I ask because today, at a dinner table, in public, at an age where I should apparently know better, I had one. A big one. The kind I’m sure a passing onlooker will be talking about for days.

You know the type? Where all of the bad words are coming out of your mouth, whilst the tension in your body is at an all-time high and feels like it’s going to exist forever. Where the words are so bad that even as they leave your mouth, you know you’ll regret them, and a little part of your brain is quietly commentating:

“Really?… Did you?… Really?… You’re still going… Oh, the shame you are going to feel in the not too distant future.”

That type.

I don’t have meltdowns very often. But when I do, they are pretty spectacular. And I’m not proud of today’s. I am full of remorse and shame. Because I’m getting way too old to be at risk of a public meltdown.

Or am I?

I categorise my meltdowns into the following grades

Minor - Sensory Overwhelm

I may be hot, too hot, I’m in discomfort, and all it will take is putting on a T-shirt that doesn’t feel right for that day, or the sense of a label against my skin, and I’ll hurl it off and swear a reasonable amount. I feel discomfort.

I know it’s sensory. I know it’s minor. I get a grip, and it passes quickly.

Moderate - It’s Brewing

I’m having my buttons pushed, one at a time. Overlapping sounds are usually the cause. Too many people talking, bickering, eating, chewing, scraping chairs across the floor, all at once. Internally the alarm rings:

“I can feel I’m going to have a meltdown…”

My rational brain keeps me in adult mode. I know the kids will go to school in a second and it will stop. And then there will be peace. I just need to keep a grip, remain present, control, control, control… and breathe.

I was an adult, a good parent. There is no shame to be had here today. I didn’t have a meltdown.

No shame. No guilt. Well caught, me.

Stratospheric / Nuclear / Postal / Full-Blown - The BIG One

This is the frightening one. Infrequent. But it does happen very, very occasionally.

It’s frightening because it’s the only time in my world where my 95% (relatively) rational brain gives way to my 5% irrational brain and says:

“It’s all yours. Do your worst. I’m going to watch quietly without butting in.”

And it will do its worst.

When that small part of my brain takes over, it can tear down walls, structure, all I have done to feel like a good person, my existence, relationships, anything. It can bring it all down in seconds, through all of the uncontrollable shit that will pour out of my mouth. Every word is aimed at myself. It’s never aggressive. It’s always frustration. It’s overwhelm. Catastrophic sensory overwhelm.

The ability to control it feels non-existent. The ‘STOP’ technique is not happening in a stratospheric meltdown. In fact, the ‘STOP’ technique, along with its well-known sidekicks — popping words in fucking clouds, ABC, CBA, DBT, CBT, FFS, WTF — are not coming into play. This is the big one. Nothing is touching logic or control.

All the while, the rational brain honours its promise not to butt in. It just commentates:

“Oh, fuck me, you’re going to regret that one.”

“You’ve done so much damage in two minutes. You’re in big trouble.”

“Now you’re just being a dick… you’ll never eat another meal with your family again?”

And when a stratospheric meltdown happens in public? Oh boy. It’s rare. But it is a sight.

What is actually happening when an autistic person has a meltdown?

Here’s what I need you to understand. Because it will make me feel a shit tonne better about the public meltdown I had today and remove some shame, if I can justify it. Yes. I am trying to justify it. I will justify it. A bit.

It took me most of my life to understand exactly what a meltdown is.

A meltdown is not a tantrum. A tantrum wants an audience. A meltdown wants the audience to disappear. A tantrum is a strategy. A meltdown is my nervous system in overload and beyond capacity.

My autistic brain takes in more of everything. More sound. More light. More texture. More of other people’s moods, sighs, chewing, chairs scraping, dogs barking, sentences overlapping, more of everything. And it filters out less.

Most days, I manage it. I move away. I suppress. I hold. Because the whole point of holding sensory overwhelm is that nobody sees what’s really happening internally.

I am, after all, a fully grown adult. I should not have public meltdowns.

Some days the sensory load builds, more often than not, slowly but surely. Rarely is it a sudden attack that creates a meltdown. It’s subtle but sure. Until one more thing pushes things over the hold capacity.

In that moment, the thinking brain, the bit that does logic, consequences, empathy, and every technique ever taught, goes out of the fucking window. The prefrontal cortex laughs in the face of the STOP technique. You cannot reason with a brain that has tipped into meltdown. Inside I can dig, one last attempt to claw back out before the damage is done, only to hear “FFS, Dad’s having one of his meltdowns, watch out”… and with that, it’s free fall, no turning back.

What pours out of my mouth is quite sweary, often unrealistic, a lot of truths, and some unrealistic comedic threats.

But the reality is that nobody chooses a meltdown. And the price isn’t the meltdown itself, it’s the shame that follows. Oh, the shame.

I don’t think you’re ever too old

Kids grow out of tantrums (I hope, mine are 16 and 14, please tell me they do)… but I can’t grow out of my nervous system. I can make better choices, learn, get better at suppression and identifying triggers. But I will never entirely grow out of them.

We don’t melt down less because we got older. We melt down less visibly, because we got better at hiding it or knowing when to move away. Hiding it is often the thing that is responsible for tipping us over the edge.

The world has compassion for the child version. A toddler melts down in a supermarket and people laugh and think “Thank fuck I don’t have to deal with that shit anymore.” A grown man melts down in a restaurant and, erm… well… enough said.

Which is why the shame hits harder with age. Not because the meltdowns get worse. Because the internal (and external) compassion that explains what’s happening ran out many, many years ago.

It’s not the meltdown that hurts. It’s the shame.

It’s the shame of being a full-grown adult who, to the outside world, appears to be acting like a hungry toddler. When in reality, a series of triggers has accumulated, and where once stood a window of opportunity to move away and save the day, on this occasion it was firmly closed.

The remorse. The hurt. The embarrassment. All of the things that felt so true and so needed in that moment come back and flood the mind. I mean, I meant every word. Why I would never eat a meal with this fucking (I know) family again. Because I can’t take one more fucking (I know) meal of relentless bickering, and privilege, and fucking (I know, I know)…

I meant every word. And I didn’t mean a single one of them. Both of those are true at the same time.

Because whilst, in my head, it felt entirely factual, on reflection it’s fairly unlikely that I’ll never again eat a meal with my family. Although, given how utterly messed up my misophonia is, I’d quite like that to be true.

And while I’m at it, people eating together is such a strange social convention. If everyone sat side by side rather than facing each other, I could at least understand it. But really, eating alone is a far more pleasant experience.

So to conclude this attempt to process my meltdown shame

Better suppression. Move away sooner.
Don’t eat with family. But more importantly…

I am not my hypervigilance or my sensory overwhelm. It’s a part of me I didn’t ask for. I am, however, responsible for my behaviour.

The meltdown wasn’t a choice. The repair afterwards is. So there will be an apology, at a calm table, probably over another meal I swore I’d never attend.

And I will pay it willingly, because the people who were apart of it do understand why these things happen occasionally.

It doesn’t help calm things down, when they laugh their way through it through the majority of it.

I try so very, very hard.

For hours each day, each week, each month, each year, an entire fucking lifetime, I’m in deep analysis of how I step forward in the world.

Most of the time I like to think I am patient, considerate, and try to meet the world someway, in knowing that I can’t have everything on my own terms. As much as I’d like that to be the case.

As an Autistic ADHD person growing out of burnout, eighteen months and counting, I’ve never understood myself better than I do today. I’ve also worked relentlessly hard, in something of a deep hyper-focussed state, to discover, learn, unlearn, grieve, long and accept why I am what I am.

I learned all about this thing, the nervous system, that I didn’t know existed until a few years ago.

I’ve advanced my vocabulary beyond recognition. The language I use to explain how I so often feel has advanced from:

“I just feel completely and utterly fucked, constantly”

To explanations of alexithymia, interoception, burnout cycles and tolerance.

I can catch narratives. Assumptions. Projections. And position them beyond myself.

I am finally becoming the best, version of myself, rather than the worst version of myself. I was always nonchalant. It’s part of the darkness. It’s back. It’s being said of me again more frequently. Another burnout milestone.

I find myself considering how important it is that I see beyond my own world, and focus on the human I am connecting with, how they receive information, process and communicate. It’s not that I didn’t previously. But in burnout, the defences are high. The stakes are high. Hypervigilance is ever present. And it’s hard to see beyond that.

It’s a version of me I am finally beginning to trust again. And at times, feel proud of.

It makes my writing quite boring. Who wants to read a Substack article of somebody in a good place? High stakes, emotions and darkness is where my writing shines, but fuck it, I’ve still got shit to process and that’s what I’m here for.

It’s nice to feel pride

I’m not proud of anything spectacular, or that many people would even notice. But proud that everything that I have thrown into better understanding myself has now reached the point where I have been to live with a more controlled and stable mind.

So why, then, does living authentically often need to feel like a life built on accommodations? Rather than the simplest reasoning of all: that when we live authentically, we shine. We become the butterfly that is often desired. Actually, thinking it about it I’m more of a moth, that’s a bit rough around the edges.

But also because, when I’m not that, erm…moth, I become a grizzly fucking bear that nobody wants to be around, least of all me. And that happens when accommodations (a word I don’t enjoy, I’ll ramble on that shortly) are met as luxury, rather than safety.

I fell into burnout through a slow erosion of humans

I can see it so clearly today, what lay at the heart of my burnout. Not one defining event. A slow erosion, primarily within the workplace. Twenty years of working against myself, each day something chipping away at me, spoken or unspoken, intentional or not, and notably, often self-induced, before and after I had an autism diagnosis in my hand. has a name for my slow erosion: the secrecy–masking–burnout spiral. When identity can’t exist safely, authenticity becomes performance. Performance is exhausting. And exhaustion, over time, becomes burnout. Eighteen months on, I can trace every single loop of that spiral.

It is no different outside of work

Humans are messy, messy people. Post burnout, my autistic soul has learnt, heavily, where to put a foot in and where it shouldn’t. And yet the world continually asks me to show up and be present in exactly the places where it collapses.

It would be all too easy for me to point my burnout entirely at my self-induced workplace experience, but it doesn’t tell the whole picture.

The slow erosion exists in all walks of life. It’s just much easier to compartmentalise the workplace, because there are very specific boundaries that can be pointed to. Where I find all of this much harder to quantify is beyond work, where we move through the world in our families, friendships and the people we come into contact with in everyday life.

It struck me that when accommodations and emotions mix, there is often conflict.

I’ll give you an example to explain myself, and what I am processing here:

Work: “I’m feeling overwhelmed and tired today. If you feel I need to be in the meeting, I’ll be there, but I’ll likely have my camera turned off. Or let me know if you think we can exchange notes through Slack.”

Response: “Thanks for this. Sounds good. Whatever is best for you. We’ll make it work.”

Home: “I’m feeling overwhelmed and tired today. I don’t feel it would be a good idea to eat dinner with you all as a family, as I know I could be triggered.”

Response: “That’s a shame, it would be nice if we all sat together. But do what is best for you.”

The shame in shame

And that’s it, right there, where accommodations, doing the right thing and emotions fuse. When I hear “that’s a shame” everything collapses.

It’s not what’s said in its intention. It’s what’s felt internally in its interpretation. Perhaps because of the younger life wounds that linger and present themselves.

I lose the momentum of moving away from being a bear that doesn’t want poking. I know that my nervous system will be easily triggered through a predictable event. For example, if I am teetering on the edge of something, my misophonia is often highly activated, bickering scrapes through my soul like nails on a blackboard, or god forbid I hear fucking TikTok suddenly bellow from a kid’s phone.

Instead, when I know these things would likely trigger me, because I’m tired, or handling something that is mentally heavy in another part of my life, I feel proud that I stand up and say: “I can see what I want to avoid here.”

Let’s replay a the shame response:

“That’s a shame, but okay, you go eat on your own.”

The only part I hear in that sentence is disappointment. And with that, the onset of a meltdown, or a feeling of internal failure for being such a shit adult, stands taller than any other reasoning.

What I long to hear is: “You know yourself best, well done on reading the warning signs, we’ll see you on the other side?”

There is so much shame that comes from the phrase “it’s a shame”.

I’m naming it. I’m processing it. Today I see it. This is why I am writing about it.

My whole body moves from doing good to bad

What once felt proud, the projection that the bear could wake if it was to be poked, has now quickly become “I now feel utterly fucking shit for being the human I am”.

Where emotion and accommodations meet is fraught with new learnings. To sit with the sense that I am letting people down by asking for an accommodation. That as an adult I should be able to force myself to through listening to the sound of people chewing food, drinking water, breathing to loud. Yes I know - hence moth, not butterfly, but these sounds, fuck they really are unbearable in my body. They can’t simply respond to the words “Can’t you just ignore them?.”

I don’t like being a disappointment.

Why I struggle with the word ‘accommodations’

This is how the word ‘accommodations’ makes me feel. I also see many cases where the word does work. But it makes me feel like I am some kind of special case. I’m not. Or I wouldn’t be, if all brains were equal.

Asking for accommodations feels humiliating to me as an adult. It fuels the internal narrative that I’m not adult enough to stand above my autism, or ADHD. That I should be able to control my feelings, find my words, tolerate all of the things that come so easily to many people, socialising, listening to the horrific sounds of people eating and drinking, being able to listen to three people talk over each other whilst the TV is on, the dog is barking and TikTok keeps showing up.

“There’s a lot of sounds happening here, I can feel it building in my body. I’m going to go and get some space somewhere quiet.”

“That’s a shame, it’s nice to have family time.”

The cycle starts up. Shame in the shame again.

But what I want to feel is empowered. In that instance I don’t want to feel I am moving away from people, because many adults would accept it as family life. A connecting time that doesn’t fall all too often with teenage kids.

I could use ‘boundaries’ but to the untrained ear, that also sounds defensive to me.

Empowerment is being able to do what I know is right for my brain, when it needs to do it, without needing to ask for it. Because the issue here is the noise, the sounds, the volume. The way noises overlay and require attention can feel like an assault on my ability to process. My nervous system isn’t built for it. I’d rather connect in a different way. One-to-one, in something meaningful. Not by throwing four people in a room and believing that healthy connection is presence alone. It can be. But so often it is just simply too much stimulation. Less can be so much more.

If all brains were equal, the bear wouldn’t get its chance to show. I’d flutter in and out of the space, obviously always targeting a light relentlessly, but also living my own safe version of myself. I’d connect in ways that don’t trigger all the things that so easily do.

And so today I am going to make sure that I aim to flutter to the light, be more nonchalant, carry less shame. Be less bear.

Another day, another learning.

Side note: Reading this back, it could sound like I have an uncaring family.

That’s not true at all. It’s simply four people living together, each with their own needs, preferences, routines, and ways of existing. Like most households, a lot of family life is compromise. In many ways, it’s a smaller version of the workplace.

Sometimes I wonder whether humans were ever really designed to live together... especially when one person is autistic and the others aren’t.

I’m joking. Kind of. There’s probably some truth in it.

It does make me wonder what life in an all-autistic household would look like. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Well, not everything. But anything that matters.

My brain primarily has two speeds - intensely rapid processing. It’ll scan, analyse and make big life changing decisions without a flicker of stress or emotion. It can multitask and leap between tasks, handling whatever is thrown at it.

And there’s the brain that can leave a conversation and from nowhere, two or three hours later, a ping goes off in my mind:

“Wait… I didn’t ask the question that was sitting right there in front of me. The important one that I was there for. I knew it. It was lined up. And now it’s too late but I need answers to close loops in my brain that have suddenly, without warning, swung wide open again. Fuck.”

I could put it down to delayed processing, after all I am autistic. In fact, I do put much of it down to delayed processing. I’m either very much in the moment, or three hours behind in my thinking.

Wait... (again).

I’m writing an article about overthinking and I don’t know why (as yet).

The irony isn’t lost on me. It’s probably the perfect example of overthinking something that many people wouldn’t even give a second thought to.

I overprocess.

Sometimes, often in fact, I have to overprocess. It’s the only way I can slow my brain down. I’m doing it right now. I write, to process at a speed that forces my brain to go as fast as I can type. To stay in the same track as I read the words back to myself and make corrections. It’s a self enforcement in many respects, I discovered it early in burnout.

Plus, if I stopped and thought about it. I’ll catch myself saying “WhyTF, would anybody be interested in reading about my life?”. But with that I counter it, because really this isn’t about my life as such.

It’s another mystery to me. On one hand I am intensely introverted. And yet I’ll publicly share all of my worst self in such a public setting.

When I stop and analyse this, I reckon with it that it is a foot in the world that connects me in social ways that I feel comfortable in. And more so, I hope it may resonate with people like me, who need to feel less alone. But also, there is a distance between the human and what I write.

It’s happening again. I’ve slipped into over processing mid article. My mind has gone into a deep analysis thinking about how my writing has connected me with people who are now friends, or have said kind words through feeling seen.

I’ve over processed my whole life.

In my previous career, I’d begin each morning at the usual 3.30 a.m. and instantly write a summary of everything that had happened the day before, what it meant and what needed to happen the day ahead. I’d share it with my colleague who would wake up to it every single morning without fail to many, many words. I remember apologising frequently for how long these notes would be and the ground they’d cover.

As I have come to learn more about my autism and how I process the world. There is a blend of two brains happening. The rapid processing, as my job was complex and multifaceted, dropping any ball felt like failure that I couldn’t risk. But secondly there was the delayed processing where the moment would arrive in the middle of the night and hit me hard.

My long notes are my autistic way of processing huge amounts of information that I’ve collected in a short period of time to made sense of it all. I close loops, ask questions that need asking, and set direction for how life moves forward.

For years, I overworked.

I believed everything I achieved in my career was luck.

Processing this now, the belief stemmed from my academic experience, in part being labeled ‘thick’ by my year head when I was twelve, whilst he also threw in that I’d ‘never amount anything’.

It took me forty years to correct that narrative. To see that I’m not unintelligent. I’m autistic.

Overworking isn’t as simple as it sounds and that I worked a few more hours a day than others, each day. It’s much more complex than that.

For many years I’d watch people fitting into standardised systems that just seemed so illogical to me. I’d try hard to mirror them, but it took way more effort, and I’d be running a narrative of why it was a waste of time - and that I had a short cut. Better results, with minimum effort.

This is also proven, with widely recognised research suggesting that in he context of ADHD, the ‘30% rule’ is a clinical rule of thumb stating that individuals with ADHD develop executive functioning and self regulation skills about 30% slower than their neurotypical peers. The result of which, in my case, was to over work to prove my capability and then some. Good enough was rarely enough by my own standards.

