Guest Contributor – Drew Manchu
Understanding ADHD, chronic pain, and the invisible effort behind “just getting through the day.”
Dear Drew,
I wish I could reach back and take the weight off your shoulders—the weight of being called “lazy” when you were actually running a marathon just to stay in place.
And the truth is, you believed them.
You didn’t have the language yet for time blindness—the way minutes slipped into hours without warning—or for why caring deeply didn’t always translate into doing consistently. You just knew you were trying… and somehow always falling short.
For a long time, you lived in the shadow of the undiagnosed.
You felt the sharp, hot burn of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD)—that emotional surge that hits harder and lingers longer than it should—and you thought it was a character flaw. It wasn’t. It was a nervous system responding exactly the way it was wired to, in a world that didn’t understand that wiring.
So you adapted the only way you knew how.
You reached for sugar. For binge eating. For anything that could quiet the noise or fill the space. But it was never really about food. It was about dopamine. About relief. About trying to feel “okay” in a system that rarely gave you that baseline.
Then came the diagnosis—a few years after your son’s.
And for the first time in decades, you took a full breath.
Relief is a quiet, powerful thing.
But here’s the part no one tells you: the road doesn’t suddenly become flat.
Now there’s fibromyalgia. Back pain. Brain fog that rolls in without warning. There are days when the Spoon Theory becomes less of a concept and more of a law—you wake up with a limited number of “spoons” (units of energy), and every task costs one. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
Learning to budget that energy becomes its own kind of currency.
Post-divorce life can feel like a quiet island. Sometimes peaceful. Sometimes isolating. And when the pain flares, it’s easy to retreat—to let irritability take the wheel and disappear into your own head.
But remember what you’ve learned:
Connection is the opposite of addiction.
The Drew Manchu Toolkit
Take what works. Leave the rest.
- Service & Peers: Find the helpers. The rooms, the groups, the people who get it. Helping someone else is still the fastest way out of your own head.
- Creative Outlets: Writing. Reading. Music. Not hobbies—maintenance.
- DBT & Mindfulness: Stay grounded when RSD starts telling stories that aren’t true.
- The 12 Steps: Trading chaos for structure. Replacing the quick fix with something deeper and more sustaining.
- The Mantra: One Day At A Time (ODAAT). And when it all feels like too much: “This too shall pass… like gas.”
You aren’t lazy.
And you aren’t just “disabled.”
You are a person navigating a complex, invisible landscape—one that requires more effort, more awareness, and more resilience than most people will ever see.
Be patient when the brain fog rolls in.
Be kind when your body says no.
And hold onto gratitude—even if it’s just for a single clear moment between the flares.
You don’t need everyone to understand you.
Just a few people who truly see you.
Keep going. Keep connecting. Keep choosing yourself—even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard.
With kindness, grit, and a healthy dose of humor,
Drew Manchu
Drew Manchu is a proud dad to two kind teenagers (when they remember). He writes about ADHD, chronic illness, food addiction, and recovery through a peer-support lens, focusing on the invisible effort behind every day functioning.
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