Today I watched a short video called “Five Signs It’s Both,” about the dual diagnosis of autism and ADHD. How they are constantly at odds with each other. It made me realize that’s exactly why people don’t like my blog. It seems like I say one thing and do another, when in reality my ADHD and Autism are duking it out. My whole body is changing, and there goes my perspective. Two things can both be true. It’s no secret to me that knowing those two things together is what makes me feel nonbinary and bisexual. I can’t choose a label because there isn’t one for me. I cannot predict what other people think of what I do and say, but I at least know why my blog sounds so different all the time. I’ve always described it as “working on different cores,” but it’s the two sides of my neurodivergence. They look like two different perspectives to other people, so therefore I’m a mess and they’re always right. I’m an inconsistent liar when you don’t know or have empathy for neurodivergence. I got by as a kid by completely ignoring my autism, because ADHD gave me the energy to be “on” in public. I didn’t have time to realize that the way I thought was always going to be a battle, and that I’d never have thoughts I’d stop turning over. This is one of them. My behavior doesn’t make sense to people who can only see things one way. Everything else looks fake.
I am certain that a lot of triggers were installed that way. That I am too introverted. That I am too extroverted. That I am too shy. That I talk too much. That I am heartless. That I am frighteningly intense with my emotions. That I cannot possibly love someone as much as I do when I don’t really know them. That I can, so deeply and tenderly. I am a lot of things, but I am working from avatar state all the time. At no time do I get to turn off any part of my neurodivergence, just like when Aang and Korra are in the zone…… except I never get the luxury of focusing on one aspect of bending at a time.
It’s why I made the rookie mistake of thinking that Supergrover could learn to love me eventually, but I made a mistake in saying something. I should have kept my mouth shut and let her come to me if it was going to happen at all. And then my ADHD and hypomania kept me from not saying anything. I keep looking at this part of my life because I think it tells me a lot about my personality everywhere else. That I’d made a decision never to tell her already and impulsivity ate my lunch on several occasions. I didn’t mean harm, ever, I was just high on brain chemicals. There are two things about her that if you knew your response would be, “ok. I get it.” Even if you don’t like it, you’d get it. And her picture isn’t even first, but it doesn’t hurt her game at all.
The impulse was that I was betting that she was so gorgeous and so smart that very few people were willing to lay that piece of information on the table because they were so fucking intimidated by her. That my only edge was having nothing to lose. In the end, she was up for wordplay, and I was fine with that. Still am, but at first was taken aback by my reaction. It was more powerful than I thought it would be and then I knew that our emotional connection had done something to me, also unexpected. I didn’t stop loving my wife, ever. I started loving Supergrover. Those things were not mutually exclusive I never cheated on my wife. Ever. Not once. That’s because she knew how I felt and she knew the situation. It was never going to happen, just be patient because I’m miserable. Her “over the line” moment was hitting me when she got angry. We as a couple had the option of making up until then. We didn’t break up because of Supergrover. We broke up because I didn’t get better on Dana’s timeline when all I can say about that time in my life is OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY.
“Medical, medical, medical.” -Lauren Graham
For the uninitiated, the quote means that she’s on a show with medical jargon. When the writers don’t know the term for something, they use medical as a placeholder word for a diagnosis or a procedure, etc. The medical consultants will add that onto the sides as they evolve. So, basically I just made an inside joke with Lauren Graham by using “medical” as slang for “yadda yadda yadda.”
My only problem with this arrangement is that there is no medical consultant anymore, so no one gets an evolved version later. What my autism/ADHD personality tells me is that I desperately need other people to help me check the story I’m telling myself because I am always seeing things in two completely different ways. Looking at the world as nonbinary because I can’t, not that I won’t. My executive function is worse than I thought, though my creative output seems to be outstanding. Everything about me is confusing, especially since I’m just now making sense of all this. Why special classes would have seemed easy and regular classes were hard. Why I was reading at 3 or 4 and failing nearly everything. Why I’m bright and a moron a hundred percent of the time….. because it depends on which part of my personality you agree with that day, not something that’s dependent all upon me. I don’t get to choose whether I have ADHD or Autism. You don’t get to choose that it’s frustrating to deal with, because I assume that if you love me, you care how I feel in our relationship. You also have the freedom to walk away if I’m just that complicated.
It’s not even that hard anymore, after feeling abandoned by so many people. It hasn’t been right or fair, but it has taught me a lot. The truth of the matter is that I’ve participated in lots of struggles brought on by me. I have also done things that I couldn’t control and I didn’t know why. Learning that I was made for my personality to be complicated intead of thinking I’m a shady fuckup is progress….. it’s not that I’m a liar. It’s that life isn’t lived in soundbites. It’s why when a problem deserves attention like intelligence, I will make intelligence my interest because I started in political science and gravitated toward international affairs. I do not like the military because I believe that you can solve more problems with information and diplomacy than you can with bombs and terrorism. I don’t love CIA and NSA and all that because they’re perfect. I love them because people hate case officers when the military does the same shit, yet we would never stop supporting our troops. You know how all autistic kids have that tendency to pick one thing? Well, like in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, we are going to have to schedule a meeting to talk about international affairs, just like she does for whales. I could go on and on about intel from the time I was born. That’s because most of the book talks I’ve been to and the topics the spy museum covers the most in depth are that period. They’re the ones who were active when I was born. Stories of getting in and out of East Germany and tangles with the KGB are exciting because the Berlin Wall didn’t fall until 1991, which made me an eighth grader. Plenty of time to have aged enough where I was obsessed with news. The earliest news story I remember has nothing to do with CIA, but just how long I’ve been obsessed. It was the kidnapping of John Walsh’s son Adam. News became a powerful drug, especially stories about stranger danger.
