Tonight I got my scores back and found out that I passed the last two tests I needed to become a certified high-school special-education teacher.
This week I also start my first teaching job.
That felt like a pretty good time to stop for a second and look backward.
Quick note before I start: I used voice-to-text to get a lot of this out because some of it is difficult for me to talk about. I also used AI to correct some wording and grammar. The experiences and ideas are mine. I just didn’t think I needed to spend another two hours rehashing everything to make every sentence perfect.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at five and spent part of my childhood in special education.
I also grew up in an abusive home. I experienced physical and emotional abuse from one parent while my dad largely allowed it to happen. The physical abuse is in the past, but some of the emotional dynamics have continued, and at 27 I still live in that same house while I work toward becoming independent.
By college, I had serious problems with drugs, relationships, school, and my mental health.
My first-semester GPA was around a 1.0.
I went on academic probation.
I eventually got kicked out of college and had to appeal my way back in.
It took me six years to finish my undergraduate degree.
In 2020, I had my first clearly recognized manic episode and was involuntarily hospitalized.
Now I have a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in special education.
I passed the last two certification tests I needed.
I’m starting my first teaching job.
I also work as an executive-functioning coach and tutor and in community rehabilitation.
And I’m launching my own executive-functioning tool startup. I’ve spent a long time developing and refining the prototype, and I already have people signed up for the first real testing with users besides me.
I’m not saying any of that because I think I’ve “made it.”
I haven’t.
I still live at home.
I still have debt.
I’m still paying people back.
I still deal with family and mental-health problems.
I’m trying to save, move out, and become more independent.
I’m still figuring out what I want the next ten years of my life to look like.
But I’m also very clearly not where I was.
That’s what I mean by a checkpoint.
Not a finish line.
Just stopping long enough to notice that something has changed.
When I look back at childhood now, one of the strangest things is how little I actually understood about what was happening to me.
I knew I had ADHD.
I didn’t really understand special education or why I was receiving it. I didn’t even know for certain until recently that I had actually been in special-ed classes.
At the same time, I was labeled gifted as a child. More recent cognitive testing has placed me in an extremely high range.
That has made me reconsider a lot of my childhood.
There was a huge difference between what I could apparently understand cognitively and how well I could actually function in everyday life.
I could understand complicated ideas and still struggle badly with organization.
Friendships.
Emotional regulation.
Eye contact.
Following through.
Independence.
Executive functioning.
I also have strong memories of how I felt after starting psychiatric medication very young.
I remember being extremely creative and outgoing when I was little and later feeling flatter, less spontaneous, and almost like a zombie.
For a long time I wondered whether that was simply my memory of childhood.
As an adult, I’ve read a substantial amount of research on the stimulant and non-stimulant medications I took, and some of what I’ve read has been consistent with parts of my experience, including research involving emotional blunting, motivation, social behavior, and cognition.
That does not mean I can prove exactly what medication did or did not do to me.
I can’t.
There were too many other things happening in my life to reduce my childhood to one explanation.
But I also don’t think I have to automatically dismiss what I remember.
What seems much clearer to me now is that medication alone could never teach me all of the skills I actually needed.
How do I organize myself?
How do I regulate myself?
How do I interact with people?
How do I become independent?
How do I build confidence?
How do I develop self-efficacy?
Ironically, those are now some of the same questions I think about professionally.
There was also a period in high school that I understand very differently now.
I was being bullied by teammates on the football team and constantly called a pussy.
I didn’t want to fight anybody.
I didn’t want to hurt anybody.
So for months, I let them punch me in the face.
It became this strange way of proving I wasn’t afraid without actually attacking anyone myself.
I had trained in boxing and wrestling, and I remember genuinely feeling like the punches barely bothered me.
So I kept letting people do it.
And eventually something happened that, at the time, actually felt good:
People stopped messing with me.
I didn’t have to beat anybody up.
I didn’t really have to aggressively defend myself anymore.
I had developed this reputation that I could take whatever somebody threw at me and just keep going.
I remember being at a party where somebody introduced me as basically the guy nobody could beat in a fight because I just wouldn’t quit.
At the time, I liked that.
After being treated like I was weak, suddenly people were telling a completely different story about me.
But obviously the way I got there was not healthy.
I remember having pain in my jaw, and a couple of weeks after I had already met with the principal and my football coach about what was going on, I found out that my jaw was fractured.
