Wolf Alice on loop, a week of washing, a dog who has been telling me something for eight years, and a London edit suite I did not understand until twenty years later.

I was outside hanging a week's worth of washing on the line. AirPods in, listening to a single track on loop. Wolf Alice, Wild Horses. As I worked my way through the never-ending pile, I found myself thinking, how the hell could Oscar dirty so many pairs of socks in five days? Underpants count less than half. Something was out of balance.

And then it landed. The dog.

Barney's hallway laps

Barney has been doing his hallway laps three or four nights this past week. Whimpering, crying, dragging his toenails across the wooden floor at 9pm, 10:30, 11:45, 1am. One of those nights I was up late working through a debugging run on the SpectralBinary benchmark corpus, and there he was, walking the hallway with a pair of Oscar's underpants held gently in his bite. His tone is usually a giveaway. This week was no exception.

If you ask him what is wrong, he stops, stares with a forlorn expression, gently lowers his chin, and slowly releases his grip on the pants. He takes one tiny step back. Maybe one and a half. Looks at the pants. Looks at you. Looks at the pants. Looks at you. Waits for the predictable next move, which is you taking the pants away and putting them in the wash.

This has been the pattern since pretty much day one. Barney is eight. We brought him home with a small knitted teddy he had been gifted, and he has done the same thing with that teddy from the first week he arrived. He still has it. Or rather, he still has the threads of it, because if we do not catch him chewing it he keeps going until there is almost nothing left.

The word

I bring this up because of the lyrics of the track I had been listening to, and how those lyrics reminded me of a word that arrived in my vocabulary about two years ago. The word arrived with weight. Before I had ever been told its definition or read the literature, I knew exactly what it meant.

Alexithymia. Emotional blindness. Difficulty in identifying, describing, and processing one's own felt emotions.

Watching Barney pace the house at 1am, I find myself wondering whether this is what is happening for him too. Whether he is wandering with a pair of underpants in his mouth and does not really know why. Whether it is the salty crotch (although, dogs) or whether he is still longing for the family he was separated from at four months old. Whether or not the word applies to a dog in any clinical sense barely matters. The functional similarity is what landed.

And then I thought about myself. About the year before that word arrived in my vocabulary, which was the year after my ADHD diagnosis. And I thought, well, fuck me Troy, you travelled a long way through life with that very thing going on and no language for it.

The dog has not fallen very far from the metaphorical tree.

The edit suite, twenty years on

What makes this even more remarkable, at least to me, is something that happened in the early 2000s. My wife and I were in London, working on a new media project for a production company. The project was sponsored by Cambridge University. The lead practitioner advising on it, the world-renowned researcher then and still now, was Simon Baron-Cohen.

One of my jobs was to look through the rushes. Tens of thousands of clips. The brief was simple. Take a target image or piece of footage. Go through this container of images and film. Find others that match it. Put them in a candidates bucket. Send the rest to scrap.

I would do that for days and days in a row. And I would think to myself, they all look the fucking same. How can anyone tell any difference between them at all?

In the beginning I asked. Then I got to a point where I thought, you cannot keep asking the same question over and over again, that is embarrassing, just get on with it. So I went internal. I beat myself up in my own head and I delivered the best I could, and I never told anyone the work had been hard. I still do not know whether the footage I selected ended up in the final cut.

The project was a DVD designed to help people on the autism spectrum recognise emotions in others.

I was working on a tool for people who could not read faces, doing a face-reading task, getting it wrong in private, and not knowing that was what I was doing or why.

Twenty years before the word alexithymia arrived in my vocabulary. Twenty years before the ADHD diagnosis. The project I could not perform on, by hand, was being built for the version of me I did not yet know I was.

That detail took two decades to land properly. It landed on a Saturday morning at the washing line with Wolf Alice on loop and the dog still asleep in the hallway after his third night of underpants smuggling.

The queue

Here is the thing about the medical health system right now. It is overburdened. Getting access to anyone is an absolute privilege, and the waitlists are as long as wealth. The people not yet in the queue are stuck. The people in the queue are also stuck, because once you are in, the process itself becomes the next obstacle.

You eventually get a diagnosis, maybe. You see your psychiatrist or your psychologist or your GP. You navigate appointments. And here is where it gets quietly absurd. The system diagnosing you for ADHD, or autism, or both, expects you to be highly organised about it. Show up on time. Track your appointments. Respond to confirmation emails. Pay invoices on receipt. Schedule the next session four weeks out and remember to attend.

Anyone who knows ADHD or its overlap with autism knows that organisation is not the home turf. Our lives do not run the way other lives run. What looks chaotic from the outside is the texture of how we navigate. So you forget appointments. You double-book yourself. You realise the four-week gap is too long. And you keep paying $300 an hour, sometimes more, to professionals who are themselves stretched and queueing.

I could not afford to keep funnelling money into that loop, and even if I could, the loop was not built for the way I move through time.

Building what was not there

So I started building digital tools. The very thing the system tells you not to put any faith in. The very thing you are warned about for being unreliable, ungrounded, hallucinatory.

I plugged the tools into AI. Different engines for different jobs. The product suite I have been building runs a number of specific detectors, each with its own configuration about which AI engine it speaks to and why. I have been working on those tools for going on two and a bit years now. Without them I would still be on struggle street. Still crawling, still not learning anything about myself at the pace I knew I needed.

Being impulsive and hyperactive both externally and internally, I needed answers and I needed them now. I could not wait. The beauty of AI is that it can move at the speed of a hyperactive mind. The downside is that, used carelessly, it can send you down a wild goose chase. It can have you believe a long list of things about yourself simply because your mind led the conversation in that direction and the model agreed with you. The models have got better at refusing those kinds of conversations. They flatten them now, mostly. Not always.

I have been tuned into that risk the whole way along. And it is from that awareness that the filters were built.

Signal, not noise

The instruments inside the suite exist to separate noise from what sounds more like an honest story. To do exactly the kind of matching work I failed at in that London edit suite, but with sharper pencils and tools that can do the sorting deterministically rather than by inherited pattern recognition I could not trust.

The bureaucratic shape of the medical system, the noise of self-doubt, the wild goose chases AI will follow if you let it, the slow drift of model agreement when you most need a model to push back. All of those are signal-to-noise problems. The tools I have been building are signal-to-noise instruments.

These tools have not replaced the work I do with the medical professionals I see. They are supplementary. They run alongside. They fill the four-week gaps and they ask me harder questions on the days no one is available to. They help me arrive at appointments with sharper observations of my own state. They make me a better witness to myself.

The thing I can say with reasonable confidence today is that I understand what is happening inside me more clearly than I ever have. I have always been able to see it in others. What is new is that I can articulate it now. And I can articulate it inside myself.

If those tools brought me here, and I have watched them do exactly that, then the next thought is the obvious one. They might bring someone else somewhere too.

Barney is still asleep in the hallway. The washing is on the line. Wolf Alice is still on loop in the AirPods. And I am thinking about the word that arrived with weight, and the dog who has been telling me something I now have language for, and the version of myself in a London edit suite in 2002 who did not yet know what he was carrying.

He got there in the end. I got him here.