Hi Sweetheart,

I know life’s a lot right now.

I know you think you’re a lot, right now. And that you should be doing more.

Moving faster, because slow looks like failure. Growing a harder shell, because you take everything too personally. Filling the calendar, because a weekend alone is something to worry about. Planning every hour, when all you really want is to unplan the whole month.

Exercising more. Talking less. Managing your emotions better. Using that lamp more often.

But every push toward more makes you feel less like you.

And your heart aches, because the longer you look around at the place you’ve been told to call home, the clearer it gets that it never felt like one.

Everything you reach for is gray.

The buildings. The roads. The fashion. Even the sky.

And your colors have never been welcome.

I know you dream of the formidable navy waves and long for the wild salt air. I know you want to walk sandy backroads dotted with Pines under a blazing sun.

I know you’d rather live simply, making peanuts, so you can take back your time.

Time to write. To create. To breathe.

And I’m writing to you now because I know you’re right at the edge.

You believe there’s something wrong with you.

That the moods swing because you’ve lost your grip. That you can’t work fast enough because you’re lazy. That the friends drift because you’re too much.

None of that is true, sweetheart.

It’s just what they say when you fight the gray.

Feeling wrong and being in the wrong place feel identical from the inside.

You can’t tell them apart from in there.

But I can tell them apart from out here.

You were so fortunate to escape that grayness as a child.

Mom worked so hard to send you off to eat burgundy figs and golden bread with Avó on the terrace perched above the garden.

Remember the colors?

You’d follow a narrow cobblestone path two kilometers to the beach and swim in your neon green suit until your lips matched the color of the sea. In the evenings, you’d listen to Fadistas woo the stars in their midnight lace and silk.

Remember the colors?

You rode your squeaky ruby bicycle to nap under a great-grandpa Olive tree and you faithfully catalogued every detail of the days in your journal.

Remember the colors.

Were you too slow on the path?

Did you ever worry about how you spoke to the girls at the beach? Or whether you’d earned the sun?

I’ve read those journals. Not once.

Remember Avó’s Hortênsias? Big, bold and blue?

Hydrangeas are a funny thing. Plant one in acidic soil and it blooms blue. Plant the very same one in alkaline soil and it blooms pink.

The soil decides which color shows.

I rise with the sun now, my most faithful friend. The lamp is gone.

Sherlock and I walk through the park every morning. We both get a bit grumpy if the route changes. I stopped counting exercise years ago. It just happens here, between the garden, the surf and the bike.

I’m called to write every day, and I cannot remember the last time I had to talk myself into it.

I must confess, I make peanuts. I sell a few things I make. I take on the occasional UX/UI project. I lean on my savings more than you’d be comfortable with.

But life here is simple, and simple, sweetheart, is cheap.

A week of groceries costs about forty euros. The sun, the sea and the garden don’t send invoices.

I’ve never earned less in my life, and I’ve never had more of the thing you’re starving for: time.

I also haven’t put a ton of “effort” into making friends. My rhythm pulls the right people close, and our unplanned get-togethers are always slow and rejuvenating.

I share my evenings with a man who smiles at my rapid-fire chattiness, and I do still get feisty, but it’s nothing a bike ride hasn’t cured. Next year, he and I will start taking people cycling across Portugal. It turns out the cure is something you can share.

I haven’t really “fixed” myself. Most of the things just stopped needing to be fixed here. None of it was free.

I had to leave people I loved; the loneliness of the first year made me doubt it all.

But it’s colorful here.

And for the first time in a long time, my colors are welcome.

I feel at home.

The houses sit side by side like scoops at a gelato counter, pistachio, peach and lemon. The sun burns tangerine every day as it sets, and the whole sky blushes pink after it. Even the ocean changes its mind about navy every few hours.

You were told color is demanding and loud, but here, it’s just another Tuesday.

Your vibrant print skirts and big feelings don’t stick out here; they blend in, like Marigolds with Borage and Cosmos.

Muting your colors is what makes you feel broken and so far from home.

I won’t try to convince you to leave. You’ll say it’s unrealistic.

You might be right, for now.

Instead, I’ll ask you for a few small things.

Do everything slowly, without guilt. Wear the vibrant prints you hide at the back of the closet. Go away for a weekend, alone. Say what’s on your mind without remorse.

And write what happens when you let the color bleed over the gray.

One day, you’ll have enough pages to stop asking what’s wrong with you.

I know. I’ve read them.

Sympathy cards and soft sentiments are useless to a person who’s mourning a death.

I personally hate: “time heals all wounds.”

When you lose someone close, it’s impossible to see through the pain into a future where it no longer hurts to breathe. Time isn’t somewhere you can go.

There are, however, some places with better “air.” And most of us have been in such a place, at least once, maybe without even realizing it.

A walk in the park after an argument. A bench by the sea after a breakup.

The Shape of Grief

After the funeral, my dad and I left.

We didn’t go to the gathering. We didn’t notify anyone who didn’t already know. We didn’t know how.

My mother was 56; an aggressive cancer, found too late. I was 22.

It took me years to even set eyes on her things. It’s taken sixteen to understand how her turbulent ending unravelled me.

She left me with one dying wish: get a master’s degree.

My parents had retired early in the Portuguese countryside seven months before her terminal diagnosis, so my father was now alone there, spiraling. My grief needed somewhere to go, so I left Toronto, enrolled at the last minute in a double MSc. in Lisbon, and went.

Every Friday after my classes, I took a two-hour bus to his village. We’d eat meals together and in the in-betweens, he’d leave to drown his sorrows. I’d sit in the stillness, studying, waiting. And every morning, I made the coffee.

For two difficult years, this was the shape of our lives. At the time, I felt abandoned; now I understand he’d abandoned himself.

The Power of the Sun

My dorm room in Lisbon was tiny and dark, so I lived mostly outside because the climate allowed it. I read under the trees on campus and worked out on the porch between classes, even in winter.

On weekend mornings in the village, I’d carry my little espresso cup under a canopy of grapevines, and I’d let the light fall on my face, my chest, my toes. Not deliberately; just the way you drift toward the one warm patch in a cold house.

Within a few months, something within me shifted. I had more energy. I was sleeping. The days weren’t so heavy. And it felt, wrong.

I was grieving my mother, studying long hours, living in a 10-square-meter space and traveling every weekend. By every measure, I should’ve been at my lowest but instead, it’s as if my body was waking up.

I’d never felt so at peace and “held” in my entire adult life, and I was in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to me. And it didn’t come from time or a support group.

Who Carries Who

My mother was a very special woman. She didn’t just carry me; she carried my father too.

She kept me focused, organized, and in school when I wanted to quit. She kept my father steady, vices in check, and his eyes on their retirement goals. She was the scaffolding neither of us knew we had and so desperately needed.

When she died, that scaffolding collapsed, and my father collapsed with it, so I had to step into her place. For two years I was her, miraculously keeping myself on track and doing my best to keep him upright. Which left a question I was only recently able to ask: who carried me?

The sun.

Even more soothing, the sun gave me what my mother rarely could: warmth I never had to earn.

The pain of her passing never got smaller; I’m not really healed, even now. But during the darkest time, I now see I was carried by the most ordinary thing.

In Toronto, my need for sunlight was a joke. I was the odd one who didn’t appreciate seasons. Losing my mother was the proof I never wanted.

More than a Mother

Once I became aware of my Autism and ADHD, I realized why I had relied so heavily on my mother my entire life: she regulated me.

I orbited her rhythm, her schedule, her plans, and her drive, so, when she passed away, my compass went with her.

Grief researchers say the people we’re attached to help regulate our bodies, not just our feelings, and, with acute grief, you partially lose regulatory functions the lost person once supported. I felt this completely. And because AuDHD brains run entirely on outside structure, I felt this failure all the way down.

And yet, in Lisbon, something took over some of that work. Grief has the capacity to scatter our sleep schedules, appetite, and our sense of time, but light is the strongest signal the human body can get to naturally orient these functions. And it may have even been doing more.

At twice the sunshine hours of Toronto’s winter season, Lisbon’s abundant winter light and warmth kept me outside.

Researchers noted serotonin production is lowest in the winter season. Had I grieved my mother in Toronto, I’m convinced it would’ve broken me entirely because nothing there would have carried any of the weight.

A Solar Retirement

After graduating, I returned to Toronto, two master’s degrees in hand. Within a few months though, I started noticing my health slip, quietly.

I started sleeping poorly. My energy plummeted. My appetite was negligible. Most of all, I truly missed waking up to and spending my days with the sun by my side. I missed sunlight so badly that I cycled through winter, braving negative temperatures and snowstorms, just to be in the light. But Toronto’s gray skies did very little for me.

I told my then partner how peculiarly good I’d felt in Lisbon despite what that period held and that I seriously thought the sun had something to do with it. He shrugged it off and said two things I’ll never forget: “You’ll get used to it again,” and “We’ll retire somewhere sunny.”

My mother had waited for her sunny retirement too. She worked and saved for decades, but never got the years she’d saved for. I remember thinking that I too might not make it to retirement.

There may be a reason my body leans so much on light: autistic body clocks tend to run on lower melatonin and looser rhythms, and ADHD clocks tend to run late. So, AuDHD clocks will always be quiet and running behind.

The sun is reliably loud and on time.

Sun-Seeking Strategies

10,000-lux light therapy every morning is the fastest and best intervention so many of us swear by. For AuDHD nervous systems, it’s genuinely the difference between functional and not.

But it isn’t sunlight.

A lamp delivers photons to your retina. It will not warm your skin. Under a lamp, your mornings won’t feel like anything at all.

I saw my Monstera struggle one winter despite good care, her stems stretching long and pale toward a window far across the room.

A plant starved of light doesn’t sit still; it leans. It will contort and extend and burn all of its stored energy just to reach light. I did the same in Toronto for most of my life without ever realizing it.

Where the Light Finds You

So maybe we’re not as sad, tired, and unmotivated as we’ve been led to believe. Maybe we’re just contorting, extending and burning all of our stored energy just to reach light.

Leaning is how we cope with a misplanting.

My father’s still here. He’s still not really healed, even now. But on every call, he tells me how nice and sunny it is, as it is nearly every single day.

I think he knows the same sun has been carrying us both all this time.

Where were you the last time the sun carried you?

Enormous feelings move through us; we see too much, think too deeply, and feel it all.

My feelings have always been too big, even about the smallest things, ever since I was young.

I remember the rage of being zipped into layer after layer before braving the winter snow. The betrayal when my mother unilaterally replaced our pancake Sundays with waffle Sundays. The euphoric, breathless monologues about why bicycles are the best invention, ever. The tears of joy at the first glimpse of the shimmering Atlantic before touching down in Lisbon.

Some feelings are so big, I need to listen to music just to finish feeling them.

I cannot fully feel an elated moment unless I move to it, just like I can’t fully sit through deep sadness unless a song sinks with me.

As kids, high sensitivity is impossible because adults dismiss the feelings taking over our bodies as "exaggerated. As adults, high sensitivity is impossible because after a certain age, reacting with such intensity just becomes inappropriate.

Beyond the Page

About ten years ago, I worked up the courage to finally tell a friend I was really hurt by how she’d treated me on a trip we’d taken together. Somewhere in the telling, I started to cry, and though she apologized right away, I could see she was really uncomfortable.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” she said, trying to move past it; “isn’t it a bit much to be crying over it?”

I was mortified.

I cried even more when she left because someone so close to me actually believed the most honest thing my body did was unnecessary.

I’ve kept a journal since I was four years old, and each one is filled with moments like this one. And for almost thirty years, the page is where my sensitive overflow went.

But I’ve come to realize that the page isn’t enough. When my emotions are too much of a jumble for language to decode, the feelings wait for another way out.

A Space to Make

In our homes, we make space for work stuff but rarely dedicate a space to make things with our hands. So other rooms end up working as 2-in-1s.

The paints come out, then the dinner plates come in, and everything gets packed away before it becomes anything.

If the work stays out, messy and unfinished, it’s easy to pick up exactly where you left off. You never need to decide to start because the unfinished work naturally calls you back.

I’ve got a summer set partly sewn and a macramé lamp half-knotted in my studio at the moment. I go to it.

A studio is also the one place where nothing has to hold together. It becomes your place for the sensitive overflow where you often walk in with the weight of the world and walk out feeling lighter.

Sensitivity Produces Art

For centuries, we’ve been told that art is born from suffering. This isn’t a lie, but it is a misreading.

A mismatched environment is what produces suffering, and it can be as small as a relationship or as large as a country.

When highly sensitive people are misplanted, the things they make come from the bleeding. We’ve assumed that the bleeding produced the art.

This is beautifully explained by the Orchid Hypothesis.

Researchers found that some nervous systems register everything at full volume (Orchids), while others (Dandelions) remain unfazed. And while Orchid individuals fare much worse in poor environmental conditions, they outperform Dandelions in better ones. The researchers discovered that sensitivity runs both ways; you can’t get one without the other.

After reviewing evidence on sensitive temperaments and creativity, psychologists found that sensitive people are, in fact, more creative. And, of all the elements of sensitivity that they examined, the strongest predictor of creativity is being able to notice the subtle things others miss.

So, your “too much” feelings are the exact raw ingredients for what you can create.