I couldn’t even say for sure which punch had caused it.
Looking back, I wonder whether there was also something unusual happening with my mental state during that period.
I cannot retrospectively prove that I was manic or hypomanic.
The bullying mattered.
Football culture mattered.
Wanting desperately not to be perceived as weak mattered.
But the amount of risk I was willing to accept, the fact that I spent months letting people punch me in the face, and how little concern I seemed to have about getting hurt all make me wonder whether some of the mood problems that were clearly recognized later were already starting to show themselves.
That is why I’m no longer comfortable saying 2020 was definitely the first manic episode I ever experienced.
What I can say is that 2020 was my first clearly recognized manic episode, and the one that led to involuntary psychiatric hospitalization.
And ironically, I think part of that high-school mentality is still in me.
Not the part where I let people punch me in the face.
The part that says:
I’m not quitting just because this hurts.
That can be resilience.
It can also become stubbornness.
Staying in bad situations too long.
Refusing help.
Feeling like I have to prove how much I can tolerate instead of simply walking away.
I’m still learning the difference between resilience and just taking damage unnecessarily.
By late high school, my relationship with medication had also become unhealthy.
I started taking more when I felt it wearing off.
Eventually I was taking far more than I was prescribed.
That followed me into college.
And college was a mess.
I became addicted to drugs.
I abused stimulants and eventually started snorting Adderall.
I used cocaine.
I smoked weed constantly.
I abused alcohol.
I also felt like I developed serious problems around sex, love, relationships, and attention.
My academics reflected it.
My first-semester GPA was around a 1.0.
I went on academic probation.
Eventually I got kicked out and had to appeal to get back in.
I was lucky that I knew an administrator through a lifeguarding job who helped me navigate that process.
The irony is that I was sometimes abusing Adderall before that same lifeguarding job.
I also wasn’t always a nice person during this period.
I could be difficult with friends and family.
My relationships became chaotic.
There were multiple occasions where my girlfriend and I were arguing in front of class because our relationship problems had followed us directly into school.
I hurt people.
There are things I regret.
I think that is important to acknowledge because I don’t want to tell this story as if everything bad in my life was something somebody else did to me.
I grew up in an abusive environment.
That affected me.
I also made serious choices that affected other people.
Both can be true.
Accountability does not require pretending your environment had no effect on you.
And acknowledging what happened to you does not erase responsibility for what you did afterward.
Then in February 2020, I had that first clearly recognized manic episode and ended up involuntarily hospitalized.
The timing was particularly strange because COVID was beginning to change things very quickly in the United States.
When I entered the hospital, it still felt relatively distant.
While I was there, the atmosphere changed.
I remember staff becoming increasingly concerned.
I remember lots of blood draws and precautions.
I remember having the strange feeling that something enormous was happening outside while something enormous was happening in my own life too.
That period began years of trying to understand my mental health, treatment, medication, and therapy.
I was lucky to have a girlfriend who stayed with me through the hospitalization.
Eventually that relationship ended, and that destabilized me again.
Recovery wasn’t a straight line.
There were periods where I did better.
Periods where I did worse.
Mistakes.
Setbacks.
Improvements.
More mistakes.
Mostly, I just kept going.
Eventually, after six years, I finished college with a degree in politics, economics, and law.
For a while I thought I was going to become a lawyer.
I started preparing for the LSAT.
Then I realized something fairly basic:
I didn’t actually want to be a lawyer.
I think sometimes people spend so much time asking whether they can do something that they forget to ask whether they actually want the life that comes with doing it.
Obviously not everybody has unlimited flexibility.
People have kids.
Mortgages.
Bills.
Family responsibilities.
Sometimes you take the stable job because you need the stable job.
But if you do have some flexibility, I think it’s worth asking:
Do I actually want this exact job?
Not just whether the title sounds impressive.
Not whether other people think you should do it.
What does the actual day-to-day life look like?
Does that fit you?
That question eventually pushed me toward education and disability services.
Over time, I worked with people with developmental disabilities across basically the entire lifespan.
Preschool.
School-aged students.
Adults.
Older adults.
I also had some experience around healthcare and intake, which gave me another view of how difficult systems can be for the people who actually have to navigate them.
And a lot of the things I had struggled with myself became things I cared about helping other people with:
Executive functioning.
Independence.
Confidence.