Before I was self employed I’d have countless conversations with my manager, who agreed with me, seeing that my ways were more effective, but the system said no. So I began overworking from an early age. I had to comply with illogical reasoning.

Overworking is, at its worst, my way of blocking noise.

And my brain can be, very, very fucking noisy. It was my solace in escaping addition and dependency. Right now in this very moment, my mind is active with unwanted thoughts, so I have turned to writing to find stimulation that will pass the time until it moves away. It’s a live example.

Overworking also played a significant role in my eventual burnout.

For years, I believed everything I achieved was down to luck. I used to say that I wasn’t running towards success, I was running from failure.

Ironically, I achieved things that many people around me hadn’t, or perhaps never would. My way of thinking, my working style, my relentless drive to solve problems, and my determination to challenge expectations became evidence that there wasn’t just one right way to succeed. By doing it my way, I was quietly disproving how the world so often forces square pegs into round holes.

I only started to believe I wasn’t unintelligent a couple of years ago. It took people I deeply respected, who were academically gifted, to correct me until I heard it enough times to believe it could be true. Slowly, I stopped dismissing their words and started paying attention to why they believed it. For the first time, I could see the evidence for myself.

I am not unintelligent. I am autistic.

But the amount of overworking it took to reach a place where I could finally believe I was intelligent was exhausting. I spent years trying to prove something that was never actually missing.

I overdo discipline (which is often dressed up as ‘willpower’)

I can’t just be vegetarian. I have to be vegan.
I can’t just cut down on wheat. I have to be gluten free.
I can’t just cut down on alcohol. I have to be entirely teetotal.
I can’t do a gentle 5k jog. I have to break my 10k record every single time.
I can’t sit and watch TV and relax. I have to write a fucking Substack article.
I can’t enjoy drumming on a whim. I have to do an intense 45 minutes every single day.
I can’t just enjoy the odd treat, a day off, some relaxation. Because a day off is a failure.
I can’t slow down. I have to keep speeding up.
I can’t age biologically. I train intensely to defy what is expected.
I couldn’t step back in autistic burnout. I had to step out altogether.
I couldn’t take a break from my first Substack. I had to delete the entire lot.
I can’t do things in halves. I am all or nothing.
I am intensely head strong and very, very fucking annoying even to myself.
The list goes on.

None of it is willpower. It’s not stubborness. It’s much, much more than that.

It’s about control. Intense control. To stay on the right side of my mental health. And yet in meeting the standards, I fear the detriment to my mental health can outstrip good with harm if I’m not careful.

Observing my my day to day, I live an underwhelmingly very boring existence

I’m a teetotal vegan who counts every calorie, is asleep by 9:30, and exercises hard at 4:45 in the morning. Seven days a week. Same routine. Same food. Same everything. It’s a good job I don’t enjoy parties or socialising.

“What have you been up to?”

Fuck all. Nothing. Genuinely nothing you’d want to hear about. No wild weekends. No spontaneous trips. The most interesting things about me happen at 5:00 am in the morning, at full intensity, where nobody can see them.

Or…

“Do you know that when I drum for 45 minutes I burn 450-600 calories? I do this every single day. Of course it depends on what music I’m playing along to, but it’s good to mix things up and keep it fresh - that’s what life’s about, variety. Oh hold on, you’ve glazed over, is this really fucking boring? I’m sorry. Shall we talk about what you had for lunch earlier today instead?.”

I am often profoundly boring.

And here’s where it all leads back

I used to think my stubborn routines were driven by my personality. Obsessive. Intense. All or nothing. Boring.

But I’m not always boring…

I’m autistic. I’m ADHD. I have OCD. I have a brain with two settings, everything and nothing, in a world that often works on the parts inbetween.

Moderation isn’t a choice my brain understands. I can’t ‘cut down’ on demand. I’ve spent the last eighteen months studying my nervous system to understand that it needs certainty, routine and predictability. I look back through my life and listen to the comments that have come my way often:

“You’re so stubborn”
“You have so much willpower”
“You’re so disciplined”
“I wish I could be like you”
“I don’t understand why you can’t just take a day off and relax”

Perfectionism comes from control. Control comes from protection.

Whilst I know the comments from my head of year, my lack of qualifications, and spending countless lessons standing outside the classroom for persistently asking why I needed to learn algebra, or what a fucking oxbow lake was, don’t sound particularly traumatic in isolation, I do know the belief they left me with.

The more I analyse my need for routine, the standards I set myself whenever I begin a task, and the intensity with which I approach every new hobby or interest, the more profound it all feels.

Perhaps it comes down to this.

Like many late-identified autistic and ADHD adults, I spent years absorbing criticism, rejection, shame, failure, and the constant fear of being found out. When those experiences become your normal, perfectionism can become a way of protecting yourself.

Perhaps my rigid routines, and the standards I hold myself to that nobody else asks of me, aren’t signs that I’m boring or inflexible. They’re expressions of safety.

They’re how my nervous system learnt to survive. And yet, looking back over the last few weeks, I see something else.

I’ve been to a concert. I’ve travelled halfway around the world for a few days. I’ve delivered a public talk. Each time I allowed my world to expand a little, something good came from it.

Routines are important. They have a purpose. They keep me grounded, regulated and safe. But every now and again, stepping beyond them creates something equally important - balance. And that’s something I have to actively work on, a battle somewhat against my nervous system and the safety of rigid routines and rules.

So yes, I like boring. But I don’t like being boring. I’m just me. Stubborn. In need of control. Autistic. ADHD. OCD.

Why would I write this? To process my messy, messy brain. Why would you choose to read this over all of the other amazing stuff on Substack? I have no clue. If you’re brain is like mine - I send you thoughts and prayers 🤷🏼‍♂️

Last week I stood up and delivered my first piece of (online) public speaking, a workplace talk on neurodiversity to an organisation in Seattle. An hour and a half of material, then questions. One of them caught me beautifully off guard: “How do you change the perception of professionalism?”

I just said what I felt. I could only hear one voice. There was no narration running underneath it and doubting what would fall out of my mouth. It just flowed.
For me, this was a moment. A big moment.

I wasn’t doubting myself. My brain and my words were finally in sync.

This is the brain I used to operate with, the one that could process complex problems in an instant and explain them, even when I was figuring things out as I went.

“I don’t think there’s a linear answer to that, but here’s my take. The presentation I’ve just given, in some people’s eyes, won’t be deemed professional. I’ve tripped over some of my words. I’ve made a few jokes, thrown in the usual self-deprecation. But I put hours into preparing it. I practised it every day for a week. I showed up on time. I finished within a minute of the predicted end time. I delivered it to the best of my ability. That, for me, is the definition of professional.”

I didn’t leave with the adrenaline that used to follow doing something outside my comfort zone. I simply felt I’d done my best.

The next day I needed to raise the invoice, and in typical autistic self-doubting fashion, a question crept in - would the person paying the bill think I’d done enough of a job to warrant one? Classic RSD. I knew I could message the client and check how it had gone, and with that fear arrived. I sat with the doubt and carried on with my day.

But underneath I’d done my best. If it wasn’t good enough. So be it.

Several hours later, an email arrived. Off their own back, the client wrote me a beautiful email, noting how impactful the presentation had been, the conversations it had opened up, that after all her years as a head of people, it had surfaced ways of thinking about hierarchy, professionalism and equity she’d never heard before.

Something I used to take for granted. In burnout recovery was momentous .
This version of me has been inaccessible for the past eighteen months.

Eighteen months ago…

I fell into my first autistic (and ADHD) burnout.

It was a profound moment of disconnecting from the real world. I swore I’d never step back into society again. I went from being the person who looked after everybody else, carrying everybody else’s problems, needs and issues, to letting myself free fall without a care. My actual words went on the lines of:

“Fuck people. Fuck This. Fuck everybody. I’m out.” and I meant every single word. I literally walked out on 19 years of blood, sweat and tears.

I lead a company of sixty people. That day I mentally wiped my entire career out of my mind, as if it had never happened.

I find it hard to put into words the true impact autistic burnout can have on late-identified neurodivergent adults. Simply put, it’s fucking awful.

On the day everything fell apart for me, I didn’t even know what autistic burnout. Looking back, it’s terrifying what it can do to a person.

I imagine it’s just as bewildering for the people around someone experiencing it. They watch somebody they know well disappear before their eyes, often with no understanding of what’s happening or why.

A few days rest doesn’t fix anything.
A few weeks doesn’t scratch the surface.
It’s a journey. A long, long journey.
An eighteen month journey and counting.

I am far, far from alone in this story

I discovered what autistic burnout was through via google and a returning study Raymaker and colleagues (2020). The words of one participant resonated instantly on what I was experiencing: “It’s like having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew.” The findings in that study tell the brutal truth. Autistic burnout leads to loss of work, loss of skills, loss of health and quality of life.

It also notes that roughly half of the autistic adults in the study connected burnout to suicidal thoughts.

This reflects my own research too.

In the depths of my own autistic burnout, I became determined to understand how common my experiences were among other late-identified neurodivergent adults.

I have very little recollection of doing this project. I was so deeply immersed in it yet much of that time has disappeared from memory. But I’m still incredibly proud of what came from it, and what it meant to me at the time.

A total of 1,165 people generously shared their experiences of burnout and its impact on their mental health. For the first time, I realised I wasn’t alone in what I was experiencing.

Among those 1,165 respondents:

• 68% had experienced suicidal ideation.
• 50% had engaged in self-harm.
• 72% had received a mental health diagnosis.

And that’s only scratching the surface.

Eating disorders. Addiction. Perfectionism. Emotional exhaustion. Financial difficulties. Struggling to access support.

These aren’t isolated experiences. They are the reality for so many people living through autistic burnout. They are all my experiences.

You can read the report here.

How far I fell

It’s now close to a year since I ended up in residential rehab for six weeks, because the ideation took a step too far. Nothing close to action. But the words running through my head became uncomfortable.

I’ve always suffered from ideation. It’s not that I want to die. It’s that I want a break from the relentless noise. And perhaps, in writing this I am acknowledging the first true quiet moments have begun to arrive. Small steps such as this, are huge steps in my brain.

Not long after I came out of rehab, I felt a milestone moment: I reconnected with an old confidence that in the working world, that I am capable. It was a moment. It was felt. And I have grown within it.

Six months ago I thought I’d hit about as good as my return to my true self would get.
I’d climbed through burnout one finger at a time. It’s a fucking slog, at times debilitating. Two steps forward, sometimes three back, occasionally two, but enough ones to make progress.

In the past two weeks, similar milestones have arrived. They haven’t been forced, or sought. I found myself saying ‘yes’ to a few more things. And with that comes momentum.

It helps that I never needed to hear or feel the words “But you used to…..”

I know well what I used to do and be. I know well what I want to be.

I never want to lead a company of sixty people again.
I want to do things I find enjoyable.
Where I feel appreciated.
Where I add value and know I’ve done a good job.
Which is where I’m at and where I’ll continue to head intentionally.
I feel fortunate. Very fortunate.

I want to keep saying more yes’ and building on each step that carries momentum that not so long ago I would have thought out of the question.

Connecting with the real world…

I’ve spent the last five days deeply outside my comfort zone. Halfway around the world, in a crowded city that is home to far too many people and tourists. Crowds, sounds, lights, smells, a deep immersion in unfamiliar territory and routines. Only a few months ago, I know the only way I could have considered stepping into an environment such as this would be to slip into some kind of dissociation to survive all of these things that I feel intensely in my nervous system. The whole trip would have been about survival and protection.Instead, I found myself becoming more present. More connected to the real world, rather than simply observing it.

Because that’s what I’d been for most of the previous eighteen months: a bystander. Watching life unfold rather than participating in it. Existing, but not really living. Waiting to die, almost.

Which is somewhat fucking ironic for a teetotal vegan who counts every calorie that goes in, and exercises hard twice a day. It’s not exactly the most logical way to live when your brain is also telling you several times a week that it would rather not exist. Or perhaps it’s because underneath the resources hold on to a different truth. A more healthy narrative.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying I have enjoyed being away from home and all of my routines and things. However it turns out that it is possible to be connected to the real world, with tight control on protecting myself from overwhelm and remaining present. Taking in experiences and expanding the window of tolerance.

That is another big step forward.

Growing through autistic burnout

Today it hit me hard just how unwell I have been through the last eighteen months.

I’d wiped my career from my memory. Today, it has fallen back into place.

I’d stepped outside the human race and mainstream society. Today, I see it’s about where I place my mental space and energy.

My hypervigilance skyrocketed at any opportunity. Today, I feel myself lead with more logic than perhaps, ever before.

I felt largely worthless to the world. Today, I see I can add value.

I can do it quietly. I can step in and out as I wish. I am at my best when others take something from me that makes this world a better place. That’s what I’ve always done. That’s what made me good at my job. Today I feel all of those things.

Several of the things I said I could never do again have returned. The ones I wanted to show up again. I do belong with people, but my people, the right people. The people who care deeply about others, who are predictable and consistent in their values. The people who have each other’s backs, who support each other through the shit times. Who see professionalism as doing our best, not what much of the world believes professional means.

I see today how unwell I have been, and I am grateful that the path forward is strengthening. I am proud to still be here. I am grateful for many things and people who stood by me. Also to have another chance at this world, as a late-identified autistic ADHD adult who no longer wants to minimise their existence until the final day comes.

Tomorrow I may feel like shit again. Next week I may take a few steps backwards. But what I do know is that the foundations are being rebuilt. And today, that’s enough.

My intention in writing this is simply to offer some hope.
I felt hopeless for far too long and I didn’t think these words would ever come.

Dr. Neff and Neurodivergent Insights offer a wealth of resources to support autistic burnout, including an ongoing scholarship programme for their flagship Autistic Burnout Course.

If any of this is close to home for you: autistic burnout is real, it is documented, and it is survivable, but you don’t have to climb out one finger at a time on your own.

If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a crisis line in your country (988 in the US, Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland) or someone you trust.

Additional worldwide numbers and resources.

I’ve always been an early riser. However, as the years have progressed, I’ve increasingly found my sleep worsen through the surge of energy that arrives in my body and brain in what most would term the middle of the night.

Around twelve months ago I headed to the Dr. and we talked about ‘Insomnia’.

I’ve long used this word to describe my sleep, although with some trepidation as I rarely struggle to get myself to sleep, my problem is staying asleep. I didn’t really see any other term or logic, or than insomnia, until I went head first in wanting to understand more about this joyful, yet painful, part of my existence exists.

Turns out it is very likely a lot to do with my AuDHD.

Sleep issues amongst ADHD & Autistic people is common

If your sleep feels broken, you’re far from alone. Mine’s absolutely fucked.

Sleep difficulties are one of the most common threads running through both autistic and ADHD experiences. It might be trouble falling asleep, waking repeatedly through the night, or waking far too early. The pattern itself almost doesn’t matter.

Even with the best intentions, when sleep is intertwined with the way our nervous systems are wired, it can be far more complex than simply fixing our sleep habits.

Understanding doesn’t solve everything. But it may help.

The instant I wake I feel many things:

I wake feeling alive, with a sharp, almost violent urgency to get up that second, regardless of what my body is telling me. There’s a surge of energy that has to be used immediately, right there on the spot.

Whatever worries or stress I went to bed with are gone. In their place: clarity, logic, certainty. I feel strong, physically and mentally, like I’m on top of everything.

Problems I couldn’t untangle the day before now have solutions. It’s as if my brain kept working at full speed while I slept the bare minimum, quietly processing, sorting, and queuing things up for me to pick off and place neatly back into their rightful lanes.

My body responds instantly. It knows what’s waiting: peace, quiet, space. A few hours that feel entirely mine, a world on my own terms, untouched by anyone else.

Most mornings I head straight into work. Sometimes I write, like this, like a man possessed. Everything flows. It just flows. With that deep, monotropic focus, the mission is simple: get as much done as possible before 4:45 a.m., when round one of hard exercise begins.

If I miss that window, there’s a cost. The crash comes quicker. The loop doesn’t close. And when that happens, everything shifts, dysmorphia, floating anxiety, that off-kilter feeling that lingers for the rest of the day.

It doesn’t seem to matter what time I go to bed. Most nights I’m asleep by 9:30 p.m., not out of discipline but necessity, exhaustion, helped along by supplements and mirtazapine.

I tested the theory recently, stayed up until midnight. It made no difference. At 3:30 a.m., like clockwork, my brain lit up.

And that was it. Up, and off we went.

It’s not insomnia, it’s a combination of other things

For years, I believed my sleep was broken and needed fixing. I called it insomnia.

But I was always at odds with that label because getting to sleep has never been the problem. I understood concepts like circadian rhythm and body clocks, and they explained some of it. But they never answered the bigger questions about my energy, or why it feels as though my body has slept while my brain has spent the night working.

Why do I wake feeling optimistic, clear headed, and so intensely alive, only to become a completely different person by 6:00 p.m.?

Every single day.

The more I’ve come to understand my nervous system, the more I realise this runs far deeper than sleep. My alertness seems to be governed by an entire internal rhythm. The same hormones that knock me out at 9:30 p.m. with clockwork precision appear to be the ones that propel me out of bed at 3:30 a.m., ready to go.

Understanding my messy brain and body has become a special interest. Not because I’m obsessed with myself, but because I’m searching for contentment. I’m trying to understand why I function the way I do, and whether there’s a way to move towards something more stable.

I’d love nothing more than to find a way to bottle whatever it is I feel at 3:30 a.m. and carry it with me for the rest of the day.

Naming the conflict (which took me a while to admit)

That’s an admission that creates some conflict.

Three-thirty in the morning brings me energy, clarity, and hope. The world is peaceful. Nobody is in my space. For a few precious hours, the world is mine—exactly as I want and need it to be. I choose how I move, what I hear, what I see. For my AuDHD nervous system, it is deeply soothing.

And then the energy falls.

The opposite becomes true. The price is paid, suddenly and heavily. It’s the difference between light and dark.

My brain begins to struggle with even simple tasks. It trips me up. My OCD often surges, which has become one of the clearest signs that my brain is exhausted. By 4:00 p.m., I’m living the opposite experience of the one I had twelve hours earlier.

What’s strange is that both versions of me know the other exists. The morning me understands the evening me is coming. The evening me remembers the morning me was there. But when I’m in that exhausted evening brain, it’s incredibly difficult to access the logic that felt so obvious at 3:30 a.m.

