We're in this together.

San Diego County, CA. Solo virtual practice. Member of the MentorCoach teaching team.

I really wanted to be good. Standing out in right field, I was determined to make the play this time. Keep my eye on the ball. Stay focused.

Then my heart jumped. Something was coming. It was a bird. Then it was the flowers in the outfield. Then the crowd. Anything but the mind-numbingly boring thing happening in front of me, which had such low odds of ever involving me. By design, honestly. Everyone knew that if the ball did come my way, I almost certainly wasn't going to catch it.

What I remember most isn't the missed plays. It's the shame that arrived a half-second after the excitement, every time I realized I'd been chasing a bird instead of a ball.

School was a different story. School came easily. I was smart. Scattered, but smart. And that's where I found safety, and honestly, identity. My intelligence was my mask, and any ding against it was exceedingly painful.

Around Christmas 2019, my sister called. "Well, someone should probably tell you: I have ADHD. Dad almost certainly has ADHD. And so do you."

I'd joked for years about squirrel moments. Never in a million years did I think it was actually true of me. I did well in school. How could someone who did well in school have ADHD?

By then I was married with two kids, and the systems I'd built to hold my life together were buckling. They'd been built for one person. They weren't built for family life. My sister recommended a book, The ADHD Effect on Marriage, and reading it was like looking into a mirror. My wife has said more than once that understanding what was actually going on helped save our marriage. It didn't make things easy. It made them make sense.

Getting diagnosed should have been the simple part. My primary care doctor said it sure seemed like ADHD and referred me on. Person after person agreed. No doubt about it. Then I finally reached the psychiatrist who could actually make the diagnosis, and his first question was, "How did you do in school?"

Well. I did well.

"Then there's no way you have ADHD. Maybe anxiety. Try Wellbutrin."

No surprise, it didn't help. I ended up at a private practice to receive the diagnosis that had been plain to everyone else in the room for months. If you've lived some version of that gauntlet, I don't have to explain what it costs.

The first time I tried medication was the first time in my life my mind felt quiet. I didn't know that was possible. It was also one of the most productive days of my life, which was its own kind of shock.

Then came the harder part: grief. Looking back at every moment I'd felt different and out of place. The lost water bottles. The time in fourth grade when a teacher scanned an angry, silent classroom for whoever was singing, and it took me a while to realize the sound was coming from me. The daydreaming, the struggle to pull the trigger on tasks that shouldn't have been hard, the dependence on pressure to get anything moving. All of it finally made sense. And slowly separating who I actually am from what I'd been told about myself is work I know from the inside, because I've done it.

I spent about twenty years in ministry. The calling was always the same: come alongside people who were hurting, holding it together on the outside while losing hope on the inside, and walk with them until they could feel confident in a future that had felt lost.

Looking back after my diagnosis, I saw something I'd missed the whole time. The kids, the students, the adults I connected with most, the ones I was genuinely able to help the most, were almost all people who likely had ADHD or some other kind of neurodivergence.

I used to say that if I could spend my days just doing that, helping people find their way, without the budget meetings and the politics that swallowed most of the week, it would be a dream job.

That's coaching. Coming alongside people to discover who they really are. Not the stigma, not the shame, but the strength of who they are, and how to actually live in it.

A former student of mine knew me in both chapters, first as his pastor, then as his coach. He told me, "Luke, don't take this the wrong way, but I actually think what you're doing now seems like a higher calling."

A client once named the same thing in a discovery call, less than an hour after meeting me: "It's clear this isn't just a job for you. This is a calling."

I'm not going to argue with either of them.

I've been coaching professionally since 2023. I hold the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential through the International Coaching Federation and the Professional Certified ADHD Coach (PCAC) credential through the Professional Association for ADHD Coaches, and I serve on the teaching team at MentorCoach.