I'm still sitting in my car. Engine off. Just finished my appointment with Dr Raj and I haven't moved yet because the weight of it is still settling.
Three years ago this week I was diagnosed with ADHD. Three years. Raj and I were talking about it this morning, almost celebrating, the way you do when you realise something has quietly changed without you noticing. He knows a hell of a lot about me because there is nothing I don't tell him. Nothing I hold back in that room. And I have no hesitation to say any of it to the outside world either, because I lived in the dark for long enough. Most people still do.
I'm one person in a world of eight billion. People have written songs about this. Novels. Whole lives devoted to naming something that didn't have a name yet. And I keep thinking about one of them specifically today.
Joey Ramone Understood Something
Jeffrey Hyman. Known to the world as Joey Ramone. Lead singer of a band that rewired punk rock and in doing so rewired a generation of people who felt wrong-shaped in the world. He had severe OCD from childhood. Doctors told his mother he would never function in normal society. His brother grew up sharing a room with someone who couldn't stop turning lights on and off, running the water for hours, unable to throw a single thing away. He experienced a psychotic episode at eighteen. He spent time in hospital. He was, by every clinical measure of the era, a problem to be managed.
And then he got on a stage and became one of the most singular voices in the history of music.
That is not a redemption arc. That is something more specific. That is a neurodivergent person finding the exact right channel for everything their brain was already doing, at full volume, all the time. The OCD didn't disappear. The difficulty didn't vanish. It ran underneath everything, including his death. But the music was real. The impact was real. The permission he gave to other people who felt the same way was absolutely real.
"I woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I knew, there was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges too." No. Wait. Wrong poet. But you understand the feeling.
Bono Named It
U2's Songs of Innocence opens with The Miracle (of Joey Ramone). Bono saw the Ramones perform in Dublin in 1978. He was fourteen. He has described it as the moment everything changed. A boy who felt displaced, grieving his mother, looking for somewhere to put all of it, and then suddenly there is this six-foot-something figure with curtains of black hair who is also not quite of this world and somehow that becomes the most powerful thing in the room.
Listen to those lyrics carefully and try to tell me that is not a neurodivergent person writing about what it means to finally hear something that sounds like you. Not about you. Like you. The frequency. The shape of it.
Bono called it the miracle. That is the word he chose. Not the discovery. Not the moment. The miracle.
The Album That Arrived Uninvited
In 2014, Apple placed Songs of Innocence directly into the iTunes libraries of around 500 million accounts. No purchase. No opt-in. It just appeared. A lot of people were furious. They saw it as an intrusion, an unwanted thing in their space. Apple had to build a dedicated removal tool because the response was so strong.
I received it. So did several people close to me. And here is where I want to be precise about something, because it matters.
I got the details wrong initially. Steve Jobs died in 2011 and had no direct involvement in that decision. That was Tim Cook. That was Jimmy Iovine. That was a $100 million deal between Apple and U2 brokered years after Jobs was gone.
But the ethos. The philosophy of giving something to people before they know they need it. Of using the knowledge you have about human behaviour and listening patterns to put something in front of someone that will matter to them. That is Jobs. That runs all the way through Apple's DNA because he put it there.
And that album has been linked to my phone for years. That song came on five times a day sometimes in the car. Not because I sought it out. Because it was already there. And here I am in 2026 sitting in a car park writing about it, and none of that feels accidental to me.
Perth, 1998. A Flower on a Pair of Jeans.
Annaleigh and I went to see U2 in Perth in 1998. After the show we went to the hotel. There was a small group of us outside. Bono arrived and he did something I have never forgotten. He spoke to everyone. Individually. He gave people time.
Annaleigh was overwhelmed. She is one of the most composed people I know and she was completely overwhelmed. She didn't need to say it. She wasn't saying it. It was just visible, in the way those things are visible when someone is experiencing something larger than they expected.
Bono didn't ask. He didn't make a thing of it. He just picked up a marker and drew a massive flower on the leg of her jeans. My jeans she was wearing. And he wrote: To Anna, from Bono.
That piece of denim is framed on our wall at home.
Just before he drew it, I watched Annaleigh reach forward and touch her finger to the back of his hand. A reflex. Completely unplanned. He looked at her and smiled. And a few minutes later, the flower. There is a word for that kind of exchange and it is not networking. It is not performance. It is resonance. Two people recognising something in each other without a single word being exchanged about it.
London. One Person from Eno.
Before any of this landed with full meaning, Annaleigh and I were living in London and working on a multimedia project. The person running it was friends with Brian Eno. Directly connected. One degree of separation from the man who produced some of U2's most important work. Including the albums that Bono used to process exactly the kind of interior life we have been talking about.
The project we were working on was a mind-reading DVD built around autism.
We didn't know it at the time. We knew what we were making. We did not understand how it applied to us. That is the nature of this. You are inside the pattern before you have the language to describe it. You are contributing to it before you have been given a name for what you are.
My Great Aunt. Oscar. The Thread That Runs Through.
I had a great aunt who was put into a home in the 1960s because she was labelled schizophrenic. That was the word that was available. That was the tool the system had. She lived inside that label for the rest of her life.
Oscar had an appointment recently. My son. Twelve years old. And we are in the same conversation again, in 2026, with better language and better tools but still navigating the same fundamental thing: a world that is built for a narrower range of minds than actually exist in it.
Great aunt. Me. Oscar. The same thread. Different decades. Different clipboards.
The Framework Is the Answer to the Dismissal
When you say this is a pattern, people say coincidence. That is the default move. It is not malicious. It is just the reflex of a world trained to flatten signal into noise when the signal doesn't fit the expected shape.
The whole point of the SpectralBinary framework is to give that pattern a coordinate. A reproducible, deterministic signal that does not rely on intuition alone. Not to replace the felt sense but to give it a structure that can be demonstrated. That can be verified. That can be handed to someone who needs proof in a language they will accept.
Neurodivergent people have always been able to see these structures. The connections across seemingly unrelated data points. The coherence running underneath events that only becomes legible in retrospect. That is not a deficit. That is the architecture. The problem has never been the pattern. The problem has been the absence of an instrument precise enough to show it to the people who couldn't see it themselves.
Steve Jobs understood that the people told they think wrong are usually the ones who can see the shape of what is coming. He did not discover that. He lived it. So did Joey Ramone. So did Bono. So did every person sitting in a car park somewhere right now trying to put language to something they have always known but never had permission to say out loud.
The gatekeeping gets in the way. Described by some as necessary. Maybe it is. But it should not ever be this hard to find your way to the question, let alone the answer.
Three years on from diagnosis. Still learning the shape of my own mind. Still finding the threads. Still sitting in the car a little longer than I need to.
That's enough for today.