The next story I remember clearly is the Iran Contra affair. I didn’t know anything about socialism or communism back then, but it seemed like the Contras were really hard on do-gooders….. but I’ll confess that I laughed when Reagan heard that the press helicopters were being shot in Nicaragua and said, “well, there’s a little good in everybody.” But those are the statements by presidents that slipped through the cracks for me. How much I see that now, fascists are always the first to start the rumors that the press doesn’t like facts. How in the hell did Trump get ahold of this country so tightly that even the Post and the Times were suspect? Do they have a long history of putting bullshit into the ether or something? I don’t think so. Why would they suddenly start in 2016? That’s because they didn’t. Democrats view the press as a necessary evil. They don’t help journalists do their jobs, necessarily, but they also view reporters as being able to get the truth out in a respected publication. They’re not being interviewed by the dumbest bloggers in the nation. There are professional fact checkers. Republicans will tell you that the facts are an illusion.
My great uncle flew Apaches in Somalia, shot down in the 80s. What no one knew is that he was covert ops and was flying missions for both C and DIA (C is Central, D is defense, both intelligence agencies for those overseas). No one in our family got his effects back until 10 years later, which added to the mystery of what really happened to my great uncle. It made two people in our family interested in working for CIA, me and James. James is said uncle’s son, and instead of being an intelligence officer, he decided to do contracting work for CIA instead. CIA needs tradesmen because stuff like this happens. If we hire tradespeople overseas, we can’t be sure it won’t be like when we ended up with a building FULL THE FUCK UP WITH BUGS……. luckily, it wasn’t an important building with classified information. It was only the US Embassy.
Because I see things with both ADHD and Autistic eyes, I can accept the fact that both intelligence officers and soldiers do horrific things. But we tend to villify CIA and celebrate Marines, for example. It’s not good for the country because the military will never promote solving anything. They’re dependent on conflict because when we are not actively fighting, profits go down. So, there’s no incentive to use CIA to stop things from happening when we can. This is not true for all leaders, but this is true for warmongers. It really depends how you vote. Some leaders are all about collaboration. Some leaders are so awful they’ll go into CIA’s house and shit all over them on day one (not even close to the worst thing Trump has ever done, but his blatant disregard for his own intelligence officers and respect for their community and traditions- like begging for clearly unearned security clearances- is just beyond the pale. If you’re going to tell people you believe someone else’s intelligence agency over yours, get your clearance with them. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. I’m sure Moscow is lovely this time of year.
I am also not sure that the Trump administration didn’t also have a Mossad plant. It wasn’t just Russia that got our attention. We definitely flirted with Israel. This is not fact in any way, shape, or form. This is my opinion not after shooting my mouth off randomly, but by searching the news for articles just like it. With ADHD and Autism, you vacillate between complete disinterest and absolute obsession. Right now I couldn’t get up from writing at gunpoint because I am in the zone- listening to EDM and a beat that won’t quit. Even when I subdivide I’m still going fast. Every once in a while I go downstairs for a new bottle of iced tea (green with lemon is my favorite), but other than that I look like Mr. Robot. Oh my God. My God. I look like Mr. Robot and he’s clearly coded as autistic. He is not me in all ways, because he doesn’t have those ADHD bursts of energy. And yet he also wears five things. He would look good in an American Giant hoodie and would know about Bombas socks.
The only difference between us is that the keyboard I use has RGB, which I set to a whitish silver. Even if you don’t like bright pink or whatever, a backlit Bluetooth keyboard and mouse are essential for me because I like being able to see them if they drop somewhere…. especially because they’re wireless. It makes them even harder to keep track of, because I lose them like most people lose umbrellas.
All of this is to say that I found someone’s story that is moving me to think about the difference between neurodivergence and masking behavior, because I haven’t really thought about how it would make me feel better to know I wasn’t alone. That I could read about ADHD and that was the same. That I could read about Autism and know what all autistic people were like. I didn’t feel like a bad person because I couldn’t get my story straight. It’s just like my eyes. Sometimes I drop something and immediately can’t find it because I don’t have 3D vision. Sometimes my right or my left eye shifts to be dominant and what I just saw isn’t there…. as if it never was. A magic trick I constantly play on myself. So, in order to be really in touch with my body, I have to know what I need. Am I in an autistic mood where everything needs to be designed for my comfort, or do I feel the ADHD pull of being hyper and wanting to talk to people? Going out is too loud. Staying in is too boring.
