This is something I've agonised about writing.
Mostly, it's been out of fear.
Fear that I would be pre-judged, fear that my friends would treat me differently, most of all fear of the questioning it would bring, of being put on the defensive, having to justify my statement, because this is a difficult and controversial subject.
But ultimately, I feel it's something that's worth saying.
A coming out of the closet, making something real by naming it.
And for me, even if it may not seem like it at first, it's an expression of joy.
I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
ADHD.
I've spent most of my life in a state of confusion.
From an early age I was extremely bright - I read the Lord of the Rings in a couple of months when I was six, and about the same time I started learning to program our Acorn Electron computer.
By the time I was seven I read eight library books every week, as well as rereading at least a couple from my own growing collection.
By age eight I had run out of children's books in the town library, and moved on to adult fiction.
I was home-schooled, but my parents put me in school for a year to make sure it wouldn't be a better choice for me, and I found I was more than a year ahead of my peers.
I took my first GCSE (for American readers: A UK qualification usually taken between the ages of 15 and 16) at age 13, and got a B.
But I couldn't work.
I couldn't organise myself, I couldn't stick with a task.
I was a daydreamer, always had my head in the clouds, and many everyday activities bored me rigid within half an hour; a boredom so intense it made me almost frenzied.
I could never sit still for two minutes, any period of time in one seat producing increasingly inventive new sitting positions up to and including upside-down with head on the floor.
I could never remember where I put things, or what I'd been told to do - I drove my mum half-crazy because she could give me a simple task and five minutes later I'd forgotten about it entirely.
It wasn't that I didn't care, things just fell out of my head.
"You remember well enough when it's something that interests you" was her frequent, exasperated comment.
And I couldn't argue, because the things that gripped me - reading, computers, other worlds - occupied my mind entirely, to the exclusion of everything.
They never fell out.
I couldn't forget them if I tried.
I could, and would, sit programming BASIC for six hours straight if I was allowed.
I talked to my brother about this, and he reminded me of something I'd either completely forgotten or didn't really understand at the time - although he's two years younger than me, I wasn't allowed out of the house on my own until the same year as he was.
My parents were afraid I'd unthinkingly wander in front of a bus.
In my year at school, away from my mum's ADHD-friendly teaching structure (short classes, lots of variety, the freedom to work my own way), I dropped back from over a year ahead to well behind my classmates.
I couldn't get my work done, I couldn't concentrate in class, I developed major discipline problems.
I turned from a child who many adults commented on being improbably polite, quiet and well-mannered into an (occasionally violent) bully and a disruptor of classes.
I stabbed another boy in the hand with a sharpened pencil.
Egged on by some friends I actually sent a death threat to one of the dinner ladies.
I still don't know what she did to deserve this outburst of hate.
I was called in and disciplined when the headmaster and my teacher identified the note by my writing paper.
They said they would report it to my parents, but I still don't know if they did - my parents never said anything about it.
I suppose, if they read this post, I'll find out.
Back out of school, my work leaped forward again and my behaviour slowly returned to acceptable boundaries, but when I went on to local college to do my A-Levels, I started to slip again.
I skipped classes, was loud and disruptive in lessons, rarely paid attention.
After two attempts I dropped Maths because I could barely last half a class and my work was nonexistent.
I only really functioned in English, a topic that was able to truly catch my interest and occasionally engross me utterly.
I finally scraped two passes - C in English, E in Biology.
Despite having been obsessed with computers since I was six, I failed a computer class two years running - I was so bored in the lessons I spent most of them trying to hack into the school network.
Since then the pattern has repeated.
I'm intelligent, extremely creative, but I'm always disorganised.
Dates and times are a blur to me - I often can't remember if something happened two weeks ago or six months.
I can put something in a prominent place to remind me to attend to it, and fail to notice it's there for two days.
If I don't make lists, I almost never return with all my shopping.
I've left a series of jobs within months or years.
It's something I put down to stress (which I felt), or the fact that the jobs were crap (which they were).
Now I'm beginning to see a pattern, a rising panic and claustrophobia in each case, brought on not by stress in the job but sheer boredom.
The only job I've really enjoyed was potentially the most stressful of all - two frantic summers at the Highways Agency on a desparately overworked team helping put together a Quality Management system, something I knew nothing about when I started and quickly had to take a large degree of responsibility for.
The last weeks of each year's contract I was working twelve to fourteen hours a day, and would have worked more if the building had been open - at the end of the day I used to bolt through the darkened corridors, halfway into my coat, to make it to the front door before the security guard finished locking it.