No matter how many times I live this pattern, almost never missing a day, I still find myself caught off guard by it.

It’s far more than a body clock

It appears my experience is deeply common in AuDHD, but it doesn’t look the same in everyone. I read that my sleep is ‘phase-advanced’, early to fire, early to fade. The mirror of my experience is called ‘phase-delayed.’ This is when people struggle to get to sleep until the early hours, usually as I am waking, instead they come alive in the lat evening and very early morning. The opposite also being true that they then struggle to scrape themselves out of bed and put their brain into the world that is waiting for them.

My 14-year-olds (who is ADHD) energy peaks at 8pm, right as mine is telling me I need to go to bed. One of us is winding down for a 3:30 start, the other is just getting warmed up. Neither of us is doing it wrong. We’re just not built to the same timetable or to the one the world assumes we all share.

There is also a whole other article that goes into the shame that I felt around this as a parent for many years, unable to meet the energy needs of a child that wanted play and attention whilst I could barely lift a finger.

But for today the first reframe focusses that what I believed was insomnia, wasn’t. It’s a rhythm. And once you see it as a rhythm instead of a fault, everything about how you respond to it changes. Kind of.

Breaking it into what’s actually going on

This is my understanding that I have pieced together and why I believe this daily experience centres around my biological make up, rather than being broken.

Cortisol: the wake-up surge

Cortisol is the body’s ‘up and at it’ hormone. It’s supposed to surge in the pre-dawn hours to lift me toward waking. Mine just does it early and does it hard. That’s the physical jolt that has me awake at 3:30. It’s not anxiety, or a problem to solve, just my alertness switch flipping on at the same time every day. It’s why I wake fully launched and in the day before my feet hit the ground.

Dopamine: why my morning brain feels like the real me

The reason those early hours feel so good isn’t just the energy, it’s clarity, motivation, the sense that everything is possible and solvable. That’s my reward system running peacefully before the day has taken all it had to offer. For an ADHD brain that spends so much of its time hunting down interests, waking with this feeling is intoxicating. I also get hooked on things I enjoy very, very quickly. Giving them up is no easy feat.

It’s not a mood. It’s my bodies chemistry, briefly, falling perfectly aligned.
I am literally the best version of myself at this time of day. I like being alive.

Circadian rhythm: the body clock

The rhythm sets the other two. My melatonin comes early (albeit that one of my get me to sleep knock out supplements is melatonin), my cortisol comes early, my whole 24 hour cycle is brought forward. That’s why it’s the same time every day regardless of when I fell asleep, the clock doesn’t track how tired I am, it’s just runs on repeat, day after day after day. It’s no different for people who are opposite to me, same system, completely different setting.

The mid-day collapse: when the opposite becomes true

The crash hits me as a wave. I feel the physical sensation wash down over me. Actually, think of a shit old phone that tanks the battery as quick as it’s been recharged.

In my window I exercise hard, work hard, all the while problem-solving, and rapidly processing my world. Early cortisol is kind enough to mask a shortfall for hours, until it’s done its job. Come mid-day I collapse into an exhaustion that feels total, out of proportion, and somewhat punishing. And what feels like a separate problem from the glorious morning sensation begins.

Functional health

I met with a functional health specialist over 12 months ago and, ever since, I’ve been taking a cocktail of supplements, all intended to support better sleep.

Despite sticking with the routine, they don’t seem to touch the sides.

The fact that I’ve seen so little improvement makes me wonder how much of my sleep difficulties are rooted in a nervous system that’s permanently on high alert, always standing to attention.

For reference, I was recommended:

• Melatonin (acquired via a friend in the US, since it requires a prescription in the UK 🤯)

• Magnesium bisglycinate

• L-taurine

• L-theanine

And then there’s hypervigilance: the sense of urgency

I’m often told that an afternoon nap might help create some balance, that it could extend my battery and bring me closer to something resembling mental equilibrium. I’ve tried. I still try regularly.

More often than not, though, the same thing happens. Within moments of lying down, I drift into that beautiful space between wakefulness and sleep, where reality softens and becomes almost dreamlike.

Then my body jolts suddenly. It’s sudden, deeply unpleasant, and pulls me straight back out again.

Last week it happened so intensely that, as I came to, my first thought was, “Fuck, this is what death feels like.” An overwhelming wave of fear surged through my body before slowly settling over the next few minutes, allowing me to reorient myself to reality.

When I look at the clock, I’ve usually been asleep for only a few minutes.

And that’s the end of the nap.

It doesn’t feel restorative. It feels as though some deeply ingrained part of my nervous system has mistaken letting go for danger. Like an act of hypervigilance is replaying itself, determined to pull me back to full alert before I can drift too far.

I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I only know that, for me, an afternoon nap is rarely a place of rest.

Much like my ADHD, I need to be interested enough in creating change

I can’t remember ever wanting a slow wake up. The idea of waking gently and letting the day flow feels wrong somehow. What I want, what my system demands, is to come up fast, and get on with the day. Even when there is nothing is urgent or even needs my attention. It’s a reason I work on Saturday and Sunday mornings first thing. Why not?

My autistic and ADHD wiring collides. A baseline of hypervigilance that doesn’t like being switched off, meets alertness with pressure attached. And underneath it, perhaps it’s my ADHD, but this incessant sense that the window that is open to enjoying the world is now, that the ideas and clarity, creativity, solutions and joy even, are here in this hour and might not be in the next. Time waits for no man as they say.

Which reframes the whole thing again. It isn’t only that my body wakes me early. It’s that the state it wakes me into is one of urgency, and urgency, for a brain like mine, is where I do my best work. The pressure isn’t the problem. For a long time it’s been the fuel. The 3:30 alarm could very well be my nervous system handing me the one condition it works best in: fast, clear, alive, and against a clock only I can feel.

All whilst the rest of the world (or at least most of it) sleep.

The three essentials

I learnt in rehab that the three essentials to good mental health are exercise, nutrition and sleep. Hmmm….

I exercise hard and well. My nutrition is complex but it is very clean and healthy. I know that sleep is my barrier to better mental health. I can’t help but know this to be true. And in there lies the greatest issue.

What I need, what I want, what my natural body wants of me, and what I am willing to change all collide.

If I could sleep, perhaps the contentment and clarity would sit with me longer through the day. Rather than in a few grabbed hours each morning.

FFS. Sometimes facing the truth is where change begins.

Perhaps it is myself tripping myself up in this belief that life is for living at 3.30 a.m. when really it’s 4.00 a.m.

Baby steps….

Why would I write this? To process my shit

Why would you read it? Maybe to feel seen. Maybe because some of it resonates. Maybe because you’re trying to make sense of your own brain too.

Beyond that, I haven’t got a clue.

But if you’ve made it this far, thank you. It means a lot. 🙏🏻

I’ve been an anxious type for as long as I can remember. Ironic, given my new moniker at the kids’ school is “the nonchalant gangster” (true fact), which, to the outside world, can look exceptionally accurate as I hide myself away, refuse to talk to other parents, and sit alone, quietly observing the world. On the inside, there’s often a whole other shit show going on. What may appear as nonchalance is often an anxiety that keeps me in my lane, my own lane, and welcomes very few people into it.

Life’s too short to worry

If only it were optional. There are strategies, logic, and moments of peace. But underneath it all sits an anxiety that has lived in my body for as long as I can remember. I long to be free of it.

I’ve calculated there are around 26 recognised types of anxiety, not all clinical, some associated disorders. The irony is I feel I could name more than that on occasion.

I’m anxious if I feel good, because I feel good.
I’m anxious if I feel shit, because I feel shit.

My mum used to say that I worried about worrying. It’s somewhat true.

Another irony is that I worried about her. Last year, during treatment, I learned about parentification and recognised something in myself that felt adjacent to it, the instinct to absorb an adult’s pain. I remember that feeling vividly. It wasn’t something she placed on me, nor was I ever expected to carry it. But I felt it in my body all the same. As if, somehow, I could hold some of it for her. Of course, I couldn’t. But as a child, that’s what it felt like.

Life is complex. Worryingly so.

I’m partnered to somebody who carries very little anxiety. And in that I’ve realised that my experience of the world isn’t common place. Many people do in fact float through their day relatively carefree, taking it in their stride. Imagine?

So what the fuck happened to my brain that made me so worrisome? Well, the answer to that is in part a traumatic incident, but more so, the anxiety is long ingrained. It’s commonplace for late-identified neurodivergent adults.

We’re often an anxious bunch, and with good reason.

It all begins in childhood

Anxiety is built into us late identified neurodivergent adults, as children.

When I first heard the statistic that that a child with ADHD receives approximately 20,000 more negative or corrective messages than their peers by the age of 10–12 (courtesy of Psychiatrist Dr William Dodson), a lot of things made sense in how those experiences would induce anxiety.

This is me. So much so. My School report for every single lesson, putting aside Art and PE read ‘Needs to focus more. Doesn’t concentrate. Lazy. Asks ‘why’ far too often’. Year after year. Report after report. I truly despised school.

I can also see that being relentlessly corrected at school ingrained my avoidant and stubborn streak. Authority makes me anxious. I don’t trust it. Unless it’s lead with care. I can smell care from a mile away, and that is the only place I believe hierarchy is safe.

In fairness I also saw that this experience at school built my fight. A mission to prove teachers wrong who’d constantly try to pull me into their systems, whilst my brain was having none of it. And that worked. It gave me a work ethic that has never waned.

But that doesn’t accommodate the anxiety that exists as the baseline, until it all began to make sense but a few years ago when I learned of my autism and ADHD.

Anxiety shows up in many different ways in our youths.

The sidelines

I’d observe how peers would socialise. I’d carefully find my place on the sidelines of friendship groups, dangle one foot in, camouflaging just enough to show willing, but also maintaining my distance. Social anxiety tore through my soul. I just couldn’t get comfortable or understand it.

It still does to this day. I'll avoid socialising at all costs. If a non avoidable social event is on the agenda, I spend days anticipating the entire event, where my entry and exit points are, what safe spots are available, all in the hope a very good reason to bail will come along.

And whilst back in my teens I wasn’t quite the nonchalant gangster that I am recognised as I am today, I was a mystery to many people that tried to connect with me. Getting close to people induces anxiety for many reasons.

I’d rather not have it, until it is entirely trusted, only then will I let a deep level of connection in. Outside of that I will remain somewhat untouchable, yet often within reach.

The mirror

One of the most complex and disturbing anxieties that I have long experienced is deep dysmorphia. From a very young age I could barely look in a mirror.

Self harm was common place. This anxiety runs so deep that I specifically tried to tackle it through EMDR only last year. I couldn’t imagine my own children experiencing this, and yet for me it feels an entirely natural experience.

I hope this doesn't resonate with many people, because it saddens me to think that others have found themselves in the same place I often did. One of the deepest anxieties that follows experiences like this is the shame that clings to them. You remember exactly how it felt in the moment, and then live with the remorse of having acted on those feelings.

RSD and emotional dysregulation

The stat on this common placed anxiety is huge and strongly linked to ADHD, with up to around 70% of ADHD adults showing emotional dysregulation, and RSD takes a big chunk of that.

Again, consider pre ADHD identification, all of the experiences, and working against ourselves, only serving to intensify the ingrained resulting anxiety. It’s no suprise come middle age that every day life has anxiety floating around it as part of the furniture.

My RSD shows up particularly strongly when I’m tired. Especially if my communication is poor, perhaps I’ve been too direct, or I’ve over explained something that I can’t get my head around. God forbid if I was trying to explain a feeling, or hadn’t been able to reply to somebody, in person, asking “How are you?” - I mean this is it right here. FFS, being asked “How are you?” induces my anxiety.

I immediately crumble. What’s enough. What’s too much. Do they really care? WTF do I say? And in I go swallowed up. Whilst much of the world reply “I’m fine thanks, and you” and move the fuck on. I’m there worried. Anxious.

Once I’ve the sensation internally, I’ll begin to watching the expressions, shifts of tone, and oh fuck, this isn’t going well. Shit, the anxiety is going further South. I really should just spend some time on my own and avoid other humans at all costs.

BTW did I mention I was autistic?

And in there is the complex intersectionality where presentations fuel the anxiety. It all runs hand in hand.

The ‘sorry’ reflex

Then there’s the apology anxiety.
When I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s the pre-emptive one.

I’m sorry for what I about to say. To bother you. For being such a twat. For taking up space. For simple existing in this world.

This anxiety, saying sorry, isn’t polite. It’s fear. It’s a reflex. It sits firmly within the ‘fawn’ reponse within the nervous system. It’s inbuilt after years of being corrected, or misunderstood, often I’ll find myself preparing myself for the next bollocking for something I had no control over. It’s easier to say sorry ahead of fucking up.

Childhood has a lot to answer for, but it doesn't end there. The thread of those experiences runs through our lives, repeating itself until we finally recognise the pattern. By then, the price of living against ourselves has become painfully clear, leaving so much to untangle. At times, it feels like too much.

Some float through life, I float with anxiety

Last year I learned of the name for a long standing sensation I’ve experienced - ‘free floating anxiety’. It doesn’t even have the fucking decency to give me a good reason for its existence.

No trigger event, no reason. It’s hum of dread that just appears and goes again when it’s had enough. This is the one that had my mum asking if I worried about worrying, because there was, demonstrably, nothing on the surface to be worried about.

It always comes back to this: being able to feel good, and then immediately becoming suspicious of feeling good. If I feel shit, I’m naturally anxious about that. But if I feel okay, I find myself waiting for something to go wrong.

Free-floating anxiety isn’t attached to anything. It’s just... on. It washes over me like a wave, or I wake up with it already there. No obvious cause. No explanation. Just an ever-present hum that is deeply, relentlessly fucking irritating, leaving me waiting for something to happen, or, just as often, waiting for it to finally disappear.

OCD & PTSD

This is where the associated disorders live in my body and brain. This is a long way from the free floating anxiety types. For me this is OCD and PTSD.

OCD, where the brain serves up a fear and demands a ritual to make it stop. PTSD, where something that already happened keeps happening, on a loop, in the body.

Hyperviglance and anxiety go hand in hand. And this where that dysmorphia from earlier actually belongs, sat right in the OCD frame.

Layer in autism and ADHD and a lifetime of being corrected, misread, masked and braced, and you don’t have one anxiety, you have a fairly hefty cocktail to contend with. Free-floating dread, the fawn reflex, RSD, OCD, PTSD, all pouring in unison, or in their own moments in the day.

It’s all about management until the end arrives

I doubt I’ll get to the bottom of all this anxiety in my lifetime. Even with this relatively newfound understanding, the protections, habits, and fears are deeply ingrained. They were built over decades and won’t disappear overnight. I can feel myself changing. I can feel acceptance growing. But it’s a lot.

I’ve stopped searching for a cure and started aiming for management. Some days are better than others. That’s enough.

And, while it may sound morbid, there’s one thing in life that doesn’t make me anxious is death. Not one bit. I don’t fear it. I see peace in its inevitability.

There’s something oddly comforting about that. In a life where my mind can manufacture anxiety from almost anything, it’s reassuring to know there’s one certainty beyond my control that doesn’t frighten me.

By my reckoning, that’s a pretty big win.

“You’re too sensitive”

I am not too sensitive. Well perhaps a little.

If any of this sounds familiar, there’s very good reason. The risk of threat sits deeply within the nervous system and is often on high alert. When the world proves it has good reason, the reinforcement continues.

And to the outside world, the exterior looks calm, collected, nonchalant even. Internally the battles are long, often and hard.

Late identification has a lot to answer for.

To somebody living within a relatively peaceful state of mind and an optimistic outlook, I see the logic in the ask. It’s what we humans sometimes do when we’ve felt low over a prolonged period of time.

Book an appointment with the Dr. Have the talk where the term ‘depression’ often appears. It’s true. I am depressed. And yet I’m not.

My brain is relentlessly lit up like a Christmas tree, regardless of what season I am in. It takes an ever-present 24 hour, round-the-clock management to contain, control, support, catch and take me through the day with as little damage limitation as possible.

There is no off switch. There isn’t much middle ground.

As strange as it may sound, I have found myself embracing situations where I hit total shutdown, and I say that with careful thought. It’s not often, but when I do shut down, proper, proper shutdown, for whatever reason the situation has manifested, there is a tiny corner of my mind that says ‘this is what it would feel like to be able to switch my brain off.’ I enjoy the momentary peace and inability to think. A glimpse as to what a quiet mind must feel like.

My cycles of energy and lows are as predictable as day and night. Even when there is a wave of positive energy, clarity, hope, there is a tap on the shoulder knowing that this is temporary, that the crash will appear, sometimes with good reason, often without. I feel what I sense is some kind of chemical shift, a wave floods through me. A physical experience, followed by the mental awareness of what comes next. The low.

Erm… You sound depressed? Have you heard yourself?

Yes, and that is part of the problem. I hear myself all day and night long.

I know I am depressed. I always have been. My brain has been on fire for as long as I can remember, even as a young child. But the reality is that since burnout towards the end of 2024, after spending the majority of my life adulting and parenting other adults and smaller humans, the slightest flicker of conflict hits my nervous system and I recoil further from society. And whilst a trigger, such as conflict or some kind of negative human behaviour, will kick-start a cycle, it is also true that the wave will flow on its own accord. Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep, or a chemical deficiency, the ADHD, the autism, the OCD, age, an imbalance.

It could be none of those things, it may be all of those things. Who the fuck knows? How could anybody possibly ever know? I don’t think I ever will.

If I had one wish, just one, it would be this:

“What the actual fuck is going on in my body and brain? I want the whole works, a complete MOT. Bloods taken, neurological mapping, biological reasoning, hereditary factors, PTSD impact, you name it, the lot. Much more than human opinion based on experience. I want a supersonic scanning machine that maps it all out.”

Then, and only then, do I sense I'd know how to find the solutions to this age-old problem. And the chances of that happening are very thin.

No, really. You should go see a doctor (again)!

I did. Last year. And the reality is there is very little that they can do. We sat for the allocated 15 minutes, which was based on the foundation of getting support for my ever-present insomnia / circadian rhythm / lack of sleep. The Dr was lovely, kind and caring. she something on the lines of, “It sounds horrific in your brain. I am just so sorry there are no resources,” which is the truth. I didn’t expect her to offer anything other than sleeping tablets, which I ended up near pleading for. Although she did switch me from Sertraline to Mirtazapine, which was instantly soothing on my nervous system. I was very grateful for that.

