Romi was built by people who have ADHD

Josh's story

1. Age 10

   Diagnosed, and none the wiser

   I was diagnosed with ADHD at 10. Being diagnosed and understanding what it meant turned out to be two completely different things, and for years I only had the first one.

2. School

   The problem child

   I was kicked out of more than ten schools. Nobody around me had the language for what was happening, so I got the one that was available: difficult, disruptive, the problem child. That becomes your identity when you hear it often enough, and I started living up to it and hanging around with the wrong crowd.

3. Age 15

   Deciding to actually find out

   At 15 I decided I wanted to know what ADHD really was, and what it was actually doing to me. Not the assembly-hall version. The real thing.

4. The obsession

   Reading everything, testing it on myself

   I became obsessed with it. I read the science and then used myself as the experiment, changing one thing at a time and watching what happened. The changes were drastic. Not because I had found a trick, but because for the first time I was working with my brain instead of against it.

5. After 10+ years

   Coming off medication

   Eventually I came off medication after more than ten years on it. That was only possible because by then I had built the scaffolding around my life to hold the things it used to hold. Medication is not a failure and coming off it is not a victory. It just stopped being the thing I needed.

6. University

   Building the thing I wished I'd had

   At university I built systems for myself, first as simple Notion templates. I shared them with friends, and it turned out plenty of other people needed the same scaffolding I did and had no idea where to start. That is the whole reason Romi exists. I had eight years and an obsession to work this out. Most people get neither.

That is the reason Romi is built the way it is: to be the scaffolding, so that understanding your own brain is not a decade-long research project you have to run alone. The longer version of the story is here.