"We're Having a Datasheet Problem"
A field biologist finds out in his 40s that he has ADHD, surprising nobody
I’ve been here before. Each time the stakes were a little higher and this time they feel incalculable. When I was a projectionist as a teenager, it was after several cases where I’d missed a crucial step while threading the projector. The result was a pile of film on the floor, several staff members trying to piece it together, and a lobby full of angry moviegoers whose popcorn has run out while waiting for it to be fixed. Later it was me and my lead teller at a bank, hours after closing, trying to balance my transactions with my drawer. Still later I was being audited by the IRS. Not as a taxpayer, but as an employee. The audit consisting of my error rate while processing tax returns. I was the fastest worker in my department, but not the most precise. “Just slow down,” they’d tell me. “It’s not a race.” But I couldn’t. Why wasn’t it that easy? It sounded easy.
This time I’m a field biologist in my supervisor’s office and the issue is data sheets. On one protocol, the one for migrating raptors, I misunderstood the way the hours column worked, which threw off a season’s worth of data. What had made perfect sense in my head for months suddenly was obviously wrong. Who even was the person who filled those out?
On another kind of project, I would leave out the sky code at a breeding bird point, or I would include the distance I heard the bird at but leave out the direction. On one work trip I missed a flight. I was told it was disrespectful to my fellow biologists that often when doing plant surveys, I would have one headphone in while listening to music or podcasts. But that was the only way I could stay focused enough to keep looking for plants instead of forgetting why I was there for a full 30 minutes because I was trying to remember what happened in an episode of Who’s the Boss for some reason.
I saved the wrong version of a document many people had all worked on once and sent it to a federal agency, the result being riddled with errors and vestiges of template documents we’ve used before. Once, when I was a field crew lead, we forgot a key piece of equipment in a remote area and wasted a day’s worth of wages for 8 people. I put unleaded in a diesel truck. I booked a hotel in the wrong city and didn’t realize until they didn’t know who I was at check-in. I was, in no uncertain terms, a screw-up. Things that seemed to come easily to other people were consistent stumbling blocks. I felt useless.
In multiple performance reviews and tough conversations, common phrases I’ve heard my whole life repeated, starting around 5th grade in school. “Smart, but unfocused,” as if leading with a compliment softened the blow. “Easily distracted.” “Wasted potential.” “Doesn’t seem engaged in the work.” The most sympathetic explanation proposed was that I was getting burned out by all the travel and long hours. It didn’t feel like that to me, but I didn’t have a better answer. I understood the position I was putting people in. It reflected poorly on our company, on our office. It could lose us projects. People enjoyed me and genuinely wanted to see me flourish, but I was getting a reputation as someone who was pleasant to work with, a quick learner, and a liability.
In all of the aforementioned workplaces, these serious conversations included the possibility—heretofore unrealized but real nonetheless—that I would be fired. As a teen that wasn’t an unwelcome prospect, and even when I was a newlywed and jobs seemed so plentiful it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. This, though, this was my career. I had kids now. I had student loans. There was a housing crisis. I started to wonder if I could do the thing I’d spent six years of college learning how to do. And if not, what could I do? I’d never failed in a job, but I’d never thrived, either. The idea of barely making it from job to job for the next 30 years was daunting.
So I worked closely with my supervisor and colleagues I considered close friends. For datasheets, I printed a blank one and filled it with color-coded highlighter for sections that absolutely needed to be filled in. I set alarms at the end of every survey point to remind myself to quickly review each datasheet before clicking it into the clipboard. I carried no fewer than ten number two pencils. As a crew lead, I assigned each member of the crew to be responsible for one or two pieces of key equipment, and we would vocally walk through a checklist before leaving the office.
My life started revolving around checklists. I had one for when I was leaving home to embark on a ten-day field trip looking for rare plants in oil fields. Hard hat, steel-toed boots, all natural fibers, check check check. A different list for bird surveys. I had a template Environmental Assessment document with each piece of vital information highlighted that I would painstakingly compare on a split-screen before submitting. The night before beginning field work, I would create a trail of everything I needed that day in a path to the front door like they were Reese’s Pieces and I was an E.T. being tricked into doing habitat assessments.
