I can't tell if I'm the problem or if this is just what life is like

How measurement breaks when you've never been anyone else

I wrote this weeks ago and didn’t publish it. I held it back because I wanted to it to have an ending, like a diagnosis, a referral, or anything that would resolved the tension.

I’m publishing this now, not because anything changed, but because I’m done waiting for permission to understand myself. The next step isn’t a diagnosis. It’s designing a life that fits.

My daughter wanted to know if 11 minutes is a long time. The pasta was boiling and she wanted to know how long until we eat. I opened my mouth to say “not long” and then stopped, because that’s not really true. Eleven minutes is nothing if you’re watching a movie. Eleven minutes is forever if you’re five and hungry and standing in a kitchen that smells like food you can’t have yet.

“It depends,” I say. She looks at me like I’ve failed her.

She asks me this all the time. Is tomorrow soon? Is the weekend far away? Was I a baby a long time ago? And every time I want to give her a clean answer and every time I get stuck on the same problem: compared to what? She doesn’t have enough life yet to anchor the scale. Everything is either now or not now. The in-between doesn’t have a unit of measurement.

I think about this more than I probably should.

So we’ve been figuring it out together. We measure time in things she understands. Brushing your teeth is two minutes. One Bluey episode is seven. The walk to preschool is about ten. The walk back home in the afternoon is somehow thirty. She’s building a scale out of her own life, and it’s working. She just needed anchors that made sense to her.

To complicate it further, she probably doesn’t experience time the way I do. For her, seven minutes of Bluey is enormous because it’s full of things happening. Seven minutes of waiting is nothing because nothing’s there. Her references work differently. We’re using the same numbers for different experiences.

I keep running into that.

A colleague told me recently, laughing, that I have no poker face. That when I’m not into a meeting, my whole face just leaves. She said it like it was a charming quirk. Something funny about me.

She wasn’t wrong. I know the meeting she meant. A thought had showed up and it wouldn’t leave, so I wrote it down to get it out of the way. Why am I so energized in some discussions and completely silent in others? I was trying to clear it so I could actually hear what the rest of the meeting was about.

But something happened to my face when I did that. Something I couldn’t feel but she could see. The moment I stopped actively managing the social performance, my expression apparently went somewhere else. She thought it was funny. I went home and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Not because it hurt. She was being warm. But she could see something about my face that I can’t feel, and she could name it, and to her it was just a fun observation. I was there. I was paying attention. The writing was how I was paying attention.

Two descriptions of the same moment: she saw someone who checked out. I was trying to check back in.

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Next week I have a 20-minute appointment where a therapist will assess whether I’m eligible to be assessed for ADHD.

I’ll probably get a form. Most screening processes start with one. Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 5. How often do you struggle to start tasks? How severe is your difficulty with attention? How much does this affect your daily life?

My honest answer to every question is the same one I couldn’t give my daughter at the stove.

Compared to what?

I spent seven years at a company where the whole product was about how people respond to questions. How you frame a scale changes what people answer. How you word a poll shifts the result. I wasn’t the one designing those tools, but when that’s the conversation around you for seven years, it gets into your head. You start noticing it everywhere. I have a master’s in human-computer interaction. Between the degree and the job, I’ve spent most of my career surrounded by one question: what are you actually measuring when you ask someone to pick a number? I know that a 1-to-5 scale without anchoring isn’t measuring the thing you think it’s measuring. It’s measuring someone’s relationship to scales.

I’ve been thinking about this with AI for months. Not asking it to diagnose me. Following threads. The poker face led to a question about attention. The question about attention led to the productivity systems I built to manage it. The productivity systems led to the cost of maintaining them. I couldn’t see the pattern from inside it. I needed something with enough memory and patience to hold all the threads while I pulled them.

For current me, I have those conversations to search through. Months of thinking out loud, searchable, timestamped. For before-16 me, I have school reports, vague memories, and photos. I’m not comparing the same trait across two time periods. I’m comparing two completely different data sets and pretending they belong on the same scale.

AI gave me a map of myself I’ve never had before. The problem is that the room I’m about to walk into doesn’t have a wall to hang it on.

If you ask me how difficult it is to start tasks, I’ll say 2. Maybe 3. Because I always get them done. I have systems. I’ve been using GTD by David Allen for 15 years. The 12 Week Year framework has been working well for me. I have workarounds for my workarounds.

What I’m concerned I won’t be able to report, because the form doesn’t ask, is the cost. The three hours of avoidance and mental negotiation that preceded the task. The elaborate runway I need before I can make myself do the one simple thing that’s been sitting there for days. The fact that my entire productivity architecture exists not because I’m unusually organized, but because without it I’m nowhere.

The scale asks about the surface. My whole thing is that the surface doesn’t match what’s underneath.

And I know these forms can work, because I’ve seen them work on me. When I was diagnosed with depression and GAD, the form asked: Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge? Not at all. Several days. More than half the days. Nearly every day. I circled nearly every day for almost everything. I wasn’t sleeping. They prescribed sleeping meds, an SSRI, and ran a full exam that confirmed nothing was physically wrong. The gap between how I felt and how I normally felt was obvious. The form caught it.

Months later, post starting SSRI and therapy, I got the same form. This time I compared myself to how I felt when I first sought help. Nearly every day became not at all. Several days at most. The scores dropped and the form confirmed it. I felt like I was acing being a patient. Look at how well I’m responding to treatment. Gold star.

And now that short period of burnout is the anchor I compare everything to. I’m doing great compared to not being able to sleep. I’m functioning compared to the version of me that couldn’t. That’s my 1. Everything else is just a distance from rock bottom.

Same instrument, same person, two completely different anchors. Both times the form produced a clear result, not because it measured something objective, but because I had a before and after to measure against.

This time there is no before. There is no version of me that didn’t work this way. The form that caught my depression can’t catch something that was already there when the depression showed up.

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I understand why the healthcare system works the way it does. Resources are limited. Someone in crisis should go first. I have an education, a job, two kids, an SSRI, a Substack. I’m fine.

Except “fine” has a cost I can’t quantify, because I’ve never been anyone else.

I don’t know if other people need to trick their brains into doing basic tasks. I don’t know if other people’s faces drop the moment their attention shifts. I don’t know if other people experience social performance as something that runs in the foreground, requiring active management, and simply stops when cognitive resources get redirected elsewhere.

Everyone needs systems. Everyone procrastinates sometimes. Everyone has replayed an awkward moment at 2 a.m. The question isn’t whether you struggle. It’s the ratio. How much of your day is infrastructure versus actual doing? How much energy goes into the scaffolding compared to the work it supports?

I can’t answer that on a scale of 1 to 5. I’ve never seen anyone else’s scale.

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The appointment is 20 minutes. I’ll sit across from a stranger and try to explain that things are hard, without sounding like I self-diagnosed on TikTok, when my entire life strategy has been getting extremely good at making hard things look easy. I’ve been told that’s part of the thing.

The tool I used to understand myself might be the thing that undermines my credibility in the room where it matters.

So I’ll sit there. I’ll fill in the form. I’ll pick numbers between 1 and 5 and try not to think about anchoring effects and sample bias and how seven years of thinking about measurement has made me constitutionally unable to take a scale at face value. Even when I know it’s just one part of a much bigger process.

My face will do whatever it does when I’m not managing it.

Compared to what, I’ll want to ask.

But I’ll pick a number.

Or maybe I’ll just send them this.