Holiday choices, for me, always start with a checklist that runs whether I invite it or not. Will it be too hot? How many people will be around? Will there be crowds? How much uncertainty will be involved — and can I book enough ahead of time to have a timetable to hold onto?

I am English-born, heat-intolerant, and living in subtropical Queensland. I have always craved travel. And for most of my adult life, farm life gave me a quiet, blameless reason not to go. In forty years we have had perhaps seven actual holidays. The farm, and something I previously couldn't name, kept me close to home.

In recent years that has slowly changed. I use a travel agent now to handle flights and accommodation — not as a luxury, but as a strategy. My AuDHD doesn't live happily in the planning. It lives in the end result — in being somewhere extraordinary, fully present, with no logistics left to manage. The planning itself needs to belong to someone else, at least the framework of it. I need to know where I will be and when, well in advance, before anything close to excitement can settle in. Once that structure exists, I can begin to look forward to it. I leave space within it for our own experiences, our own rhythm — but the bones need to be there first.

New Zealand in autumn ticked everything: cold air, spectacular scenery for my camera, snow on the mountains for Livio — something he'd carried on his bucket list for years. For farmers, the travel window depends as much on rainfall as on the calendar — if it hasn't rained enough, the irrigation doesn't stop, and neither do we. The harvest wasn't yet upon us, the rain hadn't been kind, but we stopped irrigation anyway, and the window was open.
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For me, wanting to go at all is rarely simple. Before the excitement gets a chance to settle, something else tends to arrive alongside it — a quiet guilt at wanting something other than what I already have. "Why isn't this enough?" And underneath that, the practical weight of it: money spent on a holiday is money not going back into the farm. I have over the years developed a belief that travel is a luxury.  It's not a belief I grew up with, but these thoughts have stopped me in the past. More times than I can count, probably. They didn't stop me (or us) this time — but they were part of the original wanting, whether I invited them in or not. Once we are actually there — once the cold air hits and the camera is in my hand — most of it falls away. Most of it.

​There's a term that gets used about people like me. High functioning. I understand why people use it — and I don't like it. But I also understand what it means to the people on the outside looking in.
It means you show up. You meet the deadlines. You seem organised, confident, capable. You might even be working above the standard. And so the assumption is made — you're fine. More than fine.
What nobody sees is what it costs.

The Gap Nobody Talks About
When you have ADHD or autism — or both — things that other people do easily take three times the mental effort. Sending an email. Making a phone call. Starting anything. Replaying the conversation you just had, wondering if you seemed rude because you forgot to ask how they were.
That alone is enough to drain you.
You've become a master of innovation just to keep up. Lists. Reminders. Routines. Scripts. Memory prompts. Systems that other people don't need — just to look like everyone else. And sometimes, you even convince yourself you're fine.
But you're not coping. You're surviving. There's a difference.

For most of my life — and it really was most of my life — I believed that joy and happiness were beyond my reach. Because by observing other people, I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t comprehend what it actually felt like from the inside - it looked like something other people had access to that I simply didn’t.

I was often told as a child, as a teenager,  to go out and have fun, to stop being so serious, to stop worrying. These instructions annoyed me. Yes, I was serious — but I was being me. And what I was experiencing — the wonder, the awe, the quiet contentment, the bliss — didn’t look like what other people called joy and fun, so I assumed I was missing something.

I was wrong. I wasn’t missing joy or fun. I was trying to follow the wrong instructions on life. My joy was on a completely different page.

​Wonder

My earliest memories of contemplating existence are from around age four. I would sit with the sheer fact of being — that I existed, that anything and everything existed — and it filled me with both excitement and fear. The scale of it was almost too big to hold.

But alongside the fear was something else entirely. A wonder so deep and persistent it never really left. Wonder at existence. Wonder at the sky and the trees and the ancient things. Wonder at the vast, mysterious question of why.  And it is because of this question that I call this wonder rather than awe.

I have spent most of my life navigating a world that wasn’t built for a brain like mine. The confusion, the exhaustion, the years of masking and second-guessing and pushing through — those stories are real, and I’ve told them honestly here before. But today I want to focus on gratitude.
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The deep, hard-won, this-is-genuinely-mine kind of gratitude that only comes after you’ve done the work of truly understanding yourself.

Because here is what I know now that I didn’t always know: my neurocomplexity — the whole glorious, exhausting, extraordinary package of being AuDHD 2e Gifted — has not just shaped my life. In the most important ways, it has been my greatest gift.

Here are just ten of the different, contradictory and confusing reasons why.

1. The Download — Thoughts That Arrive Whole
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The best way I can describe it is this: it’s like having access to a library. Not just the library in my own mind — though that is vast and well-stocked — but a library somewhere out in the universe itself. Information, wisdom, knowing — just arrives.
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My mind thinks in words first, then concepts. When I was younger, images were harder to summon deliberately, though they would arrive unbidden. These days I can think in pictures too. But always, before the words and before the images, there is feeling. The feeling comes first. Everything else follows.
I have experienced this my whole life. At five years old, in a playground in England, I watched children taunting a dark-skinned girl and walked over to tell them why her ancestors had dark skin — about protection from the sun, about where people came from. I stood there afterward thinking: where did that come from? I hadn’t yet been taught any of it.

It started with a simple question.

I was sitting in a room with a group of women at our local business network when a therapist asked us to think about what a best friend actually does. How they speak to you. How they show up for you. How they treat you when things are hard.

Then she asked us whether we were being that kind of friend to ourselves.

I could only honestly answer: no.