What the Hands Carry

Most see art as decoration for AuDHD minds, it’s regulation.

Music is an incredible art form to translate our feelings because it turns them into a matching shape; the feeling can go in and come back out as a melody that sounds a lot like the feeling. For those of us who aren’t musically inclined, we can make things with our hands.

Creating physical objects does something different with a feeling; it metabolizes it. The feeling doesn’t have to come out looking like itself. The point is just that it has to come out.

So, a freshly sewn skirt doesn’t look like grief because my hands are not trying to say the feeling. They’re trying to carry it out of my body.

Embrace the Feelings

It’s frustrating that the same culture that tells sensitive people to toughen up will stand in awe in a gallery, or get goosebumps when the right song comes on.

People don’t actually want less sensitivity in the world. They just want what sensitivity makes, without the person attached. And they only seem to count the making when it turns a profit.

Make anyway.

Do not let life get in the way of you making things. If you’re highly sensitive, not creating is what’s getting in the way of your life.

I didn’t grow up gardening. I was over 30 the first time I cared for a plant and I was ashamed of doing it so poorly.

I have dreams of one day buying land, building a geodesic home and setting up a permaculture plot. The idea of climate resilience became a goal after witnessing the devastating Portuguese wildfires in 2017. But how could I possibly venture into such a project if I couldn’t even keep an Olive Bonsai alive?

So I started reading. A lot. I bought gardening books and read permaculture articles, and it was honestly more than the plants needed, but I quickly became obsessed.

And then came the experiments.

With every new thing I learned, I bought another plant and would spend my free time tinkering with lighting, watering and temperature. Soon our apartment had more plants than square feet.

Everyone found it baffling that I could somehow garden in a 50sqm space that we also lived in and worked out of. Somehow I made it work, but more to the point: it worked on me.

Gardening has held people quietly for as long as there have been gardens.

Dan Buettner found it in every Blue Zone he studied: not just health, but longevity. The longest-lived people on the planet still happily garden well into their nineties.

I’d venture to say that by now, most people know gardening is good for them. But less known, perhaps, is why an AuDHD nervous system needs it more than most.

The 3 Regulation Needs

The nervous system stays regulated through several channels at once and AuDHD nervous systems tend to run under-supplied in three of them.

Gardening is an incredibly powerful activity because it feeds all three at the same time, making it far more efficient than single-symptom fixes.

1. Circadian Rhythm

   Light, how much we get, when and the type we are exposed to, greatly impacts our nervous systems. Any activities done indoors maxes out providing 500 lux; a bright gym could offer 1,000 lux, maybe. But if you’re outside on a grey day? That’s 10,000 lux, minimum.

   ---

   Autistic circadian systems run differently from neurotypical ones; melatonin timing is disrupted and this is part of why sleep so often goes wrong with us. The autistic body’s master clock needs the right wavelengths to time melatonin, cortisol, and dopamine, and indoor light simply doesn’t cut it. But if you’re outside gardening, you’re exposed to 10,000 to 100,000 lux (the kinds of doses that normalize melatonin, and downstream of that, sleep and executive function).

   ---

   A lot of doctors say the fix for a scrambled clock is a melatonin pill, but research shows the fix is actually the light-dark contrast itself. And how gardening works its magic is that it drags you outside at the exact time when light is changing, because the best (and often only available) times to garden are: early morning and late afternoon.

   ---

   Modern indoor life flattens precisely this contrast. It’s typically dark when we should have light and light when we should have dark.

   For the ADHD mind, that first hour of morning light is also the day’s first true hit of dopamine, which is critical to set everything else in motion.

   ---

2. Sensory Processing

   Autistic sensory systems process input differently but gardens do the opposite of overwhelm us; despite their rich inputs like visual variety, smells, endless textures, natural sounds, they’re entirely predictable and we can also choose how much we want to be exposed to. Planting, weeding, and watering are also repetitive motions that deeply regulate an AuDHD nervous system.

   ---

   What’s more, sensory gardens can offer both a calm refuge for an overloaded system and endless delight for an under-stimulated one. They are brilliant, adaptable environments that quietly meet our endlessly oscillating needs.

   
   Garden chores are also a kind of “proprioceptive therapy.” The heavy lifting, digging, and weeding work entailed in gardening all provide deep pressure input through muscles and joints which helps us feel more anchored in space.

   Medication, therapy, and accommodations all have their place, but so does a trowel.

   ---

3. Executive Function

   Habit trackers, visual schedules and body-doubling apps claim to come to our executive dysfunction rescue, aiming to help externalize planning, sequencing, working memory, and switching gears. The problem is, they externalize the wrong part of the process; if we need to figure out what needs doing, when, and in what order, we’re still carrying all of the mental load!

   ---

   Gardens automatically create a “to-do” list for us.

   ---

   I’ve never needed to map out my day in the garden because I act based on the cues I see in front of me. It’s simple, inviting and rewarding because I can see the fruits of my efforts. Even better for my nervous system are the soft consequences if I drop the ball. They’re gentle and easily fixed, not a ruined relationship or harsh reprimand.

   Traditional tools can only manage executive dysfunction if we supply them with the intention; a garden quietly holds the intention for you.

“Steady Frame, Moving Contents”

Gardening feeds both the autistic need for routine and the ADHD need for novelty and reward in the same environment.

Autism gets the predictable cycle, the controlled input and the clean cause-and-effect, while ADHD gets the dopamine hits of a problem to solve (why is this wilting?), a win to collect (first tomato), something new breaking ground and a body constantly in motion.

We’re told that our chaotic opposing needs are a problem, but that’s only the case in the wrong places; in the right places, our paradoxical minds are actually a myth.

The problem is that most places can’t hold the challenges AuDHD minds present because the environments are either too understimulating or too overstimulating. To hold an AuDHD mind, environments must offer both a steady frame and moving contents. Gardens offer just that.

Why Not Just Hike?

Other activities offer these regulating benefits in one, no? Surfing, hiking, a long bike ride?

A lot of other activities do get you outside, move your body, and feed both halves of a seemingly contradictory AuDHD mind, but they typically only meet two of the three regulation needs at the same time; executive-function scaffolding is always the one left out.

Gardens, unlike other things, remember. A garden will hand you a plan with each new morning you return. A wave forgets you the second it breaks and a trail does not care if you return the next day; they reset to zero when you leave.

The only other activities that offer all three regulation needs are within the garden’s own family: a farm, an orchard, animals.

And gardening is special because it is the one activity that actually scales down.

What the Plants Teach

Gardening shows us that we can build the right conditions instead of enduring the wrong ones through the daily tending of plants.

Every plant has specific needs and by observing their reactions to light, temperature, water and soil, we can start to learn just how important getting these things right really is.

A garden is one of the few perfectly tuned places for an AuDHD nervous system and the beauty is that you can build one anywhere and regulate in the best possible way, for free, for life.

You were probably told to reduce your demands. It’s solid advice for managing burnout.

My unraveling was slow until it wasn’t. One day I woke up sinking; nothing but open water around me, and I, too, was told to “take it easy” for a while. Rest.

Undiagnosed at the time, unmasking wasn’t on the table. Though I’d later discover that unmasking isn’t something we can choose to do; the mask just deactivates on its own.

So I focused on lowering the bar.

I lowered the bar until the bar was on the floor. And I was finally able to come up for air. Many of life’s demands make buoyancy next to impossible.

Despite the eye-rolls, whispers and cold shoulders, five low-demand decisions kept me sanely afloat during one of the worst periods of my life:

1. Say “No” to the Shiny Job

I was a few months in the job market and had gone through the interview process for a dream role. I clicked with the founders, the workplace was cool, the salary was competitive and so were the perks. It was the kind of offer that, on paper, was a no-brainer to accept.

But I didn’t.

The day I was called in to sign the paperwork, I politely declined. Because my body had been on overdrive for too long.

2. Find Simple, Happy Work

I’ve had more jobs than I can count. Some were just for money. Others for convenience. But a few were for sheer joy.

Working with food is my happy work (I hadn’t yet discovered gardening).

I knew I just needed to cover my bills, so I applied to a few kitchens and got a job.

Six months into this job, I met a woman at the fruit market. I was picking a cantaloupe and she asked how to pick a sweet one. I told her that you press the end opposite the stem to smell for sweetness; my father taught me that.

Like any autistic, I’m more than happy to provide useful information but less inclined to engage in the small talk that happens after that reveal. That day, though, smiling at my bag of fruit like a greedy little monkey, I obliged.

We got to chatting and I mentioned I was a vegan cook at a restaurant downtown. She said that she was a butler trying to help her employer “go vegan.”

To my surprise, butlers exist outside of Downton Abbey, apparently for business tycoons and the well-to-dos.

Nonchalantly, she asked if I would be interested in working as a Private Chef. Autistic me was genuinely shocked at how well this small-talking effort paid off.

After a cooking trial, I was hired with more pay, fewer hours, creativity, and autonomy than my previous role offered. And after a few weeks on the job, my nervous system gave me the clearest signal about work it had managed in a really long time: this.

3. Bike Everywhere

I removed an entire category of decisions and costs from daily life by no longer having a car.

I biked in a city where half the year it’s bitterly cold and road rage is a serious problem, but I biked anyways, everywhere. To work. To shop. To exercise. To meet anyone.

If I needed to go further than 30km (rarely), I got on the GO-Train, with my bike.

It’s a critical “flotation device”.

4. Downsize Living Space

I moved in with four roommates, which hadn’t been a thing for me since university. But I was making less money and rationalized that I’d rather stay afloat living in tighter quarters than continue drowning in more spacious ones.

This decision benefited the first three decisions because I was able to move into the center of town. It was within biking distance of my work, the market, and by a freak act of magic, a lovely city park where I ended up spending most of my afternoons.

This decision troubled a few people in my life but it was frankly the best financial decision I could’ve made at the time.

5. Minimize Cooking

I love cooking but during this period of my life I had zero energy to cook for myself because the load surrounding the task (planning, shopping, cleaning) was one demand too many.

So for over two years I ate mostly raw and plant-based throughout the day and one cooked meal at night. During my time at the restaurant, an awesome perk was that we got one meal at the end of our shift for free and when I changed jobs, I rotated one of three simple dinner recipes.

Nervous System “Anchors”

I don’t think our load-lightening measures are temporary, because once we go back to the old ways we’ve learned to do life, won’t that just trigger a relapse?

On that thought, I started to seriously consider my decisions as, perhaps, lifelong “anchors.”

It’s been almost ten years since my burnout and my “anchor” for work isn’t at a desk or full-time. It’s part-time or seasonal work and it must have movement, creativity and autonomy built-in. I also still cycle because it eliminates a whole category of decisions, costs, and keeps the body moving.

Finding Land

Most burnout recovery advice stops at buoyancy and I think that’s exactly why AuDHD nervous systems burn out more than once and why we feel a persistent sense of wrongness and/or frustration unless one particular variable changes: the environment.

Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that autistic well-being is tied to how well we “fit” in our world. In hindsight, I can see why I never felt fully “well” or that I “fit in.” Demands aside, if that never changes, I remember wondering how it could even be possible to recover in the same environment that had depleted me.

Most of my life living in Toronto I’d felt nature-deprived and my whole life, I fantasized about living in Portugal, quietly, with the Pine Trees and the Atlantic.

But I was raised to believe living in such places was a retirement goal. They were too slow, too simple and too modest to build “a good life.” I accepted this rationale until burnout made me revisit it.

So I bought a one-way ticket to Portugal, without a plan or a job lined up. Just the Pines and the Atlantic assuring me I’d be okay.

The biggest misplanting we can have in our lives is geographical, but misplanting isn’t about scale; it’s about direction. And it’s usually much older than we think.

Portugal called to me because of my heritage and the climate, but your misplanting might just be a simpler job, a quieter street, a season abroad, or a home with a view that faces green instead of cement.

My life changed entirely for the better after moving to Portugal.

I found a little apartment with windows facing west, and eventually the best job of my life at a family-run garden centre. I finally learned to surf and I started writing in earnest, and my energy came back, slowly but surely.

This move cost things.

I left people. I gambled on a place that didn’t owe me anything. I used up all my savings. And the first year was simply, lonely.

But the wrongness lifted because I exited the place that broke me in the first place.

I don’t think I got better; I just got relocated.

And the cruel joke is that placement is the most difficult, high-effort decision you can ask of a burnt-out nervous system. So we shelve it and just reduce the demands, try to unmask and focus on regulating activities. We float on.

Because floating feels survivable, and moving feels impossible.

But finding the “right place” to love, to work, and to live is the only decision that will get you to land.

Some of what a misplanted body knows, it knew long before it had the words.

I have a very clear memory of my body’s first cry for a different environment.

I was ten years old.

It was the dead of winter after a terrible blizzard in Toronto, Canada, and I had to walk to school in thirty-six below zero.

That morning my body understood something I didn’t have words for. And it would take me nearly two decades and a late Autism diagnosis to piece it back together. Surprisingly, it assembled in verse:

Thirty-Six Below

The radio said it and the anchorman too:
“It’s minus three-dozen with wind whistling through.
Stay home if you’re tiny and keep those fingers tucked in!
There’s frostbite out hunting for uncovered skin.”

