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In Part 1 of this series, I explored some of the labels that have helped me understand how my AuDHD brain works.
This time, I'm looking at how I experience the world around me, how I've learnt to respond to it, and the ways I've adapted myself over a lifetime.
One of the biggest revelations since my autism diagnosis at 61 has been recognising just how much effort I've put into appearing comfortable, capable and in control, even when I was anything but.
And thinking that everyone lived their lives that way.
For much of my life, I didn't understand why certain things affected me so strongly. I simply learnt ways to manage, hide or work around them.
Sometimes those strategies were incredibly useful. Sometimes they created difficulties of their own.
More often than not, I didn't realise how much energy these strategies were costing me.
The more I've learnt, the more I understand that these experiences aren't separate little boxes. They're interconnected, each one influencing the others.
Once again, the labels haven't changed who I am. They've helped me understand who I've always been.
Masking (Camouflaging)
I had never realised just how much of my life I'd spent masking until after my autism diagnosis.
Masking describes the conscious or unconscious ways we hide, suppress or adjust aspects of ourselves to meet other people's expectations.
Looking back, there are some things that I I was conscious of early on. I can remember rehearsing conversations in my head from as early as three years old. I'd imagine what I wanted to say, how the other person might respond and how the conversation might continue.
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Since my AuDHD diagnosis, I seem to have been continually discovering new words and labels for things I have experienced all my life.
Before diagnosis, I didn't think I needed more labels. I sometimes hear people say the same thing — that they don't want to be labelled, or that having a label won't change anything.
And perhaps that is the point. The label doesn't change who we are. The experiences were already there.
What a label can change is our understanding of them.
For me, having the right words has been incredibly important. A label gives me something to explore and understand. It helps me recognise patterns and discover that an experience I thought was uniquely mine is shared by other people. Sometimes it has even allowed me to reconsider something I had spent years thinking was a personal failing.
Rather than putting me into boxes, these labels have opened doors.
Every now and then I come across another term and think, Oh! There is actually a reason I do that.
Sometimes it explains something that has frustrated me for years. Sometimes it helps me look differently at something I once considered a failing. And sometimes it explains one of the many contradictions in myself that never made sense before.
The experiences were already there. Having a name for them gave me a pathway to understanding them.
These are some of the labels that have helped me understand how my brain works.
AuDHD
This was probably the most important term of all.
AuDHD isn't currently a formal diagnosis. It is a term commonly used to describe the co-occurrence of autism and ADHD.
I had known I was ADHD for many years, but discovering that I was also autistic — and, more importantly, beginning to understand how the two interact — changed the way I understood myself.
Suddenly, so many of my apparent contradictions made sense.
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For most of my life, I really thought I understood boundaries.
To me, having good boundaries meant not allowing people to take advantage of my good nature. But I'm beginning to realise that even my understanding of being "helpful" was more complicated than I thought.
Growing up, I had this need to be seen as helpful, and that clearly continued into adulthood.
Being useful - doing things for people, solving problems, stepping in, physically helping, rearranging my life to accommodate someone else's needs - had somehow become tangled up with my sense of self-worth. Being capable and helpful made me feel valuable.
I understood boundaries as something that protected me from people who might take advantage of that willingness to help, but I didn't apply those same boundaries to my family in fact I don’t think I applied them to anyone at all really.
And I certainly didn't think to apply them to myself.
Since my AuDHD diagnosis and, particularly, during this latest period of autistic burnout, I have been thinking and learning a lot about capacity. I'm starting to understand that boundaries and capacity are far more intertwined than I ever realised.
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Recently I read an article by Lindsay Mackereth called You’re Feeling It. And Also Watching Yourself Feel It. It explores metacognition and intimacy, and why neurocomplex people can feel genuinely connected to someone while simultaneously feeling separate.
I had one of those moments of immediate recognition.
Oh. Other people do this too.
For most of my life, I have struggled to explain this thing that happens inside my head. I once tried to describe it to a therapist as feeling almost like dissociation, but not quite.
It was the closest I could get.
Because I'm not actually absent from the experience. I'm still there. I'm talking, laughing, listening, loving, enjoying someone's company.
But at the same time, another part of my mind is observing and analysing the experience while I'm having it.
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Sometimes a feeling arrives long before the words.
That may sound strange coming from an artist, but I don't usually think in vivid visual images. People often assume that because I paint, I must picture everything in my mind first. The truth is quite different. My ideas arrive more as a feeling or a quiet knowing than as a clear picture. The images and words often come later.
Recently, while reflecting on this season of my life, a feeling came to me that I couldn't quite explain. As I sat with it, it gradually found its own language.
It arrived as metaphor. A metaphor associated with feelings which finally equated to a body of water.
Not a particular river or ocean. Not a specific place. Simply the feeling of meeting the waters of life itself.
The more I sat with that feeling, the more I realised it described my journey through life more accurately than anything else I had ever tried to put into words. The strangest thing is, (or maybe it isn't), is that I'm not comfortable in water even though I'm a good swimmer, even a strong swimmer. But gradually even this began to make sense. It needs to be understood through the sense of feeling rather than literally. It needs to be understood through the sense that water can drown, can carry, can swamp, can soothe, can calm, can tire, can relax - it is powerful.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.