Let me tell you about my bookshelf.

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

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

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

I was, apparently, hilarious entertainment.

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

It turns out, I do not have OCD.

What Actually Drives the Order

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

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

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

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

The Specific Obsessions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Interesting Part

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

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

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

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

The ADHD Plot Twist

Now here is where it gets complicated.

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

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

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

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

What the Rituals Actually Are

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Diagnosis No One Gave Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pipeline

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

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

Simple. Logical. Airtight.

Completely ambushed on a daily basis.

The Plants

The living room plants downstairs are always a risk factor.

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

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

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

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

No problem. I can multitask.

The Tooth Brushing Ritual

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

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

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

The Yoga Gauntlet Situation

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

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

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

I cannot stress this enough.

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

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

Breakfast, Coffee, and the Refrigerator Situation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shower Situation

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

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

I feel rather magnificent.

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

I will not surface for nine or ten hours.

The Part That Will Surprise You

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

That’s it.

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

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

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