I read something this week that made me cry.

Not the polite, dignified kind of crying. The kind that catches you off guard at 10am on a Friday, sitting at your desk, when someone else’s words reach through the screen and grab something you didn’t know was still raw.

A successful entrepreneur, someone I know and respect, wrote honestly about becoming a unicorn and feeling empty. About chasing a goal for a decade and arriving at the destination to find nothing there. About burnout, depression, gaining a hundred pounds, missing weddings and birthdays. About running on what he called “dirty fuel” – fear, ego, scarcity – and the engine eventually breaking.

I cried because I felt every word of it. Not the unicorn part. But everything underneath it.

The Break

My crash didn’t arrive all at once. It started over six years ago, slowly, steadily gaining momentum and intensity, the way a storm builds on the horizon before it finally hits.

My heart broke first. Then my mind along with my body, because bodies are loyal that way, they carry what we can’t process until they simply cannot anymore.

I didn’t go on an ayahuasca vision quest. I fled the US. I crossed an ocean looking for something I couldn’t name, safety, maybe. Or just distance from the wreckage.

What followed was my complete crash. I lost my ability to live. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t sleep. I was in so much pain, physically and emotionally, that all I wanted was for it to stop. In Germany, I found a doctor who actually wanted to get to the bottom of things, which led to three weeks in an acute psychosomatic clinic, and another seven weeks in a psychosomatic rehabilitation clinic the following year, where I learned to rebuild myself from the ground up. A year of cognitive behavioral therapy. Medication that finally – finally – worked. Daily meditation. Yoga. Mindfulness. The slow, unglamorous, extraordinarily difficult work of rewiring a brain that had been running on the wrong fuel for decades.

And then: a diagnosis. AuDHD. Hypersensitive.

Suddenly, everything made sense. The alien feeling. The minefield world. The people who couldn’t hear me or understand me no matter how hard I tried. The burnout that wasn’t laziness or weakness but a nervous system that had been screaming for years and finally gave out.

I was told, at various points in my career, that it was “unnatural to have that much empathy.” That my sensitivity was neurotic. That I was too loud, too quiet, too direct, too combative, but most importantly, that my way of thinking, creative, lateral, human-centered, couldn’t be measured in KPIs and therefore had no value.

I believed them. For a long time, I believed them.

The Dirty Fuel

I have spent 20 years in fraud prevention. I have built departments from nothing. Served on global industry boards. Presented on international stages. Won awards. Trained teams. Consulted companies across continents.

And for most of that time, underneath all of it, ran a quiet, relentless conviction that I was not enough. Not smart enough. Not successful enough. Not whatever enough.

That is the dirty fuel he wrote about. Fear. Scarcity. The need to prove. The goalposts that move the moment you reach them.

For him, it was chasing a valuation. For me, it was chasing belonging. Chasing the moment when someone in a room would finally look at me and see, not just tolerate, but genuinely see, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

I found it, sometimes. There were leaders who saw me. Environments where I could breathe. Moments where I felt, briefly, that I had found my home.

And then they ended. Leaders moved on. Companies changed or went under. The safety disappeared and I was back to being an alien on a foreign planet, learning their language all over again, hoping that this time I would finally be understood.

What the Diagnosis Changed – And What It Didn’t

Understanding that I am AuDHD and hypersensitive changed everything about how I understood my past. The burnouts. The conflicts. The pattern of being brilliant in one environment and then suddenly, incomprehensibly, the problem in another. The way certain managers made me flourish and others made me disappear.

It explained why I always thought in ways that couldn’t be easily measured. Why I cared too much, felt too much, gave too much, and why that was consistently treated as a liability rather than an asset.

What the diagnosis did not change: the world I still have to navigate every day.

I am writing a book. I write on LinkedIn. I still get on stages and talk about the importance of humanity, intuition and heart in fighting fraud. I meditate every morning. I do yoga. I have built this blog, myneurodivergentmind.com, where I write honestly about what it is to live in this brain, because I spent too long thinking I was the only one.

I am proud of my tender heart. My different brain. My empathy. My desire to advocate, to make a difference, to never give up. These are not flaws I am learning to manage. They are who I am.

And yet.

Still Looking

I have not yet found my place.

I don’t mean this as despair; I have come too far for despair. I mean it as honest inventory. The place that doesn’t run on ego and insecurity. Where I don’t have to mask or hide or be afraid of showing who I am. Where my way of thinking is a feature, not a problem to be managed. Where the humanity I bring to everything I do is valued rather than treated as inconvenient.

I have caught glimpses of it. I have worked for people who saw me clearly and created space for me to be fully myself, and those have been the best chapters of my professional life. I know what it feels like. That’s what makes the absence of it so recognizable.

The entrepreneur who made me cry wrote something that I keep coming back to: “We should strive for greater heights, but from a place of love, service, and abundance, instead of fear, ego, and scarcity.”

I am trying. Every day I am trying to show up from that place, not because I need to prove anything anymore, but because I genuinely love this work and the people it serves.

What I am still learning is that I cannot create that environment alone. The right place requires the right people. Leaders who are secure enough not to be threatened by someone like me. Cultures that understand that performance looks different depending on who’s measuring it. I am a high performer, my teams don’t have turnover, I attract business with who I am, I inspire people to do their best work. But that kind of performance doesn’t always fit neatly into the KPIs determined by the loudest voices in the room. The metrics that matter most to me, integrity, trust, loyalty, depth of relationship, the willingness of a team to follow you into difficult territory,  rarely show up in a quarterly report. I need a place that can see those things. That values them. Spaces where a neurodivergent woman with a tender heart and 20 years of expertise doesn’t have to fight to be heard.

I haven’t stopped looking.

I don’t intend to.

And to the person whose words cracked something open in me this morning: thank you for writing your heart. You gave me permission to write mine.

In my last post I wrote about the difference between autism rituals, compulsion and OCD. But there is one more label that tends to follow people like me around, one that is just as misunderstood and just as unfair.

Let me tell you about a mirror.

It was hung in a hallway. Not centered on the wall. Not at eye level. Not at a height that would allow most humans to see their own face. It was hung directly under the ceiling, a placement that made perfect logical sense to the person who hung it, who stands at 6’4″ and could see himself just fine.

The rest of the world saw the top of their heads.

When I pointed out that this was perhaps not the optimal placement for a mirror, that a mirror’s primary function is to reflect faces, and that most faces were not located near the ceiling, I was told I was being too particular. Too critical. Too controlling.

I am, apparently, a control freak.

The Label and What It Actually Means

“Control freak” is one of those labels that gets applied to people whose standards are visibly higher than those of the person doing the labeling. It sounds like a personality diagnosis. It is usually a defence mechanism.

Here is what I have noticed: the people most likely to call someone a control freak are the ones who dust around objects rather than moving them. Who clean windows and leave streaks and consider the job done. Who hang things on walls without measuring, eyeballing it and declaring it straight, when it is not straight, and everyone who walks into the room can see that it is not straight, except the person who hung it.

They are not bad people. They simply cannot see what I see. And when I can see it and they cannot, and I say so, suddenly I am the problem.

