YOU’RE NOT BROKEN, YOU’RE BROADBAND

Twenty Years of Reverse Engineering an ADHD Brain

Mark J. Hubrich

---

WHY LISTEN TO ME

Fair question. Let’s get it out of the way early.

I don’t have a degree in psychology. I’m not a doctor, a therapist, or a certified ADHD coach. I’ve never run a study. No letters after my name, no lab, no practice.

Here’s what I’ve got instead.

Thirty years in structural steel. I started as a fabricator — hands on the metal, cutting and fitting and welding, learning what actually holds and what only looks like it holds. These days I’m a detailer, which means I do the drawings: take something somebody else imagined and work out exactly how it goes together. Every bolt, every connection, every piece, every dimension, so that when the steel shows up on site, it fits. If it doesn’t fit, that’s my name on the drawing.

Navy Pier. Soldier Field. The Washington/Wabash station. Those are standing up right now partly because somebody sat down and worked out how the pieces connect.

That progression is the whole thing, actually. First you build with your hands until you understand the material. Then you learn to see the structure underneath, and write it down clearly enough that someone else can build from it.

I was diagnosed at thirty-two. Before that I was the kid in the hallway, the one who couldn’t follow the program, the guy who kept getting passed along. After that I was a guy with an explanation and no instructions.

So I did the only thing I know how to do. I got my hands on it, and then I reverse engineered it.

Twenty years of running experiments on the one test subject I had access to. What actually works. What’s just advice that sounds good in a book. What works brilliantly for two weeks and then quietly stops. I built my own tools when the existing ones didn’t fit my brain. I kept notes — millions of words of them.

This book is the drawing set.

Not theory. Not what should work. What held up under load.

I’m not going to tell you you’re cured, or that this is easy, or that it’s secretly a gift and everything’s fine. Some of this is genuinely hard and I’m still bad at parts of it. But I found enough that works that I stopped thinking of myself as broken — and I’d like to save you the twenty years it took me.

That’s the credential. I lived it, then I reverse engineered it.

---

A NOTE BEFORE WE START

This book is about meaning, not treatment.

I’m going to spend a lot of pages arguing that the way your mind works is not a defect. I believe that. I’ve lived it. But there’s a whole category of question this book deliberately does not go near, and I want to name it up front rather than let you find out three chapters in.

I’m not going to tell you anything about medication.

Not because it doesn’t matter — it matters enormously — but because I don’t know enough about the science to make claims, and I’m not willing to pretend otherwise. I’m a steel guy who reverse engineered his own brain. That gives me something real to offer about systems, attention, and how to stop treating yourself like a defect. It gives me exactly nothing to offer about neurochemistry.

So here’s my position, and it runs both directions:

I can’t tell you to take medication. I can’t tell you not to. Anybody who tells you either one — including people with a spiritual framework and a confident voice — is going further than what they actually know. Be careful with them. Be careful with me too, on anything I haven’t lived.

What I will say: if something is currently helping you, nothing in this book is a reason to stop it. Not one page. If you’re weighing that decision, weigh it with a clinician who knows your history, not with an author who doesn’t.

Everything I offer here comes from personal experience and twenty years of testing it on myself. That’s the whole warranty. It’s narrower than science and it’s more honest than a lot of what gets sold in this aisle.

Now let’s do the part I actually know something about.

---

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE — THE WOUND

1. The Kid in the Hallway
2. The Diagnosis That Explained Everything and Fixed Nothing
3. The Labeling Trap

PART TWO — THE REFRAME

4. You’re Not Broken, You’re Broadband
5. The Neurodivergent Advantage
6. The Wandering Mind
7. Volunteer Souls
8. Famous Minds

PART THREE — THE PRACTICAL

9. Time Blindness
10. The Dopamine Chapter
11. Emotional Weather
12. Hyperfocus on Purpose
13. Building Systems That Fit

PART FOUR — THE LIFE

14. Relationships
15. Work, and the Job You Don’t Hate
16. Women and ADHD
17. Raising One, Teaching One
18. Across a Lifetime
19. Identity
20. Advocacy, and Finding Your Tribe