I feel for Drs / GPs. Being the front line for complex human brains such as mine is enough on its own, regardless of what resources are available. In reality there is very little they can do, no matter how much they care. It’s no wonder antidepressants are handed out so easily.

I am diagnosed with comorbid, complex ADHD, autism and OCD.

I had a traumatic childhood experience aged 6, which I pinpoint as a significant impact on my nervous system and the moment everything lit up, my senses, my brain’s receptors, and with that my body and brain went into hyperalert. I feel and read everything intensely. Sounds, words, expressions, movement, patterns, shifts. My mind provides me with a minute-by-minute analysis of each waking minute with very little control.

I lay some of my depression at the door of late identification. It stacks up. By the time I received my full diagnosis of ADHD, autism and OCD, I’d already spent my life living against my own nervous system. Performing in a world I wasn’t built for is as good a reason to be depressed as any, in my books.

Grieving all that could have been feels somewhat depressing too. Perhaps, much like CPTSD works, the are many, many underlying reasons so many late-identified neurodivergent adults are struck by depression.

It’s not an episode, but an undercurrent, one that gets managed, rather than cured.

What are the alternatives to antidepressants?

Don’t ask me to do breathwork. Don’t ask me to do the STOP technique. Just don’t....

It’s not that I don’t believe. It’s because all of that is management, not a cure.

I am sick to death of management. That is the problem here.

I feel it’s the management that is at the heart of my depression. Over the years I’ve done extensive EMDR. CBT. DBT. Talk therapy, and more recently SSP (which I thoroughly enjoy and would recommend). It all helps. It doesn’t cure. EMDR comes the closest. SSP soothes in the moment. Beyond that, CBT and DBT often lead to ‘management’. Even that thought right there gives me a mini wave of sadness in my in the pit of my stomach.

Having to do breath work just to live a fucking moment in the day.
No. Please no. Just fucking no. I can’t do it.

As for a thought cloud technique. When that was offered to me I thought:

💭 ‘I’ll put this technique in the fucking cloud right now’.

And with that I watched it disappear. Because if I had to watch clouds all day long I would, erm, lose the will to, erm. No. I’ll leave that there.

In more up beat news, after a low spell, it’s not uncommon to feel a sense elation come through in a wave, and yet I know that it will crash not long after. I don’t want elation, or energy. I want stability. I long for stability. I don’t even want to be happy. Mildly content, some peace and quiet, an off switch would be heaven on earth. Those things would just lovely.

I don’t need any more diagnoses (unless it’s my one wish).

Yesterday I caught myself coming out of a low, a deep low, where all the bad thoughts happen and they take extra management. Actually, I think they are real, but that’s not the point. It’s that whilst I come into the brevity of energy, and I clutch at straws to hold on to it for as long as possible, I have crafted a message to my Dr in a bid to talk about alternative treatments that are available. But I don’t need any more diagnoses. I want an intervention. It may or may not exist, but today it is positive that I continue to look for one. That is me pushing energy out of a low and putting it to good use.

So, am I depressed? Yes. And no. Both are still true. I am depressed because I’m tired of coping and managing. Therapy has its place and is immensely valuable, but I don’t feel it will cure my lows. It helps manage them. And let’s not forget, 50 minutes in my company during a therapy session is enough to send anybody spiralling into their own depression.

The GP can’t unpick my ADHD, autism, OCD and trauma in 15 minutes. It’s my job to be sensible, to keep working, to keep unpicking, offering up thoughts and steps forward.

I don’t want to be depressed. It feels like a state of consequence.
But in there is hope, when I can view it that way, today at least.

Fuck me, that is a fun read 😬.
Maybe I am depressed.
Or maybe not.

Why did I just write that?

To process. To catch myself. To slow my brain down through writing. It's therapeutic, and if it helps somebody else feel seen, then that also makes me feel somewhat happy. Other than that I have little clue.

Late identification of Autism & ADHD has so much to answer for…

There was a moment, once it was confirmed I was autistic and ADHD, that I paused and felt a new feeling. This was after I got through the imposter phase.

Me? Autistic. I mean, the psychiatrist says it, but you know, it’s probably depression dressed up as autism. Look how high performing I am. Those were different feelings, that moved through eventually, and the old familiar one showed up.

I don’t really belong being autistic. Or do I? It makes sense on paper, but not in my mind. Plus I don’t know anybody who’s autistic like I am, if at all. And with that, I began to realise the extent I’d lived against my nervous system, and sensory comforts, my entire life.

Until the moment struck and I accepted I was allowed to be autistic: ‘I see it clearly. Autism. That’s why I’ve never felt like I belonged. Yes, I was fundamentally making bad decision after bad decision, yet why I didn’t understand, and now I know.’

I could put the last to bed and start living.

And then came another feeling.

Grief. Fuck me. Grief. The horror of all horrors. Grief.

I truly dislike the feeling grief puts in me. Here I am. Four and a half years since my autism diagnosis. Eighteen months after my ADHD identification. And I’m a little sad to say, I still don’t feel like I belong. But there’s more to it now.

I’ve come to understand, that in my mind and existence, there isn’t one type of belonging. It shows up in all manner of ways, experiences and moments. They aren’t stages that are moved through and left behind. They live alongside each other, and they surface in their own time. I recognise all of them.

Derealisation is erm….a real thing.

Only a few days ago I had a fairly common experience. I noticed it.
It often happens when I walk to the shops or the post office at the end of my road.

The people I pass who are living their lives, the shop workers, the endless rows of things that are available to buy on shelves, I don’t feel I am truly in the same world as them. Now, before you think I’ve completely lost the plot, not just partially, hear me out. Of course I understand the reality of the world. What I mean is, I can’t connect that there is an existence that doesn’t come with a deep existential viewpoint that considers the purpose of every single molecule and what it contributes to the world.

That humans can just glide through tasks, watch TV, sleep and go again, because that’s what life is, they don’t stop and think about every fucking moment of life, instead, they just get on with it. Enjoy it while they can.

I’m not dissociated from the world. I can perform beautifully in my day. However, I do see that I am, by and large, when I step outside, often in a state of ‘derealisation.’

It began the day I fell into burnout and it’s never gone away. I’m convinced it will never change. It’s like watching my life, and others’ lives, through a window. I’m present but I’m not truly participating.

The line ‘touching from a distance, further all the time’ hits it perfectly - RIP Ian Curtis.

I understand and see that there is reality on the other side of the glass, with people moving through the world effortlessly, or at least making it look that way. But I can’t quite get to them. I am there physically, yet I am not there. Living and observing the living. It is exhausting in a way that has no obvious cause, which makes it harder to explain, harder to be believed.

I long to free of this feeling. And on that…

Longing is painful.

There is a deep, almost unbearable desiring of something different.
Not more. Different.

A wanting of life, to exist in a world that felt made for me. There is quiet where I need quiet. The right energy, never too much. Conversation that flows without it needing a filter or over explanation. Silence is as connecting as sharing words.

I long for a place where accommodations don't need to exist because nothing about me needs accommodating.

I want to live on my own terms, not because I'm selfish. I enjoy living around other humans, I have empathy that we all want to live as close to our comforts as possible, but the longing is so specific it almost hurts to name it, because naming it is admitting how far from it you are.

The feeling that we don’t belong, even when we’ve been invited.

It is not that we aren't included. That's part of the complexity. We've been invited. And still there is an inherent hum that taps at the shoulder telling us that we don't belong, most commonly found in social spaces and engagements, where the rules move quickly and energy presses relentlessly, moving in many, many directions. Far too many directions to possibly keep up.

The internal narrative tells us that we should belong. That we can belong if we keep working at it. One day it will all feel okay. The day alcohol arrived, for many of us, so did the bridge into belonging. All edges softened, lights dimmed, noises quietened, this is where I belong! Until the day it asks for more, and more, and the thing that made me believe I finally belonged became the very thing that I knew I didn't want to belong in. Addiction.

The bystander looking in.

The feeling that we could belong, we should belong even, but we’re not welcomed.

It’s standing on the edge of a world as a human. We see circles, communities, groups, gatherings. We want to belong where others stand and connect. We can picture ourselves inside it. We believe in the equality of it, that we are no less deserving of belonging and that we’d be at home. And yet for some reason, the invite isn’t forthcoming.

Even when it’s not explicit. It’s felt. The consequence of how we look, present or perception of where we are from, not where we are at.

And yet, it’s cruel to know that underneath the difference, we are the same. We long for the same things. The issue isn’t belonging, it’s acceptance and invitation.

Toleration isn’t acceptance.

There is a place that looks like belonging and isn’t. It’s where difference isn’t met with arms open wide, nor outright rejection, but with tolerance.

An uncomfortable acceptance. The accommodations can be made, yes, but they arrive with a weight attached. A sense that you are a logistics problem being managed rather than a person being wanted.

You aren’t truly understood, but absorbed.
It’s easy to shrink requests, or restrain from fully showing up. Because asking for what’s needed risks feeling like a burden, as someone who wants too much. Too needy. Too special.

We learn to take less than we’d like, sometimes need. The performance of being easy in toleration all too often costs the very thing the accommodation was supposed to give.

Isolation is lovely. And lonely.

The infrastructure of a connected life can all be present, the career, the family, the friendships, the place in the world, and still you can be profoundly, achingly alone inside it.

This is the isolation that has nothing to do with the number of people around you. It’s the absence of true connection in exactly the places it should be most felt.

The need to move through long stretches of solitude, allowing space for comfort to become a dominant and consistent feeling in the nervous system.

I’ve learned that I can be content. Sometimes I’d go as far as saying I can feel happy. When I am alone, fully alone.

To the outside world it’s called isolation. To me it’s freedom. Until it becomes lonely.
Isolation is both beautiful and painful.

Performing sucks.

Belonging, for many of us, was conditional and earned through performance.
We learned early to study people, to mirror the right expressions, movements and ways of the human experience.

It works, often too well. So well we believe we are all that we are masking. We're given a place in the world. The mask has earned this space that we've yearned for. And yet the longer we wear it, the better it works, the more confusing and lonely it becomes.

When the mask is removed at the end of the day, we fall into exhaustion. We know deep down something is amiss.

When burnout strikes, we promise the mask will be banished from our existence. A whole new world unfolds. Where we once pretended to belong feels out of reach and inaccessible.

Grieving sucks even more.

And then the grief. The most painful of all. Perhaps.

The realisation that there may be no escape, not in the dramatic sense, but in the quiet reality that the structure of life is deeply ingrained. It’s easy to look back with the knowledge that late identification brings, and imagine what could have been.

A life built around peace, authentic living, an infrastructure that fits the nervous system, social appetite, communication and connection. Grieving that version of ourselves is hard in its moment.

We can grieve the years spent not knowing why we didn’t belong. We grieve, sometimes, simply for how hard it was to get to this place, whilst so much of the world looks effortless to others. We grieve in so many ways.

The Exile in the mirror

And finally, the deepest and darkest. The stranger: not belonging even to yourself.

The energy spent on the desire to find our place in the world can see us shape ourselves around others’ ways. The danger is losing the thread of our own. We lose touch with which preferences are ours and which were borrowed.

We meet ourselves as strangers. Late identification is, in part, the slow and disorienting work of moving back into a self that, I think, for many of us, we never fully inhabited.

The grief returns. Longing returns. But there is hope. Knowledge is power.

Why belonging sits at the centre of all of it

It’s the narrative that appears to accompany so many late-identified humans that I come into contact with. A common thread we carry. It’s the weight of the life that exists, that has had all of our heart, spirit and soul thrown at it for many decades that this new human existence is trying to navigate.

It should be easier, yet it’s often harder.

It’s not something that can be unpicked overnight. It’s complex, unwieldy, messy, beautiful and painful, frequently.

And then comes burnout, and with it the deep truth surfaces. The masks are put away. The energy to push through is gone. And in that stripped-back state, the lifelong sense of not belonging is no longer a hum. Somehow it became the main event.

Everything we managed to hold together is suddenly visible as the effort it always was.

That we can be different, and still be enough. Where we can meet our people in our authenticity and be loved for it, and love with it.

And hope that one day we’ll know what belonging feels like

Side note: While editing this, I realised I still haven’t fully owned it. It should probably read ‘I’ rather than ‘we’ or ‘our’, that was one of the biggest lessons from treatment. I need to own what I feel, rather than hide behind collective language.

But I don’t have the time or energy to edit it all now.

And the World Cup’s on.

So fuck it. It is what it is.

While I’ve clawed my way back through about 80% of it, the one area I can’t seem to shake, or see a way out of, is the profound impact it has had on me socially.

My whole career was built on socialising.

I say through gritted teeth, and deep shame, I was a recruiter. My head is hung low as I write those words. I found it easier admitting I was an addict. However, in my defence, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice having left school without any meaningful qualifications. And it served me well.

I was successful because I wasn’t like other recruiters. I swam against the tide and it worked for me. I enjoyed it.

I told the truth. I did what I said I’d do. I could pattern match effortlessly. I’m very good at decision making and multitasking, whilst my brain retained every crumb of useful information that connected dots out of thin air. Plus I worked all hours of the day, seven days a week to keep the demons contained.

That’s the formula to what being a good recruiter is - It’s not rocket science.

I was also an employer and business owner, every waking hour was spent talking, managing, prioritising, having energy for people within some kind of social capacity. Employees, candidates, clients, service providers, people wanted and needed to talk for all manner of reasons. Meeting after meeting. Call after call. A relentless stream of emails.

TLDR: My job and life infrastructure required me to be ‘very socially active’.

WTF you're autistic! This sounds hell on earth.

It was. But also, I’m AuDHD. And what I see worked well is that autism spun out the web, the ADHD drove the energy. Work was my hyperfocus and single life mission that kept me alive. And in there is a logic that overcomes what I perceive as being ‘social’, an anchor if you will.

I was the same then as I am now. There was no space for small talk. I’d manage each situation meticulously, every conversation had a purpose or it didn’t happen. Every engagement had a purpose. Get in, and get out as quickly as possible.

For 18 of my 20 years in this role, I did not know I was AuDHD. I just knew how to stay in the game with all eyes on an exit plan, promising to myself that when it came everything would change. I would fall back gently from the social demands to something far more peaceful.

“Do you have many friends?”

I remember being asked that in my autism assessment, 2 years ahead of my burnout.

“No. Very few. But I have many, many acquaintances.”

I said this at the peak of my social existence. Ahead of understanding my brain and why it felt off. Why I felt so deeply mismatched with the world I existed in.

Acquaintances and friendships are very different things (in my mind).

An acquaintance wants something from me. I am useful to them. Or we are useful to each other. We’ll cross paths. It doesn’t mean to say that acquaintances don’t care, or have kindness. There is connection. But it is different to friendship.

Friendships come without expectations. They offer a deeper kind of connection, something beyond the ordinary.

The connection can be deep or brief, frequent or infrequent, and still remain meaningful because both people understand why they exist in each other’s lives.

There is no scorekeeping. No demands. No obligation to perform. No judgement when life gets busy or difficult.

It simply flows. It is selfless.

Two humans sharing space in a way that makes living in this world a little easier, a little richer, and a little better. Both have willingly invested in the connection, creating enough trust and safety for their hearts and souls to open a little more than they usually do. At least in my eyes that’s what true friendship feels like.

Of course, sometimes it needs working at, but if there is energy for it - that too is a differentiator between friendship and acquaintance.

I like friends. I am grateful anybody would want to be friends with me. I’m not easy to be with. My rules, conditions, terms of engagement that I need in place drain me, how others allow them to exist has always surprised me.

Over the years I have let friends down because I don’t like socialising in person.

But I’m the best at messaging by a long shot. I enjoy sharing a moment. I like brief, spontaneous interactions, and then sometimes nothing for months. I like that space and then the connection.

I don’t enjoy arranging to meet at prescribed times and places. I struggle with being around people in person, even people I care about.

The exception is usually work. Give me a purpose, a role, or something to focus on, and I can show up.

Friendship has never been the difficult part.

It’s the socialising.

Which leads to why this is such a big deal. Once the human to human element dropped from my work through burnout, a little earlier than planned, solitude was embraced. Deep, dark, solitude.

“But you’ve always been social.”

I can see how my work orientated lifestyle (one of necessity) accumulates in that thinking. Especially to the people in my life today who can effortlessly float through social engagements, without any need to think beyond who, what or why it is happening.

But I wasn’t social. I’m not. I did a great job performing.
There was a reason for each and every interaction, or it didn’t happen.
Not forgetting ‘socialising’ with alcohol creates a distorted reality.

I haven’t touched a drop for eight years. It was one of the moments that made me realise how mismatched some relationships can be when they’re built around drinking habits and shared needs, rather than genuine connection in the cold light of sobriety.

Some people thrive on social connection. In person. Together. Connected.
Others, like me. Enjoy a different type of connection. Less can be more.

Neither is right, nor wrong. For some it is easy. For others it is hard.

Pre-Burnout I was perfectly capable of talking to people, complete strangers and acquaintances because there was a reason. To earn a living and move towards escaping its necessity. But it often ended at the reason we were connected. When it moved to small talk, or the need to arrange, think beyond an anchor or perform I backed out at every opportunity:

“We should have a coffee.”
“We should have lunch.”
“We should meet up.”

“No. God. No. Why on earth would we do that?.”

All of which felt like entirely different demands. When the purpose was simply to socialise.

On occasion these questions would activate my PDA. Or demand avoidance. I feel a rise in my soul. I would push hard to say yes to feel I was doing the right thing. And nothing brought or brings me greater comfort than finding an excuse to cancel, or being postponed, ideally indefinitely. Until such point people recognised the pattern of me withdrawing.

If I’d accept and went through the motions, everything was mapped. Pre-planned. What was safe, what wasn’t, where the escape route was, the hope it would feel easy on the day, that the plan wouldn’t be impacted beyond my own control.

But what I’d love most, and I hold on to this to this day. Knowing true friendship exists, when you can message somebody, or in the right conditions, sit with somebody, and when you ask each other.

“How’s it going?” - The reply can effortlessly fall out

“I’m fucked. It’s shit. I’m really struggling right now”. Because that’s friendship for me.

A place beyond social small talk where there is no judgement. No come back, other than an arm around the shoulder that says “I know. Me too.” or “I’m glad we can be honest with each other”. No awkwardness. No demand. True authenticity. The anchor is peace and space to be the humans that we are.