I love restaurants, and that’s it. Like, the most exciting I get is a bar that has darts. I do not want to come with you to a club. I don’t like to dance unless it’s a slow song and at that point, why go out when you could stay in? 😉 I would also rather walk around town arm in arm than do anything planned, because like I said earlier, my attachment style is talking to people like they talk to themselves when they’re alone, as in, they don’t have to front with me and I’ll listen to whatever they say. I offered this to Supergrover, and she said thank you, but she didn’t realize that I might actually be good for her in that capacity because she doesn’t look at me that way anymore. Doesn’t mean I haven’t talked to hundreds of people before her that would have informed my opinions when she used me as a sounding board. I make a good judge of people by judging their actions and not who they are as people.
One of the things I did with Supergrover that really, really cost me is that she thought I was trying to make her feel bad when I assumed she knew I was quoting her. I should have known that her life moved too fast and furious to be able to do that, but I could no longer tolerate being ripped to pieces when I referenced the fact that she’d said it so she wouldn’t think I was judging her. I was fucked either way.
The message was “go away and leave me alone” and “I don’t want to go.” This was not one-sided. What I mean is that after a fight, I always showed back up and tried to resolve things. Sometimes, she did before I got there. Sometimes, I got there before she did. But the pull has been irresistible because we do have such a long history. My process is getting all of that to fade into the background, because I want her to come back and don’t think she deserves it. I can hold both in my mind, so the answer is on her. I can sit in cognitive dissonance for years on end. Gray area doesn’t bother me. What I cannot stand is being in the push/pull. I would rather someone go away until they’re sure they’re right for me. I have already decided I am right for them.
I didn’t make Supergrover leave because of something she did. I told Supergrover to take a right when she wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t care what the outcome was, I wanted her to stop being the party of “no.” Stop telling me what I can’t do and start telling me what I can. How much of me do you want? How much of you do you want me to have? This is all confusing and unbreakable. It would have been easier had Michael and Dana known about this. But they didn’t and they did. We told them what we talked about. I didn’t tell Dana what it meant for me. That I couldn’t have both of them and Dana couldn’t have me. Not because she wasn’t a good partner. There was so much distress in her voice too many times at having mutual friends to believe that I didn’t do the right thing. That’s because it has come up again and I’ve dealt with it. You can’t even imagine what it cost me, and she only knows about one of them after Dana and I broke up, but there were two people I met that would have been problematic for us. One was small. One was not so small. I was angry at both situations, but not at her. I wanted empathy. A “yeah. That sucks. Let’s go eat ice cream about it.” What I got was just more anger. It felt like “how dare you be disappointed.” I felt like I couldn’t have a full range of emotion because everything was an indictment on her personality and her looks.
Oh my fucking God is that not ever true in any way at all.
If this was an 80’s movie, I’d go with standing in front of her house like John Cusack or one of the hundreds that say, “I LOVE YOU, YOU IDIOT!” It may or may not be raining, all that shit. The only carryover from anything romantic is that I like her married name, so that’s what I call her. Just like Jim from The Office calls Pam by her last name. I loved that stage in their relationship and it’s the one thing I do that I truly love, because I know how he looks at Pam when he says it and that’s as far as it goes. The reason it’s a holdover is that for me the feelings of wistful longing are so far back that it’s just tradition. I didn’t even call her by her last name when she was single, because I had a hundred terms of endearment for her until that one stuck. The best ones are the ones I can’t publish, because there are always going to be things that are just for me. For instance, you’ll never see the picture she took for me and not because she wouldn’t want to publish it. It’s that I wouldn’t publish it anyway because I want us to have some things that are just our own. I talk about her. I don’t have to prove anything. I take it that if I say she’s gorgeous, you’ll just believe me because whether that’s true subjectively or objectively isn’t the point. To my readers, it’s not a beauty contest. To me, I can call up that picture at a moment’s notice because I like her eyes better in that one that I do in the others, also it’s the most recent. She hasn’t changed a bit in all these years, as beautiful as the day I laid eyes on her.
My ADHD side says that everything will be okay if we can just change our patterns and the easiest way to do that is to just sit down with each other at a resturant. My autisitc side is freaking out like I’ve been chosen to do Wipeout tomorrow. Just shaking like a leaf at the thought. It’s so easy, and so hard, depending on the day.
I’m sure my emotions are intense, and there’s really no way to know what’s trauma, either. But what I do know is that thinking someone is beautiful inside and out is enough. Wanting to be near someone is not wanting all of them. Wanting to talk about big ideas is enough. A baseball cap because you didn’t want to brush your hair is fine. However she shows up, she’s enough. If I had enough time, I might be able to prove it to her.
But not when she and everyone else think that I can’t keep my story straight. I can. Both of them.
She keeps arguing with me about how great she is and wants to lose. It’s heartbreaking. I would give her anything she needed at any time, but I need her to be consistent in telling me how she feels so that both of us are tracking together more often.
I am hoping that by acknowledging how my brain works, I am spreading visibility on the spectrum between autism and ADHD. How they can be at odds with each other in ways you don’t even realize.
…..and there are so many more than five.
Stories That Are All True 