Yesterday I hit a kind of saturation point with relating to all the Autism/ADHD/AuDHD jokes, memes, and anecdotes, and I finally realized just how disabled I actually am. Like moisture falling out of my eyeballs levels of realization.
I'm like, "Holy shit. This has fucked with me my entire goddamn life and I spent the overwhelming majority of that time thinking I was normal-ish." Yeah, I knew I had ADHD since middle school, but at no point in my life did I ever consider that to be disabling. All I needed to do was drink enough caffeine and I'd be mostly fine.
But caffeine couldn't tweak my other behavioral oddities such as:
the noise is too bright / the light is too loud
i'm sorry i haven't emailed you back. i forgot your email existed because it scrolled down past the bottom of the email window and wasn't visible in my inbox anymore
the face i pull / the tone of my voice :: WHAT TONE?! WHAT FACE?! WHAT DID I DO?!?!
why yes, i did listen to that album 67 times in a row
hot foods and cold foods aren't supposed to touch on my plate
could you just, like, lay on top of me and squoosh me? please?
Growing up, I was utterly baffled that everyone else seemed to be breezing through life, but I was getting snagged on every minuscule obstacle like I was walking through a field of thorny bushes. The adults in my life told me I was "very bright" and "full of potential", but I felt like I was barely treading water. I couldn't explain why things were challenging. They just were, and it was so frustrating!
So finding out at age 50 that I'm autistic/adhd as fuck was welcome news, but I really wish I had known and understood this 40 fucking years sooner.
Anyway, I've kind of accepted I've got both autism and ADHD in my headmeats like some kind of foreboding chocolate peanut butter cup melting on my mental dashboard. There's no fixing it, I'm always going to be like this. I can be sad and angry about it, or I can take the fucking mask of and just be the neurodivergent weirdo I've obviously (and obliviously) been my whole life.
Shit. How do you unmask? I've been faking being normal for so long, I code switch back to it in self-defense when I recognize myself doing one of my AuDHD behavioral oddities. Ugh. This is going to be hard, isn't it.
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