There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes not from being alone, but from being consistently misread by the people around you. From trying your hardest to connect, and watching it land wrong. From caring deeply, sometimes too deeply, and being told you are cold, arrogant, aggressive, or self-absorbed.

This is a story I know well. It is the story of most of my life.

“You always make everything about yourself”

One of the things I heard most often in relationships and friendships was that I made everything about me. Someone would share an experience, and I would immediately jump in: “Oh my God, that happened to me too!” or “I know exactly what you mean, once I…”

What I was trying to do was make them feel heard. Safe. Less alone in their experience. In my mind, sharing a similar story was the highest form of empathy, proof that I genuinely understood, that their experience resonated so deeply it triggered my own memory.

What they heard was: here she goes again.

It took me a long time to understand that for most people, empathy looks like silence and nodding, not enthusiastic parallel storytelling. And it took even longer to stop feeling hurt by that, because my intention was always the opposite of selfishness. I was relating. I just didn’t know that my way of relating looked, from the outside, like hijacking.

This is one of the cruelest paradoxes of AuDHD: I feel everything. Other people’s pain, joy, discomfort, excitement, I absorb it all like a sponge. And yet the very intensity of that feeling causes me to respond in ways that get misread as oblivious or egotistical.

Too Much, and Never Enough

I am animated. When I am excited, I get loud. When I am angry, I get louder. When I am passionate about something, I talk faster, my hands move, my whole body gets involved. I have been told I am aggressive, combative, threatening, intimidating, and half the time I didn’t even realize my volume had climbed.

I would walk away from conversations genuinely confused. Was I angry just now? I didn’t feel angry. I was passionate. I was engaged. I was, in my own internal experience, enthusiastic, and what landed on the other person was a wall of intensity they didn’t know how to handle.

So I learned to censor. To monitor my own volume in real time, to modulate my tone, to consciously soften edges that felt sharp to others but completely normal to me. It was exhausting. And it was yet another layer of masking – performing “calm” and “reasonable” while internally running at full speed.

At the same time, I somehow also managed to miss obvious signals. Hints. Subtext. The thing someone is really saying when they say something else. I can walk into a room and feel the tension before anyone has spoken a word, and yet completely miss that someone has been trying to tell me something for weeks because they never said it directly. If you don’t tell me clearly, there is a good chance I won’t pick it up. Not because I don’t care, but because my brain is wired for directness and tends to take things at face value.

So I was simultaneously too much and not enough. Too intense, too loud, too honest,  and also somehow oblivious to the obvious. Another name for me „Captain Obvioius.“

The “Defect” Problem

I have spent my entire life learning everything I could about whatever captured my attention. When I was finally diagnosed with AuDHD, I did what I always do: I researched obsessively. I read everything. I learned about rejection sensitive dysphoria, about sensory processing, about the specific ways autism and ADHD interact and contradict each other in the same brain.

So when I was at a clinic and the therapists kept referring to AuDHD as a defect, a mental disability, and framing it as a psychological illness, I could not stay quiet. They had never heard of rejection sensitive dysphoria. They were telling patients that something was fundamentally wrong with them.

I argued. I corrected. I explained. AuDHD is a neurotype, not a disease. It is a different operating system, not a broken one. A neurodivergent brain is not defective, it is merely differently wired. There is a significant difference, and the language we use to describe it matters enormously, especially to the people sitting in that room trying to make sense of their own minds.

To their credit, they listened. “We didn’t know that,” they said. And that was that.

But that reaction was the exception, not the rule. More often, at work, in friendships, in countless conversations where someone asked for my opinion or advice, the pattern looked very different. I would research deeply, form a well-grounded view, and share it honestly. And I would be told I was arrogant. Lecturing. Too serious. Sitting on a high horse. The cruelest version of this was when someone specifically asked for my input, didn’t like the answer, and then made me the problem for giving it.

I have a sense of humor, by the way. A very good one. I can sit in a corner laughing at something ridiculous I said or did, completely entertained by my own brain. It is just that my humor tends to be dry, or specific, or internally referenced in a way that not everyone follows. I spent years thinking something was wrong with my sense of humor too. Turns out, I was just funny in a room that wasn’t tuned to my frequency.

The Honesty Problem

I still don’t fully understand why honesty is treated as a character flaw.

I don’t understand the social contract that says you should soften the truth to the point of unrecognizability, or stay silent about something that matters, in order to keep the peace. I find dishonesty, even the polite, well-intentioned kind, genuinely confusing. Why say you’re fine when you’re not? Why agree when you disagree? Why not just say the thing?

The answer, I now understand intellectually, is that most people are managing a complex web of social relationships where directness can cause damage and ambiguity preserves harmony. I understand this. I just cannot always execute it.

What I struggle with most is knowing when it is safe to speak. I book a seat in the quiet section of the train specifically because I cannot manage the sensory overload of noise and chaos. When someone sits down next to me and proceeds to have a loud phone conversation, I am faced with an impossible choice: say something and risk being attacked for it, or say nothing and sit in sensory distress for the next few hours.

I have tried both. Neither works consistently. When I speak up calmly, politely, I am mostly still met with rudeness or hostility that I did not expect and cannot regulate my response to. When I say nothing, I spend the journey white-knuckling it through the noise, blood pressure rising and desperately trying to control my anxiety.

The result is that I often feel voiceless. Not because I have nothing to say, but because how I say it tends to land wrong, and when I am already emotionally activated by someone being rude or unkind, my ability to regulate my tone collapses entirely. I become the problem, even when I wasn’t the one who created it.

What I Wish People Understood

For most of my life, I was made to feel stupid. By teachers who called me lazy. By people who didn’t understand me and assumed the fault was mine. By systems that mistook my intensity for aggression and my honesty for arrogance. That feeling never fully went away, even after I had every reason to know better.

The truth is that being misunderstood this consistently and this chronically does something to a person. It makes you doubt yourself. It makes you wonder if the problem really is you, if you are too much, or not enough, or simply wired wrong.

What I know now is that I was never too much. I was just in the wrong rooms, with people who didn’t have the tools to understand me, and sometimes, frankly, didn’t have the desire to try.

There were always people who got it. Who found my honesty refreshing instead of offensive. Who laughed at the same things I did. Who didn’t need me to perform a quieter, softer, more palatable version of myself. They were, unfortunately, in the minority.

But they were enough to remind me that the problem was never me.

It was the frequency.