Most of all, I leaned on allies. Close friends who were rooting for me recognized places where it felt like things didn’t stick and would help me develop strategies. Oil well pads all have an identification number, which initially seemed like a secret code. I later learned that they were based on the Public Land Survey System: base, township, range, section, corner. But before I knew that, I thought people were just memorizing random numbers. “Where are we working today,” I’d ask, because it was my turn to drive. My boss would rattle off a string of numbers and I’d nod knowingly. Then, when we got in the truck, I’d ask my friend Kris which one that was. “Remember when we got in an argument over whether Super Mario Bros 2 or 3 is better?” Me: “Got it.” Off we went.
My whole life was dictated by these strategies. They became second nature. But I still would mess up learning something new and would begin the painful trial and error of developing systems to counter them. A later job required me to attend multiple meetings across the state and often I would forget and wouldn’t get a notification about it beginning until 10 minutes before. Except it was a two hour drive. That kind of thing. This started my use of sometimes dozens of phone alarms a day. Or I’d get a notification for a video meeting in ten minutes, then start working on something, and realize an hour later I never called in. So the second I got a ten minute notification, I started setting a 9 minute alarm.
This was all a very bumpy ride, but for the last 10 years or so I’ve found a career path that caters to my abilities, and I’ve had a great time. I’ve discovered that I’m a good public speaker. That I have a gift for building coalitions and relationships. The way my mind works is uniquely suited to finding solutions and efficiency in sometimes byzantine policy. I finally feel like the guy my resume says I am. But I still can’t shake the feeling sometimes that every time a supervisor schedules a performance review, it’s all going to come back up again.
So when my teen son began to struggle with school and my wife brought up the possibility of ADHD, I started to wonder. Soon I was filling out an assessment of my observations while he self-assessed in another room. The questionnaire made me very uncomfortable. The discussion afterward more so. A psychologist explained to us what the “inattentive” kind of ADHD meant. He talked about medications and strategies. The strategies were a lot like the ones I figured out on my own, but they had names. Laying out the necessary gear before the day was called a “launch pad,” for example. Struggles with getting to the airport on time, or missing meetings? That’s “time blindness.” “I think I have this too,” I said. The psychologist nodded. “It’s hereditary,” he added. Oh.
With medication, my son has improved. School got better, and his anxiety associated with struggling with school got better. I still haven’t tried it. I believe in the drugs and advocate that anyone who thinks they could improve should see if it works for them, but I hesitate. With kidney disease I already take handful of pills a day, and I don’t know how a new one would interact. If there’s even one side-effect, the idea of piling that on top of the ones I already experience with the chemistry set that is my daily pill case is daunting. I tell myself that the strategies are working. Mostly. But I also wonder if my life would be better.
Is there another level of me yet to be unlocked with the right medication? I don’t know. Is the world even ready for enhanced Howie? Part of me doesn’t want to even accept another diagnosis, because kidney disease is already such a heavy one, and there is an at least perceived surge in people self-diagnosing with ADHD. My understanding is that this is because we’re getting better at identifying it. Especially among women, who were notoriously undiagnosed for it when compared to male peers.
I think a lot of them are right and it’s helpful, but I also hear and process and bristle at the accusation that it’s trendy. Or an excuse. It feels too much like “smart, but unfocused,” to me. It brings back bad memories in countless offices where I emphatically argued that I cared. I get stressed out and push it out of my mind. A recent social media post I made asking for field work advice for biologists with ADHD is the first time I’ve ever publicly acknowledged it, aside from maybe an aside or self-deprecating joke. This is the second. Facing this is a new thing for me.
Social media is full of people identifying ADHD symptoms alongside zodiac sign traits and sometimes it doesn’t seem that different. Part of what makes social media attractive is feeling seen by broad, relatable aspects of life. If the prevalence of ADHD really is 4.4% of adults, why does it seem like so many people have it? Could it be that the ones who are more drawn to social media, who unconsciously self-medicate with the dopamine hits associated with content creation, are self-selected and therefore more vocal? Seems possible.
It’s hard to sort out. I wonder if some of the things we associate with a developmental disability are just the evolutionary growing pains of a species that spent hundreds of thousands of years as nomad hunter-gatherers struggling under fluorescent lights in classrooms and cubicles. Or watching a scroll of cat video, political diatribe, Pedro Pascal meme, cute dance, and ten more cat videos instead of falling asleep as soon as it gets dark. I think there’s something to that, but wow a lot of things click into place when considering my life through the lens of ADHD.
