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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I recently attended a sales training. Not exactly my natural habitat, I am not a salesperson, I am a fraud prevention consultant, but it turned into one of the most unexpectedly validating experiences I’ve had in a long time.

The trainer had spent quite some time working for tech companies in the US and Israel before returning to Germany. He also knew various cultural differences, communication styles and worlds, which turned out to be relevant.

First, a detour: Active Listening

Early in the training, the topic of active listening came up. The trainer quickly realized that this wasn’t a new concept for me and that I had been applying it for years. He asked me to explain what active listening actually looks like in practice.

Here’s the irony: active listening does not come naturally to me at all.

One of the hallmarks of ADHD is that we relate to people by sharing our own experiences. Someone tells you about their difficult day, and your brain immediately fires back with a similar story of your own, not out of selfishness, but because that’s how we connect. The problem is that it looks like interrupting. It looks like making everything about yourself. I spent years being perceived as rude or self-centered for something that was simply how my brain was wired to show empathy. I needed to make sure that people felt safe and in my head, they’d definitely feel safe if they know that I had experienced a similar situation or  challenge.

Active listening taught me to do something genuinely difficult for my ADHD brain: to be fully present in what someone else is saying without simultaneously preparing what I will say next. To listen without an agenda. To hear not just the words, but the tone, the hesitation, the thing behind the thing and then simply sit with it rather than immediately responding. I had to learn to be comfortable with silence and also potentially not having a solution or a response.

I had to consciously learn and practice this, and I developed hacks to make it work. I stopped bringing my phone or laptop into meetings and one-on-ones. Not as a courtesy gesture, but as a hard rule for my own brain. Because I will get distracted by anything and everything if given the chance. If the devices aren’t there, they can’t compete for my attention. For the same reason, I always sit in the front row when someone is presenting, and I keep my camera on in remote meetings. It forced me to be fully present with the person in front of me, and over time it became one of the most powerful tools in my management and communication toolkit.

And apparently, I had gotten good enough at it that a trainer with decades of experience thought it was innate.

Then Came the Cold Call Email

The main exercise of the day: write a cold call email that would actually get read and get a response. The trainer told us that most cold emails are deleted without a second thought. Our job was to write one that wouldn’t be.

Here’s what we knew about him: he is an avid sailor who also teaches others how to sail. That was our hook, if we chose to use it.

The brief: Pitch something in a way that would make him read the email and consider responding.

For me, the answer was immediate. I have organized fundraisers and roundtables for most of my career. I know how to ask people for things. And the one thing I have always known is that the fastest way to get someone’s attention is not to pretend you want nothing from them, but to be completely honest about what you need and why you think they specifically can help.

So I wrote this:

Subject: I could use your help and expertise!

Dear [name],

I have learned that you are an avid sailor, and not only sail to various locations, but also teach others how to sail. Based on your extensive background in coaching, training and teaching, I thought you to be the perfect person to help me with a project.

I am a consultant in fraud and risk prevention and I’m currently in the process of starting a new roundtable that would enable eCommerce companies to share their pain points, knowledge, as well as potential solutions. Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to get people to join my roundtable, since I am working for a fraud solution provider, and in the global fraud world they are usually banned from these conversations.

I am well known in the international fraud world, but not as much in the DACH region. Do you have any idea how I could engage people who do not know me yet and build this roundtable?

Please let me know if you’d have a few minutes to discuss and give me some insight.

Warmest wishes, Carmen

He read it out loud to the group. Then he went through it, line by line.

“Let’s start with the subject line. See how she is asking for help and expertise? It instantly got my curiosity, because here is someone who doesn’t seem to want to sell me anything.”

He walked through how I had connected his sailing background not as a gimmick, but as a genuine reason why his specific experience made him the right person to ask. He pointed out that I had named my own obstacle openly – that working for a solution provider typically gets you excluded from exactly the conversations you need to have. He called the tone personal, humble, and authentic. Not salesy, not demanding.

He said it could have been a little shorter, but that even that wasn’t really an issue.

“This,” he said, “is an email that gets a response.”

What He Didn’t Know

He doesn’t know I’m neurodivergent.

He had no idea that the instincts he was praising, the active listening, the radical honesty, the ability to make someone feel seen rather than targeted, weren’t things I learned in a sales course. They were things I developed over decades of having to figure out how people work, because my brain processes the world differently and I had to compensate.