The snow had come down in the night like a lid.
Some forty centimetres! And oh what it did.
It swallowed the hedges, the steps, and the street.
The world was a bedsheet pulled up to its feet.

I asked Mum if, this once, I could just stay,
but she had looks that meant NO either way.
In winter, eight loops of my “get ready” song
were needed to make sure I’d get nothing wrong.

First were the leggings with a thousand teeth,
that gnawed at the girl who was hiding beneath.
A scratchy undershirt with the heat of July,
then corduroy pants with their whisk and their sigh.

A vest, then a sweater. No. Sweater, then vest?
I’d lost the whole order and started to guess.
Snow pants and a coat with the heft of a boat,
two socks over socks, then a scarf at the throat.

Then mittens. No, wait. Something comes before…
Oh, a hat! Then two boots to tie up on the floor.
By the time I was through, I could barely bend,
a knight made of laundry, sealed in at both ends.

Outside, the wind found the inch left of me.
The bridge of my nose and my cheeks out free.
The wind cut like paper, a sign, if I'd known,
as my eyes did the crying my mouth wouldn't own.

No plough had come by. The sidewalk, a myth.
A rumour of concrete I’d have to wrestle with.
So I broke my own trail like a small woolly ox,
a drift at a time, in my two pairs of socks.

It should’ve taken twenty, but it took far more,
to finally arrive at the school’s front door.
But that day it was locked. All silent as a prayer.
No boots on the mats. Not a body in there.

And stuck to the glass, on a page someone tore,
two words, just two, but I’d walked there for more:

SNOW DAY

“Ridiculous,” said a voice, whispering small.
It was the first time my body had spoken at all.

I thought long and hard, as I stood there, and froze.
“What’s the sense of a place that needs so many clothes?
Where the air wants you dead when you ramble and roam?
This is just not a place I could ever call home.”

My body was speaking in prickle and glow;
a language that no one around me could know.
It spoke for years, and it would speak for years more.
My listening came late, but the body kept score.

What I know now, I didn’t have words for back then.

See, I absolutely hate the cold. I always have. I feel defeated and distraught at the mere idea of needing to protect my body with that many layers of fabric.

I never wanted to put on my wool leggings because it felt like I was being poked to death, every single second, all day long. I never wanted to play in the snow because my face, hands and feet would always freeze, while the rest of my body boiled over. And I always despised feeling stuck in layers of clothing, unable to maneuver my body.

But it was very difficult to communicate any of this to my parents. I didn’t know how to explain that none of it was a preference. I didn’t know how to define the sensory assault.

So I learned, eventually, to swallow it.

I would get dressed as my skin burned red. And I would venture out into the cold without a word. And everyone agreed I'd finally settled down.

If a season wrecks you (or your kid) every year, the same way, believe it. And treat it as data about the place alone.

We are no longer tucked under anyone’s wing.

The things that make us want to crawl out of our skin are allowed to change. Not because we’re fragile; because we now know to listen to what was speaking all along.

By 06h00 it’s time to roll out of bed, and I literally can’t — until the right song is playing.

You’ve lived this, surely: the buzz of an alarm that irritates you to no end and prompts zero movement, versus the one track that, at the right volume, is capable of levitating you off the mattress.

For me, that’s “The Girl From Ipanema.” My brain has been hooked on the rhythmic acoustic guitar and ultra-smooth sax solos of Bossa Nova ever since I first heard my dad play the Getz/Gilberto album on vinyl.

My body wants to rise, without complaint, when I hear the hypnotic vibe of Jazz-Samba.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve done my days to a beat.

Bossa at sunrise. New Age to journal. Ethno-House or Jazz & Blues Instrumentals when I write. Latin Pop to drive. EDM to work out. Classic Rock for renovation/design work. Fado for sewing. Traditional Flamenco or Afro-Cuban to cook. Tropicália to hang. Every slice of the day has a specific rhythm.

As a kid, my life was, naturally, organized by my parents, but I was frequently told that this wasn’t a breezy affair. In my early teens, a Walkman is what got me organized — doing things.

I remember carrying around a CD wallet with music for every context, everywhere I went, swapping out CDs for each slice of the day. The release of the iPod some years later completely revolutionized how I existed.

I had no idea that needing an auditory anchor to transition into specific mental states is far more pronounced in an AuDHD brain.

I’ve also become acutely aware of the fact that without situational soundtracking, I could not do most of the things that I end up doing daily; at least not as easily.

So, for a mind like mine, music has never been passive entertainment. It’s quite literally a functional and regulatory necessity.

It’s also been fascinating to realize that part of how I express my feelings includes music. In other words, I can’t fully feel an elated moment unless I move to it. Just like I can’t fully sit through deep sadness unless a song sinks with me.

Without the right sound, it’s as if the feeling only gets half-processed. The rest remains suspended until the right sound completes it.

I’ve often wondered why my nervous system needs a soundtrack to feel level.

Recently, I discovered that just hearing a beat gets the movement parts of our brains firing, even if you’re sitting completely still. And, if you try to keep a beat going in your head, your brain has to work twice as hard.

That extra effort explains why silence can sometimes make time feel so painfully slow.

Music is especially important when you can’t control your external environment or when, for example, that environment is the infinite void of a blank screen.

And this makes music, in a very real sense, architecture.

Right now, Buddha Bar is playing softly through my AirPods. Ethno-House has the power to put me into a thought-trance; my fingers skipping across the keyboard like a stenographer trying to keep up.

This kind of music also, somehow, has the power to direct my body to the computer to write, especially when I find clever ways to avoid writing.

For neurotypical minds, music is mostly a mood. But for AuDHD minds, music is a dynamic regulatory environment.

The one place I’ve never felt the need to add music is when I’m out in nature.

I’ve never once reached for my tunes when walking in the forest or felt the need for a backbeat while I surf. And it’s not that I toggle from tracks to silence — because nature isn’t silent.

From the chitter-chatter of sunrise birds to the howling of the wind, nature produces its own music, all the time. It’s the richest version of music there is.

Sadly, as we become more urbanized, the more that multi-layered, information-rich, original music gets drowned out. Not silenced (because cities are deafening), but flattened, with the hums and rumbles of modernity.

If our nervous systems were built to read environments through their sound (to know where we are, what’s near and whether it’s safe), is it any wonder we can’t settle into modern life?

Sealed offices give our nervous systems next to nothing, and a city square gives them way too much — compared to naturescapes, where they get everything they need.

Perhaps the real enemy of an AuDHD mind is neither noise nor silence; it’s the void between them. And most modern settings are just void of the sounds our nervous systems evolved to track.

Stripped of sound information, we find a way to put it back.

We press play.

For most of my life, I wrongly believed focus meant stillness in a soundless space.

I remember being told that my need for music was excessive. That if I became more disciplined, I wouldn’t need to listen to music every waking hour.

But give me the right sound and the discipline I was told I lacked just arrives. I can get things done without strain or force. And that makes me consider that our minds, instead of fixing, really just need tuning.

Share

So tell me, what’s your soundtrack?

Not whether you have one because I’d bet my morning Bossa that you do, but the specifics of your soundscape. What’s the album that’s non-negotiable while you work? What’s the one song that can get you off the couch in a heartbeat? What’s your go-to playlist to help you relax? I want to hear what gets your mind in tune.

And keep blasting your tunes at all hours.

And keep playing that song on a four-hour loop.

Because rhythm isn’t a distraction for us. It’s fuel. It’s focus. It’s an anchor.

Read the Research

Grahn, J. A., & Rowe, J. B. (2009). Feeling the beat: Premotor and striatal interactions in musicians and non-musicians during beat perception. The Journal of Neuroscience, 29(23), 7540–7548. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2018-08.2009

Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726

The air would smell lemony, and I remember watching her dance to Lambada as she shredded beta-carotene into a pot with garlic and olive oil. Almost everyone in my family cooks, but my grandma taught us all.

Her kitchen was crescent-shaped, with a massive floor-to-ceiling window that opened out to a balcony, perched east. The shelves were long and open. The floral china was within reach. The countertop was made of stone. The knives had their own stand in front of the chopping block. The wooden spoons stood upright in a terracotta vase by the stove. And the kitchen work triangle was designed with fierce, geometric precision.

I loved cooking with my grandma.

My parents moved around a lot and our kitchens didn’t make me feel so at ease. The kitchens were at the mercy of interior design trends, weren’t always bright, and my parents accumulated kitchen clutter galore.

The years passed and I started cooking less and less.

One day, I became the sad owner of my own poorly designed, dark, and cluttered little kitchen, and I convinced myself, for almost a decade, that there were just “more important things to do with my time.”

Oh how naive I was.

Some years later, while taking my Masters, I became friends with a girl who invited me for dinner one evening with her mum. I was transported the moment I set foot in her kitchen.

Her kitchen was crescent-shaped. The shelves were long and open. The teal and turquoise china was within reach. The island, which doubled as a prep space and dining table, was made of stone. Every tool had its place. And though the geometry of the kitchen echoed the sacred rules of the past, it was also organized by “zones”.

I wanted to stay awhile. And I wanted to cook.

Looking back on it all now, I can clearly see the quiet magic of the spaces that naturally call me to dress my apron. The visual order. The aesthetic utility. The natural stone materials. Every tool with a home.

But that kind of initiation and sensory magic must be designed into a kitchen on purpose. Here’s how, with five simple rules.

#1 “In Sight, In Mind”

Believe it or not, working memory is small for most people, but it’s particularly taxed for those of us with ADHD. So, if items are out of sight, they will drop out of the mental workspace, and the mechanisms to retrieve them will fire much less reliably.

The problem is, a lot of visible items can create clutter, and clutter can read as sensory noise to the autistic body. This is why a lot of interior designers will argue that floor-to-ceiling closed storage wins over open shelving and “clutter.” But they’re only right if the clutter isn’t curated.

So, keep visible what you actually use.

My wooden spoons stand by the stove, the way my grandma’s did, along with things I use everyday to cook like: olive oil, a pepper mill, and coarse salt. I have 5 knives on a magnet bar above my cutting board and one pair of scissors.

There are no cupboards, only shelves, and two rolling carts beneath the countertop with produce. This is actually a traditional Portuguese design, extremely efficient and in my opinion, quite elegant.

#2 Set Up “Zones”

I eat fruit with chia pudding in the morning, and my partner likes toast, so we have a little “Breakfast Bar” where all of this lives.

There’s a 3-in-1 grill (that toasts bread, makes pancakes, and presses waffles) next to a little shelf full of glass jars with chia, oats, protein powder, flour and nut mix.

Zoning is also key to minimizing ADHD “side-questing.” ADHD executive systems run at capacity, so every single detour will trigger abandoning the task at hand. Specific kitchen zones, with dedicated tools at each, within reach, help with task completion.

#3 Keep It Bright

Most people’s kitchen time is clocked at dawn or at dusk, and those are the exact hours when light matters most.

I open the windows and step into the garden from my kitchen while the coffee is on the stove. This is how I give my nervous system the first light dose of the day. My grandma’s kitchen had a glass door she’d always open in the morning to let the rising sun and fresh air pour in. It’s a really important way to start every morning.

Overhead lights simply won’t do because AuDHD nervous systems are solar-powered. If your kitchen has a window, open it and cook in its light. If it doesn’t, don’t rely on the overhead; layer full-spectrum bulbs around the kitchen and under shelves. If every zone/working surface is lit (not just the room), it will be bright enough to cook and warm enough to stay.

#4 Add Greenery

It’s also really important to be amongst green company in the kitchen.

A window overlooking greenery or a garden, a sill of herbs, or even just a few plants on the counter adds restorative input passively to sensitive AuDHD nervous systems.

Nature is non-social, non-demanding, and predictable in a way that’s incomparable to anything else.

The doll-like 82-year-old neighbour often comes over for a bite. She loves to sit on the porch recounting stories from back in the day. In addition to herbs, our porch is also filled with Ficus varieties, orchids and cacti which offer a forever green view from every lookout point in the kitchen, and that, somehow, makes the kitchen feed me back.

#5 Think LEGO

Try not to see your kitchen as a fixed space but rather as a room that bends to you. Knowing my kitchen can bend to my nervous system gives me tremendous sensory comfort, and this matters a whole lot to the AuDHD mind. For example, I can bring the produce carts to the “Breakast Bar” and take the high chairs to the chopping block to hang out while my partner cooks.

The best way to design a solid sound setting might just be to keep a portable speaker on the counter and cook to Lambada, the way my grandma did. Not the absence of sound, but the sound you chose.

You can also set up dimmers and find fun furniture to use in different configurations.

I eventually left my poorly designed, dark and cluttered little kitchen. Had I known what I know now, these rules would’ve made it work.

I could’ve replaced the gaudy cabinets with open shelves. I could’ve decluttered our kitchen wares to keep only what I actually used. I could’ve set up zones, improved the lighting, added some houseplants, and changed the furniture. It wouldn’t have been perfect, but it would have made a difference.

It’s a treat stepping into the kitchen nowadays. There’s no mental chess trying to find the right knife to chop veg in the produce cart below the countertop. Cooking has never been so frictionless and so inviting in a kitchen very much inspired by my grandma’s.

And the joy of it returned simply because the room changed.

