Tag: perception

This Was Going to Be Fiction, but ADHD…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I really need to start making outlines before I write, because gardening leads to great things in blogging and plot holes in fiction. The reason there are no plot holes in my blog is that I don’t care if you find them. Just because I didn’t tell you the whole story according to everyone in the room doesn’t make it less untrue. It is me crafting the narrative without taking anyone else’s feelings into consideration. It sounds harsh and cold, but I don’t mean it that way. The reason I only include my perceptions of people’s feelings rather than what they actually are is because I am not a mind reader.

If they were bloggers, their stories would be up to a hundred percent different from mine because we were watching something from different perspectives.

“What color was the light?”

This is why I don’t care what anyone says about me, either, because they’re just as entitled to their opinions as I am to mine. For instance, I know for sure that Supergrover’s story is completely different from mine because she stopped telling it; she could then easily blame me for being a dictator when I laid out my fears, hopes, and dreams. In fact, she actually said that I was not the only arbiter of our relationship, and that’s the message I’ve been trying to give her for 10 years. She doesn’t have as much power in the relationship because she’s not vulnerable. If she laid out her thoughts and feelings, mine would adjust. Because now I just feel like I’m intruding, I’ll write her a long letter every few months because I can’t be sure God is listening, but I can be sure she is. I’ve been saying that for 10 years as well.

I destroyed that relationship out of my own insecurities because she would not do anything to calm them. She’d waffle between feeling like my Mama Wolverine and wanting out of my life for good within weeks of each other. She has also said that no matter what, we have a past, a present, and a future….. because I’m part of her wild and crazy brain. When she said that, I told her she was part of my wild and crazy soul. It’s true. I’m yin and she’s yang, except with a lot more gray area in the middle. What I’ve always tried to stop is feeling worthless because the cycle ran thusly:

I would open up about something deep, and she wouldn’t respond at all because “she didn’t have time.” I didn’t get frustrated that she didn’t have time. I got frustrated that her letters were short and didn’t tell me anything. I know that’s half because she’s protecting herself and half because I’m a blogger. My blog is the bane of my existence because it brought us together and tore us apart all in one breath. She knows she’ll always have to be a reader because we know each other, and as I told her in my last letter, “none of this will mean shit to you until it’s been five or 10 years and you see yourself as a different person. Then, the 3D character you don’t see will emerge, because you’re looking for the good things now because you want to remember. I told her about the 614,000 words I’d written in 2023, so I said something like I’ve talked about our problems, but I’ve loved you up just as much…… in all six books.

I also think that if her life is cut short like my mother’s that other people who knew her will want to read my perceptions all the more, because they’re the ones that are going to want to “spend time with her” the most. I feel like I started writing more deeply about her after my mother died, because she wasn’t my mother, but she was someone’s. The worst time she never knew she hurt me (because I didn’t want to rock the boat) was when I told her that she had a “suburban mom vibe.” She said that was probably the meanest thing I’d ever said to her, and because she is who she is, I thought she was joking. She proceeded to rip me a new asshole, when in my mind that archetype was the one I needed the most desperately, the one I’d just lost.

I’ll never forget that because she was a fan first, she has read my story and accepted it as my reality, not hers…. but she’s found truth and beauty in it. When she hasn’t been angry, she’s been very kind about how brilliant a writer I am. But what I don’t know, and will never know at this point, is how she really feels about me.

I called her on it, and she noped out…. because she realized she was waffling and couldn’t give me a solid answer. But what I know for sure, like, Oprah-level sure, is that she’s worth it….. that the experience was worth it even if it’s over now.

I didn’t move to DC to be near her, because I already had my own thing going and my sister dropping in all the time (I actually see her more now). But what I didn’t expect is that we’d still be having the same fight 10 years later when it would have been so easy to solve everything in the length of one coffee/beer.

