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Comment by sai_c | Hacker News Reader

Have an upvote from me and thank you so much for this comment. This describes perfectly my own state of mind. I've noticed having problems communicating my thoughts about my code in meetings, but simply could not point a finger at the exact reasons. But this describes it perfectly. If I may bother you, could you answer two questions?

- Were you officially diagnosed with ADHD. I never went to a doctor, but in the last years I had growing assumptions I might have ADHD or Asperger (or both).

- Do you follow certain strategies which made communicating your thoughts and ideas easier and/or better?

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> Were you officially diagnosed with ADHD. I never went to a doctor, but in the last years I had growing assumptions I might have ADHD or Asperger (or both).

Diagnosed bipolar 1 recently. But I was diagnosed as ADD as a child thirty years ago. ADHD is a popular addition to the standard Bipolar feature set.

> Do you follow certain strategies which made communicating your thoughts and ideas easier and/or better?

Not in a way I can easily teach. I learned my social skills late and had to study people to understand them. I take all of the inputs and outputs of a known person and mentally visualize what their internal state is. Then I play out how different phrasing will be received.

Whatever part of the brain normally handles social interaction is broken in mine, so I use logical thinking to run other people's brains in a virtual machine.

Thank you very much for answering, although it is a very personal thing to ask about.

I guess I should get an official opinion. Nevertheless, diagnosed or not, virtualizing people seems like it could work for me, although it seems to take a significant amount of time for each person to work.

It took a lot of time to optimize the process. Once you get used to understanding people individually, pattern emerge and you can generalize a few things. I have a number of mental guardrails like: If (person) is (things), then don't express (idea).

IF my dad IS talking about (politics|religion) THEN do not enter discussion.

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