The hospital room smelled of disinfectant and stale coffee. Machines beeped rhythmically in the background while fluorescent lights cast harsh shadows across my dad's gaunt face. He was always cold now, constantly asking the nurses to bring more heated blankets. The IV line snaked from his thin arm, and he was shivering despite being buried under layers of hospital linens.

I had flown across the country from California to Boston, carrying with me what I thought was the perfect solution. Standing beside his bed, I leaned in close and said what I believed would bring him peace: "Dad, you have enough art now. You could sell some pieces, pay for your hospital bills, cover your living expenses. You don't have to worry anymore."

That's when he reached out from beneath those blankets with surprising strength, grabbed my arm, and looked directly through my eyes into my soul.

"You don't understand," he said, his voice barely above a whisper but filled with desperate intensity. "I HAVE to create art."

The words hit me like a katana through my gut. But it was more than that—in that moment, I saw something I had never seen before. His eyes lit up with a clarity and intensity that made him more animated than I'd seen him in months. He postured forward, almost sitting up, fueled by something larger than his failing body, something bigger than himself. I understood then that he felt he had a personal legend to fulfill, a purpose that transcended everything else—even his own survival.

In that shared moment of understanding, we both knew there was no talking him out of this. His creative fire wasn't just passion…it was his reason for being, his connection to something eternal. And he was going to chase it until his very last breath, no matter the cost. I managed to hold it together just long enough to walk out of that sterile room before breaking down completely.

That was the last coherent conversation I ever had with my dad, Mark Young.

It wasn't directly being twice-exceptional (2e) that killed my dad…it was living as a 2e person in a world that didn't understand or affirm his neurodiversity, never equipped him with the skills to understand himself, and constantly pushed him toward conformity instead of celebrating his unique gifts. And if you're reading this, chances are you know a brilliant, creative, neurodivergent person who might be heading down the same path.

As Father's Day approaches, I find myself thinking deeply about my dad and the lessons his life taught me. He was born in 1947, a baby boomer who grew up in Washington DC during the Cold War, when conformity was everything and difference was dangerous. Look through any photo album of his life, from childhood through adulthood, and you'll see the same thing in every single picture: he's creating, playing, dreaming, or inventing. Always making art with his hands while his mind wandered to places the rest of us couldn't follow.

In every childhood photograph, someone is holding his hands by his side while he stares off at something else entirely, lost in his own brilliant world. He had dyslexia, anxiety, and ADHD, but this was the 1950s. They didn't have names for what made him different…they just knew he didn't fit. So they sent him to military school, trying to force his square-peg genius into their round-hole world.

He was twice-exceptional before anyone knew what that meant. Gifted beyond measure, struggling in ways that no one understood. His life became a series of extreme highs and devastating lows. He would disappear into his art for months at a time, working on a single piece for nine months straight, barely sleeping, completely consumed by the creative fire that burned inside him. Then he'd crash into periods where he could only sketch in books, feeling like he couldn't produce anything worthy, desperately seeking materials for the next obsession.

We never had the big picture perspective to understand what we were witnessing. My sister Meghan and I saw these behaviors in isolation: the inability to hold a job, the brilliant bursts of creativity followed by complete burnout, the funny stories and infectious energy, and, later, the way he always needed someone else to handle the practical parts of life.

My dad’s dyslexia meant that traditional writing was a challenge, so he developed his own communication style. It was a mix of box letters in all capitals with a Sharpie and doodles that became his artistic signature. He adapted, best he could, using typewriters for official forms and creating visual solutions where others used words.

He'd discovered that a little sugar helped him focus. His signature, candy in every pocket. Atomic fireballs were his favorite. I can taste those cinnamon candies right now as I write this. He always reached into his pocket, digging around looking for something, would grab a fireball, realize it, smile and say” fireball?”, in this silly voice that always made you smirk and say yes. Sometimes they'd been through the washer and dryer so many times they'd become sticky, misshapen lumps, but he'd still eat them.

Mark could see trends that nobody else saw, connecting dots at such a high level that it seemed almost mystical. He was incredibly charming. He had such conviction and passion about his ideas that people just followed him around, wanting to get into whatever he was into. When he would move to new places, it was almost like he had disciples who would follow him, drawn to be part of his energy and vision.

He genuinely touched and inspired people throughout his life. When his best friend's son heard about my dad's passing, he wrote a poem that began:

"Despite my shortcomings, He did what he could. We worked amongst pencils, saws, shavings of wood... His patience unwavering, never redacted. He was never afraid of what others thought. He went on his own way and struggled and sought to bring each brilliant piece from his mind to the light... He shaped me as if I was one of his suns. His work will live on as it touched everyone."

