The gaps in my résumé are ADHD-shaped

My résumé has three gaps: seven months, four months, and one glorious eleven-month canyon. For years I treated that document like a crime scene that needed cleaning.

Each gap has the same biography. I sprinted at a job with everything I had, burned through reserves nobody could see, and then couldn't get off the couch for a season.

The gaps were not random failures. They were the valleys between hyperfocus peaks.

I used to lie about them, and I was not even good at it. Freelance consulting that never happened. A "sabbatical" that was actually me staring at a wall. Date math so creative it needed its own spreadsheet.

The lying did something worse than risk getting caught. It made me walk into every interview pre-ashamed, defending a version of my life that did not exist.

The gap cost me some months. The shame about the gap cost me the room I was sitting in.

Once, mid-interview, I watched a recruiter do the subtraction on my dates in real time. Her eyebrow did the rest.

The shift came when I stopped asking "how do I hide this" and asked "what does this pattern tell me." Laid out honestly, my work history was not a mess — it was a chart.

• Every valley followed a peak I had sustained way too long.
• Every exit happened at the same point: when the job ran out of novelty.
• Every recovery ended with me sharper about what I actually need.

The pattern was not evidence of a broken worker. It was a spec sheet I had never read.

Now, when a gap comes up, I say one sentence and stop talking: "I took time to recover from burnout, and I came back knowing exactly what conditions I do my best work in." Then I ask about the role.

Interviewers do not interrogate a calm, boring answer. They interrogate a wobbly one, because wobble signals there is more underneath.

The gaps also filter, and I let them now. A workplace that cannot handle an honest gap will not handle my brain on a bad week either.