Right now I'm sitting here, in pain, kind of hungry but not wanting to eat. Kind of focused but afraid this will be terrible no matter what I do. Kind of excited but also wondering what the point is.

I've been here before. Many times. I've had this fight with myself, many times. I've overcome it, many times.

I am AuDHD. It's the intersection of autism and ADHD, and it's its own beast. My life and feelings are a constant push and pull of structure and chaos. I want to create and expand and do, do, do. But I also want routine, to know what's happening day to day, and to SLOW DOWN. I am honestly both, and I need both.

Beyond the diagnosis and the neurochemistry, I can see how my brain was formed to be like this. My story isn't typical. I grew up in a big neurodivergent family of chaos. My parents split when I was two, and both of them moved from relationship to relationship, home to home. Both of them were chaos agents in my life. Both of them worked with people who had high support needs related to autism and neurodivergence. And yet neither of them ever saw the signs in their own children.

But I knew. I knew I thought like an autistic person. I knew I had impulsivity issues and that some things didn't register the way they did for other people, despite being intelligent. I knew something was missing. And because I was surrounded by autism every day, I also knew exactly how to mask it.

That's the part that still gets me. I had a front row seat to autism my whole childhood, and somehow that made it easier to hide my own.

I have to be honest. I never really got to be my autistic self. My mother worked with autistic individuals my entire life, many of them with very high support needs and difficult emotional regulation. The constant change in our house was something I had to navigate, but the structure built for the autistic individuals she supported was never put in place for me or any of my siblings. My neurodivergence was never seen. My needs were rarely seen or met. I had to keep going, because everyone else's needs always came first.

So I set my autism aside, in some respects. I knew how to mask it because I understood autism so intimately that when my own traits surfaced, I could explain them away as copying the higher-needs autistic people in our house. I suppressed my need to rock, to stim, to have structure. And honestly, my ADHD helped with that. I could shift from one thing to the next. I was excited and high energy, all the time.

No one saw the quiet calculation underneath it, the constant effort of trying to get it right, to act right. I remember going to a boy's house that I liked, and the whole environment being so overwhelming that I just moved from window to window, staring out each one. I told myself I was being weird on purpose. I'm an artist, I thought, and artists are weird. But looking back, I was breathing. I was regulating. I was taking the time I needed to get used to a new environment.

Nobody in that house knew they were watching a nervous system trying to find its footing. They just saw a strange girl staring out windows.

I'm sure I came back from that, eventually. But the honest truth is that everyone thought I was weird. They saw the loud, chaotic, impulsive side. They didn't see the lack of support, the lack of understanding, the shame and confusion that came with simply being me.

I didn't get to be autistic.

I hid the rocking, the hand-flapping, the black-and-white thinking. I knew some things went over my head, but I also knew I wasn't an idiot. I hid the rocking and only let myself do it a little, alone. I hid the hand-flapping, or turned it into something that looked cute instead of something that looked behavioural.

I knew exactly how not to be autistic. And it hurt me, in the long run, more than I understood at the time.

My ADHD has been apparent my whole life, but I didn't even hear the word until I was eighteen. I think, in the end, my autism hid my ADHD, and my ADHD hid my autism.

I could make eye contact. I had a lot of energy, in public. I talked incessantly. But I could also rein it all in. I could listen. I could go still when I needed to.

So nothing got caught. Nothing got supported. Add trauma and complex trauma into the mix, and I genuinely told no one what was going on with me. Sharing my struggles felt like complaining, like being a burden. Honestly, it still does sometimes. But that's just old conditioning talking. If you're a parent, you know your child deserves to be seen and cared for in the way they specifically need. I knew that too, as a child. And if this is resonating with you, you knew it too.

So slowly, I've had to learn how to communicate all of it. I had been regulating since I was small. I had to, because in my environment I wasn't allowed to take up space. I needed to think of everyone else first.

My parents were so dysregulated themselves that if I became dysregulated too, it made everything worse. They would lash out or fall apart, and then I would have to help them regulate instead.

I carried more than I should have as a child, and slowly I learned to turn all of it inward, onto myself. It's like being the warden of your own jail. I'm the one who repeated horrible things to myself. I'm the one who shut down all my delights and interests. I'm the one who shamed myself into smallness.

A jail doesn't need a guard at the door if the prisoner has learned to lock herself in.

Of course, this was learned behaviour, a way to stay safe. But it still took a long unravelling to undo as I got older. Neurodivergent brains often develop more slowly, and honestly, I don't think the brain ever fully stops developing. So processing childhood trauma isn't really possible until your late twenties or early thirties. All of this only really started surfacing for me in my mid-to-late twenties. That's when I had my first truly intense burnout. Though if I'm honest, I had been living in a state of overexertion and deep exhaustion for as long as I could remember.

I remember my Obaachan, grandma in Japanese, saying to me in my late teens, "I don't want to hear that you're exhausted one more time. You are always saying it."

I was also always feeling it.

She wasn't wrong to notice. She just didn't have the language for what she was seeing, and neither did I.

I think about that sentence a lot now. Not because she was harsh, but because she was right that I said it constantly, and neither of us understood why. There was no framework yet. No one had handed either of us the words AuDHD, masking, or nervous system collapse. There was just a tired kid, and a Obaachan who loved her and didn't know what she was looking at.

I have learned to recognise my patterns since then. I am still learning them, slowly, in layers, the way most real healing happens. I am still learning what my body and my brain actually need to function, rather than what I trained myself to tolerate.

It has been a journey. I won't pretend it's been a clean one, or a finished one. It has held so much love, so much grief, so much confusion, sometimes all three in the same hour. But if I know anything about neurodivergence, it's this: I am not alone in it. None of us are, even when the warden inside us insists otherwise.

Much love,

Kat

**Photo credit Hernan Sanchez on Unsplash