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.

ADHD and hypersensitivity often occur together, especially in women. Research shows there’s a reason for this. The dopamine receptor gene DRD4 is associated with higher cognitive empathy in women, and certain dopamine gene variants are associated with the personality variant of hypersensitive people. Yes, we are literally wired differently.

ADHD people have an endless thirst for knowledge and wisdom, and it is also proven that the ability to recognize patterns is more pronounced in an ADHD brain. Not only are we more empathetic, but we also pick up on behavioral patterns more quickly and sense what people feel and need more accurately. But why is this? It is because of the three types of empathy that are wired differently in our brains.

1. Cognitive Empathy
   Allows us to mentally understand and put ourselves in another person’s situation and understand their thoughts and intentions.
2. Emotional Empathy
   Allows us to not only put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, but to actively feel their emotions in our bodies. Unfortunately, this also means that we can take on the moods of those around us, which can be detrimental in toxic environments.
3. Social Empathy
   Is derived from both cognitive and emotional empathy and allows us to understand people of different races, cultures, backgrounds, ages, personalities, etc.

We have a higher emotional reactivity, which leads to stronger emotions and increased emotional empathy. All of these traits are perfect when working in a social field, such as being a nurse, doctor, teacher, etc. Outside of these fields, however, these abilities are often detrimental and result in more judgment, friction, and trauma for us.

Our ability to feel and read other people’s intentions is also one of the reasons why we are often marginalized and targets of bullying and retaliation. We often forget, at least I always do, that other people rarely see the true intentions of others, so if a person is acting and behaving in a way that is detrimental to the team/others, or is deliberately trying to deceive, we will usually call it out; and pay a heavy price for it.

Because we are blamed, labeled, insulted, and attacked for our abilities for most of our lives, we begin to doubt ourselves and our self-esteem shatters over time. This is especially true for those of us who were diagnosed later in life. When 10 people tell you that you are wrong, a troublemaker, a liar, a shit stirrer, and a problem, while no one else around you acts the same way, sees the same things, and speaks the same language, you come to the conclusion that they are right. You begin to believe that there is something seriously wrong with you, that you are crazy, neurotic, emotionally unstable, and stupid.

The damage done to us by others, as well as a lifetime of masking, trying to fit in, hiding our true thoughts and feelings, while constantly censoring our words and actions, is exhausting and often leads to severe depression, anxiety, and burnout. Doctors will then mislabel us as suffering from clinical depression and anxiety disorders and prescribe antidepressants, which of course never work.

This world is not built for people like me. From huge, open-plan offices, to managers who not only know nothing or very little about psychology and especially neurodiversity, to performance measures that are not designed to reward or include individuality, we are simply doomed to fail from the time we leave kindergarten until the time we retire. Unless, of course, you are lucky like me and end up in a company and position that celebrates my neurodiversity and recognizes my special abilities rather than punishing me for my shortcomings.

I feel and suffer with all my friends and those who have not yet had the courage to be tested. I hope they find help and understanding so they can thrive before they break.

Being hypersensitive and having ADHD while also having fibromyalgia was not only difficult, but at times devastating. While I learned to cope and manage these conditions as best I could, it was often the interactions in daily life that caused most of my pain. How others reacted to me, the (incorrect) conclusions they drew, and the judgments they made about me made my life unbearable at times. I often struggled with major depression and felt suicidal to the point of hospitalization. I want to make it clear that I would not kill myself because I cannot bear to cause so much pain to those who love me, but to talk about the mess that is my brain and not mention depression and suicidal thoughts would be dishonest.

Let’s start with hypersensitivity. Having so much empathy that you can not only feel what others are feeling, but also read intentions and know, for example, when someone is lying or hiding things, is not an advantage. You can never talk about your intuitions because people don’t like to be found out or told things they don’t want to hear about themselves or others. They will simply label you as too sensitive, pompous (how dare you say things you can’t possibly know for sure), delusional, and therefore untrustworthy and dishonest.

When I was a child, my mother punished me for being sensitive by not allowing me to cry. Talking about bullies or cheaters in school didn’t go well either and resulted in retaliation. Telling a friend that the person they were dating was cheating was never believed and always ended with me being attacked and ostracized. Exposing someone as an abuser, narcissist, liar, manipulator, or cheater always ended with horrible consequences for me and none for the perpetrators.