Working Pieces: When ADHD Goes to Work: A Memoir About Pesola Bikes, Email Graveyards, and Learning to Build a Career with the Wrong Operating System

Twenty-six years in the same job. From the outside: a psychologist with her own practice, helping people, making a difference. From the inside: two and a half decades of white-knuckling through paperwork she couldn't make herself do, missing deadlines she cared desperately about, and masking her chaos so well that even she couldn't see it. Then, at fifty, Melanie du Preez was diagnosed with ADHD — and her entire professional history suddenly made horrifying sense. Working Pieces is an honest, funny, unsparing account of what work actually looks like when your brain runs on interest instead of importance. The meetings that could have been emails. The inbox where good intentions go to die. The deadlines that only get met when panic finally floods the system. The exhausting performance of appearing neurotypical while your admin quietly collapses behind closed cupboard doors. This isn't a book about crushing it in your career. No superpowers here — just a clinical psychologist telling the truth about being genuinely good at her job while being terrible at having a job, and the systems she built to survive anyway. For every professional woman who has sat through a performance review hearing "not living up to your potential" and wanted to scream: your potential was never the problem. The system was just never designed for brains like ours. Book 3 in The Jigsaw Mind Series.