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.