AuDHD means I have spent my entire life reading rooms. Masking. Adapting. Learning to communicate across different “operating systems,” different cultures, different communication styles, different expectations of who I was supposed to be. In the US, we did the Insight Discovery test, where personalities are differentiated by colors. Colleagues read me as Red -direct, driving, assertive. In Germany, people saw the Green-Yellow immediately – empathetic, positive, people-focused. Neither was wrong. Both were true. I had simply learned to present differently depending on where I was. In Germany I present much more authentic: Green, Yellow, Blue, Red.

What looks like a communication superpower from the outside is, from the inside, the result of a lifetime of work. Work that neurotypical people never had to do, because the standard social manual worked just fine for them.

The Bigger Point

We talk a lot in neurodivergent spaces about the deficits. The things we can’t do, the ways we struggle, the systems that weren’t built for us. And those things are real and worth talking about.

But there is a flip side. The same brain that makes a crowded conference overwhelming, that replays conversations for days, that masks so thoroughly that even a trained professional reads you as an extrovert, that brain also notices everything. It listens deeply. It connects dots others miss. It leads with honesty because performance has always been exhausting, and somewhere along the way it learned that authenticity is simply more efficient.

I didn’t write the best sales email in the room because I’m a natural salesperson. I wrote it because I have spent my whole life learning how to be genuinely heard and it turns out, that’s the only sales skill that actually matters.

In my last medication post, I wrote about finally finding some relief with Lisdexamphetamine (Elvanse) and Bupropion. If you read that post, you’ll remember that I ended on a cautiously hopeful note “an almost normal life again.” Well, this is the update.

It didn’t stay that way.

I stopped taking Bupropion after taking it for almost two years. What I hadn’t realized at the time was that it was the Bupropion causing my face to turn bright red at the slightest emotional trigger, good or bad, happy or stressed, it didn’t matter. My face would flush visibly, which is manageable in my personal life but a real problem in business meetings. Once I made the connection and stopped taking it, the flushing stopped. But so did the extra dopamine support it had been providing.

The challenge with Lisdexamphetamine is that it wears off in the afternoon. A dopamine booster that stays in the system longer had been filling that gap. Without it, the afternoons were rough again.

And then work became extremely stressful, the kind of stress that doesn’t stay at the office. It triggered something I hadn’t experienced at that level in a while: constant anxiety and daily panic attacks. Every meeting, especially certain ones, would set it off. I was living in a state of permanent fight-or-flight. Sleeplessness. Heart racing and irregular beats. Blood pressure spiking every afternoon, sometimes as high as 165/110. Trouble breathing. It was, to put it plainly, not sustainable.

Enter Venlafaxine

In February, I had an appointment with my psychiatrist and told her what was happening. She suggested Venlafaxine. She explained that it works particularly well alongside ADHD because, unlike a standard antidepressant, it targets both noradrenaline and dopamine and is specifically designed to help with panic and anxiety disorders. I had never heard of it. When I looked it up, I found that it’s sold in the US under the brand name Effexor.

Because Venlafaxine needs to build up gradually in the system, she started me on a very low dose:

• 37.5 mg for two weeks
• 75 mg for two weeks
• 112.5 mg for two weeks
• 150 mg where I am now, for about three weeks

What Changed

The first thing I noticed was that the panic attacks simply stopped. Not gradually faded, but stopped. The constant background hum of anxiety went quiet.

Then something else started happening. After a while, I began experiencing something I hadn’t felt in a long time: genuine happiness. Not a medicated high, but something much more familiar – my old self. I sing again. I laugh a lot. I don’t get worked up as easily, and when I do (because that fiery, passionate side of me isn’t going anywhere), I come back down quickly, the way I imagine most “normal” people do.

But the thing that surprised me most was this: I had been meditating consistently for almost a year, and while I knew intellectually that it was good for me, I wasn’t sure how much it was actually landing. Venlafaxine seems to have been the missing piece. It’s as if my brain could finally hear the meditation, actually observe thoughts and emotions instead of being swept away by them. That shift has been profound.

People started noticing too. Comments about a glow, looking well, seeming different and at peace, or “having a great energy.” That kind of external confirmation is something I don’t take lightly, because it means the change isn’t just in my head.

The Side Effects

In the spirit of full honesty, which is why I write this blog in the first place, here’s what I’m still navigating.

On weekdays, when I take Lisdexamphetamine, I still experience blood pressure spikes and headaches around 3 pm, namely when the amphetamine starts wearing off. On weekends without it, this doesn’t happen, which tells me the interaction between the two medications is likely the culprit rather than Venlafaxine alone. I’ve also noticed an increase in appetite and some weight gain, so I’m keeping an eye on that. Luckily, the appetite gets suppressed by the amphetamine so it’s easier to balance.

