The Drift

I was one week into building Third Space Atlas when I had surgery.

It wasn’t dramatic — a procedure that required me to sit still for two, maybe three days while I healed. I knew the work mattered. I could feel the momentum. But stillness and recovery demanded something from me: patience, and time away from the desk.

So, I did what made sense. I downloaded a game to pass the hours.

Candy Crush.

By day three, I wasn’t thinking about Third Space Atlas anymore. I was thinking about the next level, the next tournament, the next hit of completion that the game kept promising. My entire weekend disappeared into it. And then another one. The game was hosting a competition. I was doing well, so I kept playing. And at some point — I’m not even sure when — I started spending money.

Days were gone. The work that I knew mattered had become invisible.

Candy Crush is not an accident. The colors are deliberate — saturated, high-contrast, built to hold the eye. The competition ran Friday to Monday, consuming the exact window when I had the most unstructured time. Every level I finished unlocked boosters, power-ups, and small advantages that made the next round more winnable. The rewards came in unpredictable clusters, just often enough to keep me playing through the dry stretches. And if I was doing well — if I was actually rising through the knockout rounds — the game made sure I knew it. It kept the stakes visible and the exit invisible.

For my brain, it was not a distraction. It was a system that seemed to know every weak seam in my attention.

I was out there for days. And I was winning.

The strangest part wasn’t the lost time. It was that I hadn’t noticed it leaving. There was no moment when I chose the game over the work. No decision point. No conscious trade. One thing simply replaced the other, quietly, without permission — and by the time I looked up, the context I had been living in had collapsed.

I think of it now as an internal context collapse.

I’ve spent forty-three years not knowing this was happening.

Before my diagnosis — before I understood that I had inattentive ADHD — I had no language for any of it. I just knew that I needed systems. So, I built them.

I remember one in particular: a journal, a schedule, time blocks mapped out with real precision. I followed it for weeks. I was proud of it. And then one morning the notebook was still open on the desk, the plan still there, but I wasn’t — not really. By afternoon, I had drifted somewhere I couldn’t account for, doing something I couldn’t justify, and by evening the day was gone and the plan sat there like a letter I’d written to myself in a language I no longer spoke.

I thought I had failed the system. I thought the failure was mine.

I built another one. And another.

I didn’t understand that the ground kept moving underneath all of them.

The diagnosis didn’t stop the drift. What it gave me was consciousness — the ability to see what was happening while it was happening, or close enough to matter. Before, the drift was invisible until the damage was already done. Now I can sometimes catch the moment my attention begins to move toward lower resistance. Not always. Not perfectly. But enough to change the outcome more often than I used to.

I am learning to name the cluster before it becomes a current: difficulty, uncertainty, the quiet fear that the work will not be good enough. Not to eliminate it. Not to power through it. Only to see it before it carries me somewhere I did not choose to go.

I think about an afternoon when I was a kid.

My brother and I were sent outside to rake the yard — split it down the middle, simple enough. He was done in forty-five minutes. I was still out there hours later, the sun dropping, my hands going cold, the yard unfinished.

What my family captured instead were photographs of me dancing with the rake. Singing. Running through martial arts moves as if it were a weapon. They laughed. I laughed too.

Nobody knew what they were looking at.

That’s the thing about the drift — it doesn’t always look like failure. Sometimes it looks like joy. Sometimes the people who love you most take pictures of it.

Nobody asked the right question. Not then, not for decades. Not the teachers who wrote bright but easily distracted on report cards as if distraction were a choice. Not the managers who saw the gap between my output and my capability and filed it under potential, unrealized. Not the systems built to reward consistency, unable to imagine a person for whom consistency itself was the wound.

They measured what I produced, never what it cost me to produce it.

And I kept showing up, kept building the systems, kept trying to be the version of myself who could stay in the yard and finish the raking — never understanding that I was not failing the work.

The context kept collapsing.

Silently.

Without my permission.

What I grieve isn’t the drift itself. It’s the years I spent explaining it wrong. A career that moved sideways when it should have moved forward. Passions I couldn’t sustain long enough to build into anything. Dreams I was genuinely capable of pursuing, but never with the version of myself who had the right tools.

I didn’t know the context kept collapsing. I just knew I kept falling short.