Growing up, I lived one experience and assumed it was the only one. I didn't question how I saw things, how I reacted, how I made sense of the world. I assumed everyone else did it the same way.

Think of a little boy who is colorblind. At first he would never question what he sees. Later he might argue with other kids about whether two things are the same or different. It is not until someone helps him understand that he sees differently that he can understand why the world looks different to him. He is not wrong, and he is not right. He just sees differently.

For most of my life I didn't have a name for what I was living with. Just a suspicion that something was different. A struggle with feeling different, acting differently, reacting with impulsivity and strong emotions. I believed this was just normal, and that belief created a kind of uncertainty about who I really was.

When I was 15 I had a summer job as a post delivery boy in the city hall in Oslo. When I got my first paycheck I went to the nearby sports shop. They had a big climbing section and I was drawn to it without knowing why. I bought a rope, a harness and a figure-eight. Shortly after I was teaching myself to climb on the cliffs overlooking Oslo. No parental guidance or mentoring. Just pure drive to follow my passion.

That was the beginning of a lifelong pull toward extreme sports. The same gear to jump off bridges, once getting stopped by police after being reported. This was just me, I thought. It was a healthy outlet for an internal drive I didn't know how to handle.

Social interaction has always been a challenge, and this combined with discovery of alcohol was a combo made for trouble. It was a cushion for emotional distress, and at the same time, something extreme in itself. The early days where we bought 5 liter cans of moonshine, portioned it out in half liter coke bottles, as rations. These were early signs I didn’t clock, of problematic drinking habits. Alcohol did something to me that I craved. Later in life it became my goto for self-medication.

My colorblindness was not about color. It was about reactions and emotions. I had long suspected something was different, but suspecting is not knowing, and not knowing has a cost.

For some time I had been searching for answers to problems I didn't understand. It was easier to investigate one problem at a time than to try to see the whole picture at once. The colorblind kid might start with just one problem — but left unaddressed, that one problem can lead to many others.

To have someone look at you as a whole person is rare. Mostly what you get is a set of disjointed specialists: one doctor stuck on the depression, another on the alcohol use, another on the ADHD — each one working their own corner, none of them talking to each other. What I've since found is that they are not separate problems at all. They are interconnected, and they need to be addressed together. And this is especially true, when early intervention has failed.

There was only so much I could carry and hold. And at a stage it got too much. It was the international move, starting over. It was the job I had to resign from, and never found my way back to another. It was a divorce that turned high-conflict, my self medicating, and my children being parentally alienated from me — used as leverage to get to me. It was my partner's breast cancer: a double mastectomy, a heavy course of chemotherapy, and even that weaponised by the other households. Any one of these would be hard for anyone. For a brain that was already working without a map, clouded and depressed by alcohol, they didn't add up. They multiplied.

Life doesn't hand you one isolated challenge; it drops an avalanche. ADHD wasn't the storm. It was an important piece in a bigger picture — one part of why I had no structural armor when the storm came.

This next part is about the darkest of those places, which I have visited once before. Never processed, never talked about. Only suppressed and hidden like a shameful event. The realisation that you stand in this, almost like a midlife crisis, and you mostly only have yourself has been hard. If you have been in a very dark place yourself, check in with yourself before reading on.

I don't remember the trigger clearly, but I remember when things escalated. The absolute feeling of loss, that I had nothing to live for. I moved as if by an external force, preparing my undoing. The day was hot and dusty just outside my garage. I sat in my car waiting. The only sound was the humming engine.

I had called someone I loved to say goodbye. I didn't want to be alone. I accepted that this was it, my last minutes. A mix of relief and sadness. I pushed thoughts of other people I loved away, my kids, my parents. It was too difficult to comprehend. It felt like my thinking brain went offline, shut off, shortcutted and disabled. There was no room for more pain.

I got out of the car, confused, searching for something in the garage when I heard cars approaching. My partner had called the police. I had miscalculated. I felt angry at myself. This wasn't the plan.

Then chaos. Uniforms. More people arriving. Being forced to obey when I didn't want to. Being held down and handcuffed, face down. Seeing my dogs above me, I told them how useless they were. It felt like they were the only ones on my side, and still they just couldn’t help. A blur of chaos. My dignity and my worth in pieces. I felt like trash being taken out, locked into a painful position on a stretcher.

Looking back I question the treatment. I wasn’t aggressive or psychotic. I was a broken man who had failed to take his own life, in an act of dark despair. A state of mental confusion. I imagine how it could have panned out differently if they had given me some time to collect myself, some calm voice telling me I was okay, that they understood. It breaks my heart thinking back on this moment.

Then the peace on the ward. The surrender to it. Knowing what would be said and the consequences, but also the quiet space, the bed, the safety of knowing you could do absolutely nothing. Later worry crept in for my dogs. Who was checking on them, feeding them. At that time, they only had me.

This stay was different. There was a psychiatrist there who was engaged. Extremely short on time, but the time she had she spent on the important questionnaires I had completed in advance. Questionnaires meant to uncover how far I was from the standard. The preliminary results were clear. I was most likely living with undiagnosed ADHD.

Over the next several years I tried to get a proper assessment. It was very hard in my situation. Several applications were declined with no clear explanation. I was mostly relying on antidepressants, which was increasingly frustrating because it didn't seem to resolve anything. Eventually, with help from my partner, I got a psychological evaluation. What came back was not surprising, but it was a turning point for how I understood myself. Later, during another hospitalisation, I was told I had BPD after a brief video call. It really felt random.

While a colorblind kid might just mislabel a crayon, not knowing you have ADHD has a structural cost to your life, mental health and relationships. Learning this later creates a grief that is hard to accept. Long suppressed feelings come to the surface, with an understanding of why.

This was the setup for my storm. It came and brought me down. The thing that had kept me going, holding me up, was my kids. My mental health was something that had methodically been used against me and my kids, to erode my self worth, and their view of me. A potent devastating cocktail of coercive control.

When the storm left, so did my pills and my drinking. I stopped my antidepressant and have managed to cut alcohol to almost zero.

I have been dealing with a pounding heart and shallow breathing for almost a year now. My nervous system was acting like a smoke detector that is stuck on high sensitivity, unable to recognize that the fire is out. Underneath the alarm was the actual grief. The crushing ambiguous loss of my children. The mirage of a marriage that I fought for. The grief for my country, my friends, my work, my parents and the lost time. It all came to the surface at once. A debt that needed to be paid back in full with interest.

Writing this is part of my coming home. Trying to heal, and to forgive myself for my thoughts, for the harm I caused myself, and for the stress it caused the people who love me.

Self-discovery can make you more forgiving. It gives you a broader understanding of human differences, the human experience. I see the rough-looking man sitting at the bus stop and I ask myself, how did he end up there? Could that have been me? Seeing yourself in others can trigger something you don't like, but it might be one of the strongest emotional experiences I have had. Having compassion and love for others is freeing and forgiving, and can give the same to you.

It opens the way back home. A home where you want to be, a home where you can be you, and a home where there is room for people you love. Space for you.

It has been a long journey, but I am finally at the door, learning how to unlock it and let myself back in.