I enjoyed that kind of friendship. I still do.

The day I fell into burnout, my social existence collapsed.

I recall saying to my partner: “I never want to speak to another human again.”
What doesn’t help in all of this, is that she is a social butterfly.

In its moment I didn’t consider the extremes. 20 years of relentless talking and being in demand, to the next, my window of tolerance shut up shop, and that was that.

This new reclusive journey began. From living a life that demanded and commanded me to talk all day and night long, shifting between personalities, needs, wants, styles.

Fast forward to today. 18 months on.

I’m still within the hung walls of identity dissolution. From being in constant demand for 20 years, to nothing in a heartbeat. It’s both beautiful, and yet complex in how we shed skins, and see which new ones grow. As of yet, none have. And that perhaps is part of the problem. There is very little desire to grow new skin.

I’ve somehow ended up in a job I love, that allows me to sit in my 4 walls all day long, playing my music, talking shit to the dog for company, as the rest of the team are 8 hours behind me. I love connecting with them as humans. But most importantly I have very little need to communicate with the external world through the power of speech. I can’t begin to consider functioning in any other work context. And nor would I want to.

I’d imagine if I had to, it would be the kick I need. Or it would be the absolute end of me. I hope not to find out.

I have a handful of very close friends I primarily communicate with via messages. I control what I let in and out beyond that. It both worries me and it doesn’t.

It bothers the people around me far more than I believe it should concern them. And in there falls frustration, and some sadness to the knock on impact on their own lives.

Which brings shame and guilt. My social regression, impacts others.

I dip my toe in the big bad world to show willing, not through choice. And with that comes the same old story, rather than focussing on the 90% that goes well, the positive that is felt from a change of scene, or a break in the day to day routine. I just can’t help but feel the impact of the 10% that isn’t so positive. The parts that tell my nervous system that socialising, being with the messiness of human life, isn’t a place we should be spending time, and down I go, further into regression. I step away, rather than towards what all the social people tell me is healthy.

Burnout is a cruel fucker. I don’t think it will ever truly leave me in this respect.

Instead I write to communicate, to avoid total isolation.

I process the world this way. I don’t want to be perceived, or judged for how I present in person. I don’t want to think about how fucked my brain is repeatedly during a conversation about dogs, work or football. How it processes way too quickly and way too slowly. Writing is peaceful and it flows. It’s communication on my terms.

If I receive a message from an acquaintance today. “Shall we meet? A coffee, a Zoom, a phone call...” I say: “Thank you, but no. I can’t. I won’t. I don’t have it in me. But please know how much I appreciate you asking. It is not personal.”

And I don’t. It’s true, word for word. I have very little social capacity outside of written words. Perhaps one day I’ll regret holding people at length. But in there friendships seem to form with those that get it. I am grateful for that and how that allow me the space to show up in this world.

I’ll connect all day long through written words. I have many, many acquaintances still. Friends, even. We’ve never spoken. I’ve never met them. I never will. But it doesn’t mean I don’t care. And I feel connected. I like the world I operate in.

I understand how unhealthy it looks to the rest of the world that socialise with ease. Without analysis or fear of every spoken conversation.

It’s much like being autistic and ADHD. No matter how many times I say, “My brain is equal, it just works differently,” it often comes back to feeling as though my way of living is somehow problematic because it doesn’t meet what is perceived as normal.

And that hurts.

It always hurts.

It probably always will.

I feel no motivation to change this aspect of my life.

It’s the one thing since burnout I truly can’t shake.

I project forward with sadness. To those I am letting down. My family, and friends who are within touching distance of where I live.

I don’t believe I will ever recover socially to even be close to ‘being enough’.

Socialising through voice or in person feels insurmountable.

Because, in my experience, the energy required versus the outcome achieved often leaves me worse off than where I started.

I’m not absent. I’m not gone. I’m here.

I just find wiser, more intentional words when I write them down. It’s not a lesser version of connection. It’s just my version of processing relationships, friendships, and human connection. I catch the moment.

So no, I don’t think I’ll recover socially, not in the way the people who care about me are hoping. I’ve stopped fighting to be something that feels so horribly off.

For now, at least, I’ll write.

I’m actually very fucking social when I write, text, message, or whatever else takes me. It’s low demand. It’s fun. It’s serious when it needs to be. It’s where I can find what I’m feeling and express it properly.
I am present.
I care.

I’m also not entirely sure why I just wrote all that. I tried talking to the dog about it, but he doesn’t seem to respond anymore. He’s heard it all before and appears thoroughly fed up with the situation.

So I thought I’d write it here instead.

Maybe it resonates with somebody. Maybe they feel seen. And if they do, perhaps I’ll feel seen too. And, really, that’s all there is to it. I’m just being a little bit social.

In my own unnecessarily complex way.

Also...whilst I’m at it, emojis are a gift.

They can communicate a thousand words and emotions in a single reaction.

Which, now I think about it, might be the most autistic communication tool ever invented.

😮‍💨

*Apart from at 3:30 a.m., when it appears in my body and brain collectively, my energy, my words, my ideas. Very few people see me at that time, and if they do they ask me to slow down, calm down: “It’s far too early for this. WTF. How are you so awake? Where do you get this energy from at this time of day. WTAF. Will you please just slow down.”

I love it, my 3.30 a.m. energy is where I am most peaceful.

But as my ADHD energy fades away during the more human morning hours, no surprise really, my body gets tired, lethargic. I sit still, in fact I can sit for hours. I intentionally don’t let myself, as I also have the mission to reach exhaustion so I fall into an immediate sleep come 9.00 p.m. to make sure I get enough sleep.

Whilst my ADHD may have exited my body for the day, it continues to pound in my brain. It explains so much of my life that I didn’t understand until I received my ADHD diagnosis.

I get that AuDHD and OCD with a sprinkle of trauma is complex, and enough to give the best of us a few mental health issues. It’s the late identification that shows me just how much impact unidentified ADHD brought about, and why antidepressants have rarely felt like they touch the sides.

“I need the noise in my head to stop.”

I remember saying that to my mum in my mid teens. I was confused by racing, relentless thoughts that would appear from nowhere. The bully (AKA my OCD) would grab hold of them and tell me that if I didn’t carry out specific commands, bad things would happen. It was, and is, more than often, carnage in my brain.

That’s dark sh!t for a teenager, and still happens daily, though I no longer believe the thoughts themselves are true. I mean, how on earth can stopping two things touching save the life of a child or somebody I love?

But you know… it’s worked so far in life, so I’ll not risk taking any chances any time soon. Just in case.

The pace at which the racing thoughts enter my brain, before I had any language around ADHD, or autism, was, and remains, nothing short of a constant headf**k. There is no off switch. I’ve tried CBT, DBT, every f**king BT. All of which makes logical sense in the moment, followed by instant rejection.

I deeply value the work therapists do and why techniques exist, my issue here is my mind, not the amazing work these people do.

I feel my brain observe the first attempt to utilise a new technique. I then sense the rejection, an invisible walls comes up, much like how I feel my PDA arrive when I’m asked to attend a social event or comply to a social rule. There’s no negotiation. Just a hard no, the more I’m asked, the more I, or my brain, dig the heels in.

‘5-4-3-2-1’ - Worked once, my brain then refused it again.

‘STOP’ - Same.

‘Put the thoughts in a cloud and watch them drift away’ - For the love of God. Really?

If I put all of my messy thoughts in clouds and watch them float away that’s 97.4% of my day out of the window managing my thoughts and watching f**king clouds. I have never found a technique that actually quietens my mind. That’s what I truly want. A solution, not a mask.

There was very little knowledge of ADHD back in the day.

I was not the kid who couldn’t sit still. It wouldn’t have been picked up. My OCD diagnosis was instant. My ADHD, along with my autism, was cast aside as ‘depression’.

By my mid teens I was on more pills to try and calm it than they could throw a shitty stick at. There was no internet to pore over what they did, my mum was told they’d calm me down, slow me down, stabilise me. Just like the dog they bought me. My support dog, presented to me with the words “We hope this helps calm things down”.

Perhaps the tablets would have worked, but a problem was that I discovered drink around the same time. I suspect that combination only wiped out any help they could offer. Instead I found some joy in how they’d mix and create an unintended downer of sort. It was lovely. So good in fact I became addicted instantly. I like to think if I’d known about my ADHD as a kid I’d have avoided my addictions. I dream that I’d continued playing sports all day long as the distraction, much as I do today burning energy until I collapse.

If I had my time again, with knowledge and language for my ADHD (and autism).

I’d live a completely different life.

There’s grief in that by the bucket load. But there is also ‘I wouldn’t have my kids’ and the people in my life I care about, so it’s tinged with mixed feelings.

What I know is that I wouldn’t have spent the next 35 years, from my mid teens onward, living in constant battle to the same extent with my mental health, without anyone able to offer me anything beyond the word ‘depression’.

If I’d had the internet in my early teens, perhaps I’d have been able to go on a journey of self-discovery, to take the solutions to people, just as I did in my 40s as I do to this day. I imagine I’d have heard the same reactions:

“You don’t have ADHD - you can sit still.”
“You don’t have ADHD - you can focus.
“You don’t have ADHD - you’re introverted and quiet.”

I’d be able to say: “You’ve seen one person with ADHD, you’ve seen one person with ADHD.” I’ve done the work for us all. I know I should have been revising biology but I just don’t understand it, nor do I give a shit, so I’ve been figuring out how to explain my brain to you, and I am sure it’s driven by ADHD, not the OCD alone.

ADHD makes so much sense of why my brain is so, so noisy.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have even been depressed had I known, or at least not as heavily. I believe, in part at least, it existed as a consequence of living in a framework I wasn’t built for. Working against myself, pushing hard in the wrong circles, building coping addictions that fuel depression and mental health issues. Even back then I knew that was the case. I just didn’t know why.

Addiction sucks. It drags you in, keeps you in, and rips your soul apart. There is no upside. Not even the pretence that the blocking helps, it doesn’t. Underneath the moment of substance use lies a truth that it isn’t real, the temporary escape is very much that. Temporary. I knew that throughout.

I have the same experience today in the rare moments I feel calm, at peace even. My brain immediately feels a dopamine hit of “oooohhh look, you’ve quietened, this is what normal must feel like”, only for it to then build the hypervigilant messaging that the end will come soon, not of my own making. Another human will enter the calm, and break it. It’s a huge reason I longed for and found a more solitary life away from other people, to try and limit the impact of these moments.

And whilst I’m on this ramble, I know I’m not alone.

In the heat of burnout I did this thing, 1,165 Voices, where kind people shared their deepest darkest truths with me about their mental health in late identification and burnout. I wasn’t surprised how many people, much like me, have experienced self-harm, ideation and long-standing mental health issues.

68% have experienced suicidal ideation.
59% have experienced self harm.
72% have had a mental health diagnosis.

I am far from alone.

My mental health and my ADHD go hand in hand.

I don’t think my mental health will ever be ‘good’.

Not because I don’t put the work in, it goes in what feels like every minute of the day. Taking that into account, I am doing extremely well. But it doesn’t stop the noise. It doesn’t stop the ADHD in my brain.

I don’t take meds, because I was instantly hooked on how peaceful they made me feel afterwards. When they wore off after only two hours, and we’re talking the long-lasting ones here, I crashed so hard into a depression, my OCD spiralled out of control, that it was too painful to exist with.

Those meds are the only thing that truly made things feel calm, but they are masking a reality. ADHD meds are chemicals that light my brain up. I am an addict. Give an addict one hit and it instantly craves more, as much as it can get it’s hands on.

Hence why I am up there with being the most boring humans on earth. I can’t drink alcohol. Can’t touch anything that’s mind altering. My OCD has me as a strict vegan, afraid of consuming sugar, calories and saturated fats, so I don’t touch any of them. I try not to eat gluten. I don’t know why. My brain says not to.

Which brings me on to the final point of why I don’t go to parties. For no other reason than I don’t have a closure so I’ll just whittle on about something in an ADHD fashion. My reasons being:

1. I don’t like parties.

2. I’m autistic. Enough said.

3. Can you imagine getting stuck with me at a party, under these conditions that I live? And God forbid I get triggered by hierarchy, dress code or social justice. That would be nothing short of boring meets dangerous.

So I stay home. In the noise. Grateful that whilst I am an addict, I am not fuelling the noise any longer by chemicals or alcohol. I manage my restless mind organically. Staring at the wall watching the clouds come and go with all of the mess inside of them for 97.4% of the day.

And the moral to that rant, outpouring of emotion, pointless waffle, ramble, article are the words that appear in my head whenever I hear the somebody describe their ADHD.

‘You’ve seen one person with ADHD, you’ve seen one person with ADHD.’

There’s probably loads of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. I’ve hit my attention limit. Sorry. But thanks for getting this for. 👋🏻

There is joy in identification too. Like when I make sense of a small part of my brain that served me well. The specific instance I’m processing here is what I’ve always called ‘the web’, updated to ‘the autistic web’ in 2022.

Around 20 years ago, my business partner at the time said to me, “You have this unique ability to see into the future.” I didn’t disagree with him, although knowing what I know now, I would have corrected him. I couldn’t see into the future, but I was able to predict outcomes that he didn’t see coming.

Today, it makes far more sense. It’s not any kind of skill. It’s autistic wiring. A part of my brain that never switches off, relentlessly collecting data and running it through pattern matching and prediction. It’s as subconscious as it is conscious. It comes with its frustrations and benefits. It’s as exhausting as it is satisfying.

It served me well in many respects, and yet it was also one of several autistic characteristics that contributed to me falling into a deep burnout. A contradiction, like many other characteristics of my AuDHD existence, benefits, with side notes of pain.

The autistic web.

The autistic web isn’t something that’s switched on and off, it’s an ever present pursuit of data collection, analysis and storage. It works through the night, offering me creativity, clarity and solutions when I wake. I struggle with uncertainty. Without certainty there is risk. Where there is risk is threat. Where there is threat there is a need for ‘control’.

Hypervigilance reigns supreme in my body. Last year, in rehab, I learned an important lesson - ‘we can only control what we can control’. And while it takes practice to catch those moments and implement the theory, I see clearly how much I used to react to anything outside of my control. Which much of life is, especially where other humans are involved. I’d either run hard at something, desperately trying to understand and feel some sense of ease, or I’d run hard in the opposite direction, blocking every aspect of its existence, often hurting people along the way.

My autistic webs give me a level of control I’d be lost without. They’re full of logic, organisation, resource planning, risk and threat analysis, all of which are working to the required outcome. On a good day, I feel my nervous system communicate with my brain, using logic instead of immediately triggering my well versed fight or flight response. If I’m patient, create space, and ask questions, there’s a far greater chance I’ll remain calm and collected, in doing so, I’ll create the control my brain craves in order to feel safe.

Whilst it sounds dramatic, sad even, I feel as though almost every moment of being alive carries an element of threat. On the rare occasions I catch myself feeling calm, relaxed even, the conscious awareness of being in that state immediately breaks it. Knowing it will end, as logically it has to, becomes the threat itself, with the scan for danger immediately raising its presence again. I truly dislike that feeling.

The autistic web spins out in many forms

Within minutes of imagining or starting a task the web will have spun out a mental project plan in intricate detail. It runs underneath everything, subconsciously, while I’m doing three other things at once. If my instinct is that something will take 2.5 hours, it will very often take 2.5 hours to the minute, it just does, it was written in the web. Instinct based on data analysis and modelling. Every move is put into a running order before I carry it out, regardless of whether I know it or not. Shit just happens in the right order.

It’ll show in mundane life events, like cooking a meal.

I don’t have the attention to follow a recipe. But throw any ingredients at me and my brain turns them into something instantly, my partner regularly asks, “did you follow a recipe?” knowing full well the answer is “no”. Food arrives on the table at the precise minute it should. It just happens, instinctively, and I can multitask around it the whole time, cleaning, clearing, constantly recalculating what time I have and what I don’t. It’s particularly handy for my OCD as I can only eat once everything is washed, put away and decontaminated, and all of that has to finish before the food turns cold and is ruined. In the work context it showed in a very different manner.

Human behaviour and predictability is at the heart of the web

This was a revelation in my autistic discovery and how my brain works. For years I’d bang my head on a meeting room table (actually) frustrated that I could see everything coming down the line, predicting it, offering foresight and then watching all I’d said would happen, unfold in front of my eyes whilst every opportunity to intervene was bypassed in the hope I’d be proven wrong. This happened time after time, accompanied with the obligatory “you called it again”.

Shit. This also. I’d often place my head on the table in front of me and close my eyes for a few seconds. I wasn’t totally bonkers, this would only be in the company of one person who was regularly feeding me “you called it again” updates. In those few moments, I’d gather myself, I’d remap, I’d come back up, calm externally and put the new plan into action. Internally exasperated.

My brain is a relentless sponge of information that will feed the web. And yet, in contradiction never more has been true in the high functioning meets low functioning occurrence in many autistic people. I can run a £6m company meticulously, I will never remember what to buy from the shop that I was sent out for.

If I’m interested, or it’s going to impact my life, it goes in. The opposite doesn’t get close.

Humans are predictably unpredictable

My biggest web was a lifelong mission to be free of business, and humans. The irony being that, my web contained 60 humans, all of which played a necessary part in the self imposed mission. In hindsight, burnout was forever inevitable, the bigger question was when and how it would strike.

I didn’t have the data on autistic burnout or autism itself. I had no language for all that I was. I knew I was autistic, however I believed I could outrun it. No disclosure. Just run, and run hard, one day I’d be free, then I’d be able to relax, recluse and live quietly. I misread that web entirely.

I managed very few people directly, however within weeks of a new starter I’d pretty much mapped their entire existence. I’d sense how long they’d last, where their motivation came from, and when it would fall off. I knew what they’d eat for lunch, I’d analysed their communication, learning styles, I’d know exactly how well they were or weren’t being managed, I knew them better than their line managers. I’d have done all of this without any 1-1 interaction with them.

The biggest learning, post burnout, is that I wasn’t micromanaging, albeit it sounds like it. I was gathering new information as their presence would impact my web. On one hand this was healthy. It gave me information to correct forecasts, optimism and hope, where reality paid the bills. I’d be the voice of eternal reality. I am neither an optimist, or pessimist. I am a realist. Reality is where I find control and when the balance tips up, it’s a bonus, when it drops, it’s without the feeling that the bottom of the world has fallen out.

