Some days I feel like my entire personality depends on which part of my brain woke up first. I can walk into a room ready to charm the water cooler, tossing off dry one‑liners and making strangers feel like old coworkers, and then fifteen minutes later I’m quietly calculating the fastest route to the exit because a group of people has suddenly become a “no thanks.” It took me years to understand that this isn’t inconsistency or moodiness or some kind of personal glitch. It’s simply that I have two neurotypes, and whichever one is driving the bus determines the whole tone of the day.
When the ADHD part of me takes the wheel, I’m magnetic. I can talk to anyone, riff on anything, and glide through social spaces like I was built for them. New environments feel like playgrounds. I could move to Singapore sight unseen and still find camaraderie by lunchtime because the novelty would light me up in all the right ways. I’m the person who makes onboarding buddies laugh, who notices the odd rituals of a workplace, who can be both present and breezy without trying. In that mode, I’m an ambivert leaning extrovert, the kind of person who thrives on motion and conversation and the gentle chaos of human interaction.
But the driver doesn’t stay the same. Sometimes the switch happens so fast it feels like someone flipped a breaker in my head. One moment I’m enjoying a TV show, and the next the sound feels like it’s drilling directly into my skull. It’s not that I suddenly dislike the show. It’s that my sensory buffer has vanished. When the autistic part of me takes over, noise stops being background and becomes an intrusion. Even small sounds — a microwave beep, a phone notification, a voice in the next room — hit with the force of a personal affront. My brain stops filtering, stops negotiating, stops pretending. It simply says, “We’re done now,” and the rest of me has no choice but to follow.
That same shift happens in social spaces. I can arrive at a party genuinely glad to be there, soaking in the energy, laughing, connecting, feeling like the best version of myself. And then, without warning, the atmosphere tilts. The noise sharpens, the conversations multiply, the unpredictability spikes, and suddenly the room feels like too many inputs and not enough exits. It’s not a change of heart. It’s a change of operating system. ADHD-me wants to explore; autistic-me wants to protect. Both are real. Both are valid. Both have their own logic.
For a long time, I thought this made me unreliable, or difficult, or somehow less adult than everyone else who seemed to maintain a steady emotional temperature. But the more I pay attention, the more I see the pattern for what it is: a dual‑operating brain doing exactly what it’s designed to do. I don’t fade gradually like other people. I don’t dim. I drop. My social battery doesn’t wind down; it falls off a cliff. And once I stopped blaming myself for that, everything got easier. I learned to leave the party when the switch flips instead of forcing myself to stay. I learned to turn off the TV when the sound becomes too much instead of wondering why I “can’t handle it.” I learned to recognize the moment the driver changes and adjust my environment instead of trying to override my own wiring.
The truth is, I’m not inconsistent. I’m responsive. I’m not unpredictable. I’m tuned. And the tuning shifts depending on which system is steering the bus. Some days I’m the charismatic water‑cooler legend. Some days I need silence like oxygen. Some days I can talk to anyone. Some days I can’t tolerate the sound of my own living room. All of it is me. All of it makes sense. And once I stopped fighting the switch, I finally understood that having two drivers doesn’t make me unstable — it makes me whole.
Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
Stories That Are All True 