Personal update / Reforge giveaway winner 🎉

Apr 26, 2024

**This post is presented by Zeda.io:** Give your team Product Ops superpowers!

man standing on glass wall with pouring water — Photo by Samuel Austin on Unsplash

Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway!

Before I get to the announcement of who is the lucky winner, I want to say a massive thanks to you all for your ongoing support.

Whether it’s your words of gratitude and appreciation, your comments on my posts, your likes, restacks and shares of my work - it all makes a bigger difference than you know.

I’m going to share something with you that has been hard for me to talk about.

The past few months have been - to say the least - challenging on the personal front.

Our eldest child has been suffering with anxiety, manifesting in severe OCD.

He’s just seven years old.

It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see your child struggling with something like this, and frustrating to not have answers at hand to be able to help him.

As an advisor, I’m used to being able to apply all my knowledge and experience to any given product, growth or go-to-market challenge. Yet here I’ve felt completely out of my depth. I’ve felt lost, helpless, and often, quite frankly, useless.

And throughout this, my wife and I have suspected there’s been more to it than just anxiety.

For the last month he has been undergoing an assessment by a team of clinical psychologists and occupational therapists, and today, just a couple of hours ago, we’ve had confirmation of a dual diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

We have been doing everything we possibly can to support him, and his younger sister - who is absolutely affected by everything that’s going on - while trying to learn everything we can about autism, ADHD, OCD and various other subjects related to children’s mental health.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve felt that I’ve failed my kids and family throughout this.

At times, I’ve been overwhelmed with guilt over it all.

We’ve all shed a lot of tears.

Yet there have been amazing moments too. Over the recent school break he and I spent a lot of time together learning how to solve the Rubiks cube. We both learnt to do it, but already he can solve a cube much faster than I can, and he’s decided that ‘when he grows up’ he wants to be a speed cuber and become the next CEO of ‘The Cubicle’.

We’ve become closer as a family because of everything that’s been happening, and for that I’m grateful, despite how difficult it’s been, and continues to be.

As parents, we can’t give up, however hard it gets. We try to fill their lives with as much joy and love as we can. Every day, we’re trying to find ways to make things feel more normal. But ultimately our normal is going to be quite different to families with neurotypical kids. And that’s OK. That’s just us.

Now we have a formal diagnosis I feel some comfort and relief. It will hopefully feel like less of a guessing game trying to understand things, and we’ll be better able to access support for him, and for our family.

By nature I’m a deeply private person, and it’s unlike me to share something so personal, even with people I’m close with. As I started writing about our situation, I was still undecided whether I’d include it in this post. But just getting all of this out of my head and down on the page has helped me.

And you’re reading this now because as I contemplated, I was reminded of how alone I’ve felt in the past few months trying to wrap my head around everything that’s been going on while searching for, trying, and more often than not failing with ways to help him and our family better manage the situation.

If this post helps just one person, now or any time in the future feel just a little bit better about a similar situation they might be going through, then it will be worth me putting it out there.

With love and thanks to you all for the support and added motivation that gets me writing, even when I really don’t feel like writing.

Ben 🫶