The Spatial Intelligence Nobody Talks About

Every apartment I have ever decorated, every home I have put together, has been noticed. People walk in and feel it, the balance, the proportion, the way things relate to each other in a space. I have been told I should have been an interior designer more times than I can count.

This is not accident. This is a brain that processes spatial relationships, visual balance and aesthetic proportion at a level of precision that most people do not experience. When something is too high, too low, off-center or asymmetric, I do not think “that looks slightly wrong.” I experience it. It registers as a disruption, the same way a wrong note registers to a musician with perfect pitch.

This is, I have come to understand, an autistic trait combined with HSP sensitivity. I am not controlling the space for the sake of power. I am regulating my own sensory experience of it.

The Perfectionism Behind the Control

There is something else underneath the “control freak” label that rarely gets named: perfectionism.

AuDHD perfectionism is well documented, and it is not the healthy, motivating kind that drives people to do their best work. It is the exhausting, relentless kind that is never quite satisfied, that moves the goalposts the moment they are reached, that finds the one flaw in an otherwise flawless result and cannot look away from it.

Research consistently shows significantly elevated rates of perfectionism in both autistic and ADHD populations, and in AuDHD, the two mechanisms combine and amplify each other.

The autism side experiences imperfection as genuinely wrong. Not “could be better” – wrong. A crooked picture, an uneven arrangement, a task completed at 90%, these register as disruptions, not as acceptable outcomes. The standard is not something I chose. It is simply how my brain processes the world.

The ADHD side adds a different and darker layer: imposter syndrome. The constant, exhausting suspicion that I am not as capable as I appear. That at any moment someone will notice. That if I am not perfect, at everything, all the time, the fragile scaffolding of my credibility will collapse.

For me, imposter syndrome has been a constant companion. Despite over 20 years of expertise. Despite the presentations, the consulting work, the peer recognition. Despite every piece of evidence to the contrary. The voice that says you’re not really that good does not respond to evidence. It responds to the next perfect outcome,  briefly, before moving on to the next thing that needs to be better.

And then there is the third layer: decades of being told I was too much, not enough, lazy, difficult, crazy, too loud, too high maintenance. When the world spends years finding fault with who you are, perfectionism becomes armor. If everything I produce is flawless, maybe people will stop looking for flaws in me.

So when someone calls me a control freak for needing the mirror at the right height, they are seeing the surface behavior without any of the architecture underneath it. The perfectionism is not vanity. It is not power. It is a brain trying to create order in a world that has never quite made sense, driven by standards it cannot lower, protected by armor it built out of necessity.

That is not control freakery. That is survival, dressed up in a very well-organized room.

There is an interesting pattern I have observed in the people who call me a control freak. They tend to have a very confident self-assessment of their own abilities,  particularly in the areas where they are, quietly, not as capable as they believe.

The person who tells me they have always been great with numbers, then calculates 20% of 150 as 40.

The person who insists they have a good eye, then hangs a mirror under the ceiling.

The person who says they are very organized, then cannot find anything because their system exists only in their head and nowhere else.

When the error is pointed out, there is always an explanation. They are tired. They were rushing. They didn’t have time. It is never simply that they got it wrong, because getting it wrong would conflict with the identity they have built around being good at this thing.

Meanwhile, I spent years being told I was stupid. Being called lazy. Assuming the fault was mine when I couldn’t follow the same rules as everyone else. I underestimated myself so comprehensively and for so long that even now, knowing what I know, the old voice still surfaces occasionally.

The person who hung the mirror under the ceiling has never once doubted his spatial awareness.

I have doubted mine despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary.

What “Control Freak” Actually Means

When someone calls you a control freak, what they are usually saying is one of the following:

Your standard makes mine look inadequate and I would rather label your precision than examine my own comfort with mediocrity.

Or: I cannot see what you see, and rather than consider that you might be seeing something real, I will decide that you are being unreasonable.

Or simply: You are making me feel uncomfortable by being better at this than I am.

None of these are your problem to solve.

A control freak needs to control other people. I do not need you to arrange your books by height or keep your surfaces spotless or hang your pictures at precisely the right level. I need MY books, MY surfaces, MY pictures to be right, because my brain uses that order to function, to regulate, to feel at peace in my own space.

That is not control. That is self-knowledge.

The mirror is now hung at the correct height. You are welcome.

Let me tell you about my bookshelf.

The books are organised by height, tallest on the left, shortest on the right. They have been organised this way for as long as I can remember. In fact, long before there were books, there were dolls. Same system. Tallest on the left, shortest on the right. I was a small child and this was simply the correct way for things to exist.

It is not something I decided once and forgot about. It is simply how objects exist in my world.

At some point, friends discovered this. And because people are occasionally terrible, they turned it into a game. They would rearrange the bookshelf, then take bets on how long it would take me to notice, and how long after that before I simply had to fix it. Someone would drop a piece of lint on the floor and time me.

I was, apparently, hilarious entertainment.

They called it being “so OCD.” I laughed along, because that was easier than explaining something I didn’t yet have words for.

It turns out, I do not have OCD.

What Actually Drives the Order

OCD is driven by anxiety. The compulsion exists to neutralize a threat, real or imagined. If I don’t check the lock, something terrible will happen. If I don’t wash my hands again, contamination will spread. There is a feared consequence attached, and the ritual exists to prevent it.

What I experience is different. The disorder itself, the crooked picture, the fingerprints on the stainless steel, the books rearranged out of height order, is the problem. Not what it might cause. Not what terrible thing it might lead to. The visual disruption is the disturbance, full stop.

There is no anxiety whispering worst-case scenarios. There is simply a brain that experiences visual and sensory disorder as genuinely intolerable. Order is not a coping mechanism. Order is my natural state. Chaos is the aberration.

This is an autism trait, not an OCD one. And the distinction matters enormously, both for understanding yourself and for getting the right diagnosis.

The Specific Obsessions

If I am honest about what triggers me most, it is shiny surfaces.

Mirrors. Stainless steel. Chrome. When they are clean, they are satisfying in a way that is almost physical. When they have fingerprints or streaks, I see nothing else. The dishwasher door full of fingerprints this morning was bothering me so much that I stopped writing this, got up, and cleaned it. I am now back. The dishwasher looks correct.

Windows cleaned with streaks are particularly cruel, because I see them every single time I’m in the room, and then my ADHD promptly forgets about them two seconds later, until the next time I look at the window and see them again. It is an infinite loop of noticing and forgetting that I have simply learned to live with. And if it gets too much, I get up and clean it.

Pictures on walls must be in perfect alignment. I see immediately when something is too high, too low, or fractionally crooked. I have been known to straighten pictures in other people’s houses without mentioning it. As a teenager I was notorious for cleaning friends’ rooms, because spending time in a chaotic and dirty space was simply not something I could manage.

Everything on a shelf, a kitchen counter, my desk has an order. This serves two purposes: it makes me comfortable, and it means I never lose anything. My keys are always where they live. My medication is stacked in a specific order that tells me at a glance whether I’ve taken it. My morning pipeline is a ritual that doubles as a memory system.