An idea pops into my mind as I sip my morning coffee; it’s idea 218 this month.

I scribble it in the margins of my notepad and before another moment passes I blurt out to my partner: “I have an idea.”

He smiles. He’s heard this before. He hears it every morning.

I used to fantasize about a job where I could get paid to just come up with cool ideas. I’m really good at coming up with ideas. But I’ve got a lot of trouble seeing them through. And it’s been rough because, from a young age, it became clear that turning concepts into action matters far more than simply dreaming them up.

“Ideas are worth nothing unless executed,” I’d hear.

But then I read somewhere that ideas are actually half the equation. After all, action is empty without a vision to guide it. That made me feel good, for a while.

I go to my studio.

A cycling jumpsuit design hangs on my board, waiting to be drafted. A collection of essays stack in my Ulysses sidebar. A wireframe for an indie app company waits to be developed. A food forest plan holds out for land I don’t yet own. A macramé lamp dangles, half-knotted out of a wicker basket.

All of these ideas glow at once, but not one is actually finished. Shame arrives on schedule as it always does and I read it as I always have: a flaw.

Not too long ago, I stopped looking at the ideas themselves and started looking underneath them. And something changed.

Underneath our seemingly scattered, endless stream of ideas, I think our sensitive AuDHD nervous systems are reaching for very specific, unmet needs.

Most of my ideas tend to reach for the same three things: doing it my way, working with my hands, and being useful to others wanting the same thing.

And if almost every new idea reaches for these three things, maybe they’re not competitors. Maybe they’re just siblings.

We picture our attention flowing down one deep channel as a single narrow obsession, like trains or a lifelong subject, but motropism describes the depth, not the contents of the channel. Mine is a conviction, not a topic.

My monotropism is something my entire nervous system organizes around, and when I look at the scatter of my ideas, they’re just offshoots of that one conviction. So having “too many ideas,” for the most part, is actually what feeds my thesis.

Most of your ideas connect to a thesis you have yet to unearth — and what you abandon is often unrelated to your thesis.

Of course, not all of your ideas will connect. Some are like dopamine fronts that blow through and shame tends to file that under abandonment, but it isn’t always so. Offshoots test the ground; that’s their purpose.

Even if unfinished, offshoots connected to your thesis will leave something behind. A skill, a sensitivity, or a vocabulary your thesis quietly absorbs.

Not always, but most of the time.

I studied business because I was raised to believe every artistic door had poverty written on it; then I left the business world.

I went off to teach yoga, talked my way into gardening work, took alteration jobs, custom-sewed a few garments, and did brand and web work for a few clients. But every single one of these offshoots felt too simple on their own, so I wouldn’t commit and I always felt terrible about that. Now I see they’ve all been expressions of one root, one thesis, surfacing.

We grow up believing we need to pursue one career that’s tied to one income stream, but a root isn’t necessarily a career. And it certainly doesn’t need to earn a cent to be real.

Money is a costume our offshoots can wear at a specific moments in time, not a verdict on which one matters or defines us.

Subscribe now

So the scatter of ideas AuDHD minds produce non-stop isn’t automatically secret coherence, but some of it actually is, and we just need a better sorting tool than shame to sift through it. Three questions do that:

#1: What sentence does your life keep arguing?

For a moment, forget all of your ideas and just ask yourself: “What’s the one thing my life keeps insisting on?” What I noticed about trying to figure out what my life kept insisting on was that it was something I’d always somehow bring up in a conversation; any conversation.

Here’s mine: struggle isn’t a soul issue; it’s a placement issue.

This sentence took me a very, very long time to arrive at but once I got there, it was as if every idea confessed. All of my gardening ideas argue it daily because a plant’s health and growth is determined by where it’s planted. Sewing ideas argue it in the fabric because when the clothes don’t fit right, you alter the garment, not the body. Even my digital design ideas argue it, in pixels! When a visitor gets lost on a web page or APP, you never diagnose the visitor. You redesign the page. These are all very different mediums but ultimately, they say the same thing.

#2 What is the tool inside each title?

Consider what’s inside the titles you idolize. For example, titles like Author, Designer and Chef actually mean: the need to hand others a map already drawn, sensory hospitality and spatial thinking, respectively.

#3 What does the tool do for the sentence?

If the tool can argue the sentence (your thesis), it earns ground, and your idea scatter can become a stack. A stack is coherence because it feeds the root in different ways, at different times, while the ideas kept below ground wait to pass the filter. But note that its job is to filter coherence, not organize sequencing. Coherence says: “this belongs to the root,” not “this is what you should execute now.”

So, for every new idea that lands before coffee, ask if it feeds your thesis. If it does, you’ll find yourself naturally more focused and inclined to “finish” or execute it. If it doesn’t, it will still likely leave something useful before you continue on your journey. Don’t feel ashamed that it didn’t amount to more, and remember:

Your ideas were never the project. Your thesis is.

I’m back in my studio now, looking at my jumpsuit design, still pinned, and my macramé lamp, still dangling half-knotted, and my recipe deck, still covered in dust. I’m at peace with the scatter because I know it’s all part of one root, slowly surfacing — here, and here, and here.

I was once friends with the kind of person a stranger could never forget.

Out of university, she fought tooth and nail for a job most people don’t dare dream of. The kind of work that sends you across oceans to stand with the most vulnerable. Work that really matters.

She cried over it. Went into debt for it. Fractured relationships to keep it. And she was brilliant at it.

But every month, from a different time zone, she’d call to vent. She’d successfully hacked her career, but her love life was a wasteland.

She wanted to settle down and was heartbroken that her search for love kept failing. And with every short-lived romance, she began to drown in anxiety.

She’d tell me that perhaps she was too sensitive, too picky, and all the other standard verdicts handed to single women after thirty.

The reality was colder, and much simpler. She was trying to plant love where it couldn’t take root.

We rarely consider our surroundings when we look for love; we just search (or scroll) and cross our fingers.

But love is a soil test.

Default proximity is what the wind seeds; companion planting is what you do when you choose your soil on purpose.

Mission-based work has one guarantee: you eventually leave. Almost none of my friend’s colleagues were looking to put down roots while on mission. Locals at international postings also had a ticking clock.

Between postings, she’d return to a home she’d long outgrown, surrounded by old connections who quietly disapproved of her choices or found her lifestyle too eccentric. And, she’d go on vacation. Making even shorter, shelf-life connections.

It’s hard to find love when you’re living out of a suitcase.

The last time we spoke, yet another relationship had collapsed. “Long-distance mission romances work, though!” she insisted, because she knew a power couple in her field who had made it work.

Building a life on the exception when your lifestyle enforces the rule isn’t hope. It’s the most exhausting kind of self-abandonment there is: the kind that looks like optimism.

That evening, I told her plainly that she wouldn’t find the love of her life on mission or in the in-betweens.

I knew she was in the wrong place, even if I was still working out the vocabulary to prove it.

She paused, I think because the truth was heavy, and heavy things take time to settle.

In the 1930s, before apps promised an infinite pool, a striking number of people married someone living within four blocks away. Psychologists call it propinquity. It’s really just proximity over effort.

Everyone tells us to get on the apps, go to the bars, make small talk.

But if you run a soil test on those environments, the result is instantaneous sensory assault and forced performance.

None of these places sample what we’re like when we’re regulated, absorbed, and safe. Which means conventional dating demands a mask.

Neurodivergent minds do not bond over shallow interrogation.

Autistic and AuDHD minds specifically connect through monotropic depth, so if another mind is absorbed in that same thing right beside us, connection will happen without a script. And it’s the purest kind of connection there is.

Parallel presence for an AuDHD mind is infinitely more intimate than a candlelit dinner.

The person who meets you across a first-date table meets your understudy. The person who meets you in your soil meets the actor.

True love isn’t a hunt. It’s an unexpected collision. I know this to be true because I’ve lived both sides.

After my divorce, I did a lot of internal work. It matters. But it’s only part of the equation. Being in the right place is the other part.

I’d somehow always known, deep down, that Canadian soil wasn’t right for me. I knew this because there was truly nothing about the culture, climate, pace, or lifestyle that matched my soul. But I ignored my gut instinct for years and masked heavily as a result.

After only a few months in Portugal, I naturally stopped editing myself in advance, became absorbed in things I was passionate about but had never before had access to, and my body slowly entered a wholesome rhythm.

It wasn’t so much that living in Portugal changed me — it just resurfaced me.

People talk about authenticity like it’s a muscle you flex, but much of it is a byproduct of place.

One afternoon, I remember telling a friend that I’d always had a thing for men who ride off-road. Apart from the sex appeal, I admire minds that can be both fearless and calculated; both playful and serious.

I’d also wanted my M-License for a long time but never pursued it in Canada because it’s seasonal, expensive, and more of a road-bike culture. Portugal, on the other hand, is a year-round, off-road paradise.

I had absolutely no idea her brother rode, was also recently divorced, and lived in the same rhythm I was living in. I didn’t even know she had a brother.

A few months later, we were introduced at her birthday party and we clicked in more ways than just one. He eventually taught me how to ride off-road.

The rest is my life.

I didn’t meet the love of my life through a search; we collided because I was living in the exact rhythm where someone like him, and the unmasked version of me, could actually meet.

My soil happened to be a whole country because I was severely misplanted. Yours could just be a Tuesday night at a climbing gym.

The scale isn’t what matters. It’s the truth in your consistency that will make the difference. And you only need three honest questions to put that to the test:

1. Where does your nervous system naturally drop its guard?

2. Where is your mind completely absorbed?

3. Where does your body run at its natural rhythm?

Once you have these honest answers, stand in those on a rhythm you can keep.

Dating apps promise quick search results, but good soil will always deliver infinitely deeper and truer encounters.

Soil is slower than apps, and the slowness is the mechanism.

My friend got a brief glimpse of this.

At the end of her last mission, she followed her heart to a coastal town where the pace was slow, the air was soft, and the things true to her heart were within reach. And she stayed a while.

Standing in the right soil for the first time, she met a man who understood her, embraced her every quirk and wanted exactly the same things she wanted.

She would later tell me he wasn’t “the one,” but that it was the healthiest relationship she’d ever had.

We’ve been brainwashed into believing love is a static thing to find, but that’s a consumerist framing with an illusion of control.

The reality is, all we can do is be in the right place to get an invite to the event.

My friend eventually packed her bags again and her search for love resumed, so this doesn’t end with a neat answer. It ends with a wish.

My wish is that one day she calls the sunk cost by its name.

That she reroutes toward the quiet, regulating work she’s been ignoring because her dream job looks too good on paper to leave. That she returns to the ocean practice her career slowly stripped away.

When she’s standing in that life, the odds of encountering love, for the first time, would be on her side.

And when the mask goes back on, we end up feeling worse than when we started, falsely confirming that being ourselves costs too much.

It does cost too much. But only there.

Subscribe now

No Effort Required

My marriage was ending loudly and expensively. And I needed the ocean.

I’d always needed the ocean.

I knew this the way we know things but choose to ignore. For over a decade, I filed this deep need under “true, but inconvenient.” And that’s its own slow kind of grief.

I’d heard about a beach hostel in Nicaragua through the grapevine.

At the time, it was off-season so the flights and accommodation were cheap.

I stayed in a little hut a stone’s throw from a mellow surf break. It was there that I learned to tightrope walk on water. A dream that had gathered a decade of dust.

I also got back to writing daily.

My previous existence had somehow killed the germination of words over the years, but the citrus Nicaraguan sunsets shocked them back to life.

For the first time since I could remember, I didn’t try to be appropriate, palatable or whatever shape was required. I just existed there. No effort required.

Two weeks later, I returned to Canada and the efforting resumed.

It would take another few years, a late diagnosis, and a lot of plants to return to an effortless way of being.

Whatever the mask was, I hadn’t consciously decided to put it on. It just snapped back the moment the air demanded it.

The Mask Is Armor, Not a Choice

Your nervous system will activate your mask in places that punish you for being without it. And that’s not a metaphor; it’s mechanical.

Autism research has broken down camouflaging into 3 specific strategies: compensation, masking, and assimilation.

You learn the scripts, mirror the vocabulary, suppress your movements and force yourself through interactions you’d otherwise never have chosen. All of this is done of course, to avoid standing out.

But the questionnaires can’t measure a life built by someone running all three strategies at once.

In Toronto, I ran all three full-time and called the total my life. Researchers eventually confirmed what my body already knew: camouflaging flexes by context.

Full body armor appears in formal, high-stakes environments and dissolves in places that feel safe.

Camouflaging is how you manufacture a fit the environment refuses to offer. The mask is the invoice.

Share

Red Light, Green Light

Society frames masking as an individual flaw because if it’s an individual practice, it can be monetized.

When the real variable is place, there’s no subscription model for noticing you’re simply in the wrong one.

Places give your nervous system a “red light” or “green light.”

Red-light places make you feel unsafe and unwelcome. They’re war zones you unknowingly walk into where your armour activates.

Green-light places stop asking for the mask. They’re safe havens because there’s nothing to compensate for and nothing to fear. The result? You stop editing yourself and exist freely.

I had a red-light life for almost three decades. It nearly tore me apart.

Red-light places accrue serious debts over time that you will end up paying sooner or later in physical health and mental sanity.

