Let me ask you something. When you walk from one room to another, do you just… walk there? Empty handed? One trip, one purpose?

I cannot fathom this.

Every time I leave a room, I am conducting a rapid mental inventory of everything that needs to travel with me. Items get stacked, balanced, tucked under arms. My laptop, my tablet, a coffee cup, whatever mail needs to go downstairs, all of it, in one go. Never mind that a stack of electronics teetering precariously might not be the safest approach. The point is efficiency. The point is not wasting a single trip.

This is what it is like to live inside an AuDHD brain that has a complicated, exhausting, and occasionally hilarious relationship with time.

Time Doesn’t Walk. It Runs.

For most people, time is a steady background presence, something that passes at a predictable pace while life happens around it. For me, time is something that is always running out. It moves fast, it slips away, and there is never quite enough of it.

This creates a permanent state of optimization. If I have to go downstairs anyway, I am taking everything with me that belongs downstairs. If I am brushing my teeth, I am also wiping down the sink, maybe dusting the shelf. If I am watching TV in the evening, I am simultaneously playing a game on my tablet, not because I am bored, but because doing both actually helps me focus better than doing either one alone. Distractions, paradoxically, sometimes sharpen my attention.

I don’t know what day of the week it is half the time. Seriously. I have to stop and think about it. But ask me how many things I have accomplished today, and the list will be long enough to make most people tired just reading it. This is why I coined the phrase years ago: *one Carmen week equals one human year.*

I am not saying this to brag. I am saying it because it is genuinely how my brain works, not out of discipline or ambition, but out of an inability to experience time any other way. The engine doesn’t have an off switch.

The Ritual Problem

Here is where it gets interesting, because AuDHD is not just ADHD. The autism side adds another layer entirely: rituals.

My mornings are not flexible. I wake up, go upstairs, brush my teeth, shower, meditate, then open my laptop. In that order. Every day. The structure isn’t optional, it is what allows the rest of the day to function. Without it, something feels fundamentally wrong, like a song missing its opening notes.

But even inside the ritual, the efficiency brain cannot rest. Brushing my teeth is never just brushing my teeth. As I said before, it is brushing my teeth while cleaning the sink, or wiping the mirror, or straightening whatever is out of place. Because standing still for three minutes doing only one thing feels like waste.

The ritual and the efficiency instinct exist side by side, the autism providing the structure, the ADHD filling every available gap within it.

When the Ritual Breaks

The fragility of rituals becomes obvious the moment one gets disrupted.

I used to walk five kilometers every day with my dog Jack. It was non-negotiable, part of the rhythm, part of how I managed my energy and my brain. Then Jack got older and could no longer manage those distances. My other dog, Willow, could, but taking her alone felt wrong, disruptive to the household in the early morning hours. So I stopped. Just like that. The walk disappeared from the ritual and nothing replaced it.

I also used to do yoga every day. Then my circumstances changed, the space where I used to practice was no longer available, and the alternative spaces didn’t work. So that disappeared too.

This is the paradox: I am an efficiency machine, and yet I cannot easily retrofit a broken routine. The ADHD brain that can pivot instantly in some contexts becomes completely rigid when a ritual is broken. It is not laziness. It is not lack of motivation. It is that the brain needs the groove to already exist before it can run in it. Creating a new groove from scratch takes a different kind of energy, and in the meantime, the gap gets filled with work, because work is always there, always available, and always feels productive.

The Vacation Problem

I do not take vacations willingly.

This sounds strange, I know. But every day already feels like there is not enough time in it. The idea of stepping away, of deliberately not doing things, of letting time pass without filling it, it feels almost physically uncomfortable. So I don’t take time off until I am forced to. And then, inevitably, I spend the first stretch of the vacation feeling like time is running out, like I haven’t done anything, like I am somehow already behind.

The entire concept of leisure is built on an assumption my brain doesn’t share: that time is abundant, that rest is productive, that stopping is not the same as falling behind. My brain has never fully believed any of these things.

Clothes Without Pockets Are an Insult

I realize I need to address this separately, because it is important.

I hate clothes without pockets. Deeply, genuinely, unreasonably. Even my pajama pants need pockets. Even my lounge wear. Because at any given moment I might need to carry something from one place to another, and having to make a second trip just because my clothes have no pockets is exactly the kind of inefficiency that makes no sense to me.

This is perhaps the most relatable thing I have ever written, and I stand by every word.

Moving at Lightning Speed in a Snail Speed World

The hardest part of all of this is not the busyness, or the rituals, or the inability to sit still. The hardest part is the mismatch.

Most of the world moves at a pace that feels, to me, almost incomprehensibly slow. Meetings that could be emails. Processes that take weeks for no discernible reason. Conversations where I can already see where things are going and have to wait patiently while we get there. Sometimes I talk too much, give too much detail, over-explain, not because I love the sound of my own voice, but because people seem to need more runway than I do to follow a thought, and I am trying to build that runway for them in real time.

I am not impatient with people. I am impatient with the gap between how fast things could move and how fast they actually do.

Living at lightning speed in a snail speed world is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain. Not because I want to slow down, I genuinely don’t, but because the constant recalibration, the waiting, the translating of my pace into something the world can keep up with, takes energy that never quite gets replenished.

And yet. I would not trade this brain for a slower one. Not for a second. There is something extraordinary about experiencing the world at full intensity, about never being bored, about finding endless ways to fill time and endless things worth filling it with.

What I would trade, in a heartbeat, is the noise. The inside of my head is never quiet. Not for a moment. There is always something running, processing, replaying, planning. The speed I can live with. The silence I just wish I could find sometimes.

And, I just wish more clothes had pockets.

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