But I loved that job, I came home singing at the end of the day and looking forward to starting again in the morning.
The missing link? A challenge, a task I could immerse myself in, with twists and turns and deadlines and that wonderful feeling that my brain was being worked at its full capacity.
It's no coincidence that the first time in my life I felt, not just happy (because my life has had many happy times), but at peace, was travelling.
A new horizon every day, no possibility of boredom, new challenges and surprises around every corner.
One night about two weeks ago I had reached the point of total desperation.
Since the end of last year, I had been searching for a job.
I went all out, signing up with five agencies, reading seven different websites a week, two email listings and three news-feeds a day, plus following up whatever opportunities I could find directly.
But my fear was that the next job would be like the last job, and the one before.
Unfulfilling, stressful, ultimately doomed.
When I left a year and half ago to travel round the world, my intention was to come back with a new perspective and new self-discipline born of experience and challenge, and make something happen for myself.
I'd openly stated my intention that I would never work for a boss again.
But once again I was back to looking for conventional work to pay the bills because I still couldn't manage myself.
I'd come back with a new energy, having honed my writing skills and with a number of ideas for new projects, as well as material for at least one travel book.
I had written the first draft of a novel in November, started a new article-writing process, had big plans.
But my focus kept drifting away from my projects, the novel lay unattended as a first draft and I couldn't get back into it, two other writing projects I'd taken on were already slipping through my fingers.
I couldn't keep my head down.
And now my job searching was getting harder as dullness eroded my motivation.
I was starting to drift again.
I had suspected for a long time that I might have some kind of developmental problem that was the root of my inattention, but I had always suspected it was classic geek Aspergers that made me withdrawn, distracted, apt to swing from obsession to total disinterest.
Now, as I stood at 1am in front of my parents' house, smoking, trying to ignore my rising panic about my situation and calm my mind so that I could catch some sleep, it struck me that my problem had always been one of attention, and when I went back inside I started reading.
In the ADHD diagnostic listing in the DSM-IV (the international bible of mental disorder diagnosis) and a host of articles by doctors and researchers, many of whom suffered from the same problem, I found a pattern that fit my life to a tee.
Not only did it perfectly explain my current situation (and some of the personal statements and journals felt like somebody reading my own life back to me), but it began to extend tendrils back into the past, digging up flashes of "So that's why...
" and "Of course!" and "Now I understand...
" I still didn't sleep much that night, but that's because I spent two more hours learning who I was, and had always been.
So what's been different since then? Only everything, sooner or later.
Initially there was just the relief of knowing this was real, and with it a new perspective on myself.
My greatest fear, guilt and self-doubt has always come from the suspicion that I was just lazy, weak, undisciplined.
Understanding that I'm genetically predisposed to lose attention, forget things and be distracted by new ideas has been like a redemption, the effects of which are still rewriting my view of myself and my abilities.
Out of necessity, over the years I've developed numerous systems to organise myself - to-do lists, reminders, alarms, in-piles and out-piles, plans and routines to trap things before they escaped the reach of my disorganised mind.
At one time I used to timetable all my activities, from work to watching a DVD, by the hour, every day of the week.
Almost all these systems ultimately failed because I lost interest in them.
Now, understanding what makes me lose interest, the crucial breakpoint when a system starts to slip out of my consciousness, I've found new ways to organise and discipline myself.
As a result my productivity has gone through the roof; I've already finished half a dozen projects that have been lingering and nagging at me for weeks and months.
I'm learning to channel and use that obsessive energy, that hyperfocus, to hammer through projects in immensely satisfying sustained bursts of four, six, eight hours - and how to turn it off again so I can actually get some sleep and keep my life on track.
Most of all I now see the shape of the thing I'm struggling with, and now I know it, and I know its name, I have power over it.
When I start to get that feeling of can't-be-bothered, or that mild panic that rises up when a task becomes too complex and overwhelms me, I know to step back, see the shape of it, change my approach, and suddenly I'm making progress again.
When the fog descends and everything I'm trying to achieve seems like one blurred mess with nowhere to start, I know how to bring it back into focus - to knock out the easy tasks until I feel capable, and rearrange my lists so that I can clearly see the next step.
Suddenly everything's manageable again.
It's been a long road getting to this place, and not everything is going to magically become easy now.
There's going to be struggle ahead, but I'm ready for it, in a way I've never been before.
I have a mental illness, it's a part of me, it's not going to go away.
But now I know it, it's going to work for me.