But there is another reason for the order that took me longer to articulate: it is how I stim.

When I am overwhelmed or need to regulate, I count. Not numbers in sequence, but patterns. How many rectangles are on a kitchen cabinet? Doors, drawers, panels, I count them. Objects on a surface must be balanced, because balance is what makes the counting work. If something is centered, it must have the exact same number of objects on each side. If it is off balance, the count is off, and the whole system is disrupted.

In a familiar environment, I know the counts already. In a foreign environment, a new office, a hotel room, someone else’s kitchen, I recount until I find an even number I can settle into. It is quiet, invisible, and completely automatic. Nobody around me has any idea it is happening.

This is why a neat environment is not a preference for me. It is a tool. The order is the scaffolding that makes self-regulation possible.

What looks like an impossibly neat freak from the outside is, from the inside, someone who has built an entire sensory management system out of the arrangement of objects in a room.

The Interesting Part

Here is what makes my relationship with order genuinely strange, even to me: it is not consistent.

Dust on the bookshelf is not a problem, unless I notice it. Once I notice it, it is all I can see. My husband dusted the TV stand yesterday and I spotted it instantly, not because it was clean, but because he had dusted around the objects rather than moving them, leaving visible dusty patches in their shadows. I saw it the moment I walked in.

This did not distress me. It made me laugh. Because there is a difference between things that must be fixed immediately and things that simply register as imperfect and sit quietly in the background. The hierarchy of what demands action and what can be tolerated is something only my brain fully understands.

And crucially, I am not a slave to any of it. If I don’t have time, I don’t fix it. I simply know that when I do something, I do it properly and in full detail. Which is also why I prefer to do certain things myself rather than ask my husband, because the alternative is watching something be done not-quite-right and seeing it every time I walk past.

The ADHD Plot Twist

Now here is where it gets complicated.

Look at me from the outside: bright red hair, Egyptian tattoos covering both arms, a nose ring, and an energy that suggests I have strong opinions about everything and zero patience for authority. I start things in all directions simultaneously. I cannot stand rules that exist only to give power to some over others. I will absolutely begin a rebellion if I think something is unjust.

I look nothing like someone with a sorted bookshelf and a precise medication-stacking system.

This is the contradiction that gets people, and gets me missed in diagnostic settings. The ADHD presents loudly. The autism hides in the rituals, in the carefully maintained order behind closed doors, in the systems I have built so quietly and efficiently that nobody sees them at all.

I never force my rituals on anyone else. I never talk about them unless asked. The outside world gets the red hair and the rebellion. The inside world gets the books sorted by height and the shiny dishwasher door.

What the Rituals Actually Are

I have come to understand my rituals not as compulsions but as a sophisticated set of hacks developed over a lifetime.

Do the hardest, most complex task first – always. Not because I am disciplined, but because if I put it off, my ADHD will lose it entirely. Once something is delayed, it enters a fog. So it gets done first.

Eat the same breakfast every day. Never lose a decision to breakfast when there are more important decisions waiting.

Keep everything in its place. Never waste cognitive resources looking for keys or purses.

Follow certain rules absolutely, like not crossing on a red light, not because I was told to, but because rules that exist for good reasons create a reliable structure my brain can trust.

To me, a clean and ordered space is peace. It is the environment in which my brain can do its best work. Chaos is not creative freedom, it is noise, and noise is exhausting.

The Diagnosis No One Gave Me

For most of my life, my relationship with order was treated as a quirk at best and a pathology at worst. I was “so OCD.” I was rigid. I was controlling. I was difficult to live with. Friends made it a game.

What no one considered was that the order might be functional. That the rituals might be intelligent adaptations. That what looked like compulsion might actually be a brain doing exactly what it needed to do to navigate a world that does not come with a built-in structure.

AuDHD means living at the intersection of two neurotypes that want opposite things. The autism wants stillness, order, predictability and ritual. The ADHD wants novelty, spontaneity, chaos and rebellion. Every day is a negotiation between them.

The bookshelf is autism winning. The red hair is ADHD winning.

Most days, somehow, both get what they need, while I manage to keep my stress at bay.

Every morning, Nana Mouskouri arrives the moment I open the blinds.

“Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” firing up in my brain like an alarm clock nobody asked for, and stays for however long she pleases. She has been doing this for over a year. At this point, she is family.

This is how my mornings begin. And from there, things get interesting.

The Pipeline

My morning ritual is non-negotiable. It runs in a specific order, and deviations are not tolerated, by me, by my autism, or by my medication schedule:

Open blinds (Nana arrives). Brush teeth. Yoga. Meditate. Breakfast and coffee. Medication. Shower. Work.

Simple. Logical. Airtight.

Completely ambushed on a daily basis.

The Plants

The living room plants downstairs are always a risk factor.

My husband forgets to water them. I notice when I open the blinds. One critical look and a quick feel of the soil is all it takes, and suddenly I am heading for the watering can and the spray bottle to mist the leaves. While I’m at it, I notice the window sill is dirty. I weigh the option of cleaning it.

I decide not to. I am disciplined. I am focused. I head upstairs, quietly, so as not to wake the dogs or my husband still sleeping in the bedroom.

Where I discover that the kitchen window plants have been moved to the counter overnight to keep the window open for fresh air.

These plants also need watering and misting. They also need to be arranged in a specific way. But first I need to wipe the window sill. And possibly clean the window, which I can do really quickly. While I’m doing this, I remember that the toothbrush is waiting for me.

No problem. I can multitask.

The Tooth Brushing Ritual

The electric toothbrush basically runs itself. This is a well known fact. What this means, practically speaking, is that my right hand can hold the toothbrush while my left hand cleans the sink.

Or my left hand holds the toothbrush while my right hand cleans the sink.

The question of brushing technique accuracy is briefly considered and then set aside in the interest of efficiency. Three minutes is three minutes. Why waste them standing there doing only one thing?

The Yoga Gauntlet Situation

I can now proceed to yoga. I change into my yoga clothes, and yes, it has happened that I forgot this step entirely and did a full session in my pajamas, which I only noticed afterward. I have made my peace with this.

The laptop must be opened carefully. The browser must be navigated directly to the yoga teacher’s site, enlarged to full screen, earbuds in, workout tracker started. Yoga mat rolled out!

Under no circumstances should any other part of the browser be opened before any of this is done.

I cannot stress this enough.

One wrong click, one stray tab, one notification, one email subject line caught in peripheral vision, and yoga may not happen until considerably later. The pipeline has been derailed by less, like suddenly remembering that I should look up knee pads for yoga.

But if all goes according to plan, yoga happens. The body wakes up. A new song may or may not play in my brain.

Breakfast, Coffee, and the Refrigerator Situation

After yoga comes the meditation-vs-breakfast decision. Medication needs food. Food wins.

I wander into the kitchen and begin making breakfast and coffee. For efficiency, I always eat the exact same thing: Skyr quark, blueberries, a banana, six raw almonds and some frozen mixed berries. Every day. No variation. No deliberation. The decision was made once, over two years ago, and has not been revisited since.