What I know is that I was too hard on her in my own insecurity, because if she didn’t want to make up her mind, I was out. I didn’t need to inflict fear of a phone call or get-together. I was furious that after 10 years she wouldn’t tell me the truth about anything.

She practically treated me like a stalker when I never was that…. at all. If I was, we wouldn’t have made up. But those feelings of fear remain, so I thought it was crazy when she said, “do you think I care if you look up public information about me?” Ummmm…. yes. Yes, I do. To the point where if I really thought about it, I might throw up. Going back to those days in my mind is torture, and I’ve been trying to forgive myself and can’t. I said some things that never should have been said on a wide variety of topics, and the fact that she hung in for the ride means more to me than she’ll ever know.

However, when I started doing actual conflict resolution and not letting her rattle me by escalating, I was dismissed. That leads me down two trains of thought. The first is that she likes the ups and downs because getting her anger out is a good thing. I don’t care if it’s at me. She’s got to emote sometime, and anger is an emotion. Her outbursts at me are the most emotion I’ve seen out of her in a long time. That’s because I know she’s going through the shit, so I pray for her. The second is that she’s simply avoidant because she doesn’t know how to open up, and that’s not personal to me at all. I can imagine that if she’s shut down with me, she’s shut down with more than just me.

The way you resolve conflict is learned in your first family, and it takes extensive therapy to make a relationship last because you’re constantly trying to merge two parenting styles. My family was all buttoned up for many years. We got over it. It was better to be mad in the moment and forgive quickly than it was to hold onto frustration for years and years. Therefore, it’s very hard for me to be in a relationship where people keep their anger, guilt, whatever bottled up. I can’t stop thinking about when the other shoe is going to drop. Neither does my beautiful girl, because her answer is to keep avoiding everything and my answer is “there’s no way back, only through.” I can’t do much to help the relationship heal, but like I said, I pray for her every night, and it’s been the same prayer every night for the last 10 years.

If there truly is a God, they can go places with her that I can’t. It comforts me to know that she’s not alone, because even if she doesn’t think God is listening, it’s a comforting image, anyway.

What I missed were all the ways we treated each other during new relationship energy. We lovebombed the absolute fuck out of each other. I have never found anyone like her, and I keep saying that, but some things are too unique. It’s not only that letting you know would be telling her story and not mine, it’s that there are some things about any relationship that I keep private so that there are some things only for me.

You absolutely can’t go back to lovebombing each other if you can’t do conflict resolution over and over. When I stood up, she did not rise to meet me. I didn’t so much let her go, but let her go back to the way she used to live.

I told her she was a phoenix, and I can’t wait to see her rise from the ash…… because she has, professionally. I’m not so sure about relationships, but I only have ours as an example.

I got that INFJ judgmental bastard urge to drag people into the light whether they want to go or not. However, I am not judgmental of people. I’ve wanted to be a lawyer most of my life and have done well in undergrad regarding the preparation for it. Therefore, I will lay out facts representing what I think about both sides of a situation. I am not saying “you’re a bad person.” I am basically reading my emotional docket and the case in front of me has as many complications as medicine. The diagnosis in medicine is the same as the verdict in law: it depends.

I am emotionally capable of being fair and balanced, but because I’m autistic, I’m often not thinking of how to phrase things so that they’ll come across as how I meant them to a neurotypical person. And here, on my blog, some of the literary devices I use don’t make sense unless you’re talking to me behind the scenes.

That’s always what brought Supergrover back around. She didn’t like reading the blog without the brochure, as I’ve said before. But if she talked to me, she’d see that I was being quite reasonable and had a good head on my shoulders. What she has not realized is the lengths I’ve gone to in order to protect her and harps on breadcrumbs I never would have seen……… unless we had talked about it.

In this way, I am my own main character (in the original writing prompt, the kid was a picky eater), because when I feel these emotional situations weighing themselves in my mind, I develop sensory issues because I need deprivation so badly to regulate my emotions. I don’t even listen to music when I write anymore. I just listen to my typing.