Reality is where my autistic soul feels most comfort.

For all of my gathering for information about every moving part of the web came at a cost. Where humans fell short, I see it, I took it on me to cover their parts of the web. Think shovelling snow off the drive in a fucking blizzard. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. Without break for nineteen years.

The web was too big. Too complex. Humans are too messy, unpredictable, and on their own life missions. If I could do it all again. I’d do it completely differently. I wasn’t built for it and it broke me.

The world won’t listen

For all of that acceptance on my part, what I can’t make peace with is the role ‘avoidance’ plays in so much of the general public’s existence. Not just in work, but relationships and systems. The world has never held more data, more insight, more knowledge. We can see what’s coming down the line.

It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when health services refuse to deal with all we are learning about ADHD and autism. Millions of kids, who have incredible and perfectly good brains, are being cast out into the world, into lives they aren’t built for. Welcome to mental health issues. Welcome to burnout.

Autistic brains see the whole of it, the trajectory, and the way through. And still, day after day, the world chooses to work against itself. It chooses ambiguity over clarity. It avoids the conflict. It repeats the same mistakes rather than working with new information and the map that’s already sitting in front of it.

It’s all in the web.

Processing isn’t a singular event. It’s another complexity in my neurodivergent brain that can flip between efficiency and painful in the blink of an eye.

What’s happening around it has a profound impact. The environment, the person, the content, predictability, what the question or task is actually about and what’s at stake in the answer, or output. Not forgetting how literally I take the words in front of me, how laterally I connect them to everything else, all of it compounding to whether the answer comes in a heartbeat or three hours later.

Rapid processing.

Most mornings I wake up and clear a backlog of work related emails. A quick glance, each prioritised, responded, loops closed. Multiple tabs open in my brain and in my browser, I’m in my hyper processing sweet spot. Throw as much reactivity at me as you like and I'll carry it. At this time, and in this work, my brain processes rapidly and effectively. I can cut through noise with a knife.

And yet, when the same brain is asked how it feels about something that requires emotional processing, it couldn’t be more opposite. It happened this week.

I stared vacantly into the distance for what felt like ten minutes, in reality it was probably more like thirty seconds, my brain at a total standstill.

Where I can make instantaneous decisions, others take days. And vice versa.

I’m writing this to process my processing. When I type, my brain is forced to slow to a pace it absorbs and pays attention. Especially when I am being pushed internally to read and re-read. Ordinarily it scans, grabbing at the parts that feel important and then pieces them together, itching to get onto the next task. I have ADHD.

Ohhh, here’s a way of explaining it, in the UK, allergens are highlighted in bold on ingredient lists. That’s how my brain reads. It grabs the important words, hopes the fillers make enough sense around them, and moves on. I’ll read from the bottom up, the middle of a paragraph, right to left, wherever my eyes go. I scan.

This is my way of making sense of my brain in a manner it can learn, and grow.
Slowly and intentionally.

Delayed processing isn’t slowness of thought.

The emotional question I was asked this week wasn’t complex, I understood it perfectly. Where a practical decision is filtered without consciousness, the need to process an emotion or feeling, and relay it back to another person carries something very different.

An internal voice catches the question and says:

💬 “Let’s just slow the fuck down here, this isn’t a decision you can make in heartbeat, like buying a car, having a child or moving house, this answer is going to take some serious digging around for”.

Anytime I’m asked a question about feelings or emotions this happens. I grind to a halt. Imagine a cute puppy that tilts its head to one side, curious to what happens next. Now think the opposite, that’s my facial expression. Dead behind the eyes, lost and somewhat dissociated temporarily from presence in the conversation.

In a work context I feel privileged that I can cope where I see others struggle with prioritisation and decision fatigue. Yet one persons ease is another’s pain. Processing feelings and emotions is where fall off a cliff and struggle deeply.

Another brain stopper for me is auditory processing.

Sound hyper sensitivity deeply impacts my ability to process thoughts.

“Autistic individuals often show enhanced auditory perception alongside reduced auditory filtering, meaning background sound is processed more intensely and harder to suppress, so noise actively competes with thought rather than fading into the background.” (Robertson & Baron-Cohen, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2017).

They took the words out of my mouth.

My daily rhythm is to wake up at 3.00 - 4.00 a.m. For many years I believed it was driven by insomnia. I no longer believe this to be true. I am confident my dopamine, cortisol, both run on high at this time as I wake up bursting with energy, focus and drive.

My brain is as clean and serene as my work inbox. I’d love that mind to be with me at all times. It’s often an upbeat little fucker and it’s not what many people get to experience. Recently though, I’ve attributed another reasoning to why I wake so joyously in the middle of the night.

I love the quiet. The stillness. There isn’t a noise to be heard, and what sounds appear are totally in my control. I choose whether I play music, a soundscape or nothing at all. There are no doors opening or closing. Chairs scraping across the kitchen floor, humans talking, and best of all there is NO FUCKING TIKTOK coming from a teenagers phone.

The moment I hear another human wake, everything changes. Three hours will have flown by, I’ll have packed the majority of a days work in. I instinctively know my processing power is about to transform into something far lesser.

The world is a noisy place, and my ears are hyper sensitive to sound. My misophonia can tip me into despair and shame. I’ll never win parent of the year.

“Thanks for turning that fucking horrific noise TikTok off. Now is there any chance you could stop breathing for a minute or two? It’s like having Darth fucking Vader in the room and I’m trying to think here. And if you could stop drinking and eating, that too would soothe my soul, and give me space to be alone in my complex ways. Thank you, I appreciate it. I appreciate you. Love you.”

The request is unreasonable, I know. The first time I made it I felt immense shame, but that soon passed. Gamification is everything. When my kids were younger, we’d play who goes blue soonest whilst Dad could ‘think’ for a minute or two.

And whilst I’m at it, misophonia is an unpleasant experience that isn’t often talked about. It goes well beyond processing. Without understanding and management it can easily lead to a meltdown, shame follows meltdown. Any kind of logical life processing is disrupted and goes out of the window.

Life sounds amplify at some kind of super high frequency in my ears. The slightest of noises, that are out of my control, disrupt my ability to process.

I work from home. School holidays are long. The presence of humans, their movement, associated noises, phones, TVs, talking, doors opening and closing, all stop my brain from processing the way it did at 3:30 a.m.

And that alone brings me back to why my sleep pattern is so disturbed. My brain needs silence to function as I often need it to.

“Can’t you wear headphones. Loops etc.?” Yes. The sounds can often still be heard, but to a lesser degree and frequency. The interruption isn’t cancelled, it changes but it still exists.

Hypersensitive auditory processing

My one social activity is going to watch football. Something I used to enjoy. An escape. My escape. Until this year.

This season gone, two men have season tickets and sit behind me. For some reason there is an empty seat between them, causing the need for slightly extra volume in their communication as they lean across to each other. They talk relentlessly. And I mean relentlessly. My brain has tuned into the tone of each of their voices and made it my public enemy No.1. The content is the same every week. The same jokes. The same analysis. They are having the time of their lives. Inside, I am crying and there is no escape.

You may ask what this has to do with processing? In this moment, I am with my kids, it is a time we connect out of the house, away from the ever present pull of TikTok and YouTube. I’m not working or asking them to stop eating and breathing. A true shared experience. One that for many years has been connecting and a distraction from how noisy my brain is. I also see the benefit I take in how my brain processes when it is distracted. There is a relief in it, I feel fresh perspectives or answers to problems emerge through the space to breathe.

So whilst this matter may appear trivial, it’s not. It has had quite a profound impact that has removed a rare connecting experience, given how infrequently I leave the house.

I’ve tried loops. A hoody pulled tight over the loops. I’ve tried double-covering my ears with my hands, loops and hoody. But all I can hear is these two fucking humans and their never ending piercing voices.

My kids are deeply embarrassed watching me squirm and crawl. Nor will the move seats, because they also find it amusing to watch me suffer. They two acknowledge it is relentless. But it doesn’t impact their enjoyment.

There came a point towards the end of the season, I turned around and said:

“Please, can you just shut the fuck up, I can’t take any more. I’m autistic. And some sounds, including your voices tear through my body. I’ve sat here and said nothing all season, but enough is enough. YES I KNOW, AUTISTIC, I’M CLEARLY VERY HIGH FUCKING FUNCTIONING TO BE AT THE FOOTBALL WITH MY KIDS. GIVEN YOUR MINUTE BY MINUTE SPECIAL INTEREST IN HOW MANY FUCKING CORNERS THERE HAVE BEEN IN EACH AND EVERY GAME THIS SEASON I WOULDN’T BE SURPRISED IF WE HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON. Now, please can you stop talking for the next 45 minutes? I just want my brain to process the world peacefully for this short period of time. Thanks.”

In my head. In reality I sit in deep discomfort absorbing every word. My entire energy is spent on something that it really has no need to.

“What do you feel about that?”

This is the big one. The show stopper. Where I catch a question related to emotion or feelings that has been asked of me, and the world stops. The answer is important.

The obligatory auto-reply kicks in. “Hold on, I’m not thinking anything bad. Give me 30 seconds.” I worry it sounds defensive, that I’m buying time to soften something. That isn’t what’s happening. What’s happening is my brain trying hard to pull all the pieces together, to give meaning and context.

And mostly, I don’t know the answer to the question yet:

Seconds 1–15. WTF. This one’s going to take some digging to unpick.

Seconds 16–30. I’ll find words rather than feelings. Like the allergens on the ingredients list. Usually two or three of them leap out. That will give me a framework to operate with.

Seconds 31–60. Take those words and wrap them into a sentence that presents the information meaningfully, and as intended.

Sometimes, the silence has been filled with various attempts to ease the evident pain by the receiver. Help that is meant kindly, and yet the sound of the incoming voice creates a new roadblock in the moment that sets the processing back to stage one.

It takes patience. It often loses the moment. It often becomes painful.

I worry that at times, the harder the question, the more impact it may have on a relationship where somebody is seeking clarity or reassurance. I want my words to land perfectly. An additional pressure, which slows things down a notch further.

To a degree, it’s also something that adds weight to the prospect of socialising. With an anchor subject in a conversation, such as work, football, or the darkest of dark jokes I have no processing issues, I’m rapid fire and back at you in a shot.

Ask how I feel about something in my personal life, or an emotion that’s close to me, and I fall into the depths of the unknown. The vacant stare that suggests I’ve momentarily left my body. I turn woefully slow, laborious and painful.

People wish they’d never asked the question.
wish they’d never asked the question.

But then, three hours later
It hits me.

“I KNOW WHAT I FEEL. I’VE GOT IT…”

Wait, where have they gone?

It’s all too late. They’ve moved on, the moment has gone. The conversation has ended. The interest has moved on. And I’m several miles behind, wanting to share what I found when it had slowly moved through the pathways until it all had context and perspective.

Delayed processed has a cost, but more so, it’s very, very frustrating.

I’ll replay conversations all day long wishing I’d answered differently.

“Give me time to think about it and I’ll come back to you” can sound like a brush off, it’s often the most honest response that’s needed to be said.

Occasionally I’ll find myself trying to capture my processed thoughts it in a post event WhatsApp, although the words typed in this manner rarely do it justice. I feel the pull of an open loop that didn’t get closed, followed by the RSD of a replied 👍.

The term alexithymia naturally plays a very evident role. A double compound that sits beautifully alongside delayed processing.

A winning combo in my prominent AuDHD features.

When I stop and think about it, neurodivergent processing is far from easy.

If you’ve ever asked me how I felt and watched my face slip somewhere between RBF and dissociated, this is why.

If you’ve ever seen me at the football and wondered why I was so fucking tense, and didn’t give you the obligatory minimal nod of acknowledgement. Now you know why.

And if any of this sounded like a description of someone you love or care about: Please know how much we need the awkward silence. Try not to fill it or offer help, we often get there much quicker when the air hangs.

Patience and space is truly received as kindness.

I can cook Christmas dinner for 14 people*, without any recipe book, delivered on the promised minute. No stress. Effortless co-ordination. And yet it will have taken me multiple trips and deliveries to gather all of the forgotten ingredients.

I can spin out a complex idea, complete with five year business plan, complete with intricate detail, that considers each and every risk, requirement and opportunity. And no matter how hard I concentrate, I can’t remember a single direction after “first, you turn left. Then…”

I’ve built and run a £6 million turnover business group with immaculate governance and understanding. And yet I couldn’t enter the company kitchen if anybody else was already in it.

I can multitask harder and faster than a super fast microchip. I’m a human production line. And yet the instant someone enters my space unannounced I’ll crumble and lose my way entirely.

I can recall every business transaction and its every detail I’ve made in the last 20 years on demand. And yet I’ll be sent to the shop for marmite, oat milk and lemons and come home with soya milk and hummus. Even with a note in my pocket to remind me.

I can spot a single error on a complex financial report from a million paces. And yet I was completely out of my depth looking at my then six-year-olds maths homework.

I can pick up my laptop and write, put words down, just like this, without a plan or knowing what will fall. And yet I’ve been told 1000 times what a verb, adjective and all those other things mean and I still don’t know to this day, I never will.

I can hyperfocus into a project without coming up for air for hours on end. And yet I can’t watch more than two minutes of a film without losing the plot (both mentally and relationally to the films story line).

I’ve been told that I am intelligent, and that I can do many things effortlessly that others struggle to do, and yet I have 2 GCSE’s in art. An academic failure of the highest degree.

It took me years to understand that last one. I am intelligent? How is that possible? I’m not intelligent. My intelligence is simply common sense, a work ethic that is ever on. In my 40’s I began to recognise that when I’m interested, I go in so deep I retain, absorb and make understanding and action my entire existence. Failure isn’t an option.

Today this aspect makes complete sense:

I am ADHD. It drives my energy, creativity and ideas.

I am Autistic. It drives my logic, structure and architecture.

On their day they are a combination that can be incredibly powerful. The outside world envies how they can push each other to create and deliver. The inside world feels the relentless effort that it takes to keep them in their lanes.

“You’re unique. Nobody can do it like you do it. You just have a knack of knowing where to cut through the noise, say what needs to be said, to match A with B and spin it all without dropping anything.”

This sentiment was first suggested to me early in my career.

And yet, I refuted it at every opportunity. How can somebody be both ‘intelligent’ and unable to even say their name in public. How can somebody be both ‘unique in their thinking’ and be unable to sit in an exam room and stare blankly at a piece of paper and questions that meant nothing to them.

In my early 40’s, before my autism diagnosis, I had begun to accept that there was more to my brain than luck and overworking to have built a very secure, yet complex business model that employed 60 people. And yet, I’d walk past the dentist, which is next door to my house, and feel this deeply uncomfortable feeling knowing it was beyond my capability of walking through its door to book an appointment.

It took me years to walk through that door. When the day finally came and I pushed myself hard enough to do it, I left with more pride, relief, and sense of achievement than I’d ever stopped to recognise throughout my entire business career.

And today I understand why.

I’ve learned that for many autistic people, perceived demand can trigger the shutdown regardless of capability.

It isn’t always about whether I can do something. Often, it’s the feeling of expectation, pressure, or demand attached to it that causes what I feel as a freeze sensation.

Which is why I could build a business, solve complex problems, and work at extraordinary speed, yet still feel completely overwhelmed by the simplest of tasks.

From the outside, those contradictions make little sense.
From the inside, with language, they make perfect sense.

Why could I do things that others find impossible so easily, whilst being totally incapable of doing the most basic things in life within the same body and mind?

This is part of my autism that took me so long to understand. And only once I understood that I was in fact autistic, let alone ADHD.

It happened this week. I stepped into an unfamiliar public setting.

When I first speak to a stranger, usually an interaction where somebody is simply doing their job, I’m often shocked that anything comes out of my mouth at all.

I can feel the words trapping in my throat, stuttering awkwardly as they try to form. I have to physically push them forward just enough to be understood, purely to avoid the horror of repeating myself.

Occasionally, if having my correct name isn’t essential, I’ll just let whatever they think they heard stand.

Though I do sometimes wonder whether they thought I said “Dick”… or whether they’re silently implying that I need to get a grip of myself.

Either could be true.

My body instantly begins to buzz. Hums even. A physical sensation that I feel from my head to my toes and through my skin. I’ll analyse it in the moment. It’s a powerful, overwhelming sensation.

I’ll feel like a child that needs a parent to guide them through the task. Quiet and with a sense of dread, that I don’t belong in public spaces. I am an entirely different being, to the person who has ‘intelligent' and ‘unique’ in my work settings.

Put me in my work environment and I’ll be confident in what my abilities and limits are. What I am unable to do, I’ll either give to somebody else and guide what I need achieving, or I’ll go deep to learn and better myself. Put me in a public setting and I’ll usually fall apart, incapable of the most basic of human functions.

Capability isn’t the problem.

From the outside, I appear deeply inconsistent. Contradictory, even. How can someone operate at one level, and then fall apart over something so small?

To some degree it falls into what is often termed as high performing v low performing capabilities.

The deeper I research to understand myself, I begin to believe that it’s less about capability and more about conditions.

My essential levers of wellbeing and capability are control, predictability, cognitive load, sensory input and social demand.

Change those variables, and the impact is felt in an instant. I will stand and crumble based on all of those things. What goes from high performing turns into low performing in a heartbeat.

Give me structure, autonomy, interest and architecture and I will outperform my own expectations. Add unpredictability, interruption, or social pressure, and I’m fucked. My brain, and often my body, will collapse into a pit of uselessness.

And that uselessness will often turn to shame.

Shame from having to explain this feature of my existence, whilst the majority of the world make it look easy retaining academic information, what they went to the shop for and of course, saying their name out in public without feeling deep and utter panic at the prospect of doing so.

I am grateful I have language and understanding. For many years I was deeply confused by this way of existing.

Burnout enhanced and reduced capability simultaneously

The instant loss of skills and executive functioning was profound.

The memory I’d once have gambled my house on being correct disappeared almost overnight. I remember a few days into this new existence, staring at the hamster cage, desperately searching every pathway in my brain trying to remember its name. It wasn’t only the hamster, it felt like my entire internal memory of useless business facts had vanished.

BTW, I eventually asked my youngest. “Hammy.” 🐹 Obviously.

And within that was a genuine moment of: WTF. HTF. I mean, it couldn’t have been simpler.

Looking back now, I can see how significant burnout’s impact was on what some people would class as high functioning. For several months even the things that once felt effortless suddenly became near impossible. And the things I already struggled with, like saying my own name in public, remembering Marmite, were well out of reach.

