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.

The Anticipation — Excitement With an Edge

For weeks beforehand, I was mostly excited. The kind of excited that hums quietly underneath everything else — the checking and rechecking of the itinerary (sooo many times), the packing lists, the countdown.

But as departure got closer, something else moved in alongside the excitement. Not loud enough to stop me. Just present. A low, persistent awareness that something big and unpredictable was approaching — airports, unfamiliar spaces, days without routine, the relentless performance of being a person in public.

This is the AuDHD paradox of travel for me. I crave the new, the exciting, the wonderous — genuinely, even hungrily. And my nervous systems quietly begin its threat assessment anyway. Both things true at once, neither cancelling the other out.

Running the Gauntlet — What Travel Actually Costs

Let me be honest about airports and flights, because I think we don't talk about this enough.
It is relentless. From the moment you walk into an airport, the sensory overload begins and does not stop. The noise — announcements, engines, the general constant drone of thousands of people in an enclosed space. The crowds pressing in, the loss of any control over your immediate environment. The unpredictability of it all: trying to find the right gates, worry about delays, queuing through customs, the particular anxiety of not knowing. And underneath all of it, the masking — performing capable, calm, unremarkable human-in-transit for hours on end.

And then there is the automation. Airports have quietly removed most of their human staff — check-in, baggage, boarding passes — and replaced them with machines that cannot read your face, cannot see that you are overwhelmed, and cannot guide you through a process that everyone is apparently just supposed to know. There is no-one to ask. There is no-one whose job it is to help you find your footing. You are expected to already know what to do, and to do it efficiently, while the queue behind you waits.

Here is the paradox that I couldn't name before my diagnosis: I am a capable, intelligent, tech-savvy adult. I know things. I manage things. And yet that situation nearly broke me. Not visibly — I masked the tears and the frustration, held myself together (just), kept moving. But underneath the composed surface, I was working harder than anyone around me could see, trying not to cross the line into full meltdown in the middle of a busy terminal.

And intelligence doesn't protect you when you are AuDHD. It just means the gap between what you're supposed to be able to handle and what is actually happening inside you becomes something else you have to hide.

This means there is an energy deficit before the holiday has even begun. By the time we landed in New Zealand, I had already been working hard — not visibly, not in any way anyone around me would have noticed, but hard nonetheless.

I didn't fully understand this for most of my life. Now, with my AuDHD diagnosis, I can see it clearly: airports don't just tire me out. They cost me something that doesn't simply replenish overnight or even in a week.

The Trip Itself — The Mix

The first full day set the tone for what the trip would require of me. A boat trip, a busy restaurant, the  stimulation of being somewhere new and beautiful and full of people — and by the time we returned to the hotel, I was out of sorts in a way I couldn't immediately explain. Irritable. Teary. Running on empty without quite knowing why.

It took me a little while to identify it: I'd had no alone time. Not a moment to myself since we'd left home. For a nervous system that runs on solitude as much as connection, that absence had quietly accumulated into something that needed addressing.

I explained it to Livio — which is its own kind of progress, being able to name it rather than simply suffer through it — and went and sat outside by myself in the cold with a book. Just that. Cold air, quiet, no demands. And slowly, I felt my energy return to an even keel.

Most of the rest of the holiday was just the two of us, driving to different places in our own time, stopping along the way to hike or sightsee. Off peak, so not too busy. No itinerary demanding we be anywhere. No performance required. This was, it turns out, almost perfect. The car became its own kind of sanctuary — moving through spectacular scenery, at our own pace, answerable to no-one. And underneath all of it, the quiet reassurance that at the end of each day, accommodation was booked, meals were taken care of, and I didn't have to organise a thing.

AuDHD as Asset — The Wonder and Awe

But then there was that scenery.
This is where I need to be equally honest, because the difficulty is only half the story.

Standing in front of landscapes that genuinely overwhelmed me — in the best possible way — I understood again why I needed to go. My camera in hand, hyperfocused, drinking in colour and light and cold air and the particular quality of silence in a landscape that ancient and vast. This is where AuDHD stopped being a challenge and became something else entirely: an intensity of presence, a capacity for awe, an ability to be completely absorbed by beauty. It fills me up. It replenishes me.

The wonder I felt in New Zealand was not in spite of how my brain works. It was because of it.

