Jesse T. Mills — About

I'm 50.
Here's what that looks like.

ADHD Is Not A Disorder. It's A Superpower.

My name is Jesse Mills. I'm 50 years old and I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was 48. Looking back on my life, though — it shows. School wasn't easy for me, but not because I couldn't keep up. It was because I was bored. I've been working since I can remember. That part I was always good at.

My first real job was McDonald's, full time, with side work at another fast food place, Fashion Bug, and bouncing at a bar. When McDonald's wanted to promote me I got my GED. Then I did Hamburger University. I was there for years. One day I decided I was going to be a smokejumper, so I quit, went to Job Corps, went through their forestry program, and became a Hotshot. Loved it. Joined an engine crew in North Carolina. Got bitten by a cottonmouth. Went home to heal.

That's when the backpacking started. I met a Navajo girl who'd been adopted and didn't know her heritage, so we traveled to Arizona together so she could learn. We ended up living in a shack in the desert outside of Tuba City, tending sheep for a family. When she got pregnant I decided it was time to get serious. Our baby didn't survive her. That loss put me in a spiral that eventually landed me in jail for an extended stretch.

When I got out I went to live with family in California and enrolled at the Art Institute of San Francisco. Did well. Didn't finish — money ran out. Moved back to Washington. Took jobs remodeling Walmarts, stocking nights — bored out of my mind — then quit and went to work at a plywood mill. Then I joined a church, became Catholic, and that took me to World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany.

I didn't go home from there.

I had no money and no plan. I backpacked across Europe staying in churches and monasteries. In Lourdes, France, someone told me about the Camino de Santiago. I started walking the next day.

When I finished the pilgrimage someone handed me a plane ticket to England. I stayed in a monastery. From there I was given a ticket to Israel, where I met the woman who would become my wife. We traveled to Egypt, came back to Israel, then she flew home to the States — and found out she was pregnant. I followed. I lost that child too.

We moved to Washington. I got a job building yachts at Westport. My first child was born in Port Angeles. We moved back to Pennsylvania so she could be close to her family. I married her. We had six kids together over the next twenty years.

In between I did what I had to do — painting, satellite dishes, wiring businesses for computers — until I landed full-time work at a pool company. I was a pool tech, got my Class B CDL with tanker and hazmat endorsements for deliveries, and stayed there for seventeen or eighteen years. Didn't love it. But I was the only one working, and my wife wasn't ready to move, so I provided. That's what you do.

We were together twenty years before we separated. Just after that, just before my 50th birthday, I was in a serious car accident. I've been in recovery ever since — housebound in Pennsylvania, two legal cases working their way through the system, and more time to think than I've ever had in my life.

So I'm using it. I have a dream of building Iron Lotus Sanctuary — a permaculture retreat property in Arizona that's been in my head for a while and is starting to get real. And somewhere past all of this is a sailboat and open water. That dream hasn't moved.

The ADHD brain doesn't do straight lines. It never has. But looking back — every detour went somewhere.