I live in a green-light place now.

The relationship-first culture carries a social contract my nervous system reads as deeply human.

The outdoor lifestyle offers me endless curiosity and stimulation.

And the warmer climate and slower pace of life lend me sensory ease instead of sensory assault.

The performance demand of living in a green-light place has dropped to zero on almost every axis at once.

The Danger of Unmasking in Red-Light Places

Unmasking is not a simple act of bravery. Pushing this narrative isn’t just wrong; it’s exhausting and cruel.

Removing armor on the battlefield isn’t brave. It’s exposure.

And the fact that a mask is a nervous system safety feature means it can only deactivate permanently on its own.

The shift is physical first. Because your body always knows ahead of your mind.

In red-light places, your body is always braced. In green-light places, your body is at ease.

When I first realized this, the grief crushed me like a 100-foot wave. But above the grief was a quiet, radical clarity.

It forced me to stop asking why I was as I was, and instead, led me to question where I was and why I was still there.

The Quiet Exit

Maybe you can’t quit your job tomorrow. Or pack your bags and move to the dreamland on your Pinterest board.

But just knowing that unmasking is a matter of geography, not courage, changes the math.

Keep your mask on in red-light places for self-preservation. But in your downtime, start quietly planning your exit.

Find your green-light, micro-geographies first.

Maybe it’s a friend who couldn’t care less if you ramble on about your special interest. Or a garden nook where the light hits just right. Or a low-demand job that pays less but offers total nervous system regulation.

Perhaps you have a memory of a specific green-light place. Or know someone who has a distinct “vacation self.”

Most of us think these versions of us are temporary breaks from reality but they’re not. They are baselines. It’s the rest that’s a performance they’re forced to sustain in order to survive a war zone.

The mask does not fall off because you become braver. It falls off when the air changes.

Read the Research

Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(5), 1899–1911. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-03878-x

Cook, J., Hull, L., Crane, L., & Mandy, W. (2021). Camouflaging in autism: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 89, 102080. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2021.102080

Hull, L., et al. (2019). Development and validation of the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(3), 819–833. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3792-6

Klein, J., & Macoun, S. J. (2025). Person-environment fit and social camouflaging in autism. New Ideas in Psychology, 76, 101112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2024.101112

My mother would play spelling games with me when I was little.

She taught me to keep a daily journal so I could practice my writing, organize my thoughts, face my fears, and release my dreams.

She crafted summer reading lists and took me to the library. And as I grew, she gave me a book budget to start building my own library.

She also taught me how to type. We’d have obscenely intense tiptap typing competitions that drove my dad mad. To this day, I type 93wpm with 98% accuracy because of that training.

But my fondest memory, by far, is waking up at dawn and hearing her type, with Enya playing softly in the background. And I knew that when Enya was on, she was not to be disturbed.

By the time I finally rolled out of bed to sit down for breakfast, she’d already put in three solid hours of word connections.

To me, she was super-human.

Subscribe now

What’s for Breakfast?

Growing up, I mostly hated breakfast.

My mother was a health nut, so I was forced to eat a bowl of Bran Flakes with skim milk and banana slices every day, except Sundays. On Sunday, she did me the favor of making pancakes.

I will never forget the smell of vanilla and maple syrup that would trail through the hall on 80s rock-pop sound waves, lifting me out of bed, eyes still shut.

I used to watch the pillowy cloud stack absorb the caramelized tree plasma, unhurried. The irregular edges and spongy interior somehow made Sunday mornings feel unapologetically slow.

One day, in my mid-teens, she bought a waffle maker.

I never ate pancakes again.

The Architectural Marvel

A waffle is an efficient, quick bread marvel.

The iron grid offers mathematical crunch with each structural syrup trap. The only effort required: waiting for the beep.

A pancake, however, is an old-school dance between chef and skillet. You have to gauge the heat. Read the bubbles. Engage in wrist acrobatics.

I was extremely annoyed with my mother’s unilateral decision to turn Pancake Sundays into Waffle Sundays. And I voiced my disapproval weekly. I wanted fluffy, not crispy. But no matter how much I argued for pancakes, the reliability of the crispy waffle always won.

Looking back, I see how autistic my reaction was. Undiagnosed at the time, my parents chalked up my disapproval to deeply irrational teenage behavior.

And as the years passed, the waffle’s engineered brilliance slowed my resistance. I respected its geometric genius.

Sunday mornings, though, could no longer hold their sacred, lazy allure.

The philosophical divide of the breakfast world on pancakes vs. waffles isn’t all that different from the writing world when it comes to working with AI.

Share

An Inherited Addiction to Words

My mom had an addiction to words.

She kept a quotations dictionary on her nightstand, wrote poetry in her spare time and spent her final years writing a doctoral thesis in education.

I think I inherited her addiction.

I’ve written poems ever since I can remember. But only for the most extreme of feelings. Love. Joy. Pain. Mostly for myself. Sometimes for others.

For some reason, the extreme feelings make it onto the page in beats. The other feelings have no rhythm. So they go into journals. The stacks of which pile high at my dad’s place. A memory archive with seemingly no purpose.

I studied business in school, but much preferred my history, English and language electives. Back then, friends and family would bring me their writing to structure and proof. Essays. Grad applications. Thesis chapters. Speeches.

Autism and ADHD impact my expression in speech, but not written form. Somehow, a blank document has never stressed me. It soothes me. This has been both a gift and a curse.

Bleeding Out of the Margins

After moving to Portugal and unintentionally finding incredible ease in my life, I found myself drawing parallels between an array of fields to try to explain it.

I bought a 2-meter by 1.5-meter whiteboard to assemble a jambalaya of ingredients across gardening, psychology, philosophy and ecology. But the ideas started to bleed out of the margins and onto the white tiles that lined my wall. My whiteboard marker scribbles saw no bounds and my autistic mind began to overheat.

The thoughts were complete with no door to carry them through. The demands of the open skillet started to overwhelm me.

Then, a tool appeared.

Within minutes, it created perfect, efficient structures of the liquid mess I’d been trying to cook with for months.

And the only honest word for what happened next is: waffle.

For the first time, I could see the whole tapestry. Woven out in front of me. And for a mind like mine, this wasn’t convenience. It was a doorway.

Not unlike many others, I was stunned at the clarity and mathematical precision of AI. My ADHD mind took the instant dopamine hit and ran.

And the drift happened ever so gradually.

First, just brainstorming. Then researching. Then outlining. It was all just so incredibly frictionless. Soon, my addiction transferred from words to output.

I still remember the day I asked AI to revise my work. The result unsettled me. The warm, pillowy texture had been stamped out. And because I was afraid my thesis was too heavy for my own voice, I conceded to the recommended edits. After all, a machine surely knows how to bulletproof this work better than I.

The irony of this isn’t lost on me.

My publication argues that we break when we contort to fit environments not built for us. Then I contorted to deliver it.

Share

Protect the Dawn

I used to see the waffle iron as the enemy of Sunday mornings. But my mother was budgeting friction.

She chose the efficient, structural crunch where it mattered less, to protect the soft, irregular crumb where it mattered more.

I still run my waffle iron. To give shape to the messy batter. To set the grid. To handle the heavy heat. Where she’d have used it too.

My stacks of journals had a purpose after all. They’re where I built my cadence when no one was watching.

Dawn was my mother’s favorite time of day. She wasn’t grinding. She was doing wrist acrobatics.

I’ll protect my dawn.

— A.

Nights. Weekends.

Not because anyone demanded it but because all-in is the only way autistic and ADHD minds know how to love a thing. That all-in sprint on a rigid, unchanging calendar always ends badly, though. And for most of my life, this kind of rhythm came wrapped in criticism.

Friends told me to take it easy. Family worried I was overdoing it. And so I’d try to force myself to stop mid-flow. Or worse, hide the fact that I was working on a Sunday like it was some secret vice. It took a late diagnosis to realize I wasn’t alone in that hiding.

This is definitely not another hymn to the grind. Quite the opposite actually. AuDHD minds fare badly (often catastrophically) on the standard work schedule and just as badly on hustle culture’s version. The problem isn’t necessarily how much we work. It’s the timescale we are forced to work on.

Autistic and ADHD minds don’t have a steady middle setting. We live at the extreme ends of a single dial.

We are sprinters. But almost all modern work is a marathon.

Who decided, exactly, that work ends at 5? That weekends are for shutting down? And that rest arrives in annual vacation slices? And why do we treat these factory settings like laws of human biology?

Subscribe now

The Factory Blueprint

9-5 workweeks weren’t discovered; they were negotiated about a century ago. For factories.

Back then, interchangeable bodies tended machines that ran at constant speed.

The machines didn’t have good days. Or floods of insight on Saturday morning. Or fog on Tuesday afternoon. They produced the same output per hour, every hour.

So the only humane question was: how many identical hours should a body stand beside one? The answer was: eight, five days straight. With weekends to rest the body so it could tend the machine again on Monday.

That schedule was a triumph for factory labor.

But factories faded. The service industry took over. And the rhythm stayed, installed on nervous systems that never ran at constant speed.

The thing about factory settings is they’re defaults. Not laws. And you’re allowed to change them.

The Myth of “Relaxing”

The deeper myth underneath the standard work schedule is the energy ledger it assumes.

Work is supposed to drain us. Leisure is supposed to restore us. So “balance” means rationing the draining thing and maximizing the restoring thing.

But the research says the ledger is wrong.

In one of the most famous studies in the psychology of experience, Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre paged adult workers at random moments for a week.

The result became known as the “paradox of work:” the great majority of flow experiences (deep absorption, engagement, satisfaction) happened at work, not at leisure.

Left to “relax,” people frequently reported feeling bored and anxious.

Restoration tracks engagement. Not the category on the calendar. An absorbed Saturday can fill you. An idle one can also drain you.

Burnout research points the same way from the other side.

In Maslach and Leiter’s model, workload is only one of six mismatches that produce burnout. The central ones are control and values: doing hours you didn’t author, for reasons that aren’t yours.

So it’s not always the hours that burn us out; it’s hours without authorship.

And I’ve felt that difference in my own body.

Years ago, I was burning the candle at both ends for work my soul never reached for, with no rest in sight. Along with a collapsing mask and severe health problems, that marathon broke me.

Getting to the other side required a radical, terrifying choice: walking away from the illusion of conventional security and deliberately taking a massive cut to my income. It was a steep trade, but I bought back ownership of my time.

Subscribe now

The Volume Dial

The DSM lists distractibility as a core ADHD symptom, but it entirely ignores its mirror image: hyperfocus.

These aren’t two separate traits. They are a single attention system, steeply gated by interest (Ashinoff & Abu-Akel, 2021).

Pointed at the wrong task, the attention scatters. Pointed at the right one, it locks for hours.

But this isn’t just about ADHD dopamine-chasing.

When you pair ADHD hyperfocus with the autistic mind’s natural monotropism (the intense, hardwired need to channel most of your mental energy into a single deep interest), the AuDHD system becomes an absolute firehose (Murray et al., 2005).

It introduces a fierce state of inertia: once the mind is locked onto a track, pulling it away feels like tearing Velcro.

And this explosive, combined flow state was left entirely out of the manuals.

When researchers map when this locked state actually arrives, the answer is unyielding: it requires self-chosen, deeply engaging work. It feeds on interest and autonomy, not obligation and the clock (Hupfeld et al., 2019).

So the AuDHD “flood” doesn’t come when scheduled. It comes when fed.

This is why the 9-5 breaks AuDHD minds. And it does so in two environmentally distinct ways.

If we love the work, our hyperfocus and monotropic drive team up and we pour our whole selves in, but the factory calendar offers no dry season.

Monsoon without recovery is collapse on a schedule

If the work bores us, the mind screams for autonomy while the manual writes down “distractible.”

Drowned or starved, the mind was never the problem. The timescale was.

In fact, occupational research shows adults with ADHD experience their symptoms as context-dependent: liabilities in rigid work, strengths in stimulating, self-chosen work (Lasky et al., 2016).

This is the orchid nervous system at work, and it's why so many AuDHD minds are relentlessly creative.

Work Built for the Flood

Environmental design doesn’t stop at choosing what we work on. The deeper choice is the shape of the work.

Most jobs are clock-bound.

AuDHD minds thrive on project-based bursts. Whole categories of work already run on this rhythm:

1. Seasonal: Farming, fishing, tourism, ski seasons, wildfire crews, tax season. Intense on, fully off.

2. Freelance: Design, development, trades, consulting. A defined sprint, a delivery, a gap you control.

3. Mission-Based: Field research, humanitarian deployments, emergency medical expeditions. Total immersion, then genuine return.

4. Art: Writers, musicians, painters, makers. Albums, books, and collections have always been made in floods, with fallow time between them. Nobody asks a novelist to produce chapters every Tuesday at 2PM.

5. Events/Production: Theater, film, wedding planning, political campaigns. Explosive, high-adrenaline execution followed by structural dead-stop.

These work categories are neurodivergent heaven because they’ve never installed the factory setting.

Share

Balance Is Real. The Timescale Is Wrong.

Work-life balance isn't a lie. Every living system needs output and recovery. The factory just sliced it wrong.

Most work schedules slice “balance” into: eight hours on, evenings and weekends off, summer vacations.

