Apparently this week was neurodiversity celebration week with the rather charming tagline "celebrating different minds". Last year I made reference to being diagnosed with Autism and ADHD and this week seems like a good opportunity to write a little about what it's like.
First, the important caveats. I'm not medically trained so I'm writing from my own experiences and reading. Also, different forms of neurodivergence have very different impacts on people's lives and many exist on their own spectrums - my experience with autism may well be very different from another's.
I'm not going to draw a dividing line between my experiences with ADHD and Autism here. I have both, which seems counterintuitive - you might think they would cancel each other out. They don't. Instead, your brain goes to war with itself. This can result in an outward balance - for example, my need to fidget being cancelled by my need to follow the social rules for not doing that - but inside, it's a constant tug of war between opposing impulses. Most of this is invisible from the outside.
So over time, I have learned how to ride through this. I have always struggled to do things in good time. At school, I would do assignments late in the deadline but then I'd have absolute focus to get it done - or rather, the drive would be to avoid failing. If this sounds stressful, then yes - it is. It has been the same with job applications.
Heavy procrastination in general is something to actively manage. I have to watch myself from a distance and ask pointed questions like "why are you still doing that?" or write deadlines to trigger my desire to not fail. I write daily lists to create this impulse.
My brain needs stimulus. I am very good at not being bored, but anyone who has read this blog for a while will see the posts popping up saying variations of "I am bad at resting". I need to be doing something, learning something, creating something, thinking five thoughts at once... Even while I'm writing this I am jumping to another screen to upgrade a Rails app in the background.
This leads to a very noisy inside life. One experiment mapped the brain activity of a neurodivergent individual vs a neurotypical person doing the same, mundane activities. Where the neurotypical person has nice smooth signals, the neurodivergent person shows signals which look more like a seismograph during an earthquake. This was a very powerful image for me - a picture showing that my internal world is both extremely noisy, and not "the same for everyone".
Much of that links to regulation of dopamine and reward in the brain, and that can lead to all kinds of behaviours. The more obvious are seeking stimulation, which can be very destructive if that leads to drugs or other harmful behaviour - this is a whole separate topic. It can also create other unexpected behaviours. For me, I find I struggle with snacks - I have to avoid keeping them in the house at all else I'll just eat them. For a long time I did not know why, but now I realise this was dopamine-chasing behaviour - in essence, I was inadvertently self-medicating. I also do not really feel the same high from exercise others describe, which makes it a real grind to actually do any. Combine these, and you can guess the effect on my physical health!
At the less destructive ends of the different spectrums, where I am fortunate to be (I think), life carries a lot of friction, but I see it as a series of tradeoffs like my brain is overtuned for some effects. Hyperfocus is a good example of that. Getting lost in a topic completely can be great for learning and progress - a benefit. However, unlike "flow" (something everyone can experience), hyperfocus adds destructive elements - losing track of time and reality to the extent I forget to eat, sleep or ... other functions. Without counterbalance and control, it can create serious problems. The same is true of other traits, such as strong pattern recognition which can progress to the point of overanalysis and over-interpretation, drawing unhelpful conclusions.
Another overtuned trait I experience is noise sensitivity. Like many neurodivergent people, I can hear the whining of electrical devices most people can't and my brain prioritises strange background sounds like electronic beeping of alarms in the distance. This makes me a pretty good sound engineer, and able to find electronic components which are not behaving properly. However, this isn't something I can turn off and the outside world is so very noisy. From distant alarms which crawl under my skin until I can hear nothing else, to feeling agitated in a room most people think is silent, to rooms I find so loud it physically hurts to enter. I had a long period where I had to sleep with all the windows closed because of the whining noise coming from the generator in the basement next door. Their management company had an engineer look at it, and they kept saying (quite correctly, to be fair) that their generator was behaving within normal parameters but that noise entered my brain and would not leave. So I lost sleep for months, while anxiety built and built. This was resolved when the generator failed because the component I could hear across the street died so ... painful vindication.
However all this happens below the surface. If you meet me, you may not notice anything different about me at all. Even if you do, I've managed to navigate the world successfully. Which is where masking comes in. In practice, this is deciding how to show up to different situations (which everyone does to an extent) but like most things here pushed much further than the norm. For me, this practice has been helpful with conforming to different sets of social rules or expectations but does also lead to problems with identity. When am I ever me? Masking, like all the different ways of behaving to fit the norm, is very tiring. It can also go further - prolonged masking can lead to burnout and the loss of sense of identity, along with experiencing dissociative symptoms.
All this can result in a lonely existence. People draw comfort from being around folk who see the world like they do but - put bluntly - we don't get that in mainstream life. This can be very useful - channelled right, a different worldview can challenge norms and drive change - but it is also isolating. I rarely get to relax around people, I'm always putting on a mask for the occasion.
Even writing this is causing some anxiety as I expect someone to say "yeah everyone is like that".
These are just some of my experiences. I've found people often have questions about neurodiversity but don't feel able to ask them. If anything here raises questions, I'm very happy to talk - no question too strange.