It took around eight months before I felt my memory begin to recover. I thought it was gone for good. There was immense relief when useless information began to appear from nowhere.

Being autistic can be so hard it hurts.

To the untrained brain, these contradictions in capability make very little sense.

To me, I can see how a life built around false narratives slowly became ingrained. I long to have understood my autism and ADHD from an early age. For somebody to have sat me down and said, there’s this thing called a ‘spiky profile’, don’t stress on it.

So many things would have made sense, to me, and to the people around me. I imagine the relief in that. Living with myself rather than against myself. Without the weight of false expectations and made-up explanations for why I struggled.

That’s grief right there. For me it’s one of the hardest parts of the late-identified journey. It often makes me feel sad.

This has taken me years to understand. I see the adults around me who are capable of ‘adulting’, moving through their day with ease and steady management rather than fragility. Without this all-or-nothing capability I’ve always lived with. And yet they look at me and say “You can do this, but not this. It makes no sense. WTF?”

It’s confusing for me too, the holder of these contradictions and extreme ways of functioning. To the observer standing beside me, it can often look like choice. Like selective effort. Like I can do things when I want to, and avoid them when I don’t.

But it isn’t that simple.

Most of the time, it isn’t choice at all. Actually… perhaps occasionally when it comes to parenting, I might call it in every now and then.

But that’s between me, you, and Substack.

Selective adulting.

For years I felt, and it has been suggested, I am a selective adult.
A selective parent even. And that comes from my own kids mouths.
In part that’s true. But it’s not that I don’t want to adult or parent in the ways that others make appear so effortlessly.
It’s not that simple as simply trying hard and pushing through.
When I try, it often ends up being the kid that does the adulting and parenting.
The confusion begins.
The shame spiral begins.
The comments begin.
The laughter begins if I’m lucky.

And I am happy to laugh at it. I need to laugh at it. Or I may cry.

But fuck it’s hard being Autistic. I don’t even like fucking Marmite.
Perhaps that’s why I don’t ever remember it.

* Christmas with 14 people isn’t my choice. But having an excuse to stay out of the socialising by cooking, cleaning, then more cooking and cleaning, is how I survive the horror of it all.

Loads of typo and terrible grammar. Probably. I hit my limit of focus. Sorry.

The feeling wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t quite depression, I know what that feels like.

Hurt. Ache. Discomfort. All came to mind as symptoms, but without a root cause I could pinpoint. On paper everything was going well. Business was good, very good in fact, 15 years of relentless blood, sweat and tears had paid off, although that too left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable in the comfort. Covid was far enough behind us to still feel relief in freedom.

“I’m having a mid life crisis.
This must be what having a mid life crisis feels like.
Fuck. I don’t want to have a mid life crisis.
I’ve run so hard all of my life to find comfort, things were supposed to get easier from here, not worse. I feel horrific. All day, every day. I don’t belong. And I have no clue why I am feeling all I’m feeling. I’m sure I’m not depressed. This must be a fucking mid life crisis.”

Three months later I was diagnosed with Autism.

Two years later, having been completely and utterly confused about what me, as an adult, employer and parent was supposed to do with an autism diagnosis the shit really hit the fan. My job was to ensure that 60 humans at work were fed, paid, protected and safely employed. Not that dissimilar to my responsibilities for two small kids at home.

Being an employer, when you care deeply about people, can suck. It really does. The reason some business owners make it look easy, is because very often they simply don’t care about people. They’ll brush away anything that stands in their way.

I was the opposite. I felt everything intently.
It takes the skin of a rhino to care about 60 humans.

I will name this truth. It’s not a criticism, but a truth: we humans aren’t very good at looking up at the people above us and treating them as humans.

The word ‘hierarchy’ often carries negative connotations, but it shouldn’t always. In some worlds it means power and control. In others, it means protection and support.

For all the talk of flat structures, whole-team cultures, and human-centred approaches, when it comes down to it, much like children, people rarely look up the ladder and ask the humans up there: “Are you okay? Do you need any help?”.

And with that reality, disclosing my autism simply didn’t feel like an option.

Adults and parents don’t get much space to process a late identified autism diagnosis (in my experience at least.)

Especially when we’ve spent our entire lives working against our nervous systems in an attempt to care and look after the people around us, as best as we knew how.

To the people we have protected, there is familiarity and safety in how we’ve supported them. An autism, or ADHD, diagnosis is a life changing moment for the majority of people. A journey begins. For some it can be a total rebirth, for others it can be learning to live with their brains and nervous system, rather than against them.

Change that benefits a newly diagnosed adult will very often directly impact the people around them. When one person changes, it changes things for everybody. And that doesn’t always land well.

In fact, the transition can be just as hard for the people who have found safety and security in the old dynamics, as it is for the person now relearning how to live their life.

Unlearning, relearning and creating new rules

I am late diagnosed with Autism and ADHD. My OCD is long standing.

When I live my life alone, without dependency or interactions with other humans, I find myself more content, dare I say it ‘happy’. I catch myself in surprise that I can feel such positive sensations. I can relax, I can feel ease and comfort as I move about my day. I’ll even believe I have turned a corner, perhaps the mitrazapine have finally kicked in. A life with contentment may well be possible.

Until other humans enter my world. And on doing so I feel a sudden and sometimes intense change in my nervous system. No longer is my space, my space. I have lost control. There are new presences, sounds, considerations, personalities, moods, emotions, and demands that I now need to account for. Things that seem to gnaw at my edges that simply didn’t exist when I was alone. Everything changes.

Of course, I enjoy the presence of other humans in the right conditions. I love my children deeply but I also truly hate the sibling bickering. I love my family, yet put three of us in a room and things often flow gently. Put four of us together and it can feel like hell on earth.

I’m not a total twat, just a bit of one. I don’t hate people. I struggle with the demands and influences other people bring to my nervous system. That is all.

I don’t enjoy that my autism, and or ADHD, can be viewed as ‘the problem’.
They aren’t. Other humans are my problem. It’s simply a fact.

What I can name in this thought stream is how hard it is to hear disappointment that I’m not the person I was. What I used to be able to do, when I performed hard day in day out.

I love time on my own. I really don’t enjoy socialising. So I rarely do it.
But that is another’s loss, and I take the weight of that. Living an authentic life to me brings peace, to another, it can bring sadness.

And in there I feel the weight of authenticity.

Where this gets hard, is when the people who are looking up, or sideways even, can’t help but like the version that existed before diagnosis, that performed so hard against their nervous system it pushed them close to depression and mental health challenges.

I didn’t have a mid life crisis.

I was autistic all along.

I was ADHD all along.

I was building a resume over 15 years that would culminate in the mother of all AuDHD burnouts that would wipe my feet from under me, remove me from society and leave me 18 months later with barely a foot back in it.

I know for a fact, in my bones, in the depths of my soul that having 60 humans to look after put me in burnout. The ways of the world and the way people operate to exist in the game of life, completed the job. It was a recipe for disaster, working against my nervous system, the amount I cared and poured into every single hour of every day and sitting on an autism diagnosis longing for somebody to look up and ask if I was okay, when I knew full well I wasn’t.

Language changed everything

Burnout may have taken a part of my soul away, but it did give me language and understanding.

Language that let me see clearly that I hadn’t had a mid life crisis, if anything it was the opposite. Burnout told me that I needed to downsize, walk away, drop relationships and connections that I didn’t enjoy or feel authentic.

A complete and utter transformation that allowed me to actually live with my values and internal needs, coupled with a fast growing understanding of my biology and neurology. Why I feel so deeply uncomfortable socially, why I connect profoundly with only a handful of people, why I feel some things intensely, and others bounce off me that has even the hardest of souls in tears. It at the very least all made a lot more sense.

And it wasn’t a fucking mid life crisis.
And I wouldn’t want my old life back.

Sorry if it feels lazy or cheap. Sorry if the grammar and structure offend you.
I’m sorry that I don’t really care too much about things like that.

I’m most sorry if you got this far and it felt like a waste of time.

A few years ago, I realised that sorry is one of my most used words.

I’d be sorry for what I was about to say. Always.

Sorry for over-explaining, trying my best to feel understood.

Sorry for the pause when I’m asked a question and my mind sifts through millions of thoughts and words, trying to put them into an order that gets to the point quickly enough, only to trip itself up in the delay.

I’m always sorry about that.

I’m sorry for my confused appearance when somebody asks, “How are you?”

I wish I could say “Okay” or “Good” well enough for it to feel true.

I’m sorry for breaking eye contact and staring into the abyss whilst I dig deep for a contextual response.

For hearing myself think, “FFS… you’re going to over-explain again.”

I’m sorry if it all feels awkward.

Such a simple question.

Sorry.

I learnt to apologise when I was young.

Sorry for not knowing the answers to things that had just been taught to me.

Sorry for not paying attention.
Sorry for being lazy.
Sorry for asking “why” at every opportunity.

Sorry for not living up to my potential.

And fuck. I’m sorry to everybody who has ever given me directions.

“Sorry, can you repeat that….?”
“I turn left and then… what came next?”

Sorry. Let me make sure I have this right.

Fuck, I have no clue what comes after turning left.

So I pretend I understood. Always.

It’s easier to walk around aimlessly than apologise and ask again.

I’m sorry that I’m not the person I used to be.

Capable. Strong. The adult. That was me.

An Oscar-winning performance.

Now, I don’t really socialise. One of the reasons is that would spend most of my time apologising under the pressure of small talk.

That’s if I even make it beyond the pause and apology that comes with every “How are you?”

For years, people would fill the silence whilst I dug deep for the right word.

“Sorry, I’m just trying to find it…”
…………….
…………….

“Do you mean…?”

“No. Sorry. Give me a second.”
…………….
…………….

“How about…?”

“No. Sorry. I’m almost there.”

“Don’t worry about it. Take your time.”

“Sorry. It’s gone.”

I can’t concentrate now. I’ll either over-explain it or just agree with your word so we can move on.

I’m sorry that I don’t feel like talking some days.

I’m sorry that I didn’t call back.
I’m sorry it’s been weeks. Months. Years even.

I’m sorry that time flies when I avoid things.

I’m sorry for so many things.

I’m sorry that I take things too literally.
That I’m too sensitive.
Too intense.

I’m sorry that I need space, quiet and routine.

I’m sorry for the incessant cleaning, tidying, decontaminating.
I’m sorry that my brain analyses everything relentlessly.

I’m sorry that I can’t drink and switch off.
I’m sorry for my hypervigilance.
I’m sorry that I often feel ‘off’ and can’t settle until it passes.

I’m sorry that I need the sound turning down.
That I don’t like noise, bright lights, or crowded places.

I’m sorry that I postponed and will probably never rearrange.
I’m sorry I said yes when I should have said no.

I’m sorry I haven’t replied. I have tried many times.

I’m sorry that I live this life that pushes against the ways of the world.

I’m sorry that I go internal to make sense of the noise.
I’m sorry that I replay conversations from 2014 that still piss me off.

I’m sorry that I spoke about that one thing for 30 minutes that bored you to tears.

I’m sorry for being direct and literal.
For naming truths and needing clarity that should be hidden.

I’m sorry for saying sorry.
I’m sorry for many things, in fact. Too many to mention

But I am not sorry for my language.

Fuck no.

It’s one of the few things that falls out of my mind with ease.

Unless that offends you.
In which case… sorry.

I remember it clearly.
I remember the moment of confusion.
I remember how the wrong clothes started to scratch at my skin.
I remember how the smell of cooking made my stomach nauseous.
I remember how upset I became if I was left with the wrong people.
I remember going to bed and holding my breath.

I became aware of my mental health when I was eleven.

I remember my mum taking me to the Dr’s in despair.
I remember them saying I had OCD and that I was depressed.
I remember them saying I’ll grow out of it.
I remember this weird feeling that I just didn’t belong in the life around me.
I remember feeling intense feelings towards bad people.
I remember counting the days until I would be free from education and authority.

I became aware of my mental health when I was sixteen.

I remember being put on a course of six tablets a day.
I remember the antidepressants were red, I have no clue what the white ones did.
I remember how when I mixed them with alcohol everything softened.
I remember a feeling in the pit of my stomach, that I still didn’t belong.
I remember my mum worrying deeply.
I remember my mums depression and willing it away from her, into me.
I remember not wanting to wake up when I went to sleep.

I became aware of my mental health in my twenties.

I remember saying it was a miracle I made it to twenty.
I remember thinking I’d never make it to thirty.
I remember holding this feeling that very little in life felt comfortable.
I remember feeling that the only way was through numbing.
I remember becoming angry with the ways of the world. The bad people.
I remember pushing hard against anyone that told how I should be.

I became aware of my mental health in my thirties.

I remember thinking if I faced life cleanly, it would cure everything.
I remember how it didn’t work. It just changed.
I remember that the clothes still scratched, and the smells still made me nauseous.
I remember that my environment had to be just right to feel any sense of ease.
I remember that everything became louder, more intense.
I remember grieving that the reward of being clean, didn’t match the effort.

I became aware of my mental health in my forties.

I remember longing to belong.
I remember hunting for answers, explanations, something to cling on to.
I remember CBT, talking, working relentlessly, more talking, more fucking CBT.
I remember feeling everything and nothing, always.
I remember sensing that I was trying to outrun something.
I remember the moment I learned about autism and thought ‘WTF.’
I remember the moment I learned about ADHD and thought ‘WTAF.’
I remember thinking ‘These feelings, aren’t OCD and depression alone WTAFF?.’

What I know about my mental health in my fifties.

It’s okay to be worthy.
Sometimes, it’s better to surrender than run.
Occasionally, very occasionally, CB ‘fucking’ T has a place.
But EMDR is next level.
Talking helps. But it has to be the right person. Experience is everything.
Buying clothes in bulk brings years of scratch fee comfort.
If the smell of food brings nauseous, walk away.
Grieving sucks, but it exists, understanding it matters.
Longing sucks, but it exists, understanding it matters.
Surrounding myself with the right people is everything.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month.
I’m more aware of my mental health than I’ve ever been.
I’m also aware of how fragile it is.
I’m grateful to be aware,

When I received my (hopefully) frank and final diagnosis it was given to me verbally by the psychiatrist as “complex comorbid, ADHD, Autism and OCD”.

For the two years prior I’d been trying to wrap my head around being an ‘Autistic OCD type’.

All of the years before that I had lone lane, ‘OCD and a confused, messy, scrappy brain that made little sense of the world. Depressed they called it.’ It was so messy I ran hard and fast away from each day to escape all of the feelings that had no name.

Hearing the terminology was eye opening to the impact intersection had on me all those years, and continues to do so.

Comorbid

Naturally, when I heard ‘morbid,’ my first thought was that it explained why I’m quite a dark character, occasionally perceived as miserable. My autistic logic tends to take things exactly as it hears them.

I can only be grateful I didn’t blurt out, “Well, that explains the depression, Doc… so at least I’m leaving with something today.”

I very easily could have back then.

Complex

My next thought was ‘it is complex’. You’ve just had the best part of an hour and half in this brain, plus all of the forms, and I dread to think what my dad told you. I guess you are confirming it’s pretty complex in here.

To help pay for the private assessment I was dreamt up selling ‘brainshadows’.

People pay me to sit alongside my thoughts and I narrate them to them. The whole lot. Every last detail. 30 mins is the maximum session available. The longest survivor so far came in at 22 minutes before they pulled the escape lever, muttering the words “I can’t take anymore, I can’t do it. I’m so sorry. I’m just so, so sorry.”

It’s complex, it really is.

“It’s an intersection of ADHD, Autism and OCD”

He went on to explain whilst all that was running through my head, along with 300 voices all trying to have their say over what was happening at that moment in time. Standard stuff for any zoom call in my brain. But this one I was desperately trying to hold on to and understand all that was being said to me.

“I’ll explain why it all feels so hard:

ADHD - You can try and treat the ADHD with meds, so that bit we can try and take care of. BTW here’s our menu of eye watering prices to supply you with those meds for a year, plus service charges, check ins, prescription processing and much, much more. You’ll need to remortgage but there’s a chance you can get a few hours work done each day with a little more focus.

Autism - Nothing you can do here. It’s all about management. The more you can understand about your presentations, how they come into your day to day, the better you’ll cope. But there is ultimately no medical support for autism.

OCD - Have you ever tried CBT?.”

I actually did say to him: “Well that explains why I feel so fucked all the time” and he smiled, which I appreciated as a human.

But here is the important part.

What I did learn that day is just how complex the intersections, overlaps, and comorbidity of each neurotype really are, and the impact they have on our nervous system, cognition, and executive functioning. None of it shows up in a neat, predictable way. Especially in the heat of the moment.

More often, it leaves me at some points in each day reflecting on all that is happening internally AKA “what the fuck is wrong with me?.”

Add a solid dose of delayed processing, and the timing becomes almost comical. Two hours after any experience, my brain finally delivers the logic it needed 2.5 hours earlier, just in time to be completely useless, but incredibly accurate.

Understanding intersections, comorbidity and complexity gave me some answers:

Why do I collapse into all but uselessness every afternoon? - In part because my dopamine rages at 2 to 3 a.m. every single day, so it’s understandable I’m exhausted. But that isn’t the whole story. It’s far more complex. I feel a physical wave run through my body and brain. As though a switch has been turned off, shutting down capabilities and existence.

Why is my nervous system always on high alert? - Because once you throw in early life trauma, the presentations escalate into super level hypervigilance that takes years to understand and intense therapy to get any kind of grip on. It’s brutal. Bruising even.

Why do I feel my bully (the OCD) tap me on the shoulder around 3.00 p.m. with a whisper of “I’m here, brace yourself sucker” - Because that’s what bullies do. They prey on the weak. At 3.00 a.m. I am at my strongest, my OCD doesn’t get a look in. Come 3.00 p.m. it will have me running rings to make sure I’m firmly back in its control.

I scratch the surface.

The hardest part is the performance that sits around it. The daily routine, knowing what is coming and when. Knowing that if an evening work meeting is needed or I need to make any kind of social connection it will be filled full of apologies for my entire existence throughout.

And so it goes. The daily cycle. The pulls, the depths, the exhaustion, the planning, the routines, feeling the ADHD, cross with the autism, with the OCD waiting to pounce, and all the while the sensation of ‘But wait, what the fuck, why am I on antidepressants? Am I depressed as well, or are they to try and help calm the carnage down, because imagine what it would be like in here’.

