My boys and I were on a FaceTime call.
We'd been talking baseball for the better part of an hour. Yankees pitching depth. Whether the Phillies are overrated. "C" breaking down bullpen strategy like he works for ESPN or his favorite, Jomboy Media. "N" jumping in late after grabbing dinner in the food hall at college. Normal stuff. Dad-and-sons stuff. The kind of call where nobody's watching the clock because nobody wants to hang up first.
And somewhere in the middle of all that — between C's take on the AL East and N showing me the circuit board he'd been soldering in his engineering lab — I said it.
"So that morning in January we got together and went to Dave & Buster's… that morning I had a call with my therapist. And she diagnosed me with ADHD."
I didn't plan a speech. I didn't set the mood. I just… said it. The same way I'd mentioned it to myself a few weeks earlier — almost casually, like if I said it softly enough it might not rearrange everything.
But it did.
What I didn't say out loud — what I haven't said until now — is how terrified I was. Not of the diagnosis. Of the telling. I grew up around men who held things in. Quiet. Stoic. You didn't talk about what was hard. You didn't burden people with your stuff. You figured it out alone or you didn't figure it out at all. That was the model I absorbed, and for decades it's the one I ran.
Posting this is its own version of that same fear. But I think the silence costs more than the vulnerability does.
I told them what Ally (my therapist) had found. ADHD Combined Presentation. Eight out of nine on inattention. Seven or eight out of nine for impulsivity. I told them about the assessment — the clusters, how I scored high on two of them. I told them the first reaction I had: Why did it take this long? How different could things have been if I'd known at their age?
And then I told them the second thing I thought, which was the reason we were having this conversation at all.
"My second immediate thought was — what does that mean for you guys? Because this is genetic."
Here's what I didn't do: I didn't sit them down in a formal way. I didn't make it heavy. We were already talking. The baseball was still warm in the air. And I think that mattered — that it came wrapped in normalcy, not ceremony. Because the point wasn't to scare them. The point was to open a door.
I told them what I'd learned. That ADHD in adults doesn't look like what most people think. It's not bouncing off walls. C said it plainly: "In my head, I always thought ADHD was just like… hyper all the time." And I said, "Exactly. That's what I always thought. And that's why I never thought I had it."
I told them about the panic attack — the one a few years back at the indoor water park. It was our first real public setting after COVID and we were downstairs in the dark noisy arcade room with flashing lights, surrounded by people. I was overwhelmed and had to leave. I quickly said I had to go somewhere else and went upstairs to the lobby. That was my first panic attack. And I've had more of them since. All of it connected. All of it architecture.
I wasn't diagnosing them. I'm not qualified for that. But I know my sons.
I have seen the procrastination. I've watched the pattern — the avoidance, the last-minute surge, the cycle repeating. I recognize the fixation on something until the world disappears, and I know what that looks like from the inside because I live there too.
So I told them I was going to send them the screening questions. Not as a test. As a mirror. Just to look at and see if anything reflected back.
"I just want you guys to be aware of things. So you can kind of see and self-assess. See if you see those same signs in yourselves."
And they listened. Not with alarm. Not with resistance. C said, "Okay. Appreciate it." N nodded. And then we went right back to talking about the Yankees and N's robot and whether the Dodgers are beatable this year.
That's the part I want people to understand. It's the part I was so nervous about. The conversation didn't break anything. It didn't make things heavy or clinical or weird. It was a dad telling his adult sons: here's something I just learned about myself, and it might matter for you too. That's it. That's all it has to be.
I think about the version of me who didn't know. The one who spent decades thinking the problem was discipline. Willpower. Character. I think about every system I built and abandoned, every relationship that frayed because I forgot something that mattered, every job where I burned bright and then fought against fading.
I can't get those years back. But I can make sure my sons don't lose theirs.
I also told them about the medication journey — how the first one was terrible, made me sleep all day and feel anxious. The second was supposed to be taken at night but kept me up instead. How I finally found one that works, how I'm exercising now, how my sleep is crawling up from four hours to six and it feels like a revelation. I wanted them to see that figuring it out is messy. That there's no clean before-and-after. You try things. Some don't work. You keep going.
That's the inheritance I'm talking about. Not the ADHD itself — that was always going to be there, encoded in the wiring. The inheritance is the awareness. The knowing. The language to describe what's happening inside your own head so you're not fighting a ghost for thirty years.
There's a reason I'm building CanopyOS in the open, and it's connected to this. Every productivity tool I ever tried assumed I was a person who could just… do things in order. Those tools weren't built for the way my brain works. They were built for someone else's brain and sold to me with a promise that this time it would be different.
It was never different.
CanopyOS starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with a question: How do you feel right now? Because if you have ADHD, you know that the answer to that question changes everything about what you can actually accomplish in a day. The tool has to meet you where you are. Not where a calendar says you should be.
I'm building it for people like me. And maybe for people like my sons, if it turns out they need it too.
Last post I shared how I got diagnosed. This post I wanted to share what I did next — and why I did it the way I did. Not in a doctor's office. Not with a formal sit-down. On a Tuesday night video call, between baseball and circuit boards, in the middle of ordinary life.
Because that's where the important things happen. Not in the big moments. In the ones that feel small until you realize they changed everything.
If you've been diagnosed and you're wondering whether to tell the people closest to you — your kids, your partner, your friends — tell them. Don't wait for the right moment. There isn't one. Just open the door. They'll walk through it when they're ready.
Next: The Graveyard of Productivity Apps — every system I tried, why they all failed, and what I'm building differently.