Then there’s the one I find almost amusing: the dreams. Vivid, strange, and often completely nonsensical, but not nightmares. Sometimes they’re oddly therapeutic. A couple of times I’ve actually worked out real-life conflicts in my sleep and woken up laughing. What makes it even more interesting is that I almost always remember them, which is not something I could say before.

The other side effect, shaking hands, can be contributed both medications rather than Venlafaxine alone, but worth mentioning for the full picture. It’s been part of my life since I’ve been taking amphetamines, so I’m used to it.

I’ve tried stopping the Lisdexamphetamine entirely, but within a couple of weeks, the focus, concentration, and memory issues return. So for now, I need it, I just need to manage the combination better.

I’m currently experimenting with timing: taking my blood pressure medication and Lisdexamphetamine first thing in the morning, then waiting two hours before taking the Venlafaxine. I only just started this approach, so the data isn’t in yet.

The dosage question is its own saga. I’ve been on 30 mg of Elvanse for over a year and a half. In Germany, adult dosing guidelines are limited, and the guidance isn’t always clear. My doctor suggested opening the capsules and weighing micro-doses, which I tried and gave up quickly. 60 mg is too high and simply unbearable and measuring out of a capsule to add to your daily dose was messy and highly inaccurate. Whether I’m currently under- or overdosed at 30 mg is genuinely unclear to me. It’s one of those frustrating grey areas that I suspect many of you living with ADHD in Europe will recognize. However, my glass is half full, because in certain countries ADHD meds aren’t even available for adults.

The Bigger Picture

What I can say with confidence is that Venlafaxine has changed my life when I added it to the Lisdexamphetamine. The stimulant gave me back my focus and the ability to do my job. Venlafaxine gave me back myself.

If you’re neurodivergent, struggling with anxiety or panic attacks, and feel like something is still missing from your medication picture, it might be worth asking your doctor about SNRIs, and specifically about Venlafaxine.

As always, none of this is medical advice. I’m just someone with a noisy brain, sharing what’s worked and what hasn’t, in the hope that it saves someone else a few years of trial and error.

For the majority of my life I used to think that I am crazy; that there is something seriously wrong with me, because I couldn’t understand the polar opposites that dominated who I was. I used to refer to them as the light and the dark side.

Being diagnosed made me realize that it was my ADHD side I labeled as the “dark” side and the autism side as the “light” one. Why did I see it that way?

There has always been an internal tug-of-war inside of me. My autistic side craved structure, was rigid and needed to follow rituals and rules, while my ADHD brain needed spontaneity, was fearless, despised rules, was rebellious and often reckless. I would get bored easily but really couldn’t stand mixing things up. I’d want to follow a structured day, but then impulsively get sidetracked and abandon any plans or lists I’ve made. The same was true for my communication. I’d impulsively spew “honesty and truth,” then analyze for hours, days and even months how I could have come across better or avoided a confrontation. I learned to fear my dark side, because she seemed to get me in trouble and would do things that were, at times, downright dangerous. She was represented in my colorful exterior, sporting blue, purple, bright red or black hair with pink streaks. I would often kill my curiosity and simply avoid people and situations that might lead me to act impulsively or cause me harm. The advantage was that I never really experimented with drugs or drinking alcohol, because I knew that finding anything that would quiet my noisy brain would have been dangerous.

Both traits contributed to me becoming a perfectionist. An autistic trait drives me toward thoroughness and attention to detail, and my ADHD side had to be perfect due to the constant imposter syndrome and fear of failure I experience. The sensory world is another set of contradictions. I crave and even seek out certain stimulating environments like a conference, until I arrive. Suddenly, everything is too loud, too bright and no longer manageable. While I used to and still use certain stimming techniques that don’t get noticed (picking my cuticles, rubbing my fingers, counting silently items in a room, etc.), inevitably I’d reach a point of having to flee. I started calling it my crab walk. Sideways stepping away until I could disappear behind a wall/door, etc. and run to my hotel room. Luckily, people always thought it was funny that “now you see her, and then she’s gone.” But I felt shame and embarrassment.

I was so good at masking that everyone believed me to be an extravert — which couldn’t be further from the truth. Even when I was tested, I had to actively think about answering without masking, which was difficult to remember, because I had masked my entire life. I had to really remember what I used to do and trained away, or what my response would be if no one was around. Having all the information now does not necessarily fix what decades of masking have damaged, but cognitive behavioral therapy, daily meditation, exercise and medication have given me tools to recognize my patterns more easily and change my responses and behaviors.

Turns out, there’s no dark and light side. Simply a person living at the intersection of two overlapping yet distinct neurotypes.