symptom

Best summarised as a lifetime of withdrawal. I knew no other modality of being until I started treatment in 2025. This was the world I was born to; this was the world as it always was and always would be.

I guess this rewrite is a poem of sorts?

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rejection sensitive dysphoria 

was the worst part of adhd for me. It is the pre-cognitive stomach-lurch that you will lose it all; your loved ones, your money, your house, your life. Unfounded. Caused by rapid dopamine fluctuations. Dukkha. Distrinct from learned thought patterns. This constant fear of losing it all leads to great

motivation

when you’re in the zone. Otherwise; actual potato. I can feel it pulling me under the cheekbones, fishhooks and wire. It is irrefutable, whether it says go or stop. It is volume 11 or 0, black or white, and all to avoid ever staying still. People used to ask how I stayed so motivated. Unhappiness and withdrawal my friend. Whenever I stopped moving, my brain would eat me, and my body would scream, and the only escape was

focus

6 hours of barnacle-level attachment to an activity, oblivious to your surroundings. This is also a great way of avoiding feeling the pain of existence, and one of the few ‘good’ things about adhd is you can get into

flow

easily because of lack of memory. Flow is when the universe fills your memory front to back and your algorithms work without obstruction. The chase was the only satisfaction, but I always had to have a

target

to rein in the adhd and make sure I didn’t vibrate apart at the seams. The effort of it would push me into asd burnout every year. Multiple times. I would get a race, sign up, plan, backward, and put on my…

mask

choose a persona and then divide it into legoblocks. To be an athlete you just live like an athlete and wait for time to pass. So you divide everything to fundamental particles and rebuild it, because your brain cannot hold more than a couple of units at a time. Each one of these gets optimised and optimised and optimised and the…

steel wool

spins faster and faster and the rules get closer and tighter and start to conflict. The steel wool is the rules and the algorithms I have created to hold together my mask. They are my volitional action and the place where karma acts. They are an abstraction and less granular than the reality of me, so when they become optimised enough they…

implode

because they are unable to contain my pegboard mind. I go into 3-4 months of autistic burnout, with adhd keeping me just active enough to not go to a doctor. Recent PTSD with asd and adhd burnout had waves of adrenaline and suicidal images hitting me every 3 seconds for months. But that wasn’t the implosion; the implosion came later. I think it’s a type of…

defence mechanism 

which kicks in when the steel wool gets too optimised and the rules start to hurt. It feels like an angle grinder in my head, which I guess might mean I’ve been having migraines all along? Huh. I think a trauma response kicks in when these internal mental objects cause you too much pain, just like when an external one does, and this is how the buddha became enlightened. One of the major ways this mechanism kicks in is when you get stuck in a…

looped thought

where you have an algorithm which is just looping around on itself faster and faster. ‘ideation’ and ‘definitely don’t want to die’ was a recent one, and as an autistic person I tend to see…

fate

everywhere; we spot patterns as a species and autism is that dialled up to 10. I am lucky in that most of the patterns I spot happen to be moderately rooted in reality, but I’m never quite sure. The events of my life have been so uncanny that it’s almost like I dreamed them up in some..

disinhibited thought

which is the mental equivalent of disinhibition of action. These are good for creativity but bad for cognitive dissonance. Don’t dance on the coffin! Because of executive function dysregulation we tend to think and do stupider and more dangerous things when we are tired, which is all the time because it is utterly 

exhausting

to have the two sides of adhd and asd conflicting. Adhd starts projects and asd finishes them. Asd researches and adhd exaggerates. Asd plans and adhd trashes. And both of them are so damn

loud

the external world for sure because I’m autistic but the internal world is the real killer for me. I think I am hyper aware of my bodily sensations which is why I blocked out all stronger emotions and

didn’t cry

until about 6 weeks ago and now I’m playing catchup on a full lifetime’s worth of wracking sobs after a lifetime of being a 

highly sensitive person

who feels both physical and mental wounds intensely. I initially thought that all of these issues might be because of 

trauma

but I looked and asked and could find none apart from the odd bit of schoolhood violence. Turns out the symptoms of adhd are almost identical to trauma. Probably because adhd is trauma from a brain chemistry perspective. But I latched onto that for 10 years with a bit of

monotropic thinking

where I grab something and run to the moon with it before anyone knows what’s happening. Then I’ll get stuck in a loop. This monotropic thinking does result in one hell of an ability to hold a special

interest

and I’m sorry but I make knives from samurai swords so go sit on your football with your ‘special interest’. I have an achingly painful amount of

empathy

and feel everything you feel, but I am incapable of acting on it the same way you would. My brain solves logic first, so all these years when I was trying to solve your problem… that was me empathising. But I guess this comes back to 

communication

and the fact that I’ve been autistic all this time without knowing, so I assumed everyone was the same, all struggling, all in disaster mode, all in pain, fear, trying to keep out the gas. They weren’t. And I think that’s the difference I think the difference is 

fear

because when I started ari I came out of fight or flight for the first time in my life and my world had warmth. I think this might be the key. Dopamine dysregulation means you’re always unsure, always unstable. Always afraid on a pre-cognition level. And it’s pretty hard to empathise with people who exhibit such

ease

in their life, just pottering around the garden having a cup of tea and honestly unaware of the fact that they are living in a different universe to you. Utterly different. Because the only thing you have ever really cared about is

substances

and that makes you so sad because you always wanted to have real relationships but the operating system in your brain was broken and all that could come out was pain and hunger, like a baby. So you try everything you can. All the behaviours. All the drugs. Nothing works. Not for long enough. Because you have one hell of a 

tolerance

to any kind of substance that floods the synapse with dopamine. So everyone else is passed out while you’re having another line, cracking your 18th beer, just waiting until the day you can die. And then

…

one day

you have half a child’s dose of ari

it blocks the leaky receptors

and 4 days later

your world is safe