But no farmer works a balanced day in harvest, and nobody calls farmers workaholics. When the fields rest completely, so do they.

Note that “seasonal” here means rhythms, not calendar quarters. An artist’s flood can land in January.

Mine happens to track the sun (light is my fuel, and winter genuinely dims me). Yours might arrive in the dark months and rest in June. The point is the amplitude, not the calendar day.

My partner and I used to argue about this.

Both neurodivergent, both flood-shaped, both dutifully enforcing “balance” on each other because we thought that’s what health looked like.

Some time ago we stopped and redesigned around our actual wiring.

Now, when the flood comes, we let it run all the way through. And when the “season” ends, we rest. Weeks, sometimes months.

Recovery researchers Sonnentag & Fritz have a name for what makes time off actually restore you: psychological detachment.

And it predicts recovery better than the number of days taken.

In other words, the dormancy has to be real.

Now, applying this to a shared life requires coordination, not compromise. My partner and I learned to sync our dormancy, not our sprints.

Last winter, my season wrapped a month before his, so I migrated ahead, and he met me once his work closed.

For parents, children set a daily rhythm that can’t be moved, but the principle simply scales down: sprints are sized to school terms, deep rest is reserved for the complete summer season, or one partner anchors the daily rhythm while the other floods, then they swap.

The goal isn't escaping reality. It's designing around it.

Balance over a day is a factory setting. Balance over a season is a biology.

The Denied Flood

Sometimes the flood arrives on a Tuesday. The energy is real but you spend it in meetings.

Or it arrives on Sunday and someone you love calls the laptop a betrayal.

You feel the monsoon arrive and watch it drain away unused, again.

You're told you lack follow-through and worse, you start to believe it.

Consider instead: a sprinter denied the track doesn’t become a marathoner. They become a sprinter in pain.

If this is you, start smaller than a career change.

Protect one “flood window” a week and treat it like a medical appointment you must attend.

Tell those you love what a flood is and what it’s worth to you. And stop calling your droughts laziness when they’re the fallow half of your blooming calendar.

The Fine Print

Hustle culture deletes the winter, but winters are sacred.

If your sprints have no scheduled dormancy, you’re not seasonal. You’re burning out in a more flattering font.

Also note that the nervous system decides, which means yours might genuinely need daily rigidity.

Many autistics love the certainty of fixed hours. That’s not a contradiction. It’s placement.

I need rigidity too. I’ve just moved it into my lifestyle anchors: exercising, walking our dog, and meals at the same hour, alarms for all.

The container stays fixed so the work inside it can flood. Rigidity in the frame. Freedom in the flow.

I hold this work rhythm because I built a life that allows it (remote, self-directed, no one’s calendar but mine), and that’s a real privilege. But the principle scales to any life.

Set your clock by your nervous system, not the factory.

We Are Sprinters

I still remember hiding my laptop on a Sunday like contraband. Apologizing, mid-flow, for my most alive hours.

But nobody apologizes for the harvest.

If you recognize yourself or someone you love in the secret projects, the “lazy” droughts, or the benched holidays, know that it just points to being in the wrong race.

Stop trying to run a marathon. We are sprinters.

— A.

PS: This is the first piece in the Factory Settings series. Which default should I audit next? Tell me in the comments.

Read the Research

Ashinoff, B. K., & Abu-Akel, A. (2021). Hyperfocus: the forgotten frontier of attention. Psychological Research, 85(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01245-8

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & LeFevre, J. (1989). Optimal experience in work and leisure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(5), 815–822. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.56.5.815

Hupfeld, K. E., Abagis, T. R., & Shah, P. (2019). Living “in the zone”: hyperfocus in adult ADHD. ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders, 11(2), 191–208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12402-018-0272-y

Lasky, A. K., Weisner, T. S., Jensen, P. S., Hinshaw, S. P., Hechtman, L., Arnold, L. E., Murray, D. W., & Swanson, J. M. (2016). ADHD in context: Young adults’ reports of the impact of occupational environment on the manifestation of ADHD. Social Science & Medicine, 161, 160–168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.06.003

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It. Jossey-Bass.

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398

Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204

I used to write first thing. I know better now.

My garden ritual runs the same way every morning. Coffee first. Then the vegetable patch, the herbs, the flowers, the tropicals, the Ficus trees. Occasionally the succulents. In this order, always.

The part of me that needs the world to hold still goes quiet here. It knows exactly what’s coming. But nothing that happens next is the same.

A bud that wasn’t open yesterday. Aphids on the roses overnight. A tomato leaning that needs staking. The smell of rain left in the soil.

The part of me that needs the world to move gets a fresh hit with every row.

The autistic me and the ADHD me used to spend most of their time at war. In places like the garden, they’re satiated simultaneously.

For a long time I thought I was just “difficult.” I wasn’t. I just needed places and spaces that happened to be built the way I’m built: steady with liveliness.

A garden isn’t the only place that offers this magic.

Subscribe now

The Paradox That Isn’t

If you’re autistic and ADHD, you’ve no doubt felt the exhaustion of dealing with your “contradictory” needs:

• Autism wants sameness. ADHD wants novelty.

• Autism wants routine. ADHD wants spontaneity.

• Autism wants to go deep on one thing. ADHD wants twelve things by lunch.

• Autism wants the plan. ADHD wants to blow up the plan.

One part of you is flooring the gas. The other is stamping the brake.

The clinical literature files this under “co-occurrence” and moves on. So you’re forced to live with the sense that you are permanently at war with yourself.

But brains run on contradictions.

Everyone has to balance fast, automatic instinct against slow, deliberate reason. We all conjure a bright, loud, colourful world while sealed inside a silent, pitch-dark skull.

Contradiction isn’t a glitch in the AuDHD mind. It’s the baseline condition of having one. So when you think of it, your two needs aren’t even a real contradiction. Because they don’t sit on the same axis.

One wants the container to hold still. The other wants the contents to move.

Sameness and novelty are only enemies if you force them onto the same thing. And the sad reality is that most environments do exactly that, then hand you a label to explain your war.

AuDHD Synergies

The science here is quietly damning.

In 2024, Barack and colleagues ran 457 people through an online foraging game: stay and keep picking a patch, or leave to explore a new one. The people who scored highest for ADHD traits left depleting patches sooner and collected more overall. They didn’t play worse. They played closer to mathematically optimal.

The exact trait that gets a kid in trouble in a classroom became an advantage the moment the setting rewarded exploration instead of stillness.

You can see this in older data too.

Among the Ariaal of northern Kenya, men carrying the gene variant most associated with ADHD were better nourished while they lived as nomads, and worse nourished once their community settled into village life (Eisenberg et al., 2008).

The brain that read a moving horizon beautifully sat down in a market stall and became a liability. Not because it degraded. Because the place stopped rewarding what it was built to do.

The autistic side runs the same way.

What a clinic files as “restricted interests” is, up close, an attention system that pours itself into one channel at a time, deeply (Murray et al., 2005).

Drop that into a loud, interrupting environment and it reads as rigidity and overwhelm. Give it one absorbing track and it becomes the ultimate flow that produces artists, musicians and explorers.

Same trait. Different place. Symptom or strength.

Share

Fed or Starved?

So, every environment does one of two things: feeds both halves of the AuDHD mind (and the paradox never shows up) or starves one to satisfy the other (and the civil war begins).

The trick is learning to read exactly which environment feeds both. Here are some examples I’ve noticed in my own life:

1. EXERCISE

For fifteen years I couldn’t keep a gym schedule. But consider what a gym actually is: a wall of mirrors, strip lighting, tons of people.

My autistic half spends the whole hour being perceived and sensorially hammered. My ADHD half goes comatose on the same eight machines by week three. Gyms overwhelm one half of me and bore the other at the same time. Both starved.

Cycling and surfing offer me magic.

The paddle-out is the same paddle-out. The road is the same road. And this offers the repeatable frame my autistic half trusts, alone and unwatched.

But every ride offers a different challenge. And every wave has a different shape.

Both halves of my mind are fed. And I exercise daily now. Not from discipline. Because the frame holds still while the contents move.

2. FOOD

I come from a family of cooks.

My dad and grandma taught me at the stove. But in my twenties I was the sad owner of a dark, cramped, cluttered kitchen. And I stopped cooking.

The layout and my lifestyle starved both halves of me.

My autistic half needs order it can see and control over the sensory load. My ADHD half needs everything in reach, so a task is possible to start.

Behind closed cabinets in my old kitchen, everything was out of sight. The tight, dark space also made the whole thing feel like dread. Today, my space is different.

I designed the kitchen to have open shelves, tons of hooks and lots of light. There’s room to move. I’ve got herbs growing on the sill and on the porch. My lifestyle now also favors slower evenings. The cook in me has come straight back.

3. CULTURE

The vibe of a place decides who lives there, which decides who you end up beside.

Land somewhere whose values aren’t yours and the masking never stops. But there’s a quieter mechanism underneath.

A place will force the internal war when it offers no spontaneity and no ritual (or only rituals you have to pay and schedule for).

Every place I’ve lived in ran that way. The connection had to be booked, and every friendship needed my wallet. Except Portugal.

People here simply drop by for a coffee, no plan required (my ADHD half, fed). And the daily rituals are free and repeatable: the evening walk, the park meet-up for a chat after work (my autistic half, home).

And I’ve noticed much of southern Europe and Latin America for example, runs on this culture of spontaneity and casual ritual.

The same test works on every place you spend time.

Work that lets you move, or a fluorescent desk that pins you down. A home full of light and open shelves, or a dim box of shut cupboards. People who bring steadiness and spark both, or a circle that only ever feeds one side.

You don’t have to fix them all. Just change one environment that favors both halves. You’ll notice your whole life starts to breathe.

The Paradox is a Social Myth

Notice who the myth protects.

If the world says your autism + ADHD are at war by nature, then no workplace has to change its layout. No city has to greenify. No relationship has to bend. You do all the adapting. You pay the whole bill.

Convenient, isn’t it?

And you’ve certainly felt this. Or know someone close who bears the weight of it.

It shows up as being called difficult and feeling stuck. But that same wiring, if even only for a moment, does know how to flow.

That moment in time is data. Environmental conditions that fed both the autistic and ADHD halves effortlessly.

— A.

Read the Research

Barack, D. L., Ludwig, V. U., Parodi, F., Ahmed, N., Brannon, E. M., Ramakrishnan, A., & Platt, M. L. (2024). Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 291 (2017), 20222584. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.2584

Eisenberg, D. T. A., Campbell, B., Gray, P. B., & Sorenson, M. D. (2008). Dopamine receptor genetic polymorphisms and body composition in undernourished pastoralists: An exploration of nutrition indices among nomadic and recently settled Ariaal men of northern Kenya. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 8, 173. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-8-173

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9 (2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398

He asked if I had any gardening credentials.

I said no.

He chuckled. Said sorry. And walked off.

So I went looking for a plant to buy and a quiet corner to cry in.

I ended up by a collection of Orchids. Stunned. I’d been reading about them. They’re among the oldest flowering plants on earth.

Then an old woman appeared by my side, with a train of cats behind her. “Do you like Orchids?”

Her white hair, floral summer dress and hemp sandals made me smile. Eighty if she was a day.

I told her I had recently become obsessed with them. And that I’d love to work somewhere like this to learn more.

She said, “Well, come with me.”

I followed her down the narrow path to a little hut where her granddaughter sat ordering stock.

“This lovely girl wants to work here,” she said. Her granddaughter looked up.

“Okay. When can you start?”

You can picture the man’s face the next morning, watching me water the greenhouse.

Subscribe now

Happy, Making Peanuts

For two years I worked at that garden center.

I loved every single minute of it.

And the rhythm around the work was its own quiet magic.

I’d wake early and water my own indoor jungle, coffee in hand. Write in my diary. Walk with my dog through the park. Cycle to work (10 km round trip). Swim or surf after work. And write before dinner.

I was regulated. My mood was stable. My energy was consistent.

And no one there knew.

No one knew I had two master’s degrees. No one knew I’d run a successful business. No one knew I was, on paper, wildly overqualified to be watering ferns.

And for two years, not even I cared.

Why the Garden Worked

It took me a long time, and a diagnosis I didn’t yet have, to understand what that job had quietly done.

Gardening is one of those rare, beautiful activities that offers the precise conditions AuDHD nervous systems need to function, meeting two sets of paradoxical demands simultaneously.

The autistic me got sameness. Predictability. And a workplace where I was not performing, being read, or assessed.

The ADHD me got movement. Air. Variety. A job that is never identical two days in a row.

We’re told our AuDHD minds are a paradox. Creating constant friction between opposing needs. But perhaps the paradox is only a problem because we try to fix it internally. The fix is external; in the environment.

A gardening environment offered me frictionless days, with:

• A rhythm I could count on + work that never repeated itself.

• Nature’s company + not a single face to read or perform for.

• Outer quiet + my hands and body in constant motion.

• One absorbing task at a time + a whole green space to roam.

These are supposed to be opposing needs. And in most environments, they are impossible to meet. But garden work met every one of them at once.

And this paradoxical resolution is something the autistic and ADHD mind rarely gets.