There are days when I can’t take exciting food, because I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs. A meltdown would be serving me something from a restaurant instead of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, because I was overstimulated before you brought home lobster.

I don’t have very good meltdowns. I have shutdowns. I am not very good at standing up for myself, nor being impolite or socially awkward in any way. Therefore, having a meltdown in front of someone would have to be major. I’d eat the lobster, I’d just hate that the food is one more thing I don’t have the bandwith with which to pay attention.

Meltdown often comes online, when I am overstimulated and itching for a fight. But I’m so dextrous with words that I’m not looking to destroy people (though some would say I am after a straight woman read an entire thread from me and a friend talking about how straight people could support queer people, and then asked me for ideas on making an ally flag. Now, in this instance, angry black woman and angry white lesbian are not dissimilar. I don’t want to do work for straight people. Look it up. Read the rest of the comments, at least.

She caught me on a very bad day and she was also uneducated as fuck, so I could have been nicer and I didn’t know how. I just had to be kind. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was heated…. where I took apart every one of her talking points in order to educate herself on being the parent of someone queer, because if you have a queer child, you can’t possibly have institutionalized homophobia, now can you? I also have mixed emotions about straight people wearing rainbow flags, because they have the option to take them off.

Most of the time, though, I go in and de-escalate a situation. I’ve whipped line cooks’ asses and it turned into an actually deep conversation. It was a Taylor Swift joke in poor taste and I took issue with that.

I am certain that I have responded like this to Supergrover, but because she didn’t see the meltdown, she didn’t see me as trying to be kind but not nice. I will agree that I was over the top, but I never said anything untrue about our anxious/avoidant attachment. I don’t expect her to treat my anxious attachment with kid gloves. I expect her not to withold information so that I know exactly what’s going on, because I can’t process situations on no information from the other person. I will send myself into a spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem about which I couldn’t overthink.

So, the less information she gave me, the more I spiraled out trying to fix things, because I assumed that everything was all about me. It’s not because it actually was. It’s that I had absolutely no information to the contrary to put things into context/perspective.

We don’t have a context, and that’s a good thing most of the time because we can talk about things without it affecting everyone else in our physical lives. But over time, it began to be a hard row to hoe, because I wanted peace……

One way or the other.

So Much More

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What could you do less of?

I could do less of a lot of things.

I could do less writing. It would be worse for my portfolio and better not to spend so much time lost in my head. I am not sure I get a choice on that considering how much quiet I require, but I do recognize that my mind is a busy place and I get lost there. I have said this before, but there are times when autism makes me feel lost to the rest of the world, and I wouldn’t have said that before because I have had that constant feeling since I can remember, I just didn’t have a word for it.

Because, I mean, of course I’m not autistic. I did not equate myself with other autistic kids because my school wasn’t mainstreamed, therefore I rarely saw any. There is also more and more evidence that ADHD and Autism are missed in many, many women because of the way we were raised. I didn’t look like a “special” kid, so I wasn’t. You get on YouTube and you find out that there is no “look” to autism. I do not have mental retardation because of autism, and those two things are conflated often. Autistic people are either savants at coding or developmentally delayed in popular culture. What is missing in the zeitgeist are regular people who also have that processing disorder. The kind where some doctors say, “I’m hesitant to give you a diagnosis because I don’t want you to be unable to see outside it.” Trust me, this is not just for patients. New parents of autistic children are equally shellshocked as me.

What is intimidating is receiving the same amount of information as autistic parents because it’s a lot easier to make decisions for someone else than it is to make decisions for yourself. You don’t have demand avoidance in mentally healthy parents because it is an inborn trait, the reflex to nurture. A baby’s cry affects men and women differently, but they both respond at the drop of a hat if they see a child in trouble and they are in any way parental.