In general I’m skeptical of self-assessments. For my job’s orientation we took a strengths test, the results of which I have not taken seriously to many people in my agency’s chagrin. The reason is that I don’t trust myself when evaluating myself. I think something like that would be interesting if a handful of people who knew me well took it on my behalf, which is why when my wife started to ask my mom if she though I had ADHD and my mom answered, “Yes” before Kristin could even finish the question, I decided to start taking it seriously.
And that’s where you’re all finding me now. Realizing that the way I get obsessed with a topic or product for months at a time to the point that it feels like there’s a demon inside me and the only thing that feeds the demon is another article about how mechanical watches work, then finding out that experts sometimes use that exact metaphor for hyper-fixation. Being kinder to myself about my past mistakes while also realizing that I’m ultimately still responsible to meet people’s expectations in my professional, social, and family life. Trying to figure out if my strategies alone are enough to meet the expectations I have for myself. Worrying that I didn’t put enough jokes in this post or that I haven’t acknowledged yet that perhaps the only reason I still have a career in spite of being a screw-up is because of privilege.
I initially wanted to write a “how to be a field biologist with ADHD,” post, but the reality is that I don’t know that yet. This piece is definitely full of strategies that worked for me, but some of you who don’t struggle with ADHD still chafe at modern life and careers and have to come up with ways to exist in a world that feels almost diabolically designed to make it feel like we're always hanging out on the precipice of failure/survival, regardless of promotion or a new relationship or whatever life event is supposed to get us to the next step. Maybe it will help you, too.
I realized while writing this that more than any other little trick I devised, help from people who cared about me has been the most vital. There’s a part of us and society as a whole that pushes us to suffer these things alone to the detriment of everybody when instead being aware of how we can help each other is what’s needed. I realize that some people reading this didn’t even make it this far, instead rolling their eyes at another self-diagnosed “ADHDer” making excuses and moving on. I hope that we can question that impulse.
I’m certainly out of my realm of expertise here, but maybe we didn’t hear about neurodivergence so much before because we were looking out for each other and no one person needed to be everything in order to survive. When communities were tighter-knit villages, when multi-generational families lived together or in close proximity and happily filled in gaps in a loved one’s ability because we knew they’d pull their weight in other ways. Maybe it mattered less because each of us mattered more.
Please share the little tricks you’ve learned in the comments. Even more than that, though, I’d love to hear how important other people have supported and helped.
I just want to say you don’t need to put any jokes in your posts. You showing up in an authentic and vulnerable way is more than enough. I don’t have ADHD but like all people I have my own struggles that have made me find my own solutions on how to move through the world in way that is more comfortable and doable for me. I go to the grocery store when they open at 6 am as crowds of people overwhelm me. I try to get my stuff done in the mornings as my energy flags in the afternoon. I keep lists and a paper planner. I know when I need a day with no obligations and unstructured time. I notice when my fuse is short with my furry kids. I am always super early for everything because growing up with my father, I was late for everything because of him. And so it goes. Just trying to do things in a way that feels less stressful for me.
In my work, I get sent children that are still struggling after all "the basics" have been tried. Sometimes more testing by a skilled Psychologist is necessary, but in the end, each child works with me to come up with the unique tools and protocols that work for them, in much the way you have done for yourself. Not all the children have ADHD, but it starts with an understanding of how they work, and what they want to accomplish. It is also true that in the journey of discovery for the child, at least one of the parents generally discovers a similar issue in themselves, so that believe me when I tell you, you are not alone. I am sorry if you are suffering from stigma with this. You mentioned 4.4% of adults having ADHD. Given The number of adults in the world, that is a LOT of people figuring out what works best for them, which isn't the same for everyone. There are quite a few different medications out there, and they are almost all a form of stimulant that lasts for different lengths of time. There are also anti-anxiety meds, anti-depressants, and calming meds to help one sleep after all that stimulation! And yes, the medications can have a toll on the body. There are also non-medication choices. There is no one right answer, and the only one that knows when you get it right is you. If we need to rely on people we trust as a background grid to test our truths, that is fine. That is how we manage a lot of the most important things in our lives,-together. And you are free to change your mind, you know. If you decide at any time that you want more tools in your tool box than you can manage without meds, you can always get a doctor and try them. Just remember, it takes time to get them right, and they are not for everyone, but they can make a big difference for some. If you try and don't like them, you are free to stop,-slowly.