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.