I was Searching Instead of Allowing: My AuDHD Experience of Joy

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 carried, from a very young age, the sense that we all must exist for a reason. That we each had a purpose we needed to find and fulfil. For a long time, I thought that purpose was to find joy and happiness — the kind I saw in other people. But I was measuring myself against something that was never mine to measure against.

It took many cycles burnout, and collapse, and a very long slow return to myself to understand that my purpose is simply to be. To find my way back to me. To exist, unconditionally, as I am and to help others find their way back to themselves.

Awe

When I stand by an ancient tree, (or magnificent rocks, waterfalls, vast landscapes) something happens inside me that I could probably call joy. An energy fills me and my thoughts reach towards all the things that tree has seen, felt, known across its lifetime. It makes me feel small — but not insignificant. We are all part of the same energy.

I feel the tree’s power. Its wisdom. Its beauty. I feel connected to something ancient and enduring, something that existed long before my particular worries and will exist long after. An ancient landscape does this to me. Archaeology, and the knowledge that people have been here for thousands upon thousands of years - living, breathing, learning, in awe themselves.  An artefact that holds energy from the past does this to me.  Music, dance, even architecture can induce awe.   I now understand that awe is one of my truest forms of joy.

Contentment

Contentment is also something that I am starting to understand now as a significant part of my joy.
It happens on a physical plane — but it is also a state of mind. It arrives when there are no demands on me. No expectations. No performance required. Just existing. Just being me.

For most of my life, lying on the grass watching clouds would have felt like laziness. Like wasting time. I only ever allowed myself these moments in recovery — when I was so depleted that rest became unavoidable. And I have memories of each of those times, because they were so rare and so precious that they stood out. They were times when I relearned how to stop and notice.  I learnt to recognise birds, watched bees as they gathered pollen to take back to the hive.  My nervous system filed them away - these moments of joy and contentment.

My swing offers me another version of the same thing. I have always had one — a proper swing, solid wooden seat, rope or chain. Not for the thrill of going high, but for the rhythm. The gentle movement. The air. The energy of it moving through me as I watch the trees, the clouds, the birds and listen to the gentle sounds of nature around me. It is interactive and soothing at the same time, asking just enough of my body to keep me present, but nothing more. Lying on the grass is pure stillness. The swing is gentle movement. But both ask nothing of me except to be here. It means I was tending to my own joy long before I understood that that’s what I was doing. And something maybe peculiar to me - hanging upside down.  I still do it.  It quiets my mind. I see things from a different perspective.
I am learning now that these periods are essential. Not a luxury, not a reward, but a necessity.

Bliss

This for me, is probably the most important aspect of my "joy".   As a child, when things were tough, I would step outside and feel an instant connection to the universe and to the earth. It was spontaneous and effortless. A knowing that everything would be okay. It felt like being filled with light — warm, safe, comforting and energising all at once.

When I collapsed at eighteen, that spontaneous connection disappeared, and what followed were decades of learning to call it in intentionally, to reconnect and re-energise and heal myself. The connection was still there — it never truly left — but it no longer arrived on its own. I had to reach for it.
Right now, in burnout, I am once again struggling to remember that it is there. That the light is still there, waiting. That I can call it back.

Nature works as an empath for me — it hears me, and it helps me heal. It always has. Even when I couldn’t name what was happening, even when I didn’t have the words, I knew that going outside and standing among living things would help. That light, that warmth, that knowing that I'm ok, was and is  bliss, and I’ve always recognised that. What I never saw, until now, was that that bliss was also part of my joy. My version of it, in my language, on my path — but joy nonetheless.

Yes — with my new understanding of myself, I can call it that. But maybe, deep down, I still prefer my own words. Awe. Wonder. Contentment. Bliss.  They fit me better. They are more precise. They are more mine. And I’m not sure they are lesser versions of joy. They might actually be richer ones.

The Joy of Witnessing Kindred Spirit
There is yet one more version of joy that I’ve realised — and it can arrive anywhere, anytime.  When something I said, something I taught, or simply being present with someone has helped them feel better, lighter, more themselves and they express it in a way I recognise.
When I witness that — when I see someone step into their own joy — something happens inside me that is very similar to bliss. I fill with light and warmth. It feels like love. And I think it has to resonate at a similar vibration to my own joy to land this way. It isn’t just witnessing happiness. It is recognising something kindred. Something that speaks the same language as my own inner experience, whether the other person is conscious of that or not.
It is, I think, almost spiritual. A moment of connection across the invisible. And it is one of the most reliable ways I know to fill back up.  But in the past, I assumed that it wasn't my own joy, that it was somehow separate from me.  Now I understand, I am just recognising my own joy in other kindred spirits.
​
Allowing instead of searching

My joy and happiness were never missing or out of reach. I was reading the clues wrong — searching for something that would never fit me anyway, instead of allowing my own versions to exist and be recognised.

I spent decades looking for the version of happiness I saw in other people — the louder, more social, more visible kind — and coming up empty. Not because I was broken, as I thought, but because that version was never mine anyway. My joy lives in wonder, and awe, and stillness, and connection, and pure and simple bliss. It lives in ancient trees and quiet skies and the feeling of being held by something larger than myself. In feeling safe and heard and loved.

Awe, wonder, contentment, and bliss are not lesser versions of joy. For me they are the truest versions. They are the ones that have been with me forever — like gazing at the sky and contemplating existence and seeing the magic in every day and being held in the loving hug of someone who truly sees you.

My late autism diagnosis gave me something I didn’t expect: a way to reframe my inner life. It gave me the ability to look back and finally see all the joy I had been living without realising that’s what it was. Not a new vocabulary — a different perspective. A different way of seeing the world and life. And with that came permission to simply be who I am.

A Message Across Time

If I could speak to the child I was — the four-year-old gazing at the sky, feeling the universe rush through her, filling up with light, yet carrying the weight of wonder and purpose in such a small body — I know what I would say.

Hold on to that connection. It is a gift. It is your birthright. It’s  very much part of your joy.
​
And she, I think, would say exactly the same thing back.