It is so much harder when you realize the child you’re trying to keep alive is you. Like, in middle school there were not consequences this dire for my Tomagotchi. I’m older and less flexible, more demand avoidant because I’ve either been guided away from handling because I didn’t know I was autistic and didn’t realize that ADHD gives it to you as well (not mentioned in any of the layperson’s ADHD books I’ve read). I also didn’t know that if you have it pathologically, that is also part of the autism spectrum, and because I haven’t been diagnosed, I don’t know which is which. Pathologically Demand Avoidance is somehow part of autism and its own thing. Basically, you get treatment. If it doesn’t work, it’s PDA.

Social stigma around figuring out your processing disorders and mental illness is big and difficult because you get it on both sides. From neurotypical people, there is a constant need to reassure you that things aren’t that bad, you’re not autistic (because in their minds what I am saying to them is worlds apart from what they hear), you’re just too hard on yourself and if you X, then……… Their answers are not my answers because I am incapable of their thought process.

It is not a matter of pity on my end, it is a matter of acknowledging disability and illness. There’s a huge difference between acknowledging something and “making it your whole personality.” No one has said this to me, I just know I talk about it a lot because that’s what I’m reading/watching right now- educational videos. It’s not that “it’s my whole personality,” it’s that you didn’t come here on leg day, capiche? I am obsessed with getting the diagnosis of my neurodivergence right, not fitting the facts to a certain outcome. There is such a thing as ADHD with autistic traits, and there is a lot of overlap between the two diagnoses, so it’s not always clear which is which. I already have an ADHD diagnosis. The “huge leap” is in your perception, not my reality.

Here is the other very serious thing. I am the same amount of different now that I will be after I’m officially diagnosed, or after I’m told I have ADHD with autistic traits. ADHD is not valid in the way that autism is, because in other people’s minds, an autism diagnosis is devastating and if your child is ADHD, it’s bad, but at least it’s not fucking autism…………. when the reality is that the introverted form of ADHD can be just as debilitating. It’s invisible because it doesn’t come with physical symptoms and again, a processing disorder that doesn’t affect the development of the brain so that you can’t figure out how a person can be so smart and so stupid at the same time. But that’s neurotypical perception/stigma, not what’s really happening.

For instance, women’s voices were largely absent from ADHD research because to the researchers, ADHD became invisible in people without hyperactivity. People often don’t see autism because I do not have extraordinarily regimented sensory issues. I do not have a meltdown when I touch or taste something unfamiliar, so therefore I cannot have sensory issues. Some people have autism but do handle sensory perception well. Some autistic people are mentally delayed and some aren’t.

High IQ autistic people have two archetypes in society…… the manic pixie dream girl and “Comic Book Guy.”

I know what you’re thinking. Shut it.

No, I don’t identify with Comic Book Guy at all……….. eyeroll.

Now that everything is so expensive, I feel like coders who live in their mother’s basement are the luckiest bastards on earth. They live with people who love them on a salary that really helps everyone while acknowledging that they- are in some ways- able to take care of themselves and also not. I feel a jealousy toward programmers that I don’t feel in other areas of my life because they created the standard that all their sensory issues being tamped down was critical to the way they work and no other department in an office functions that way…… so if you’re autistic and not a programmer you’re just shit out of luck.

For instance, lights are usually very low in a server room, as are sounds. A server room has the same decibel level as a library. I live like Mr. Robot, because CPTSD and AuDHD being comorbidities means that I am constantly more comfortable with less stimulation through sound and more information through sight. Loud noises and bright lights are anathema to all of those things. I do not have a problem with flashing lights, but office fluorescents. I have a problem with prolonged eye contact, because sensory information becomes too much; I also become self-conscious about my eye drifting. It’s why I’m much better about maintaining eye contact when I’m wearing my baseball cap. I don’t think it’s much of a distraction, but my brain believes it is.

I could do less caring about my appearance, and so much more. By caring about my appearance, I could do more in terms of skin routines and putting on makeup once in a while when I actually feel like it. By not caring about my appearance, I mean constantly worried about how I look in front of other people because it’s not whether I’m attractive or not, it’s whether my social masks are working.