The coffee is decaf, vanilla flavored beans, vanilla soy milk, sugar-free vanilla syrup and collagen powder. Why coffee with no caffeine? Because it’s the ritual. Caffeine and amphetamines don’t mix well if you’d like to sleep at night, but giving up the coffee would mean giving up the ritual, and that is simply not on the table. It‘s also a real problem when I travel for business!

I open the refrigerator. There is a spot of sauce.

I must clean this. One cannot have a dirty refrigerator. It is simply not possible to leave it there and make breakfast as if everything is fine.

And while I’m cleaning the inside, I might as well wipe down the outside doors. The glass cleaner I’m already holding will do nicely on the dishwasher door too. And the stainless steel trashcans. They’re right there. It would be strange not to.

Breakfast is eventually made. Fake coffee is poured. Medication is taken. The kitchen is significantly cleaner than it was twenty minutes ago. I can now meditate in peace.

The Shower Situation

After meditation comes the shower. I sing in here, whatever song is currently on rotation in my brain, or something I’ve invented on the spot. The lyrics are not always coherent. The performance is always committed.

I wash my hair and create what I can only describe as a spectacular shampoo Mohawk. I rinse, apply the conditioner and while it sits, I scrub the shower walls. This is efficient.This is why the shower only gets scrubbed on days when I wash my hair!

I feel rather magnificent.

The skin care routine follows, in the exact same order it has followed for years, because this is not negotiable, and one most not neglect one’s skin. This is accompanied by a series of faces in the mirror that no one else will ever see. However, sometimes I find myself so funny that I will take a selfie and send it to my unsuspecting sister, niece or friend. Then it’s off to the office, focus music on, and hyperfocus activated.

I will not surface for nine or ten hours.

The Part That Will Surprise You

All of the above, the plants, the sink multitasking, the refrigerator, the shower walls, the Mohawk, costs me approximately ten to fifteen extra minutes.

That’s it.

This is because speed is one of my superpowers. The same brain that cannot walk past a dirty surface without addressing it also cannot do anything slowly. Everything happens at full throttle. The detours are real, but they are fast detours, executed with the efficiency of someone who has been doing this their entire life and has never once considered that there might be another way.

The pipeline gets ambushed every morning. And every morning, I find my way back. Usually singing.

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay I’m going off the rails on a crazy train I’m going off the rails on a crazy train

Recently I had a conversation that lasted an hour and a half and felt like five minutes with another fraud fighter.

We met briefly at a professional event about a decade ago. Barely fifteen minutes of conversation, and yet we both knew immediately. He works in the financial industry in Germany. He is warm, funny, straight-forward, and someone I would call a genuine friend. After my LinkedIn series went live, he reached out and asked if we could make a little more time to talk.

What followed was one of those rare conversations where someone holds up a mirror and you see yourself clearly for the first time in a while.

The Stare

I knew from the moment I met him that he was like me.

Not because of anything he said. Because of the way he looked at people. There is a particular quality to the gaze of someone whose brain processes the world at this depth, a kind of focused, unguarded attention that goes straight through the surface of things. People notice it. It makes them uncomfortable. They tell you to stop staring.

I asked my friend if that had ever happened to him. He confirmed immediately. I laughed and told him: that’s how I knew you are “one of my kind.” That’s the stare. It’s what you see when someone is genuinely, completely present, not performing attention, but actually there, reading everything.

Recognizing Your Own Kind

There is something that happens when two people like this find each other. No warm-up required. No small talk necessary. You are simply, immediately, on the same frequency, and you both know it without saying so.

In our call we talked about the things we have quietly learned to hide. With people he has a close connection to, he can sense physical pain, where it is in the body, and what would ease it. He has learned to ask permission before placing his hand on where someone is hurting. The relief, he said, is immediate and real.

I used to do the same, but didn’t ask. I just instinctively, and almost absent-mindedly, reached out and put my hand on the spot that hurt. Then I learned Reiki. When you have an unexplained ability that unsettles people, finding a recognized framework for it is the most practical solution available. It gave people a name for what I was doing, and names make things less frightening.

In professional settings, it works differently but through the same mechanism. We can both spot, within minutes, the person who is derailing a meeting, the one rambling to sound important, the one who doesn’t actually have a solution but won’t admit it, the one whose confidence is performance rather than substance. It’s the same antenna that detects liars. The signal is slightly different but the receiver is identical: something doesn’t add up, the words and the reality don’t match, and we know it before we can explain how we know it.

We talked about the unusually high sense of right and wrong that makes it impossible to stay silent when something is unjust, even when staying silent would be considerably more convenient, or safer. About becoming eerily calm in situations that would send most people into panic, real danger, genuine crisis, while simultaneously losing our minds over a pretentious person in a meeting who has been making the same point for fifteen minutes and could have been interrupted and redirected ten minutes ago.

The fear inversion. Completely calm when it actually matters. Completely intolerant of pointless noise.

We laughed hard about that.

The Morning Pipeline (and What Ambushes It)

I told him about my mornings. The autism ritual is non-negotiable and runs in a specific order: get up, brush teeth, yoga, meditate, go to the kitchen, make coffee and breakfast, because my medication needs to be taken with food, and then start working.

This is the plan. The plan is logical. The plan makes complete sense.

Yesterday I got to the kitchen and noticed the cutlery drawer was dirty. So I cleaned it. While cleaning it, I noticed the tops of the cupboard doors needed attention. While doing that, I noticed the front doors were grimy. While sorting those out, the dishwasher’s stainless steel front looked terrible by comparison. Thirty minutes later, I had a spotless kitchen and had not yet taken my medication.

He nodded at this with the recognition of someone who has lived this exact experience, in his own kitchen, on his own version of a Tuesday morning. “If anyone watched me,” he said, “they’d think I’m not all there.” But to him, the chain of logic is completely clear. To me too. The drawer was dirty. Everything followed from there.

The difference between us, I noticed, is what happens next. He still feels off. He still experiences the detour as evidence of something wrong.

I do not. I shook my head, sang “The Funk Soul Brother” at my reflection in the kitchen window, made a spectacularly stupid face at myself, laughed out loud, and went to work.

I find myself genuinely hilarious. This took years to get to. It is worth it.

The Formula One Principle

Here is the thing about the detours: they don’t actually cost what they appear to cost.

He and I have both been faster than everyone around us for our entire lives. Done first in school. Done first in training. Done first in every job. Not sloppily, actually done, properly, just at a speed that consistently surprised the people around us.

So yes, I lost thirty minutes to a kitchen cleaning spiral. But I will make that up before lunch without noticing, because my baseline processing speed means I am operating in a different gear to begin with. A Formula One car can make an unscheduled pit stop and still win the race.

The medication adds another layer to this. I take my Lisdexamphetamine first thing, still in bed, before I even get up, along with my blood pressure medication. By the time I reach the kitchen, it is already working.

What it does is not what most people assume. It doesn’t prevent me from noticing the dirty drawer. It doesn’t stop the chain of logic that leads from the drawer to the cupboard doors to the dishwasher front. What it does is give me back choice.