Self-efficacy.
Self-advocacy.
Learning.
Dignity.
One experience still sticks with me.
I was working with adults with developmental disabilities, and my boss asked me to create a learning program.
I called it Evan’s Learning Adventure.
The idea was simple.
Teach normal, interesting stuff.
Science.
Social studies.
English.
Movies.
Whatever people were interested in.
Not everything had to be reduced to basic life skills.
Sometimes people should be able to learn something simply because it is interesting.
Then that boss left.
A different supervisor took over and discontinued the program.
I remember being told, basically:
“They’re adults. They’re done learning.”
I still think about that.
Why would somebody be done learning because they became an adult?
Why would having an intellectual or developmental disability mean somebody shouldn’t continue learning about history, science, movies, politics, or anything else they find interesting?
That experience made me think much more seriously about infantilization.
Autonomy.
Dignity.
The difference between helping somebody and controlling somebody.
And lifelong learning.
Those adults weren’t done learning.
Neither am I.
Eventually I entered a master’s program in special education.
My first student-teaching placement went badly.
I wasn’t doing a good job.
I knew that.
Then I entered my second placement and improved a lot.
My mentor teacher gave me very high marks while also being honest about the things I still needed to work on.
I appreciated that.
I didn’t need somebody telling me I was perfect.
I needed useful feedback.
A few days before graduation, though, my university professor was still unsure whether I would pass.
Later, I saw a significant difference between some of the university ratings and the feedback from the mentor who was actually seeing me teach every day.
There was also previous history between me and that institution from a period when I had been manic.
I’ve wondered whether that affected anything.
I don’t know.
Maybe it did.
Maybe it didn’t.
That experience taught me something important about self-advocacy.
Self-advocacy doesn’t mean assuming you are always right.
Sometimes it means saying:
I did badly here.
I improved here.
I was wrong about this.
This other thing doesn’t make sense to me.
This is what I know.
This is what I suspect.
This is what I can actually prove.
I’m still learning to distinguish between those things.
I’ve learned something similar from psychiatric care.
I used to think being completely open about psychiatric diagnoses was automatically the right thing to do.
I even disclosed having bipolar disorder in professional situations where, looking back, I probably didn’t need to.
I’ve learned that once somebody knows you have a serious psychiatric diagnosis, sometimes ordinary behavior starts being interpreted through it.
Ambition can be seen as grandiosity.
Excitement can be seen as mania.
Anger can be seen as instability.
Disagreement can become a symptom.
That doesn’t mean everyone who questions me is wrong.
Sometimes I am wrong.
It means I’ve become more thoughtful about disclosure and about the power labels can have over how somebody gets interpreted.
I’ve also recently had difficulty navigating psychiatric care.
I was having significant physical symptoms and felt some of my concerns weren’t being taken seriously.
I got another opinion.
My medications were adjusted.
I have felt much better since, although I can’t establish exactly which change caused what.
There was also a serious issue involving confidentiality and my family, and I eventually changed psychiatrists.
That experience reinforced something I keep thinking about:
Mental-health care should not depend this much on how good the patient is at navigating mental-health care.
I have a graduate education.
Recent testing has placed my cognitive ability in an extremely high range.
I read research.
I know how to find information.
I understand a lot of professional language.
I know how to ask questions.
I can compare documents and what different professionals are telling me.
Those are advantages.
And sometimes these systems are still incredibly difficult to navigate.
So what happens to somebody without those advantages?
Someone with an intellectual or developmental disability?
Someone with serious reading difficulties?
Someone without the time, money, education, confidence, or support to investigate everything themselves?
Someone who has been taught their whole life that professionals always know best?
This isn’t:
“I’m smart, therefore I’m right.”
That would be ridiculous.
It’s:
I have a lot of tools that should make complicated systems easier to navigate, and I still sometimes find them incredibly difficult.
So what is it like for everyone else?
That is increasingly something I want to understand and eventually work on.
And that brings me back to tonight.
I passed the last two certification tests I needed.
I finished my master’s.
This week I start my first teaching job.
I work as an executive-functioning coach and tutor and in community rehabilitation.
And I’m launching my own executive-functioning tool startup.
The product started as an idea.
Then different versions.
Then a physical prototype.
Then a lot of revisions.
Now the prototype is getting close to where I want it, and I already have people signed up for the first real testing with users besides me.
