So, I have my good days and my bad days. This is true of both autism issues and ADHD issues… and they are not on the same cycles. This means that the variance between my good days and my bad days is huge. No, huger than that. I run the range from “I can’t feed myself” to “I just put in six hours and did something that was expected to take three to four weeks”.
A big part of coping with this is support and recognition. One of my friends is autistic, but wasn’t diagnosed until relatively recently. If she couldn’t handle cooking, her parents were dismissive and told her to soldier through it, hoping to toughen her up. Yeah, that doesn’t help. Seriously, some days cooking is too hard. I can’t deal with it. I just need to sit and have my thumpy music. If no one’s around who can make food happen, I probably stay hungry, or eat junk food. (I keep bags of chips to hand in case of such days.)
This kind of thing can be good or bad for jobs. It’s okay at my current job, where they’re generally okay with my long-term average being good. Sure, there’s the occasional day where the sum total of my contribution to our embedded software product is that I played Minecraft a lot. There’s also days where I’m on a roll and I clear up three or four old bugs that were expected to need a day or two each. On average, I understand I’m pretty good. But some days I skip conference calls because I can’t deal with using the phone. It’s… well, it’s different.