FIFTH POST

July 7, 2026 · 10:42 PM

Early on in my career in brokerage, I was introduced by some well-meaning managers to the idea of a CLM, or a Career Limiting Move.

A Career Limiting Move is an action you take, that while it might feel extremely good to do — hell, you might even be justified in doing it — will ultimately limit your ability to advance in your career.

I found the idea myopic at the time. While I still think that on a grand scale, it’s something that doesn’t really exist, I do understand that within my local minima of reality there are choices I can make that will cause damage to myself and others, and not allow me to progress forward without great frustration, effort, and broken stuff behind me.

I have been working on my impulse control for years. I am diagnosed by the NCAA as severely ADHD. This means that I was allowed to fail drug tests for my medication, despite being drug tested something like 27 times while I was in college, because the NCAA had actually done the follow up work to test that yep, I am certifiably unable to control my impulses. Literally can’t do it.

To expand on what it means to be called severely ADHD by the NCAA: they put me through rigorous and extensive testing to make sure I could have these sometimes performance enhancing drugs.

For one part of this examination, I was put in a room with no clock. They allegedly forgot to set the timer on the ensuing series of tests. I am pretty sure that is part of the test.

One of the tests the NCAA administers takes place on a computer. You are presented with a black screen. Every second or so, a white letter will appear. Your job is to press the spacebar when you see a letter, any letter, except for the letter X.

During this test, I:

• Asked how much time had elapsed twelve times
• Took my shoes off
• Put them back on
• Hummed twelve different songs
• Asked how long it had been another four times
• Changed position in the chair somewhere between twenty and thirty times
• Hit the X an astounding 97% of the time (that is, I accidentally hit the spacebar 32 of 33 times an X appeared on the screen)

It was so very obvious that this test was a formality that the woman administering it laughed when I was done. She looked at a printout for all of maybe nine seconds, and said that I’d have my results very shortly.

You can see how I may have made some career limiting moves in my lifetime.

These CLMs would be pretty understandable, in light of this information about my brain. Not necessarily excusable. I got (get?) away with a lot because I make up for it in other ways… and besides, there’s really no such thing as that bad of a fuckup. You can always just change careers, shed your life, become a new person, slip on a new identity.

None of it really matters, because all of this is malleable and programmable. It’s nearly resettable. I have done this something like five times.

The recipe for starting over entirely is simple: move to another city, drop your online presence entirely. Or change to a new one. You can log off of one site and find your way into another. There’s literally always another.

It’s even easier IRL than it is digitally. People have posting quirks and soft spots for their online friends and are easily found. People are not so easily found when they straight up disappear and stop posting on all the socials you know them under, tell no one where they went, and never respond to a text or phone call again.

Tonight, I am trying my best not to make another one of those moves. I like this life, this skin, and for the most part, I like this identity. Every time I’ve shifted who I am entirely, it comes at a cost. I said above that these are simple steps to take, but they are not easy, and they are not free. You lose ties along the way, you lose people you held close, you lose a strong sense of self, amongst other things.

But boy, do I have some shit I want to talk right now. Some really good, grade A, eyebrow-raising, shit. It is not worth it. It won’t win me a single thing.

It will be a waste of a battle, a Pyrrhic victory.

I’m doing my absolute best not to write an extremely shitty post that the right (wrong?) people will read. I’m really proud of myself for making it this far without writing the whole thing down, in plain English, for just about anyone to understand. Here’s my dirty laundry everyone! Here’s a look at my inner self, the stuff I keep for me! I’m giving it to you because I’m mad! Surely, I will not regret it this time!

I should be given a treat. I think I deserve a parade for the absolutely Herculean effort it took to tell you about getting tested for ADHD in college instead of talking my shit.

Today, I found some unexplored alpha in getting a hard reservation: I had dinner and drinks at 4:30pm. It was with another new friend, and I really, really enjoyed it. We talked about the hottest takes we could, the fact that we got no less than four spoons each for our meal. We classified and taxonomized so many things. We invented both new types of guy and girl, and then squished every person we could think of into new types. We shared the hottest, scariest takes we could dream up (they weren’t very hot). We had dinner and dessert. There were even hot firefighters that arrived with machetes at one point. It was great. We were out by 6:45.

After that, I decided I do not want to make a career limiting move. This is maybe as close as I will get to that. I said I would try —