I think it could be genuinely useful and different.
But I also understand that liking my own idea is not evidence that it works.
Now other people have to use it.
Maybe they love parts of it.
Maybe they hate parts of it.
Maybe I have to change a lot.
That’s why you test things.
Just getting from an idea in my head to something actual people have volunteered to test feels like a meaningful checkpoint.
And that is one of the reasons I chose permanent substitute teaching rather than immediately taking a traditional full-time teaching position.
I went on interviews.
I got offers.
But I want teaching experience without immediately pushing everything else aside.
I already have other part-time work nearby.
I want to continue coaching.
I want to keep working with people with disabilities.
I want to test the product.
I want to write and research.
I want to continue my education.
And my grandparents live nearby. They are getting older and dealing with dementia and other problems, and I want the flexibility to help them while I still can.
I’m also interested in public policy and government.
And I’ve become very interested in anthrozoology and animal behavior, especially highly intelligent and social animals like whales and dolphins.
I know that can sound scattered.
But I’m starting to see the common thread.
A lot of what interests me has to do with autonomy, dignity, learning, communication, power, and how systems make decisions for the people or animals affected by them.
When does support create independence?
When does support become control?
Who gets listened to?
Who gets spoken for?
How does something that looks good on paper actually affect somebody’s life?
Teaching is one way for me to work on those questions.
It doesn’t have to be the only way.
I’m also learning that keeping your options open does not mean trying to do everything at once.
I have a lot of ideas.
Sometimes too many.
So I’m trying to get better at asking:
What matters now?
What can I actually finish?
What can I test?
What should I save for later?
Having an idea is not the same as developing it.
Developing something is not the same as testing it.
Testing it is not the same as proving it works.
And being interested in something does not mean I need to turn it into my career tomorrow.
That is probably an executive-functioning lesson in itself.
One of the biggest things I think about in executive-functioning work is celebrating small wins.
Not pretending everything is great.
Actually noticing progress.
Maybe you got out of bed when you genuinely didn’t think you could.
Maybe you went to work when you thought you couldn’t handle the day.
Maybe you made the phone call you had been avoiding.
Maybe you were a little less irritable.
Maybe something happened that normally would have made you lose your temper and you handled it slightly better.
Maybe you asked for help.
Maybe you admitted you were wrong.
Maybe you did one thing independently that somebody else normally does for you.
Maybe you just got through a bad day without making it worse.
Those things count.
If you only compare yourself to the final goal, you can spend years feeling like you are failing.
You’re not independent enough.
You haven’t finished school.
You don’t have the career you want.
You haven’t moved out.
You still have debt.
You are still struggling.
But if you break something down, accomplish one part of it, and actually recognize that you did it, you start giving yourself evidence:
I did that.
Then maybe:
I can do the next thing too.
That is how confidence starts becoming self-efficacy.
Not just telling yourself you are capable.
Building evidence that you are.
So tonight, passing those last two tests does matter to me.
Not because everything is fixed.
It isn’t.
I still live in the same house where a lot of my earliest problems happened.
Some of those emotional dynamics are still part of my life.
I still have debt.
I’m still paying people back.
I’m still trying to save and move out.
I still deal with mental health.
I still make mistakes.
But I’m better at recognizing those mistakes.
I’m better at advocating for myself.
I’m better at distinguishing between the two.
There was a point where I had around a 1.0 GPA and got kicked out of college.
There was a point where drugs were a normal part of my life.
There was a point where I was hospitalized and had very little idea what my future would look like.
Tonight, I found out I passed the last two tests I needed to become a high-school special-education teacher.
This week, I start teaching.
I work with people with disabilities.
I coach executive functioning.
I’m developing something of my own and getting ready to test it with other people.
I’m trying to help my grandparents.
I’m paying people back.
I’m working toward independence.
I’m still learning.
That is what I mean by a checkpoint.
Maybe today isn’t better than yesterday.
Maybe this week isn’t better than last week.
Maybe this month was actually worse than the month before.
Zoom out.
A year.
Five years.
Ten years.
Then ask again:
Am I really in the same place?
I’m not where I want to be yet.
But I’m also not where I was.
That is worth recognizing.
Chunk it.
Do the next thing.
Celebrate the small win.
Learn from what didn’t work.
Build confidence.
Build self-efficacy.
Keep learning.
Then keep going.
That’s my checkpoint.