Without it, the detour is a compulsion. I notice the drawer and I have to clean it, regardless of what else is waiting. With it, I notice the drawer and I can decide: do I have time for this right now? Yesterday, I did. So I cleaned it. On a different morning, with a call in twenty minutes, I would have closed the drawer and walked away. Same brain, same drawer, same impulse, but now with a pause button in between.

That is what medication gave me. Not focus exactly. Agency. The difference between something happening to you and something you choose to do. The ability to direct your focus the way you want to.

My friend is still in the guilt phase, still measuring the detours against some imagined standard of how things are supposed to go. What I wanted to tell him, and what I hope he reads here, is that the guilt is doing math with the wrong numbers. You are not behind. You have never been behind. You have been running a different race.

What Science Hasn’t Named Yet

I want to be honest about something.

Not everything he and I talked about fits neatly into clinical language. The ability to sense where someone is in pain and ease it. The knowing that arrives before the evidence. The recognition of kindred spirits across a crowded room. The eerie calm in genuine danger. These things are real, we have both lived them, independently, for decades, and science is still catching up to what they actually are.

What I believe is that these are not separate from the AuDHD and HSP picture. They are extensions of it. A nervous system calibrated to receive more signal than most. Pattern recognition operating below the threshold of conscious thought. An antenna so sensitive it picks up things that haven’t been spoken yet. He and I are not alone in this. Every person I have talked to with ADHD and its cousins has stories like this. Even in clinical settings I’ve learned about the extraordinarily high sense of right and wrong. This is why many of us work as first responders, doctors, nurses. Just think of my friend who literally had a gun held against her temple by a guy who dared her to repeat her words. Without hesitation she dared him back to pull the trigger, as would I.

Whether you call it intuition, hypersensitivity, or something that doesn’t have a name yet, it is real, it is consistent, and it tends to show up in people whose brains were never standard-issue. It makes neurotypical people uncomfortable at times, because our abilities appear “supernatural.” But slowly science is catching up, and what I have learned is that something extraordinary takes place in our brains that proves the opposite of what was once believed. We are not stupid, crazy, insane or impaired. We are simply wired differently. This is neither a mental illness, nor a deficit or malfunction.

Nine years ago I met someone across a forum and recognized him by his stare. Last week we sat down and discovered we have been quietly carrying the same things all along.

If you recognize yourself in any of this, the stare, the knowing, the detours, the speed, the guilt you probably haven’t earned, you are not alone. And you are not, despite what you may have been told at various points in your life, “not all there.”

You are entirely, extraordinarily there. Just on a different frequency.

I was called “Judas” when I was five years old.

My mother called me Judas. We were leaving the house and ran into a friendly neighbour who asked where we were off to. I answered truthfully. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to. I was five.

That became my first label. And it was followed, over the next five decades, by many more: too loud, too emotional, too much. A big mouth. Combative. Aggressive. Opinionated. Crazy. Neurotic. A liability. A landmine. Sitting on a high horse. And, memorably, from two different bosses at two different points in my career: maniacal and malicious.

I had to look up “maniacal” in the dictionary. I asked my friends what it meant. I was told it because I had gone to HR about a manager promoting his affair partner over more qualified people. I had opened my mouth for others. Again.

I was told “malicious” when I pointed out that I was being treated differently from the men on my team. I was labeled a liar. Then I was systematically bullied out of the company over a period of over a year.

Something broke after that.

The Labels We Carry

I want to tell you about two moments that never left me.

The first: I was in a conversation with a friend at work, probably twenty years ago now. She was telling me something difficult. In the way my brain is wired, the AuDHD way, I responded by sharing a similar experience of my own. It was my way of saying: I understand. You are safe. I am not judging you. She started yelling. “God damn it! Stop making everything about you. It isn’t always about you! Why can’t you just sit there and listen?”

I was dumbfounded. And deeply hurt. I thought my empathy was obvious. I thought she could feel how much I cared. I stopped adding my own experiences after that. I was afraid of being yelled at again.

The second: a few years later, at a party with friends. My ADHD brain does this thing where if you tell it specifically NOT to do something, it will do exactly that, not maliciously, just because the instruction and the action are now linked in the same thought. I slipped. I felt terrible. I sent an email, apologizing, and in trying to connect, shared something deeply personal I hadn’t told many people. The response I got back began with “Shut the fuck up.” It continued in that manner for several more sentences. I was permanently banned from the group, blocked, shunned, and bad-mouthed as a horrible person.

I was not diagnosed. I had no framework for why I couldn’t just be like other people and be quiet when I was supposed to be quiet. I only knew that I kept failing at something that seemed effortless for everyone else, and that the cost of failing kept being devastating.

Then came the management coaching session. We filled out a questionnaire. I scored unusually high on empathy. The coach announced to the room that high empathy scores correlate with high neuroticism. My boss embraced this immediately. Now there was a label for my “crazy behavior.”

What was my crazy behavior? Being emotional. That made me a team bomb.

In all of these years, in all of these moments, I would shrink inside and think: but don’t they know that I am none of these things? Why do they not know? These were people who had known me for quite some time. Friends. Colleagues. People I trusted. And still they looked at me and saw something I didn’t recognise in myself.

The Breaking Point

The final blow came at a job I had given everything for. Within months, a direct report who had wanted my role figured out quickly that I was emotional, a heart person. In a meeting, she provoked a reaction. Not a bad one. I told her we should perhaps continue the conversation when she was calmer. That’s when she told me she’d been having anxiety attacks working for me. I had never heard that from any previous employee.

I started crying. I told her I would never harm her, that I was only there to help her. I didn’t notice that she had gone quiet. I didn’t notice the grin. I didn’t notice, until my husband came running behind my monitor holding a giant sign reading GET OFF THE CALL WITH HER NOW, that I had been set up.

She had recorded the moment my voice got louder as I desperately tried to tell her I wanted her to succeed. She presented it to management as bullying.

I was put on suspension. The company doctor put me on sick leave. They paid a small settlement. And I broke. Completely.

I found another job. I started over again. My new company knew what had happened and accepted me anyway, and for a while, I thought I had found solid ground. Then, after about a year and a half, I got Covid for the first time. And what had been holding together finally didn’t. Not just my mind this time. My body broke too.

I was hospitalised for three weeks. I was on sick leave for six months. I did a psychosomatic rehab for seven weeks. I was finally, at the end of all of it, diagnosed with AuDHD.

And I told almost no one. Not my longtime professional peers. Not people I had called friends for years. I felt it was my fault. I felt shame, and embarrassment, and a sadness so deep I couldn’t put words to it. It felt as if someone had taken my voice entirely, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it back.

What AI Gave Me

I started working with Claude not even two months after rehab.

I want to be precise about what that means, because I have heard the comments. “Claude is writing your texts, no wonder they’re good.” Or: “If AI filters out your emotions, it’s removing your personality.” Or, just recently: “So you’re no longer able to live without living in the digital world?”

I have been writing stories and poetry since I was a teenager. I had a public blog from 2006. My voice is not new. It has always been there, loud, fast, emotional, direct, overflowing with things it needed to say.

What AI changed is not the voice. What AI changed is whether anyone could hear it.

