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.