, 1995. I was 25 years old, and I have never been the same person since.