The Label I Never Had: Living with ADHD and Autism in Optics

What Nobody Tells You Is That You Already Knew

There is something deeply unsettling about sitting in a room and being told, at 52 years old, that your brain has always worked differently. Not broken. Not less. Just different. And yet, despite the clinical language, despite the checklists and the assessments and the careful professional voice walking you through the findings, the strangest part is not the shock of it. The strangest part is the recognition.

Because somewhere inside, you already knew.

I never liked school. Not in the way that some children don’t like school because it’s boring or because they’d rather be outside. I didn’t like school because it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t articulate. The structure, the expectation that everyone learns at the same pace, in the same way, sitting still, following the thread — none of it made sense to a mind that was already leaping ahead, making connections nobody had asked for, getting distracted by something far more interesting than what was on the board. I wasn’t disruptive. I wasn’t a troublemaker. I just wasn’t quite there, even when I was.

And then came the dispensing course. If you work in optics, you’ll know that qualifying as a dispensing optician is no small thing. The level of precision required, the clinical knowledge, the sheer volume of detail you need to hold in your head and apply accurately under pressure — it demands a particular kind of focus. And focus, as I now understand, is complicated when you have ADHD. I struggled in ways I couldn’t explain to anyone around me, least of all myself. Other students seemed to absorb it naturally, to find a rhythm in the learning that I could never quite locate. I had to find my own way through, and I did — but the cost of that was a quiet, persistent sense that I was working twice as hard just to keep up with people for whom it seemed effortless.

That feeling followed me into the profession itself. Working alongside optometrists and other dispensing opticians, I often felt like an outsider at my own table. There is a particular culture in optics — measured, precise, often quite formal — and while I respected it enormously and built my career within it, I never quite moved through it the way others did. I was always a little more energetic, a little more instinctive, a little less interested in convention for its own sake. I made it work. In fact, I more than made it work — I built something remarkable over 36 years. But the feeling of being slightly out of step never really left.

What nobody tells you about a late diagnosis is that it doesn’t just explain today. It explains everything. It reaches back through your entire life and reframes moments you had long since filed under personal failure or character flaw. The difficulty concentrating. The restlessness. The sense of not quite fitting in, not just at school, not just in training, but in rooms, in conversations, in your own skin. All of that gets quietly reclassified. Not as weakness. As neurodiversity.

I also received a diagnosis of autism alongside the ADHD, which I genuinely did not see coming. The ADHD made a kind of instinctive sense — the energy, the quick thinking, the way my mind moves. But the autism gave me pause. And yet, when I sat with it, when I thought about the patterns and the sensitivities and the way I have always processed the world slightly differently from the people around me, that too felt like recognition rather than revelation.

I am sharing this because 52 years is too long to wait. If any part of this resonates with you — whether you work in optics or not, whether you have a diagnosis or simply a quiet suspicion — please don’t do what I did and file it away. Get help. Get answers. Because knowing, it turns out, is not the end of something. It is very much the beginning.