Maybe I Was Never Lazy

At 67 years old, I think I’m finally starting to understand myself.

For most of my life, I believed there was something wrong with me. My mother used to call me lazy. My teachers would tell me I had “so much potential if only I applied myself.” I look at the graveyard of business ideas behind me. I was endlessly energized by creating things — new ventures, concepts, experiences, brands, stories. The beginning stages lit me up. But once the excitement settled into structure, maintenance, or repetition, my attention would often wander toward the next fascinating possibility.

For a long time I saw that as a flaw. Now I see it differently. Every abandoned project still left me with skills, stories, relationships, lessons, and creative momentum that shaped who I became.

Sound familiar?

School bored me. Homework almost never got done until the last minute. Not because I didn’t care, but because I couldn’t seem to engage until the pressure became real. Even then, I usually knew enough to get by. Half the time I felt like the teacher was taking forever to explain something my brain had already jumped ahead of.

Looking back, I can also see signs that my brain worked differently very early on. One of my favourite things on family road trips was doing Mensa puzzle books. I loved patterns, problem solving, and figuring things out. My brain seemed to light up when something was challenging or interesting.

The strange contradiction was that while I could spend hours absorbed in puzzles or deep ideas, I struggled with ordinary structure, homework, and repetition. That confused a lot of people around me… including me.

I now realize not everyone experiences life like that.

My mind has always been busy. Constantly. I can have a conversation while simultaneously solving a problem, thinking about lunch, remembering something from twenty years ago, and designing a new project in my head.

Apparently, most people don’t have that many tabs open at once.

I didn’t know that. I had never really considered it.

Oddly enough, this whole thought process and self-realization started because of my doomscrolling through social media.

Funny enough, I think I was scrolling to feed my lack of focus… and accidentally found an explanation for it.

I kept seeing posts about ADHD and the way certain people experience the world, and I found myself quietly thinking: “Wait… that sounds like me.”

The procrastination. The mental noise. The unfinished projects. The nonstop stream of ideas. The impatience with slow conversations or surface-level information. (That last one is a doozy for me.)

I’ve never gone to therapy, and I’ve never been formally diagnosed, so I’m not trying to suddenly label myself at 67 years old.

But for the first time in my life, I started seeing descriptions that made decades of my behavior make a little more sense.

After experiences with ayahuasca and mushrooms, I started seeing my life differently. Not as failure, but as patterns. I began understanding that I may have spent decades trying to force myself into systems that were never designed for the way my mind works.

I love creating things. I love ideas. I love possibility.

But once the excitement of the idea fades, my brain often disconnects. The maintenance part becomes difficult. The emails, paperwork, systems, and follow-through feel heavy.

SQUIRREL!

Then comes the shame.

For years I thought that meant I lacked discipline.

Now I’m beginning to understand I simply have a differently wired mind.

For many years I also used cannabis without fully understanding why it helped me so much. It wasn’t about escaping reality. If anything, it helped me finally arrive in reality.

It quieted the noise.

Without it, my mind can feel like twenty conversations happening at once. Cannabis seemes to slow the traffic enough that I can focus on one lane for a while. Meditation has also helped in a very similar way. Not by shutting my mind off completely, but by creating enough space between thoughts that I no longer feel dragged around by all of them at once. Kundalini yoga has helped with that.

This isn’t a sales pitch for plant medicines or any particular practice. I’m simply acknowledging that I spent years intuitively searching for things that helped me feel calmer, clearer, and more present inside my own mind.

Now I look back with more compassion toward myself instead of judgment.

And maybe that’s the real lesson here.

So many people are walking around believing they are broken because they don’t fit neatly into the expectations of school, work, productivity, or society.

But maybe some of us were never meant for factory settings.

Maybe one of the biggest beliefs worth questioning is the idea that your value as a human being is tied to how productive or organized you are.

Maybe I was never broken.

Maybe I was just built differently.

And after all these years, that realization brings me a strange kind of peace…and perhaps even a little unreasonable happiness.