In another poem, the same young man wrote about how Mark

"filled all of its rooms with whatever he saw potential in... made use of my eagerness to learn and work and helped me grow and develop skills he thought essential... He made my youth comfortable while maturing me at the same time... I hold that blue house and the man inside dear and close to my heart for sculpting me into who I am today."

My pops married young. He first married his high school sweetheart, but that didn't last long. Then he met my mother, and they were married for 25 years. My dad was one of the most complex and difficult people in the world. My mom is the most amazing human on earth for committing so much of her life to trying to help him. She stuck by him when no one else would. He was both an incredible force of passion and personality AND draining for those around him. He was demanding. Through it all, my mom worked tirelessly to balance him and parent my sister and in all the ways that he could not.

When I got older, my dad and I would talk about relationships, love, and dating, as any boy and his father might. He would always say he was better when he was with someone because it kept him home, kept him focused, and kept him out of trouble. But I think the truth is that he was depending on partners because he couldn't really care for himself in the ways that daily life demanded.

When my mother first met him, he was living in a five- bedroom, four-story Victorian house in Northwest DC, that perfectly captured the beautiful chaos of his mind. He was sleeping on a sofa in the living room while the master bedroom housed an 1800s German sleigh that he was restoring. This was the kind of life my dad led: art in the master bedroom, basic survival relegated to whatever space was left over. My mother became the force that organized his brilliant chaos, paid the bills, made sure he ate regularly, and reminded him of appointments. She was the scaffolding that allowed his artistic vision to become reality while he poured his soul into creating beauty.

When my parents divorced in 2007, he immediately started dating someone else. For twelve years, this woman attempted to provide support and structure for him. But when COVID hit and they broke up, the scaffolding of his life collapsed completely. Without someone to regulate his daily existence, he was lost. It was the first time in his adult life that he was alone. That’s when things got bad. That's when the end began.

My dad was a true inventor. He created the original bagel slicer—not the one with the guillotine blade, but a lucite one with a cutout and two studs to hold the bagel in place. He sold it to Kraft, and he created the "Bagel Slicer” and “Bagel Butler" combo because Kraft owns Philadelphia cream cheese. He made enough money to buy three BMW, fund a construction company, and try to get into business like his father and his grandfather. Years later, he was broke.

This was the pattern of his entire life: brilliant creation followed by wild success followed by complete sabotage, because he never learned the executive function skills to sustain what he built. He didn't know how to organize a business, manage finances, or maintain the boring but essential structures that keep creative enterprises alive.

He came from a long line of neurodivergent minds, though no one had that language then. My grandfather was a photographer who became an architect and major developer in Washington, DC. It said that my great grandfather invented the first Cinder block. not the figure eight one that you might be thinking, but half of that it was essentially just a square. It's rumored that my great grandfather was in the circle of inventors that once hosted Thomas Edison at one of their meetings, when he was on a trip to DC. There was a clear genetic pattern, but no understanding, no support, no roadmap for how to harness these powerful brains without being destroyed by them. My Great grandfather and grandfather got on fine, but my father did not.

For years, I’ve spoken at conferences and done keynote talks about twice-exceptional children. I'd stand on stages and tell audiences that for 2e brains, creating in their zone of genius is like oxygen, you can't skip breathing and make up for it later. We must create regularly, or we suffocate. I thought I understood this intellectually.

But I didn't truly comprehend the life-or-death nature of this need until that moment in the hospital room.

My dad was obsessed with getting his collection together, creating a comprehensive archive of his life's work. We had layers upon layers of his creative journey: paintings from the 1950s when he was a boy, his Lucite work and custom furniture, planters and garden pieces, 20-foot-tall metal sculptures, fountains, and his signature metal sun faces.

Each piece represented a different chapter of his creative journey, and he needed to have it all catalogued and preserved together. It wasn't about money or fame. It was about meaning, about proving to himself and the world that his life had purpose, that all the chaos and struggle had been worth something.

We later found out that in the last couple years of his life, my dad would check himself out of the hospital against medical advice because he had to get back to his art. The doctors would explain what he needed to do to save his life, but he couldn't hear their words. All he heard was that they wanted him to stop creating, and for him, that was the same as asking him to stop breathing.

Even in his last days, after being in a medically-induced coma with a breathing tube, doctors said he'd never speak again. After a long day, my wife and I left and my sister Megan stayed with him. Soon after he woke up, he immediately started attempting to tell stories. He could only speak in a whisper because his voice was failing him. He grabbed whatever medical papers We're around him, flipped them over, and began faintly whispering and manically writing and drawing about Native American vision quests, Crazy Horse, about the sacred importance of creation and legacy. His mind, even as his body was failing, was still spinning stories about art and meaning and the deep human need to make something beautiful that lasts. Megan still has those drawings and stories on paper.