For a time, the Autism and ADHD co-occurrence was understood by stacking two paradoxical lists of needs. But living with both lists isn’t an impossible struggle when the environment naturally provides for both.

The autistic half explains why garden work steadied me. The ADHD half explains everything else.

Research on autistic burnout traces it to masking and environments that demand you suppress yourself to fit in. The exhaustion typically isn’t the job’s difficulty. It’s the cost of performing a version of yourself the room requires. Most jobs I’d held before working at the garden center had a performance cost.

A national study by Frances Kuo and Andrea Faber Taylor found that time spent in green, outdoor settings reduced ADHD symptoms, and the effect held across age, income, and severity.

Though their sample was children, and the study is from 2004, the mechanism it points to (attention restoring itself in natural settings) is documented in adults too.

This explains why an indoor, screen-bound, sit-still job will always starve our minds. And why outdoor, hands-on, nature-related work will feed them, effortlessly.

Share

Overqualified

I’d just come out of burnout and was finally at peace with who I was, what I was working on, and where I was living. And that’s when the comments started.

A family member. Then a friend.

“You can’t do this forever.”

“It’s a cute interim job.”

Little drops, here and there. And for about six months I let them in. And then, sadly, I started saying them myself.

I came to believe that building an identity around tending plants was a silly thing for a person with my résumé to do.

And one day, I quit.

Because my mind’s idea of potential started yelling louder than my body’s whisper of peace.

Nasturtium Wisdom

Nasturtiums are the plant most get wrong out of kindness.

You bring them home, you want them to flower, so you give them the good stuff: rich soil, fertiliser, everything you’d give any plant you love.

And they reward you with leaves. Big, lush, beautiful leaves. But almost no flowers.

Because Nasturtiums bloom in poor soil. Lean ground. The kind of conditions that look, to an outside eye, like deprivation.

Feed Nasturtiums too well, and the plant pours everything into foliage and forgets to flower. So, what looks like an upgrade is actually what takes the bloom away.

I let others “fix” my soil.

They looked at what I was capable of, where I was planted, and saw poverty and wasted potential. So they urged me toward richer ground.

I leafed out impressively. I also stopped flowering.

Not all plants are underachieving in “poor soil.” In fact, many depend on it.

“Poor soil” depends on who’s defining it.

Subscribe now

Making the Invisible, Visible

The lesson I arrived at is not to work at a garden centre. Garden work was the diagnostic, not the prescription.

Losing it wasn’t a failure of judgment. I see it now as the exact contrast I needed to read the data my body had been collecting.

Sometimes you have to lose an environment completely to understand how much heavy lifting it was doing all along.

So now I spend more time tending my own little indoor jungle. Mornings and weekends. Unpaid and untethered to any timecard. As a non-negotiable part of how I stay level. Not as my job. As nervous system regulation. As deliberate medicine.

And I notice, down to the day, that when my hands are in the dirt my focus sharpens, the static in my body goes quiet, and my mood holds level in a way nothing I was ever prescribed could match.

Miss a few days, and the executive dysfunction and the sensory friction come creeping back in.

The work isn’t to backtrack and reclaim the exact places that once “worked.” It’s to recognize those conditions, and incorporate them back into your life today.

And doing that often means fighting a very heavy narrative. Because the conditions that keep a neurodivergent nervous system level rarely look impressive from the outside.

Frequently, these conditions get read by society, the people who love us most, and eventually ourselves, as a lack of ambition, a waste of potential, or just a break from “real life.”

But once you know what your soil requires, your only job is to protect the lean ground.

Regulation is only ever felt in the body, so it’s easy to talk yourself out of it when the thing providing it isn’t glamorous or well paid.

But the soil that grows your best self never needs to apologize for looking like dirt. Not even to you.

— A.

Read the Research

Kuo, F. E., & Faber Taylor, A. (2004). A potential natural treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Evidence from a national study. American Journal of Public Health, 94 (9), 1580–1586. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.94.9.1580

Mantzalas, J., Richdale, A. L., Adikari, A., Lowe, J., & Dissanayake, C. (2022). What is autistic burnout? A thematic analysis of posts on two online platforms. Autism in Adulthood, 4 (1), 52–65. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2021.0021

“This doom and gloom routine, again?”

“Can you just focus, please?”

“Why are you always getting sick?”

“Sleeping pills might help…”

I held deeply internalized shame about these five specific “flaws” for most of my life.

It took moving through dozens of spaces in over half a dozen cities to first notice the thread linking these “defects.”

Then a lightbulb moment happened with my late Autism and ADHD diagnosis: I discovered that my kind of wiring needs light. Lots of it. Contrary to popular belief.

While a neurotypical body can coast on office lighting, autistic and ADHD nervous systems are strictly solar-powered.

When starved of raw light, we enter an invisible biological crisis, triggering 5 specific survival responses that we’ve spent a lifetime internalizing as character flaws.

Subscribe now

1. You think you’re lazy.

You sleep enough and you’re still exhausted.

The afternoon crash arrives like clockwork, and your motivation completely evaporates. And somewhere underneath that fatigue sits the quiet, shaming verdict: other people manage to push through this; I must just be lazy.

For years, I believed this.

Until I got a dog.

I’d walk him at sunrise, before work, for nearly an hour, whether I felt like it or not. And even in Toronto, with its thin, rationed light, those early walks did something to my energy.

I had more in the tank by noon than I’d had in years.

I assumed it was the exercise. It wasn’t.

It was the morning light hitting my eyes at the exact hour my body was waiting for it.

We completely underestimate the illusion of indoor brightness.

Standard office fluorescents or home lighting fixtures deliver about 300 to 500 lux (the measure of light intensity).

To your brain, that is near-total darkness.

A completely overcast, grey winter day outside still delivers 10,000 lux. Direct solar morning light delivers up to 100,000 lux.

You cannot trick an atypical circadian clock with a lightbulb. Autistic and ADHD brains are waiting for a tsunami of lux that a ceiling fixture simply cannot manufacture. 

A landmark study in 2013 by Arns and colleagues mapped ADHD prevalence against sunlight across dozens of regions and found that solar intensity accounted for a striking share of the variation.

This is because bright light drives dopamine production, and dopamine drives the baseline energy and executive function an ADHD brain runs on.

Later genetic reviews by Korman and colleagues in 2020 also found that common variations in core circadian "clock" genes are associated with ADHD symptoms and a strong pull toward eveningness (a biological tilt toward being a night-owl).

The autistic side has its own circadian story.

Disturbed sleep-wake patterns and abnormal melatonin profiles point to an impairment in the very timing system that's supposed to keep the body on schedule (Glickman, 2010).

And because light is the master cue that resets that clock each day, a system that's already struggling to stay synchronized has all the more riding on getting a strong morning signal.

Put both in one body (AuDHD) and you get a system that needs an incredibly powerful morning light signal that has become evermore difficult with our modern, indoor lifestyles.

What gets called "laziness" is often just a circadian clock trapped in a biological blackout. An engine waiting for a massive wave of morning light to trigger the dopamine it needs just to turn over.

2. You think you’re depressed.

Saddness every winter and a low, vibrating hum of something’s wrong that lifts, inexplicably, on the first bright day of spring.

Eventually, someone suggests seasonal depression, and you file it away as one more broken piece of your psyche to manage.

Depression is complex. And clinical depression doesn’t care if the sun is shining. But for a massive subset of us, what we call depression is actually a systemic slump tied to a changing axis of the earth.

As a kid, I was convinced I was only happy in the summertime. Then I took a few summer trips that quietly disproved this. Montreal. Frankfurt. Places with the same lukewarm skies as Toronto. And my mood took a hit.

It wasn’t a summertime high. It was a sunshine high.

Your brain’s serotonin production directly tracks the amount of bright light you get on a given day (Lambert et al., 2002). So winter doesn’t flatten our personality. The physical darkness does.

And for autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD brains, the hit lands twice: autistic serotonin signaling already runs atypically, and the ADHD dopamine system dims in low light at the exact same time.

Two of your primary neurochemicals, starved of the same environmental trigger, in the same dark season.

"Depression" is frequently just a predictable neurochemical drought. A state of involuntary hibernation where your primary mood pathways are waiting on sunlight for permission to switch on.

Share

3. You think you can’t focus.

You sit down to work, and your mind slides off the task like water off glass. You’re entirely convinced it’s a focus problem.

I didn’t understand the pattern related to my lack of focus until a semester abroad in the Czech Republic, where I was stuck in a shoebox dorm room with a tiny desk shoved against a blank, beige wall.

I couldn’t force my brain through a single paragraph. In desperation, I dragged the desk out onto a tiny east-facing balcony, into the raw spring light.

Undergrad was brutally hard for my ADHD brain, but out on that balcony, the impossible suddenly became possible. The light on my skin did something that willpower couldn’t.

Naturally, I forgot this lesson.

Nearly a decade later, I became the custodian of a very dark house. I built a beautiful indoor office (fancy desk, library, proper lighting), and I barely use it.

Instead, I work outside. Surrounded by plants, even through the rain and cold. Because time and again, outdoors is where the focus actually lives.

This isn’t a quirky design preference. It is measurable neurology.

A critical national study found that time in green, outdoor settings significantly reduced ADHD symptoms across every group tested, regardless of where they lived or their socioeconomic background.

And, that it was the setting itself doing the heavy lifting, not the activity (Kuo & Faber Taylor, 2004). Natural environments physically restore the neurological systems we drain during deep work.

Deep-focus brains burn through resources at a frantic pace, and they require a constant intake of raw light and greenscapes to rebuild their attention engines.

4. You think your body is fragile.

You’re the one who’s always catching something.

The seasonal cold. The stomach trouble. The sense that you’re built a little weaker than everyone else.

In my last year in Toronto, I had full bloodwork done. The biggest flag: severe vitamin D deficiency.

This was the first hard, numerical proof that my body’s need for sun wasn’t a whimsical preference.

Within a few weeks of supplementing high-dose D3, I felt like a different person.

I actually remember breaking down over my morning latte, not from sadness, but from the grief of why I hadn’t started taking Vitamin D3 sooner.

It wasn’t only my mood. I felt physically stronger.

Lo and behold, over the next few years, I stopped getting sick so frequently.

Vitamin D is a neuroregulatory hormone your skin manufactures from sunlight, and it directly governs immune function, systemic inflammation, and serotonin synthesis.

A comprehensive meta-analysis found that autistics have significantly lower vitamin D levels than non-autistic populations (Wang et al., 2021).

The complicated, systemic feedback loop of the AuDHD experience is that we need the most light, but our wiring wants to keep us in the dark. Because we get locked into intense hyperfocus loops indoors and forget that the sun exists. And because we get so sensory-overwhelmed by the executive-function friction of stepping out into the chaotic world, we choose the safety of our homes.

Our neurodivergence actively creates the isolated, indoor environment that starves our nervous system. The body that needs the most gets the least.

The physical "fragility" of an autistic and ADHD body is rarely an innate defect. It is a cruel environmental feedback loop that starves the endocrine system of the exact light-driven hormones it needs for protection.

5. You think you’re a bad sleeper.

Wired at midnight, wrecked by four in the morning.

You’ve tried the sleep playlists, the wind-down routines, and “screens off” by dinner, and your body still refuses to keep human hours.

You’ve concluded you’re a night owl.

For most of my life, my sleep schedule was off. I barely woke up rested. And I was proud to be a night owl.

About ten years ago, everything flipped. And the fix was entirely upstream.

Sleep doesn’t start at bedtime. It starts the moment morning light hits your eyes and sets an internal master timer that, fourteen to sixteen hours later, tells your body to release melatonin and shut down.

When we skip that morning signal, that timer never gets clicked.

You end up wired at the wrong end of the day and exhausted at the other.

Once the other four pieces of the light puzzle sort themselves out, sleep follows like the last domino.

There’s no such thing as a “bad sleeper.” Your internal clock is unanchored. Without a piercing morning dawn signal to hit the reset button, your melatonin timer is left running hours behind the rest of the world.

Share

The Under-Lit Life

It’s highly profitable to pathologize the person. To keep us locked in a self-improvement loop, buying small, commercial fixes for our personal flaws.

The productivity planner. The antidepressant. The supplement stack. The sleep app subscription.

After all, nobody profits from “you just need more sunlight.”

Light is not an aesthetic wellness choice for a neurodivergent brain. It is raw operational fuel. And most of us are trying to run our engines in the dark.

Maybe you know someone who spends every winter apologizing for being "so down"— always exhausted, always catching something, and certain their body is just fundamentally flawed

Tell them to check the light before they file it away as a character flaw.

Because once we see these struggles for what they are: a biological response to an under-lit life, the shame has nowhere left to stand.

— A.

