I can’t say for certain that every AuDHD person feels this way sometimes, but I will assume some of you can relate.
Today has been one of “those days”.
It’s not even lunch time yet, but I’m already exhausted from the effort of simply inhabiting my own mind.
Over the years, people have complimented me on two main things, my analytical abilities, or my creativity. I tend to fob these compliments off with a casual phrase such as “That’s just my autistic brain kicking in” or “What can I say? The ADHD brain is strong today.”
With autism, I’m hyper-aware of my ability to recall vast amounts of information on a topic I’ve researched with an almost inhuman obsession. With ADHD, I pick up a new obsession every week or so (or return to an old one I’d discarded) like a dopamine-addicted raccoon. With autism, I can see patterns and trends in people’s behaviour and experiences, and apply that to current experiences that I or someone I care about are going through, to better understand their feelings. With ADHD, I can mentally race ahead in a conversation like The Flash on Adderall, trying to see where the conversational path is headed. If the AuDHD is working well that day, I end up pre-empting the emotional peak of the story, and showing empathy for the person that they might not usually expect. With both sides of the brain firing in sync, I’m able to navigate the intricate chaos of life with some semblance of comfort.
Today has not been one of those days.
Today, I’ve been working on a report for a client. I needed to be able to take in vast amounts of new information, and focus it through a single lens, consolidating a thousand words into a single sentence, over and over again. I needed my autistic brain. I needed to examine every word, reviewing each of them from every angle to validate them against everything I knew already, and I needed to do it fast.
My autistic brain didn’t show up. Either that, or my ADHD brain had woken up and immediately jumped up and down on it, in an imitation of the Pixar lamp bouncing the “I” into submission. I mentally screamed for it to wake up and get going, but to no avail. My ADHD then declared war on my ability to focus in a desperate attempt to break free and find more dopamine. Sadly, my work was not giving me the required dosage. I sat re-reading the same page incessantly, waiting for the moment that my autism would kick into gear, ready to devour new information, but found myself unable to focus long enough to understand anything. Try as I might, I could not get to the end of a page without my ADHD frantically trying to find anything else to focus on. It felt like it was actively fighting me, a strategic foe who was desperate to deny me any gain in territory. I was able to make progress, but at a fraction of the speed and agility that I’m used to. Forcing my mind to take in all this data without the grease between the gears had brought it, creaking and groaning, to an exhausted halt.
My ability to focus and take in information about the world around me was gone. The way I perceived reality and the world around me was different to how it was yesterday. It's a very alien feeling to wake up and view the world and the information it contains so differently. I'm sure there is a philosopher somewhere who would argue that it constitutes a separate sense of self - that by viewing the world and your own existence in such a distinct way, you can be a completely different person. To feel like you aren't yourself, and to have no control over when you return to your regularly scheduled programming, can feel debilitating.
What can I do?
The same as any of us, I guess. I just have to find a way to bring it back to balance, in whatever way it needs today. So, once I’m done writing this, I will heat up some lunch, watch something mindless on YouTube to slow down and try to let the system reboot in the background, and take my dogs for a walk. It might work, but it just as easily might not. And it’s that uncertainty that is one of the hallmarks of being neurodivergent, in my experience.
We just have to live every day, not knowing how we will be existing that day until it happens.
J.P. Shaw
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