I watched this brilliant, chaotic, beautiful man go from financial success and creative achievement to living in difficult circumstances, struggling to care for himself. The trajectory didn't have to be so devastating. If he had just had proper executive function support, if someone had taught him systems for managing the practical aspects of life while honoring his creative genius, if the world had understood neurodivergence when he was young, he could have lived blissfully.

He didn't need to die at 75, alone and obsessed, checking himself out of hospitals because his art felt more important than his heartbeat.

His life was complex, and he had burned many bridges over the years through his beautiful chaos. But when he passed, the people who had immediate breakdowns were those who interacted with him day-to-day at arm's length. People like the bank teller who had one of his sculptures on her desk, the neighbor downstairs who told me through tears that he was "the brightest sunshine in this building, lighting up my face every single day." It was the grocery store workers he made little paintings for, the strangers whose lives he touched with his enormous capacity for seeing beauty and connection everywhere he looked.

Growing up, my dad would always say to me that it's so easy to make people's day and that you should always work to do that for others. In many ways, it's for that reason that so many people were affected by his passing. It was the people at arm's length who interacted with him in smaller capacities that felt like the sun had been extinguished. People closer to him had struggled with him for a long time and it was a more complex experience.

Where he went, he wore a name tag in the shape of an artist’s thumbhole pallet that said his name on because creativity was so central to his identity that he needed the world to know who he was. But he also needed that same world to take care of him in ways he could never take care of himself. At the end of his life, he had an incredible case manager named Liz who cared for him and his best friend Joe, who became this grounding force. Joe loved my father like a son. He would visit him weekly and care for him. Joe stepped in like no other to provide the support he desperately needed. My sister and I consider him family and know that he kept my father alive for years longer than he could have done so himself.

When Meghan, my sister, and I inherited his massive collection, I understood the weight of his obsession. Every statue had a story, every piece was either an heirloom or a key part of his artistic legacy. He had made up voices and personas for different objects, turning his entire apartment into a living narrative. That's how his mind worked. Everything was connected, everything had meaning, everything was part of a larger story about creativity and human connection.

I tried desperately to honor his dream. I called museums, art galleries, and collectors. I found a beautiful soul named Jay Block at Bridgewater State University who took a set of pieces and curated a permanent installation in my father's memory at the school. Jay made my dad's dying wish and lifelong dream come true, at least in part. I think there's a part of my dad who might be looking down, probably disappointed that he didn't end up in one of the big museums or galleries he always dreamed of. But I hope he knows that we tried to honor him and we did the best we could with what we had.

But there was so much more…decades of work that I couldn't save. I had to get back to California, back to my wife, back to Young Scholars Academy. Emotionally, I was drained after spending nearly 6 weeks by his side through this journey and trying to keep Young Scholars Academy afloat. Not to mention that we were coming up on a deadline because the first of the month was coming up. Needless to say, I couldn't be there when they cleared out his apartment… Knowing that his life's work, the very art both made him whole and that killed him… the work that he'd spent my whole life telling me stories about, was going to end up in a dumpster. It made me sick. It still bothers me when I see the pieces I was able to salvage, because I know I could have done better.

But here's what I learned from watching my dad's creative, precious mind and complex life: twice-exceptional people are not broken. They're not less than. They're beautifully, powerfully different, with gifts that can change the world. AND they need support systems that honor both their strengths and their struggles.

They need executive function skills taught with the same intensity that we teach reading or math. They need people who understand that their creative obsessions aren't luxuries…they're necessities.

WE need systems that work during both our productive periods and our recovery phases. We need to understand our own neurodivergence so we can advocate for what we need.

Most importantly, we need a world that sees our asynchronous development not as something to fix, but as something to support and celebrate.

I say WE because the truth of the matter is that I'm not so different from my dad. I'm a twice exceptional individual from a long lineage of bright, quirky inventors.

The biggest difference is that I grew up in a more supportive time with a mother who helped me get the reading interventions that I needed and the executive function support that's helped me to get by. That’s it. Time, affirmation, love, and support.

When my dad grabbed my arm in that hospital room and said "You don't understand, I HAVE to create art," he was telling me the most important truth about twice-exceptional minds: our areas of genius aren't just talents or hobbies. They're essential to our survival, as necessary as breathing.

Our job isn't to change these beautiful, young minds or force them into conventional molds. Our job is to build the scaffolding around them that allows their genius to flourish without destroying their lives.

Lack of executive function skills and an overly narrow obsession killed my dad…

But they don't have to kill the brilliant, creative, neurodivergent people in your life

What really killed him wasn't his twice-exceptional brain, but our failure as a society to support it.

We deserve better. 2e children deserve to create, to thrive, to live long enough to see their gifts change the world.

Being Twice-Exceptional Killed My Dad

Feeding the Exceptional Brain: Nutritional Strategies for Twice-Exceptional Children