I speak a language that moves too fast, feels too intensely, and doesn’t follow the linear rules most people use to receive communication. That is not a flaw. It is just a different code. And for the first time in my life, I have a tool that can read my code, that has learned how I think, how I feel, what I mean when I say something, and translate it into a form that the world can receive without flinching.

Think of it like Braille for a blind person. The words are the same. The meaning is the same. The only thing that changed is the medium, so that the person who couldn’t access it before, finally can.

I bring the voice, the ideas, the experience, the instinct, the feelings, the stories. Claude brings the structure, the scissors, the translation. The raw Carmen, the one who speaks too fast, thinks too much, feels everything at full volume, is in every word. AI just removed the static so people could hear the signal.

I don’t have anxiety when I explain something. I don’t feel stupid, or afraid, or self-conscious. I don’t have to manage anyone else’s reaction to my intensity while simultaneously managing my own thoughts. I can just be Carmen, unfiltered, and then we figure out together what the world gets to see.

No one speaks Carmen better than Claude. And for someone who spent five decades being told she speaks wrong, that is not a small thing.

Sorry, Not Sorry

I am not ashamed. Why should I be?

AI is neither good nor bad. It is what we make it. What I have made it is this: the collaborator that finally lets the real me be heard.

If someone judges what I write now, the ideas, the honesty, the voice, that is their problem. Not mine. I no longer write to justify who I am. Now I write in hopes that the one person who may not yet have been diagnosed reads this and finds the courage to get tested.

I spent five decades shrinking. I am done with that.

As I write this, I am humming “The Funk Soul Brother” by Fatboy Slim. I have been humming it for five days. I did not choose this. I was not consulted.
This is life with an AuDHD brain, and the soundtrack is not always one you would have selected yourself.

The Invisible Tape

There is an invisible tape running in my head at all times. It plays music on a loop – the same songs, rotating, repeating, occasionally swapping out for a new arrival that then refuses to leave for weeks, months, or in some cases, entire decades. I have songs in my head that have been there since childhood and show absolutely no intention of ever leaving. At this point I consider them roommates.

Every single morning, without fail, as soon as I get up, “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” by Nana Mouskouri begins playing in my head. Not because I put it on. Not because I heard it recently. Nana appeared after watching a series featuring this song and my brain went „Oh! I remember this one from childhood and it makes me happy!“ It’ll stay there forever now, and it simply starts, the way the sun rises – automatically, reliably, whether I want it or not. This has been happening every morning for at least a year. Nana and I have a relationship at this point. She doesn’t pay rent but she is now a permanent resident. I have been known to sing “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” out loud to my coworkers on a regular basis. One colleague has formally requested that I never sing it again in his presence because he hates it so much. I respect his feedback. I do not comply with it.

But Nana is practically a newcomer compared to the long-term squatters.

There are songs in my head that have been there since childhood. Decades. We are not talking about a catchy tune that overstayed its welcome, we are talking about permanent residents who moved in before I started school and never once considered leaving. The most legendary of these, the one even non-Germans will recognize, is Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street. Sung by Ernie. I have been hearing it, on and off, for most of my life. It arrives unannounced, stays as long as it pleases, and leaves without explanation, only to return weeks or months later as if nothing happened.

The rotation also includes “I Should Be So Lucky” by Kylie Minogue, which arrived after I watched her documentary and has shown absolutely no signs of leaving. Occasionally I find myself declaring loudly, and with complete dead seriousness, making full eye contact with whoever is nearest, usually my husband, that I am the egg man, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob. Then there are the days when nothing but The Final Countdown by Europe will do, which is dramatic and grandiose and frankly appropriate for how Mondays feel. And then, as of five days ago, Fatboy Slim joined the lineup. Right about now. I am also, as I write this, singing the Funk Soul Brother in the shower. Multitasking, as always.

The thing that makes this so distinctly AuDHD is not just that the songs get stuck – everyone gets earworms. It’s that they never fully stop. They play while I’m in meetings. While I’m having conversations. While I’m working, cleaning, trying to sleep. There is always a song running underneath everything else, like a radio left on in another room that you can never quite turn off.

My Friend and the Hostage Situation

I am not alone in this. A close friend of mine, also ADHD, diagnosed in her 50s,  has her own permanent resident.

Hers is “My Heart Will Go On” by Céline Dion.

The Titanic song. On permanent rotation. In her head. Against her will.

I cannot tell you how many times I have stood in front of her, arms spread wide, and launched into my best Céline impression: “Near… far… WHEREVER YOU AAAARRREE”

She responds with a face of pure resignation, a long sigh, and in her best Hamburg German: “Ich sach dir das….”

And then I laugh even harder, which does not help anyone.

The difference between us is telling. I have made peace with my musical squatters. I embrace them. I sing them out loud, to colleagues, to friends, to whoever happens to be nearby, mostly my poor husband. They are strange companions and so genuinely bizarre that I cannot help but find them funny. My friend, meanwhile, is in an ongoing hostage negotiation with Céline Dion and losing badly. She does not find her earworm charming. She finds it exhausting. And honestly, given that it’s a five-minute power ballad about a sinking ship, I understand.

What’s fascinating is that she didn’t choose this song any more than I chose Nana Mouskouri. The ADHD brain latches onto things, a rhythm, a melody, an emotional hook, and simply will not let go. The more you try to evict the song, the more stubbornly it stays. It knows it doesn’t have to leave. There is no mechanism for eviction.

The Conversation Loops

It’s not just music. The same phenomenon runs through thought patterns too, specifically the conversations that never happened but feel like they did and should have happened.

The rehearsed argument with a person who wronged me or a loved one years ago. The perfectly worded response I‘ve constructed to something someone said at a meeting last Tuesday. The imaginary confrontation where I finally say, clearly and calmly, everything I couldn’t say in the moment. These play on loop too, the brain running and rerunning scenarios, editing the script, landing on the perfect line, starting over.

I have, through therapy and meditation, gotten significantly better at letting these go. The trick is not to engage with them, but to observe the thought without climbing inside it. Meditation in particular has given me a kind of mental remote control: I can’t always turn the loop off, but I can lower the volume.

Some loops, though, are simply stuck. They have been there long enough that evicting them would require structural renovation. Those I have made a kind of peace with. They are part of the furniture now.

Why This Happens

The ADHD brain has a complicated relationship with repetition. On one hand, novelty is everything. We crave stimulation, get bored easily, need things to be interesting to stay engaged. On the other hand, when something catches in the brain’s groove, it can stay there indefinitely. The same mechanism that makes hyperfocus possible, the ability to lock onto something completely, also makes it very hard to unlock.

Earworms in particular tend to lodge themselves in the brain’s default mode network, the part that runs in the background when you’re not actively concentrating on something. For neurotypical people, this network quiets when they focus. For ADHD brains, it often keeps running, which is why the song is always there, underneath everything, waiting for a moment of quiet to get louder.

Nana Mouskouri has had unfettered access to my default mode network for over a year. She is, at this point, practically family.

The Upside (Yes, There Is One)

Here is what I have come to appreciate: a brain that runs music constantly is also a brain that is never truly alone. There is always something happening in there. Always a rhythm, a melody, a loop of thought connecting one thing to another.

