Experience did not make my ADHD disappear. What it gave me was a very large collection of evidence about the environments in which I work well, the conditions that make ordinary things harder and the difference between a strategy that genuinely helps and one that simply makes me look more conventional.
Social work has always suited parts of my brain because it is relational, complex and rarely reducible to one correct answer. It rewards curiosity, pattern recognition and the willingness to ask why something that looks straightforward may not be straightforward at all. Those same qualities have also got me into trouble when curiosity became a side quest, responsibility expanded too far or reflection tipped into rumination.
The longer I have practised, the less interested I have become in tidy explanations for human behaviour. Somebody misses appointments and we call them disengaged; somebody asks repeated questions and we call them challenging; somebody cannot complete a small task and we decide they lack motivation. Experience has made me suspicious of the speed with which observations turn into character judgements, particularly when a different explanation is sitting just underneath the behaviour.
ADHD has sharpened that suspicion because I know how misleading appearance can be. I know what it is like to care deeply about a task and still be unable to initiate it, to listen carefully while looking distracted, to be highly capable while overwhelmed, and to need an adjustment without needing the standard lowered. Those experiences have made professional curiosity personal for me.
They have also made me less impressed by systems that demand sameness for its own sake. If two practitioners can reach the same safe, ethical and evidence-informed outcome through different routes, I want to know why the route matters before insisting that one of them abandon the way their brain works best. Consistency has value where it protects people; it is much less convincing when it exists mainly because the template has always looked like that.
Perhaps the biggest lesson has been that support works better when it begins with curiosity rather than correction. Notice what is happening, wonder what might sit underneath it, ask rather than assume, adapt where there is an unnecessary barrier and then review whether the change actually helped. That sequence has become useful to me far beyond ADHD.
After more than twenty-five years, I am still learning about social work and still learning about my own brain. I no longer see that as evidence that I should have mastered either by now. Complex things remain interesting precisely because there is always another thread to notice, and Barry has never promised the web would stop growing.