There was something almost desperate in that realisation. Not a gentle nudge of “I should be kinder to myself.” It was a knowing that landed in my body — a recognition that I had to do something about this. That I couldn’t keep going the way I had been.
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This was just before my autism diagnosis. I was about to receive the piece of information that would finally make my whole life make sense. But first, I had to reckon with what I’d been doing to myself in the meantime.

I am writing this from inside chronic autistic burnout that began with a traumatic year in 2024. I want you to know that upfront — not as a disclaimer, but because it matters. Because the words are harder to find today. Because I nearly didn’t write at all. Because that, right there, is exactly what autistic burnout does.

This week I had a meltdown because of my mother - in front of my mother for the very first time. After a lifetime of holding it together until I was alone, I just couldn’t hold it back. I sobbed and sobbed. I am sixty-something years old. It has taken that long for the mask to slip in front of her.  To let her see that I'm not the "confident, in control, reliable and capable person" she has always believed me to be the one she has leaned on for decades.  Some masks go very, very deep.

What Autistic Burnout Actually Is

Autistic burnout is not depression. I want to be clear about that, because for decades, that’s what I was told it was. Doctors, well-meaning and wrong, would listen to my description and reach for their prescription pads. But I knew. Even in the 1990s.   I had my ADHD diagnosis — but I didn’t yet know I was autistic. What I did know was that the word ‘depressed’ was wrong. I sat in a doctor’s office and said: “I am not depressed. I am burnt out. I cannot do this.” Nobody really understood. The concept of autistic burnout as a specific, neurological experience did not yet exist in clinical awareness.
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Autistic burnout is a complete and utter collapse due to overwhelm. It is exhaustion that goes beyond tired — and I know tired. I have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I am very familiar with physical exhaustion. But autistic burnout is different. For me it is primarily mental, even as it pulls the body down with it. It is what happens when an autistic brain has been running at full capacity for too long, masking too hard, managing too much, absorbing too much of the world — and finally runs completely out of fuel.

At sixty-one years old, I finally heard the words that reframed my entire life.
"You're autistic. There's absolutely no doubt."

For one week, I experienced the most profound euphoria I have ever known. I don't have to try anymore. I don't have to fix myself. It's just me. Then came the grief - wave after wave of it. "If only I'd known before."

I had already been diagnosed with ADHD at thirty-one, which had been a relief in itself. But the autism diagnosis thirty years later filled in the missing pieces in a way nothing else ever had. It explained everything. And it raised the question that so many late-diagnosed women ask themselves: why did it take so long?
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The answer, I've come to understand, has everything to do with being a woman.

Hello, I'm Jane Marin—and I exist at the intersection of art and advocacy, where creation and understanding are inseparable.

For decades, I've lived with what I call a neurocomplex mind—AuDHD (autism and ADHD combined) along with layers of intuition, empathic sensitivity, and pattern recognition that shape how I experience everything. My ADHD diagnosis came in the early 1990s; my autism diagnosis arrived in 2025. But the truth of who I am has been here all along, weaving through every part of my life.

Art has never been just a creative outlet for me—it's my sanctuary, my compass, and the way I make sense of a world that often feels overwhelming. As someone whose nervous system runs hot and who lives daily with fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, my creative practice is how I self-regulate, find calm, and reconnect with myself when everything feels like too much. You may know me for my Oracle card illustrations or my portrait paintings of strong, resilient women—figures who carry quiet messages of strength, love, and wisdom. Sometimes a gentle masculine energy steps forward too. These characters often feel like messengers from another time, whispering stories that want to be remembered.

Bookbinding has become just as vital to my creative rhythm. There's something profoundly grounding about stitching pages into form, about turning discarded materials into something meaningful and beautiful. Each journal I make becomes a vessel for someone else's story—a safe place for reflection, mess, and magic. This repetitive, tactile work quiets the constant motion in my mind.

But my work extends beyond my own creative practice. For years, I've been supporting ADHD and autistic people in my regional community of Bundaberg, Queensland. I've run support groups, brought specialists to our town, and walked alongside hundreds of neurodivergent individuals as they discover their own paths to understanding and self-acceptance. Currently, I'm writing a book about my neurodivergent journey—one that explores the complexity of living with a neurocomplex mind while teaching coping skills to others. I share regularly through my monthly newsletter and fortnightly blog, and create educational Instagram content about the lived reality of AuDHD experiences.

Here's what I've learnt: my art and my advocacy aren't separate. They both flow from the same source—a mind that sees patterns others miss, feels deeply, and knows things intuitively before words can catch up. I experience what I call "the download problem"—thoughts arrive fully formed but scatter like startled birds when I try to express them. My creative work gives those thoughts form. My advocacy work gives them purpose.
Through my Gather and Create workshops, these worlds meet beautifully. These gatherings aren't just about making art—they're about reconnecting with creativity, with community, and with the parts of ourselves that need care and expression. They're neurodivergent-friendly spaces where regulation happens through creation, where there's no "right way" to be or make.

In the months ahead, I'll continue to share more about what it looks like to live, create, and advocate from a neurocomplex mind. The behind-the-scenes reality of running a creative business when your brain works differently. The joy and challenge of supporting others while navigating your own journey. The ways art becomes medicine, and understanding becomes art.

If this resonates with you—whether you're neurodivergent yourself, love someone who is, or simply recognise that creativity and self-understanding are deeply intertwined—I hope you'll join me.

Here's to finding beauty, healing, and meaning in the everyday—and to honouring all the ways our minds make magic.
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