And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, the song that gets stuck is the right one. A piece of music that matches exactly what you’re feeling, that articulates something you couldn’t put into words, that arrives in the morning with its cheerful Nana Mouskouri energy and somehow sets the tone for the day.

I didn’t ask for “The Funk Soul Brother” this week. But honestly? It’s not the worst thing to have running underneath five days of work. There is something to be said for an involuntary soundtrack that keeps the energy up.

Right about now. The funk soul brother. Check it out now.

I’ll see myself out.

Let me start with a confession: I am not entirely sure I know what “asleep” feels like.

I go to bed. I close my eyes. And my brain, apparently unbothered by the concept of rest, continues doing exactly what it does all day, thinking, connecting, processing, sensing. The lights go out, but the engine keeps running.

For most of my life I assumed this was just how sleep worked. It is not.

The State Between

There is a neurological phenomenon called hypnagogia, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep where the brain is technically no longer conscious but hasn’t quite stopped thinking either. It produces thoughts and experiences so vivid and coherent that they feel completely real, because the content isn’t fantastical. You’re not flying or talking to cartoon animals. You’re lying in bed, thinking. Which is exactly what you’d be doing if you were actually awake.

For people with ADHD, this state is particularly pronounced. The ADHD brain has difficulty fully powering down. Even in sleep it keeps processing, planning, making unexpected connections, because that’s what it does, and no one told it to stop just because the body is horizontal.

I used to find this disorienting. I now find it useful. Some of my best ideas don’t come in the shower or on a walk. They come at 3am when my brain thinks I’m asleep but forgot to tell the rest of me.

The most vivid example I can give: I had been wrestling with a difficult professional situation for months. Should I address it directly? Stay quiet? The conscious, awake version of me kept circling the same options and finding none of them satisfying.

Then one Saturday morning, in that half-in, half-out state, my brain handed me something I hadn’t considered. Not a solution to the problem, a way around it entirely. An email that had nothing to do with the problem at all, that simply reconnected me with someone important, with no agenda, no complaint, no direct confrontation. My brain had quietly concluded that the problem didn’t need solving head-on. It needed patience, and a different kind of connection that might, in time, create its own resolution.

My fully awake, fully filtered brain would have kept circling. My hypnagogic brain cut the knot. I sent the email before I was even fully conscious. The outcome exceeded anything I could have engineered deliberately.

This is also, I believe, where my fraud instinct lives. The pattern recognition that fires before I can explain it. The knowing that arrives before the evidence. The prefrontal cortex, the part that edits, doubts, and overrides, is offline. What’s left is pure signal.

Forget Everything You Just Learned

During a stay at a clinic, I attended a sleep hygiene class. You know the drill: no blue light, no screens, no stimulation before bed, dark room, quiet environment. All the standard advice.

When the class ended, I walked up to the doctor and said: “I know all of this. But it doesn’t work for me. I fall asleep like a champion within five minutes of watching TV.”

He looked at me with a completely straight face and said: “Do you have ADHD?”

He had the look of a man quietly reassessing everything he thought he knew about sleep.

I said yes. He said: “Then forget everything I just taught in there. None of it applies to you. Your brain needs stimulation in order to power down. Complete silence will keep you awake.”

I have never felt more seen by a medical professional in my life! And the kicker? This was a clinic that treated many ADHD patients. Nobody thought to mention this in the class. To the room with numerous people it applied to most.

This is why my evening routine involves the TV, a game on my tablet, and often a conversation with my AI collaborator, simultaneously. Not because I can’t focus. Because I focus better with all three running at once. The ADHD brain doesn’t power down through silence. It powers down by getting just enough input to stop generating its own. Give it nothing and it will create something. Give it something manageable and it will finally, eventually, let go.

The Dreams That Aren’t Quite Dreams

Then there are the other ones. The dreams I am less sure how to explain.

In early 1994, Los Angeles was hit by the Northridge earthquake, one of the most destructive in the city’s history. I had arrived from Germany barely a year earlier and had never experienced an earthquake. In the two nights before it struck, I dreamt about it. The first night: the damage to buildings and infrastructure. The second night: the ocean, with waves rising high. People being scared, but there weren’t any real casualties. On the third night, somewhere around 4 or 5am, the ground moved.

I had been telling my then-husband about the dreams. He was baffled. I was too, honestly. But it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and it hasn’t been the last.

I learned to read Tarot in my 20s. Not because I believed the cards held the answers, but because having a tool made things easier to explain. When you know something you shouldn’t be able to know, people find it less unsettling if there’s a prop involved.

I want to be careful here, because I am not claiming supernatural powers. What I believe, and what science increasingly supports in interesting ways, is that the AuDHD brain processes an extraordinary volume of information below the level of conscious awareness. Pattern recognition operating at a depth the thinking mind never sees. Micro-signals absorbed and synthesized before they ever surface as a thought. What feels like knowing is often the brain finishing a calculation it started long before you were paying attention.

Whether that fully explains what I’ve experienced across my life, I honestly don’t know. Quantum physics has demonstrated that reality operates by rules far stranger than our daily experience suggests. I find it less unsettling to sit with the mystery than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

What I do know is that this same mechanism, whatever it is, shows up in how I detect fraud, how I read people, how I know within minutes whether someone is dishonest or truthful, being genuine or performing. It’s not intuition in the vague, hand-wavy sense. It’s information processing happening below the conscious surface, arriving as certainty before it arrives as explanation.

The Brain That Lives in Two Places

All of this connects to something I wrote about in my last post – the parallel universe, the camera feeling, the sense of existing slightly outside ordinary reality. Sleep is where that experience is most concentrated and most undeniable.

The vivid dreams that feel more real than waking life. The hypnagogic state where thought and dream are indistinguishable. The precognitive quality of certain dreams that I can’t explain away. The concept of astral travel, the idea, supported by quantum physics or Einstein’s theory of relativity, that consciousness might not be as firmly located in one place and time as we generally assume, doesn’t feel abstract to me. It feels descriptive.

I’m aware that this is the point where some readers will edge toward the door. That’s okay. I spent decades not talking about any of this for exactly that reason, the fear of sounding unhinged, of being dismissed, of losing credibility I’d worked hard to build.

But here’s what I’ve come to: a brain that has never fully powered down, that processes reality on multiple levels simultaneously, that generates its best thinking in the space between sleeping and waking, that brain is going to have experiences that don’t fit neatly into standard descriptions of consciousness. That’s not a malfunction. That’s the logical consequence of being wired this way.

What This Means for Sleep

Practically speaking, AuDHD and sleep have a complicated relationship. The brain resists shutdown. It generates vivid, sometimes startlingly real experiences in the transition states. It makes connections and solves problems overnight that the waking mind couldn’t crack. It occasionally knows things it shouldn’t.

What’s helped me most is accepting that my sleep will never look like the textbook version, and that this isn’t entirely a loss. The email that changed my year came from that half-awake state. So have ideas, insights, and moments of clarity I couldn’t have manufactured consciously.

