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This brain fog is defeating me. It doesn’t help that I am ill and haven’t been sleeping well, but I’m not sure I can really blame either of those for the almost permanent lethargy which afflicts me.

Looking upon myself at my inaction and disengagement, I can’t help but recall that this has been my default state for as long as I remember. I just can’t motivate myself to focus and get on.

I’m no different from the kid in the school library in the early 1990s, daydreaming lunchtimes away. Or the undergraduate in the university library, egging his essay on to write itself.

Eventually, as a deadline loomed, I’d kick myself into a flurry of activity, producing my best work yet. Who could forget the lecturer who after reading an essay I had turned in late, literally pleaded me to furnish him with an excuse to give me a First?

Had I had a diagnosis then, perhaps that would have been acceptable. But instead I just had to say, no, sorry. Though I’d put my heart and soul into that essay — and he could see that — I just had to tell the truth, that I had fallen behind on my work.

So to the present, and not much has changed. Once more, I’m staring at my work, begging it to do itself. None of it is challenging in the slightest: mostly they are mundane tasks, well beneath me. A lot of it work that has been upwards delegated, which I have no inclination to touch.

Right now, I feel completely immobile. The burst of activity just a few weeks ago as I put new processes in place and documented them in detail is all forgotten. My heavy, foggy head is back with a vengeance. I’m in a pit.

This is the reality of what we optimistically call chromodiversity. Some advocates want to convince us that it’s not a disorder, but a natural genetic variation. But, no, to me it is a disorder, for it has brought disorder to every facet of my being.

Treatment offers a momentary respite, lasting about six weeks, only to be followed by a horrible crash. That’s where I am right now. Back in that trough, with no perceivable way out. The result? All of this chaotic disorder in my life.