And that is my introduction to comorbid complex blah, blah, blah.

It’s messy and complex, but at least I have a name for it all, and I know I’m not alone. Throw in all manner of mental health conditions, along with biological and hormonal influences, and the demands of how we’re expected to show up as the people others want and need us to be, and it only fuels the fire. Everything tangles, and far too often it becomes about how we’re perceived, rather than how we’re understood.

Spot any spelling mistakes or poor grammar? Bonus points, I couldn’t be arsed to read it again. It’s 3:00 p.m., I’ve got no energy, and I need to go decontaminate the kitchen before somebody, somewhere dies a horrific death if I don’t follow the OCD commands.

The first time I understood I was experiencing grief was the sudden, one-in-a-million death of my mum. Each day, week, month, that followed would flow differently, from contentment for her peace, to despair that I never had the chance to repair all the things that I’d longed to do for many years. I was always just waiting for the right day.

Her death was the first time the word grief was brought to my conscious attention. I spent time trying to understand the range of emotions as they came and went. The way it changed how I experienced life, associations, memories. The attempts to go back and touch and smell and sense her ‘real’ presence. I’d long for a single moment to say goodbye. To let her know everything was going to be okay.

That was over twelve years ago. Today I am in complete peace, that she is in peace.

This said, I’d be fascinated to hear her response to me saying:

“Mum, it wasn’t just OCD and depression. There’s a trauma part I can’t tell you because it would kill you inside. No pun intended. But there’s this whole autism and ADHD thing too. I know it’s late in the day to tell you, but have a read. Plus I am more than certain you’ll also have the WTAF moment about yourself. I know, sorry for swearing, but you’ll see it when you see it. Anyway. Bye. It’s going to be okay. Enjoy the peace. Oh, when you read it, don’t start all your usual “I’m sorry, I should have done more, why didn’t I spot the signs, it’s all my fault.” Don’t turn it into that. But come on, you will. Go read, and then sleep. Bye.”

I had my autism diagnosed three and a half years ago. My ADHD eighteen months ago. The full Autism, ADHD, OCD combo. Fun times.

Several months into the full diagnosis I began to understand just how much I was grieving. How much of my past and present life I had already spent grieving, the pit-of-the-stomach aching, a longing to belong, to land in the right connection and to have the right life architecture.

Grief is the most compounding and impactful thing my autism and ADHD has brought me. To this day I experience it frequently. I can be mid conversation, and it will pull at me. I won’t immediately recognise it as grief, I’ll feel off, discomfort, anxiety perhaps. I’ll search for what’s happening and why it’s shown up, but slowly, once I have moved through it all falls into place and I see it clearly.

I’m far from academic. Or in a position to draw comparisons of any meaning. But the feelings of grief that followed my mum’s death mirror those that I feel around my ADHD and autism diagnoses, and the life that wasn’t lived authentically and the cost that I can’t help but attribute to the discovery and truth of my human make up.

This is my version.

1. Denial

For a long time I believed I wasn’t worthy of being autistic. Or having ADHD. Or having trauma for that matter. I am very worthy of my OCD.

I am formally diagnosed, but for fun (and perhaps a smidge of “let’s just check I’m not making this up”) I recently retook the Aspie Quiz and it came out with a result that had an autistic friend say “You’re very autistic”.

And yet only this morning, I walked into the lounge and a couple of family members were watching ‘Love on the Spectrum’ and I couldn’t help but try and enter a conversation as to why I find the programme confusing. I wasn’t prepped for the conversation, and I’m still not, but I blurted out. “Whenever I see bits of this in passing, it doesn’t feel very representative of ‘the spectrum’. In context I present very differently to the couple on screen.

But more importantly I can perform so well, on my day, thanks to a life time of practice, I’d probably look more at home on Blind fucking Date rather than Love on the Spectrum, but inside I’d be crawling through the performance ready to fall into complete and utter exhaustion.

I paused before I dug myself too deep into something I hadn’t processed…well done me. But I had the moment. The two people on screen were far more autistic in their presentations than me. And with that I slipped into denial. Worthiness even.

It hurt that I thought that. Still to this day I will catch myself denying accommodations or asking for help, due to a denial of need, more so, worthiness.

2. Anger

I rarely get angry. I can become very frustrated. I can shutdown intensely. I can have some pretty deep meltdowns.

When it does show, it’s not often externally, I live it internally and through a repeated narrative.

I am angry with parts of the human race for the suffering they cause other humans who just want to live the best life they can, with what they are born into, or is brought to them during their existence.

I am not angry that my ADHD and autism wasn’t caught sooner. I don’t believe health professionals, or my parents, teachers etc. had the information needed to understand it themselves.

But I am angry that today, in 2026, my child couldn’t get an ADHD assessment due to a lack of funding. Had I been unable to fund a private diagnosis, he would not have a full support plan at school, because without a diagnosis, the system says no. And he too, like me, may have been broken by a system, failed the education’s measurement of intelligence and risked falling into belief he too was ‘thick’ because we both have different learning styles and needs to the masses. So yes, I am angry about that.

I spent my entire life believing was truly unintelligent. I overworked until it broke me and put everything down to luck. See I’m quietly angry right now writing this. This is my grief showing, I don’t think it will ever stop. I just got angry.

3. Bargaining

This is one of the hardest aspects of grief for me to contextualise.

It’s the narrative that, for me, showed up quite early on about “what could have been?”.

If school had been different.
If I’d known why alcohol and drugs gave me the ability to socialise.
If, if, if – that’s the bargaining.

Bargaining is a dangerous place, because nothing can change what has been. It creates longing. A desire for time over again. It’s not a nice place to live.

I also see this. I think to some degree I’m using my own bargaining through my kid. If I fight hard enough, fund what the system won’t fund, name what I wasn’t named, I can spare him being the version of me. Maybe by preventing a repeat of my life, I can retroactively make up for what I want to change.

I know it doesn’t work like that, but I sense that I am playing out that way of making amends. Grief shows up in many ways. It is far from linear.

It also runs deep with my mum. If I’d known earlier, everything would have been so different, and the grief of her death would have been held very differently.

I don’t like this grief. I feel it physically.

4. Depression

I’ve spent large spells of my life on anti depressants. I’ll be on anti depressants for the rest of my life, thankfully I love my mirtazapine, it gets me a few hours sleep and it somehow soothed my nervous system when I needed it to. Perhaps they take the edge of things, I don’t know. My nervous system is so messed up I find it hard to distinguish what’s what a lot of the time.

Aged 17 I recall being on seven tablets a day for my depression, and I assume OCD which had been diagnosed aged 11. I was intensely depressed.

Today, recalling that depression is my benchmark. It’s not melancholy, or feeling low energy. For me depression is the sense of hopelessness.

I am very open about ideation. And I say it loudly, because I believe it needs talking about more, and without stigma and in doing so more people will stay alive.

My ideation is this. I don’t want to die. But I want the noise to stop, or at least quiten to get some rest from it every now and again.

I became depressed again in Summer last year and headed off to rehab to help sort my shit out and understand the whole package of what I then new - ADHD, autism, OCD, trauma, and deal with it all head on in one sitting. And I came out far less depressed and with far more intentional purpose. I learnt a lot. I recommend it highly.

But to the untrained eye. The general public. They would talk to me for five minutes today and declare me as depressed. I’m not. I simply have a lot of noise to manage and it never stops. I am constantly exhausted. I have been for a long time and I suspect I will be for a long time to come, possibly forever. There is a distinct difference.

For me grief and depression run close lines.

5. Acceptance

It took me a long time to accept my autism. Yes the whole ‘you’re not worthy, you know those people on Love on the Spectrum discussion’. It took me even longer to accept my ADHD. The first recommendation on my autism report was ‘Recommended ADHD assessment to complete the picture’. I flat out refused to accept I had ADHD on the basis that I had no clue how to handle the autism diagnosis, especially as somebody responsible for a lot of peoples livelihoods. And I wasn’t that kid at school. I can sit still. I can focus intensely. But did I tell you about the noise, the dopamine, the pace my brain processes at relentlessly?

Turns out it was the ADHD.

Today I do accept it. But it took a long time. I had quite a lot of “You’re not ADHD. You’re not autistic” - As I said, I am the master of performance if I’m thrown into the real world. Which is why I don’t enter it anymore. I don’t like that person who can switch in on and off so easily. The ‘on’ gives those around me false hope. “Look, you can socialise, let’s do it again” - It’s hard to even write it, let alone hear it.

I also find it difficult that so much of the world views autism and ADHD as deficits or disorders even.

They aren’t. And I hope one day in the not too far off future the general public will see that an autistic, ADHD or AuDHD brain isn’t just as capable of out performing averages, by which the world operates, give it the right environment and it can thrive.
I proved this in my 20 year career. Nobody ever beat my performance and it was always put down to ‘But nobody can do it like you, it’s unique’ - Yes, it is. My Autism and ADHD creates a work ethic and system that produces far better results than a ‘typical’ approach to the working day. But I’m the one with disorder?

Oooo…I think I just got a bit angry again.

Perhaps I do get angry more times than I care to admit. But I do it quietly. Via my writing. Rather than throwing bricks through windows.
Though that sounds fun. If only I was 15 again 😬

If this is full of typos and crap grammar, celebrate it. It proves it wasn’t written by AI. I can’t read it again. I have such a lack of attention beyond a certain point, thanks to my ADHD.

It took me over 40 years to understand even what a nervous system is. But once I had my ‘why’, why I do all the things I have ever done, why I still do all the things I instantly feel the need to do, things began to fall into place.

My nervous system longs to feel safe.

Once I learnt that alcohol and drugs only ever gave me a fleeting moment of calm, and that the gaps between were simply additives to an already persistent state of fight or flight, why I never froze (the reason being that I see freeze as being in a grey zone, I need black or white - fight for flight), I saw it clearly. My hypervigilance was forever all or nothing. Run fast toward whatever promise of ‘better’ was shining brightly in front of me. Run even faster away when the glittery prize failed to soothe all that was tearing me up inside.

Over the last eight and a half years, since putting alcohol to bed, I switched all of my energy and attention to seeking out the answers, to why I still felt (and still feel) so deeply uncomfortable the majority of the time. On good times, ordinary days when nothing dramatic is present. The underlying question sits quietly, ever present:

“So why do I still feel like this? The nauseous, nagging feeling that something is off, not right, WTF, when will this ever end. I feel shit. Uneasy. Wrong. Is this how everyone feels?”

I’ve done a lot.

SSP, EMDR, CBT, DBT, IFS, neurofeedback, somatic work of all sorts, psychoeducation, six weeks in rehab. And talking. Relentless fucking talking. Staring out of windows, numb, bored, slightly dissociated. Leaving sessions with more questions than I walked in with, and the therapist more confused than I am.

All that work has done a huge amount of good. I understand my nervous system more than I ever have. I’ve invested so much time and energy into moving it into something more comfortable.

I do all the basics religiously. I don’t drink or consume anything that can push it off its most natural, organic, birth-state baseline. I eat, in many respects, extremely healthily, albeit falling very close to the line of ARFID, though I keep on the right side of it becoming a problem. I think. Maybe. Hmm… I exercise hard. I move a lot. Healthily. Kind of. But you know. Once an addict, always an addict.

But I don’t sleep well.

And in there falls my biggest challenge.

My nervous system is exhausted by the routine of being clean, moving, managing, coping. An ever-present awareness that sits above the relentless scanning for danger, correcting it, re-routing thoughts through better and unnatural neural pathways, blocking the old ones that would have me running hard and fast and causing damage to myself and those around me, leaving them wondering what triggered my disappearance, as if they had never existed in my world.

Not so long ago, after a course of SSP, I went through a spell of improved sleep and I felt a physical easing. It completed the three basics, exercise, nutrition, sleep. And I truly believe that if we have those three things intact, we give ourselves the best scaffolding to work on whatever else is happening in the mess of a neurodivergent, trauma-informed nervous system.

I take five supplements to help me sleep, plus my daily mirtazapine, which I still believe knocks me out, although reports say that tolerance after a couple of weeks prevents this, so I choose to believe what I like. In reality, most nights I crash out instantly, exhausted from managing my nervous systems shitty responses to life.

Last night was different. I’m here now trying to process it.

There is a moment between lying down, settling, and falling asleep.

That I often enjoy. A dream-type state appears, and I know I can rest for a few hours before I’m jolted into a frenzy of activity around 3 a.m. (this happens daily, and I assume is an ADHD dopamine-cortisol rhythm thing, plus I love the stillness of the night and the absence of humans, so it is very shiny and my favourite time of the day).

That moment, the gap between consciousness and sleep, didn’t go as expected. What is usually a peaceful transition the opposite happened.

Instead came a deep, intense shock of anxiety on the moment of hitting dreamworld. It felt like lightning hitting my body. I was instantly taken to a moment I’d lived before, walking away from my home last summer as I made my first steps to rehab, and I was back there. In body. In mind. With a sense of trepidation and fear, as if I were reliving that moment all over again.

The sensation was like no other.

I lay somewhat paralysed, it felt like fear. I instantly searched for the threat, the root cause. The day was a day like most other days. There was nothing present. I was tired. I’d worked hard, feeling as though I’d achieved little, and yet I had been incredibly productive all day, but I couldn’t feel at ease that I’d done enough to satisfy my own self-worth.

So I took to my research. Plugged in the experience. Asked for an understanding of what might be happening.

The result was this:

What you’re describing sounds like your nervous system treating sleep-onset as a threat event. In a brain wired with ADHD + autism + OCD and shaped by an ACE, the handover from wake to sleep — when vigilance, motor control, and sensory gating all drop at once — can register as being dropped rather than letting go. The amygdala and brainstem don’t get the memo that this is safe surrender; they read it as falling, suffocating, or disappearing, and fire a sympathetic surge (adrenaline, diaphragm lock, that painful full-body crackle) right as the parasympathetic system is trying to take over. OCD compounds it by priming the catastrophic narrative; trauma compounds it because six-year-old you learned — somatically — that dropping your guard has a cost. The pain isn’t metaphorical. It’s your body defending against sleep like it’s defending against disappearance.

And in this moment, I am deeply grateful to have language and information.

Whether it is entirely accurate or not, is not the point. Whether I understand it fully, same. What I need is a conceptual and reassuring arc that I understand enough that reasons logic, and that alone gives me something to work with.

There isn’t always a linear answer, there often isn’t one, especially in the complexity of intersections of neurodivergence, trauma and their lasting impact on body and mind.

I see how much damage was done to my nervous system through a traumatic childhood experience. Its response was a complete and utter fuck-up, one that gave a pathway to so many challenges, layered in with autistic sensitivity, ADHD drive and falls, OCD commands and demands.

I accept that I will forever need to manage my nervous system with great care. The effort it takes to sit above it, to observe it, to make good decisions over everything my body is screaming at me to do otherwise is exhausting. So much so that most days I completely crash to sleep from how much energy it takes to get through the day unscathed.

I am really fucking proud to have made the adjustments I have, instead of running, blocking or falling back into negative addictions and dependencies. I have never felt more in control of myself than ever before.

But fuck. If I had one wish, I’d wipe out any human who ever inflicts harm onto children in such a way it will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

They may leave their experience behind as something and nothing. The child doesn’t.

I learnt so much about trauma in rehab. I can pretend all day long that things are okay. But they’re not. Management isn’t release. It’s a way of coping.

We can’t change what has been. Or put in us. We can learn to heal. And perhaps some people can actually fully heal and let go. Or we can live in management.

Some days, after an experience like this, my nervous system feels bruised. Management slips out the window, there's an almost-comfort in surrendering to the recovery. All because something, somewhere inside, stirred and arose without warning. Ever present. Waiting to pounce.

And now I feel better. I have processed. I haven’t run, or blocked, or done anything bad. It all makes sense, I have my why.

And from there I manage and we move forward. But fuck sometimes it’s not easy.

All doors must be shut, properly shut, there has to be a click.
And a push, or two, or twelve, just to make sure.
The relentless need to collect the bits off the floor, all the bits, so many bits.
Avoiding the rooms where the sun comes through, to avoid seeing particles in the air.

Refusing to shake hands, or touch skin on skin, for fear of contamination.
Or to stand or sit within breathing distance of any other humans, for the same reason.

Making meals, holding the kitchen knife and testing the edges, and ‘What if?’
It’s driving past cyclists and pedestrians and thinking ‘What if?’
Avoiding balconies and heights, because, you know, ‘What if?’

It’s constantly correcting each room I walk into. Everything in its right place.
Its exact place. Nothing touches or overlaps. Everything is immaculate.

It’s getting to the end of the road and turning round to check the doors are locked.
It’s getting to the end of the road after checking, and turning round again.
Some days I’d like to think it could be three times lucky.
But it’s not because I only do even numbers.
It’s four times lucky.

It’s having my kids check that doors and windows are locked so I comply with therapy.
And I tell the therapist that I didn’t check the doors and windows because I didn’t.

It’s walking into a room, freezing, and feeling the urgency to clean what is already immaculate.

But I know that nothing is immaculate. On my hands and knees I pull out furniture, and scrape the tiny gap between the skirting board and the carpet.

Carpet disgusts me. It tears at my soul to know what lives and grows in it.

As one command, ritual or compulsion is completed, there is a fleeting moment of life.
Before the next appears. Some timed to perfection, others led by all my eyes can see.

Every single speck of dust, contamination. A relentless need to clean and clear.

A need to eat the same food, at the same time, every single day.
Keeping it simple keeps it safe.

It needs to know everything is just as it should be.
Avoiding the bully feels deeply discomforting.
Anxious. That something is profoundly wrong.
And the correction is always within reach.

The same routine, to the minute, every single day. One activity missed brings a deep sense of shame, grief, dysmorphia, dread, who knows, all of the things.

Apparently it’s an anxiety disorder.
Hypervigilance. Protection. Ever searching to feel safe.

In therapy we’re told to name the OCD. Mine is called ‘The Bully.’
Because it controls my almost every move.
When it’s not controlling, it’s interrupting, it’s demanding.
It’s a bully because it is a bully.
It’s a powerful being.
It’s super powerful when it’s combined with ADHD and Autism.
They swirl around each other.
The ADHD drives the OCD urgency, the autism enjoys the routine.
The OCD builds the systems and patterns around each of them.

It’s messy, very messy. The Bully often wins. Usually wins.
Right down to having the final . at the end of every single sentence.