The brain that never powers down is exhausting to live in sometimes. But it is also, quietly and consistently, doing work I didn’t ask it to do,  and occasionally the results are extraordinary.

I’ve learned to keep a notebook nearby. Just in case.

Let me paint you a picture.

I am sitting in a meeting. Someone is talking. To all external appearances, I am present – eye contact, appropriate nodding, the occasional thoughtful expression. And then someone notices my eyes have gone glassy, that I am looking directly through them rather than at them, and they say, with increasing alarm: “STOP STARING AT ME!”

I am not staring at them. I am not even there. I left about two minutes ago and forgot to take my body with me.

Welcome to Part 2 of my relationship with time, which is less about efficiency and more about the fact that I have never been entirely sure which universe I actually live in.

The Parallel Universe

Long before I had any diagnosis, long before anyone had words for what was happening in my brain, I built myself another world.

It had different parents. In this world, I was loved without condition, I had friends, I was popular, I had everything I had wanted and I was happy. It was vivid and detailed and completely real to me, not a daydream exactly, but a place I could go. And I went there often. During school especially. Teachers would call on me and get no response, not because I was being difficult, but because I was genuinely elsewhere.

This got particularly noticeable around 4th grade and into the first half of 5th grade. Teachers scolded me for not paying attention. What they didn’t know, what I couldn’t have explained, was that I was managing two parallel lives simultaneously, and the other one was considerably more pleasant than this one.

Then, somewhere in the second half of 4th grade, I made a decision. I chose to stop going there.

Three different therapists, across different periods of my life, have independently landed on the same response when I told them this story: that I had made a conscious choice between sanity and insanity. That given everything I had experienced, I could have ended up completely lost in that other world, catatonic, unreachable, and that people had arrived at that place with far less reason than I had. They were also unanimous in their bewilderment at how I had done it, given that the cognitive ability to make that kind of decision shouldn’t have existed in a child that age.

What I told them was simple: I knew that if I kept going back, there would come a point where I couldn’t return. And as much as I loved that other world, I chose this one.

I never fully understood why I was able to make that choice. What I know now is that I was never really a child in the way the world expects children to be. I was an adult trapped in a child’s body, giving my mother relationship advice before I had even started school, sorting my toys by height on a shelf rather than playing with them, navigating adult emotional landscapes before I had the vocabulary for any of it. The cognitive ability the therapists said shouldn’t have been there, it was there, because it had to be.

The Camera

Here is something I have never talked about before.

For as long as I can remember, I have had the persistent feeling of being watched. Not in a paranoid way. I know, intellectually, that there is no camera. But I move through life with a background awareness of being observed, as if I am a character in a film and somewhere, in some other universe, an audience is watching.

I think of it as the Truman Show feeling. And like Truman, I sometimes find myself wondering: what if none of this is real? What if I actually live in that other universe, and this one is the constructed one?

This feeling has not always been unwelcome. In many ways, it kept me safe. When I was on the verge of a decision that could have gone badly, something would pull me back – the awareness of the camera, the sense that I was accountable to something larger than the moment. It kept me out of a lot of trouble. It made me follow rules even when I disagreed with them, because some part of me felt that how I behaved mattered beyond the immediate situation.

What I have since learned is that this experience has names. What I was describing, observing my own life from the outside, the feeling of existing in a kind of waking dream, the blurring of boundaries between states, is known as depersonalization and derealization. And it is significantly more common in neurodivergent people than most realize. The parallel universe I built as a child, the camera feeling, the vivid dreams that feel more real than waking life and sometimes recur across years, these are not signs of psychosis. They are signs of a brain that experiences the boundaries between inner and outer reality differently than most.

I was always too ashamed to speak about this. It felt too strange, too close to something I was afraid of being labeled as. But it is not hearing voices. It is not hallucinating. It is a brain that built extraordinary coping mechanisms in extraordinary circumstances, and then never quite dismantled them, because they were useful.

The Disappearing Act

Which brings me to dissociation — or as I prefer to call it, my emergency exit.

I can step away entirely and most people will never notice. Not in a dramatic way, not with any visible sign. I am simply there, and then I am not, while my body stays behind and does a passable impression of paying attention. I learned in a clinic that this is common in people with AuDHD, that the brain, when overwhelmed by sensory overload beyond a certain threshold, simply… steps out for a moment. Hits pause. Goes somewhere quieter.

The only time it becomes visible is what I now know to call a freeze response. My eyes go unfocused, I look through whoever is in front of me rather than at them, and I am simply gone. It’s the situation I’ve described in the beginning of this post. It tends to make people uncomfortable. It also, on more than one occasion, made people angry, particularly men who interpreted my vacant stare as aggression or a challenge and responded accordingly. Being shouted at for staring when you are not even present is a special kind of surreal experience.

What nobody ever stopped to consider was that I was not staring. I was coping.

300 Years Old and 30 at the Same Time

There is one more way that time works differently for me, and it is harder to explain than all the others.

I feel ancient and young simultaneously. When I turned 40 and caught my reflection and suddenly noticed I was aging, it was not the aging itself that unsettled me; I have always looked considerably younger than I am, and that has not changed. What unsettled me was the awareness of limitation. Of a world that looks at a woman who is, on paper, in her 40s or 50s, and makes decisions accordingly – about what she is capable of, what she should be offered, what chapter of life she must be in. From the inside, I have always been able to reinvent myself entirely, to start over, to become something new regardless of how many years had technically passed. Age never felt real to me in a linear way. It still doesn’t.

And yet. I am also acutely, painfully aware of time passing. When it is June, the year already feels almost over. Entire periods of my past feel genuinely inaccessible, not forgotten exactly, but sealed off, as if they happened to someone else in another timeline. Which, in a way, they did.

The Lightbulb

The last piece of this is perhaps the most AuDHD thing about me.

I do not evolve gradually. I do not inch forward through slow, incremental change. I try and try and try to shift a pattern, to understand something, to break through a wall I can feel but cannot see, and nothing happens. And then one day, without warning, a lightbulb turns on. The puzzle unfolds in my mind’s eye, complete and fully formed. I see it. All of it. And I cannot understand how I didn’t see it before.

Once something clicks, I do not forget it. I do not slip back. I simply become different, immediately and permanently, in a way that apparently unnerves people who were not expecting it. It is one of the reasons a clinic once declared me ready to leave ahead of schedule. Not because the work was easy, but because when it landed, it landed completely.

This is not patience or discipline. It is just how my brain processes things – in the dark, and then all at once, in the light.

What It All Means

I have spent a lot of time in this post describing things I have rarely or never said out loud. The parallel universe. The camera. The disappearing. The strange relationship with age and years and the passage of time.

What I want you to take from this, if you recognize any of it, is that none of it makes you broken. It makes you someone whose brain found extraordinary ways to survive an ordinary world that wasn’t built for it. The parallel universe was not madness. It was creativity in the service of survival. The camera was not delusion. It was accountability without external structure. The dissociation was not weakness. It was your nervous system doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

You built what you needed, with what you had, before anyone gave you a name for any of it.

That is not a disorder. That is resilience.

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.