If I don’t call attention to my disability, you won’t notice it and I’m grateful until we get close enough that we can’t social mask around it anymore. It gets more intense with more connection, because social masks fail on a whole other level when you live with someone. I have never had a partner that truly understood me, partly because I’m a complicated case psychologically and partially because I didn’t have the tools to express myself.

You know what I also couldn’t do? I also couldn’t say, “I know you’re feeling personally attacked, but here’s several videos of other people explaining how their symptoms affect them so that you know I’m not just ‘using my disability as an excuse.;” The “motherfucker” is implied. I do not have a problem taking responsibility for my behavior as it is sometimes problematic, but I draw the line at seeing only my behavior as problematic and not acknowledging that things don’t happen in a vacuum. I can say that moving to DC was the last thing that happened, but Dana put us on the road toward divorce originally because of my reaction to her DUI, not blaming her because she got one. There is a cause and effect to everything.

In short, I can take responsibility for developing a wandering eye in a relationship not built for it, but I will not take responsibility for Dana’s drunken mistake that changed my whole sensory perception of life.

You are not the same person at work after a full night’s sleep, and one of the things that would have saved our marriage in retrospect was me putting my foot down and saying, “you’re on your own, kid.” This does not mean me stopping helping her. I mean forcing her to quit her job and get a different one if her boss didn’t move her schedule. That taking her to work in the middle of the night while holding down an office job would bring about destruction for me because I am not capable of it. I got fired from Marylhurst for the same reasons I got fired at Alert Logic. Especially when I don’t sleep at night, I cannot listen and talk at the same time, nor listen and write things down. The reason that transcribing the constitutional law class was easy is because I was transcribing, not taking notes. I was not having to constantly make a decision on what was important to write down and what wasn’t. I got that on my own, by going back and reading what I’d written down, faster to process because I’d heard it once.

I cannot blame Dana for her mistakes, but I can blame my reactions to them. Dana getting a DUI doesn’t make my words and actions okay, or let me off of any kind of hook. I am acknowledging that in a relationship, I only own half.

The problem came in thinking that my issues were so much worse than Dana’s. That Dana needed help and I was just a bad person. There was no medical explanation for why I did what I did, so it was worse….. and yet, there was a medical explanation. I was overloaded and overwhelmed, depressed and anxious except for when I was hypomanic and at no time able to regulate those things. So much was said without thinking, which is why there’s such a disconnect between my thoughts and the words I used in the heat of a moment.

With autism, the heat of the moment is everything. If your words are charged, we will pick up all 7,000 subtexts and our brains are immediately overloaded because we don’t know how to respond. This is why it’s easier to communicate with a neurodivergent person in text. It’s a balance, though, because we have to get to know your voices well enough to have context for when we leave it out. For instance, I think our conversations would have gone a lot differently had I known in the early years that hearing Supergrover’s voice feels like watching molasses drip……. she is a velvet hammer. I might not have been so quick to attribute rage if I’d known she was so laid back in person. She does not portray that through text. In text, she’s strident and it’s “pull yourself up from your bootstraps.” I only get frustrated when she can’t see I’m barefoot.

I choose to be butt hurt over this right now, while it’s happening, because what I know to be true is that my history is to save it all up until I explode, and as Supergrover herself has said, my anger isn’t helpful. She’s right, and in a lot of cases it’s due to lack of coping mechanism. In others, it’s autism and I can’t work around it. That’s because coping mechanisms fail when sensory overload is happening.

This relationship was a new level of sensory overload because we are both so different from each other. I cannot blame anyone else for anything, but I can get it all out so that I can look at it and see what I can do about my own situation.

I think more about it now, so that I know I can and will do less later.

I could do a lot less thinking about all of this. But it wouldn’t turn out the way I think it would. I would be even less able to regulate my emotions.

I cannot do less of that.