The cold air I'd been craving. The autumn colours. Livio standing in snow for the first time, something he'd carried as a dream for years. These moments were vivid and saturated and real in a way I couldn't have manufactured if I'd tried.

The beauty, the wonder, the learning — they made the trip completely worthwhile. I want to say that plainly, in spite of anything else.

The Pull Toward Home

I have always known, long before I understood why, that ten days is about my limit for a holiday.

Not because I'm not enjoying myself. Not because anything was wrong. But because home pulls at me in a way that is almost physical, and ten days is roughly where that pull becomes louder than the adventure, or the adventure begins to wear thin.

On an ordinary day, a couple of hours away from home is enough before I feel it — that quiet, persistent tug back toward my own space. My sanctuary. The place where I don't have to manage sensory input, where everything is familiar and predictable and mine. Where I can finally stop performing and just be.

I used to think this was a flaw. A limitation. Something that made me less adventurous than I should be.

I understand it differently now. It's my nervous system knowing exactly what it needs. Home isn't just comfort — it's regulation. And ten days away from it, in unfamiliar spaces with constant sensory input, is a significant ask of a nervous system that was already working overtime.

It was inevitable. Even craving the cold and dreading the Queensland heat, I was still ready to come home. My sanctuary is my sanctuary, safe, predictable and home.

And then the end of the trip arrived, and everything reversed. The busy hotel. The airports again. The flight back to Australia followed by a long drive home. The same gauntlet as the beginning, only now with ten days of accumulated experience behind me and the knowledge that home was close but not yet there.

It was harder, not easier. I was ready to go home. I was more than ready. But home, and what I would find waiting for me there, was still a day's travel away.

When the Body Sends the Bill

AND I came home without a recovery plan.

This was a mistake — one that I can see clearly now. I came home and expected to slot back into ordinary life, more or less immediately. I did not build in time for what travel had actually cost me.

The flu hit hard. The kind of depletion that goes beyond tired, beyond jet-lagged, into something that felt neurological as much as physical. My body, having held itself together through airports and flights and unfamiliar restaurants and ten days of disrupted routine and the constant, invisible work of existing in public — finally had permission to collapse.

Or perhaps it didn't wait for permission.

This pattern is not new. Looking back over any significant departure from routine, I can see it repeating — the crash, then the illness that arrives once I stop, and the recovery that always takes longer than it "should."

My AuDHD diagnosis didn't change the pattern, but it named it. That need for recharge the nervous system regulation.  And naming it gave me new understanding. This time, instead of pushing through the flu, I rested until I was fully recovered. And in doing so, I averted a major ME/CFS flare up.

What I'd Do Differently

I recognise now that  I needed a recovery plan for coming home.

Not a vague intention to "take it easy." A real, built-in buffer: days with nothing scheduled, gentle re-entry into routine, permission to rest without guilt before the world demanded I be functional again.

The travel itself cost more than the obvious — more than the flights, more than the disrupted sleep. The masking, the sensory load, the loss of routine, the performance of being fine in public: these have a price that doesn't appear on any itinerary. And if I don't plan for the paying of it, my body will plan for me.

This isn't unique to me. If you're AuDHD and you've ever come home from a holiday feeling like you'd run a marathon in your sleep, wondering why you're more exhausted than before you left — this is why. The holiday was real. The cost was also real. Both can be true.

Worth Every Bit of It
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There is a version of this story that ends in regret. The crash, the flu, the weeks of recovery, the cost of it all — financial, physical, neurological. I understand why someone might read all of that and wonder if it was worth it.

It was. Completely.

The beauty was real. The cold air I had been craving was real. Watching Livio stand in snow for the first time was real. The wonder I felt behind my camera, hyperfocused and alive in a landscape that ancient, was not something I could have manufactured anywhere closer to home.

My AuDHD diagnosis has given me the understanding of what travel costs me — therefore what I need to do differently. The pattern was always there. Now it is legible. And legible means changeable.

I'm still processing parts of it, honestly. I don't have everything neatly resolved. But I know this: there will be a next time. And next time, I'll come home differently.

I'll build in the landing.


Have you noticed this pattern in your own travel? I'd love to hear how other AuDHD people navigate holidays — what helps, what doesn't, and what you wish you'd known sooner.