Read the Research

Arns, M., van der Heijden, K. B., Arnold, L. E., & Kenemans, J. L. (2013). Geographic variation in the prevalence of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: The sunny perspective. Biological Psychiatry, 74(8), 585–590. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2013.02.010

Glickman, G. (2010). Circadian rhythms and sleep in children with autism. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 34(5), 755–768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.11.017

Korman, M., Palm, D., Uzoni, A., Faltraco, F., Tucha, O., Thome, J., & Coogan, A. N. (2020). ADHD 24/7: Circadian clock genes, chronotherapy and sleep/wake cycle insufficiencies in ADHD. The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, 21(3), 156–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/15622975.2018.1523565

Kuo, F. E., & Faber Taylor, A. (2004). A potential natural treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Evidence from a national study. American Journal of Public Health, 94(9), 1580–1586. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.94.9.1580

Lambert, G. W., Reid, C., Kaye, D. M., Jennings, G. L., & Esler, M. D. (2002). Effect of sunlight and season on serotonin turnover in the brain. The Lancet, 360 (9348), 1840–1842. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(02)11737-5

Wang, Z., Ding, R., & Wang, J. (2021). The Association between Vitamin D Status and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients, 13(1), 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13010086

I remember him saying I could apply for government disability. I remember thinking: disability?

I’d walked in convinced it was ADHD. Autism, I had no framework for.

He handed me the paperwork.

I swallowed the verdict and filed it away with the other things wrong with me.

Most of the people from my past had never been shy about convincing me the problem was me. There was evidence, after all.

I struggled where others were fine. I came apart when there was, visibly, nothing to come apart over. The conclusion wrote itself.

But, nearly a decade before my diagnosis, I ran a radical experiment on myself without knowing it.

I moved my nervous system from one set of environmental conditions to another: new work, new country, a new rhythm, and a different climate.

And after about a year of settling in, I was shocked to see many of my “problems” completely changed shape.

The executive dysfunction loosened. The emotional weather calmed. The distractibility thinned. The sensitivity started running my best work.

And for about six years, I was, by every functional measure, a person no clinician would have flagged.

It’s as if the pathology nearly disappeared because the environment no longer outstripped my brain’s natural style.

But three years ago, I changed my environmental conditions again. Unknowingly, for the worse.

My boyfriend and I moved to a remote part of the same country to take over a family project. And I simultaneously left the home, work, friendships, hobbies, climate, and micro-environments that had been quietly regulating my nervous system.

Lo and behold, many of the “problems” returned at full volume.

Ever since, I’ve been trying to understand how the same neurology can produce a disabling condition in one setting and dissolve almost entirely in another. And what then, a clinical diagnosis actually measures.

The answer doesn’t just expose a flaw in the system. It collapses the diagnostic framework from the inside out

Subscribe now

The Broken Math of the DSM-5

Every science worth the name obsesses over one thing before it trusts a number: the conditions under which the measurement was taken.

You don’t measure a fever right after a hot bath. You don’t weigh yourself on the moon and record it as your baseline mass.

Psychiatry is the one field that skips this constraint.

A person is typically assessed during a period of acute distress, in a sensory-hostile clinical room, after years in environments that were quietly grinding them down. And yet, the resulting diagnostic label is recorded as a permanent, intrinsic defect.

Psychiatry notices the environment only long enough to prove the individual is failing within it, then completely removes the setting from the final equation.

To admit that the setting alters the reading would crack the medical-authority posture the discipline is built on.

But the manual’s own data is screaming the answer.

Before releasing the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association ran field trials to see if two different doctors examining the same patient would actually agree on a diagnosis.

For common conditions like depression, the results were a disaster. By any historical scientific standard, the trials were an outright failure. But instead of fixing the broken manual, the leadership simply changed the grading scale.

They published a defense that lowered the passing threshold for the entire manual, rebranding a massive structural failure as acceptable “real-world” variation (Regier et al., 2013).

Dr. Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who chaired the DSM-IV task force, went public about this corporate expansion of psychiatry in his archived hub DSM5 in Distress and his book Saving Normal. He warned that lowering these systemic bars would lead to diagnostic hyper-inflation, turning normal human variance into psychiatric pathology.

This is where the modern conversation gets incredibly defensive.

The knee-jerk panic over “rising diagnoses” often insults the intelligence of the neurodivergent community. To be absolutely clear: the massive wave of late-diagnosed adults (particularly women like me who masked their way through a deeply male-biased clinical framework) is a real, necessary, and life-saving correction.

But the institutional scandal of the DSM-5 isn’t that the telescope is catching more people. It’s that the telescope is structurally blind to the weather.

Because the diagnostic criteria do not factor in environmental demands, the manual cannot distinguish between an internal biological deficit and an external breaking point.

It views a human life entirely in a vacuum.

This environmental blind spot is the real reason the system dissolves into chaos when forced into real-world clinical practice.

When the same person can leave two clinical offices with two entirely different verdicts based solely on when the ceiling fell in, the category isn’t measuring a fixed property of the individual. It is measuring the invisible volatility of the conditions.

The Somatic Bill

The clinical error likely wouldn’t matter as much if the traits in question shifted only slightly across settings. But they don’t shift slightly. They reverse.

When researchers asked ADHD adults how their environments shaped their symptoms, people described the same trait flipping between disability and strength based on occupational settings (Lasky et al., 2016).

The word hyperactive is context-dependent by definition.

A body that “can’t sit still” in a room built for sitting still is, on a stage, for example, simply a body in motion.

The behavior doesn’t change. Only the architecture does.

And the downstream cost of forcing that fit isn’t neutral.

Decades of research on “camouflaging” show it is reliably linked to chronic anxiety and clinical depression (Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019).

The illness we are measuring is frequently the toll of the mask, not the fault of the brain.

Changing the setting often removes the need to mask, so you remove the very metrics being recorded as pathology.

An Ancestral Engine in an Industrial Garage

A deeper layer turns this from a critique into a biology.

For years, the dominant model of vulnerability was simple: some people carry “risk” genes and temperaments, and bad environments harm them more. Diathesis-stress.

But when researchers actually tracked these “vulnerable” individuals, they found something the defect model couldn’t explain. The same individual who suffered most in harsh environments also thrived most in nurturing ones. Boyce and Ellis named them “Orchid” profiles.

In other words, sensitivity isn’t a one-directional flaw. It’s bidirectional responsiveness.

Unlike the hardier population majority ("Dandelions"), Orchids possess a nervous system designed to register conditions deeply, for worse and for better.

This isn’t just an observation from developmental psychology. It is anchored in our evolutionary architecture.

Landmark work in Neurocognitive Mismatch Theory argues that conditions like ADHD and autism are not intrinsic, internal failures, but “sociobiological mismatches” with our hyper-rigid economic structures.

Traits like rapid attentional shifting, high novelty-seeking, and intense sensory awareness were heavily preserved by natural selection because they were profoundly adaptive in fluid, high-movement ancestral communities.

They only turn into disabling pathologies when forced into the sedentary, abstract constraints of modern industrial civilization.

The market demands uniform sensory compliance and infinite delayed gratification from an organism built for dynamic, real-world engagement.

The crisis isn’t a design flaw in the brain. It’s an emergent friction born of an artificial ecosystem.

Measure an orchid in a desert, and you will record a struggling plant. Measure it in a rainforest, and you record a masterpiece.

A diagnostic system that only evaluates people in environments that are actively breaking them isn’t collecting objective data.

It is systematically recording the drought and blaming the seed.

The Cognitive Double Standard

The maddening part is that society has had this exact realization before. And we rebuilt the physical world around it.

The disability rights movement drew a historic line between impairment (a biological fact about a body) and disability (what happens when an environment refuses to accommodate that fact).

For example, a wheelchair user is independent in a building with ramps. They are disabled only when trapped by stairs.

We partially rebuilt our cities with ramps and automatic doors because we collectively agreed that disability lives in the interaction with the environment.

But for the nervous system, we have done the exact opposite.

We took a mismatched brain and a hostile setting, collapsed them into a single metric, called it a mental disorder, and located every single gram of it inside the person’s soul.

We built the ramp for the wheelchair and left the staircase standing for the mind.

Why?

Because diagnosing a person is highly profitable and convenient.

Diagnoses generate pharmaceutical prescriptions, billable insurance codes, and repeatable corporate appointments. Diagnosing environments, however, would require us to rebuild workplaces, schools, and systemic institutions.

One model forces a vulnerable individual to absorb the entire human cost. The other demands that institutions alter their structural assets.

The cultural lag isn’t a lack of scientific clarity. It is a misalignment of economic incentives.

Diagnosing “Place”

If human functioning is fundamentally a match between a nervous system and its conditions, then those conditions belong in the text of the diagnosis.

What our clinical manuals require is a diagnostic framework pointed directly at “place.” There are several types; below is an example for the workplace.

Environmental Pathology, Type 1: Workplace

Diagnostic Criteria (Minimum 3/5 Required):

1. Sustained fluorescent lighting six hours daily, with no natural-light alternative.

2. Open-plan acoustics with no dedicated retreat space.

3. Performance metrics that reward constant task-switching over depth.

4. Feedback structures with on-demand social calibration.

5. Decision-making authority concentrated where the actual work doesn’t happen.

Every single one of these criteria is objective, quantifiable, and backed by organizational research.

The only reason we do not pathologize these conditions is because we have normalized them.

We made the architecture the constant and the human soul the variable. But it has always been the other way around.

The Ghost Measurement

Somewhere in our lives, there is a memory of us working.

A specific stretch of time, a unique rhythm, an environment, a style of execution, or a collaborative relationship where what was later labeled a biological disorder simply wasn’t there. A setting where we were unmistakably, even if only briefly, well.

Most of us possess at least one of these memories. But we tend to dismiss it as a fluke or the fleeting relief of a holiday.

It is not a fluke.

It is a ghost measurement. A piece of data the clinical software filters out as noise.

To the diagnostic system, that memory is an invisible phantom. But to your body, it remains like a phantom limb. A vivid, aching proof of a whole self that still exists beneath all your survival strategies.

It is the orchid experiencing a native climate. And it remains the most critical clinical data you will ever hold about yourself.

Precisely because it is the one reading the machine was built to ignore.

— A.

Read the Research

Belsky, J., & Pluess, M. (2009). Beyond diathesis stress: Differential susceptibility to environmental influences. Psychological Bulletin, 135(6), 885–908. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017376

Boyce, W. T., & Ellis, B. J. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: I. An evolutionary-developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 271–301. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579405050145

Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(5), 1899–1911. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-03878-x

Frances, A. (2013). Saving normal: An insider’s revolt against out-of-control psychiatric diagnosis, DSM-5, big pharma, and the medicalization of ordinary life. William Morrow.

Kidwell, J. L. (2025). ADHD and autism in Neurocognitive Mismatch Theory: distinct neurodevelopmental incompatibilities with the market-based system. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1617192. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1617192

Lasky, A. K., et al. (2016). ADHD in context: Young adults' reports of the impact of occupational environment on the manifestation of ADHD. Social Science & Medicine, 161, 160-168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.06.003

Regier, D. A., Narrow, W. E., Clarke, D. E., Kraemer, H. C., Kuramoto, S. J., Kuhl, E. A., & Kupfer, D. J. (2013). DSM-5 field trials in the United States and Canada, Part II: Test-retest reliability of selected categorical diagnoses. American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(1), 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12070999

It wasn’t.

Even at ten years old, I could feel that I was being carried out of the one place my body had ever felt at ease, and back into the one where it didn’t.

As a kid, I flinched in the classroom and went queasy at the faintest chemical smell.

I was filed under difficult, and the thousand other euphemisms the inconvenienced invent for sensitivity.

But sensitivity has two settings. And most of us are only ever told about one.

Subscribe now

The Half We’re Shown

The half we’re shown is the cost. And it’s called overload.

We have almost no words for what the AuDHD nervous system produces when the place is right.

It registers light sifting through forest leaves at full volume.

In the right context, sensitivity is the exact raw material that produces artists, writers, gardeners, and dancers. The brain that is easily shattered by noise is the very same brain capable of capturing exquisite, subtle beauty.

It does not need to be cured. It needs to be curated.

And this gets left out of the sensitivity conversation.

The DSM describes what we look like when the environment is wrong. It has no language for what we look like when it’s right. We built an entire diagnostic system on our worst days and called it a definition.

It turns out the other half isn’t a poetic feeling. It’s in the research.

A Taste of Portugal

I remember the air smelling of salt, pine, and figs. The kaleidoscope of colors at the local market. The feeling of the golden sun on my skin.

Even as a child, I understood that this was the kind of environment my body needed. Operating in it wasn’t just effortless. It skyrocketed my energy, my creativity, my mood.

The part of me that flinched under fluorescents went quiet. The other part that couldn't begin a single task in the sterile indoor spaces became productive. Same body. Same sensitivity logic. The placement was the only thing that changed.

I’d wake up without an alarm. Do my chores and study Portuguese without being asked. Write profusely.

Back home, my body was locked in a permanent strike. I had to be begged, sometimes threatened, just to do the basics. My poor mother carried the weight of that friction.

Toronto’s grayscapes and increasingly artificial lifestyle left my autistic sensory channel nothing soft to land on, and the ADHD motivation channel nothing alive to reach for.

So when I got older, my body did exactly what these bodies do in the wrong place. It failed fast, and it failed visibly.

And everyone agreed I was the problem.

High Sensitivity, Higher Ceiling

After I was diagnosed AuDHD, I went looking for a framework that could explain the physics of my life. I found it. Funny enough, it's botanical.

In 2005, the developmental psychologists Thomas Boyce and Bruce Ellis published what’s now called the Orchid Hypothesis, formally biological sensitivity to context, later folded into differential susceptibility theory.

Most people, they argued, are dandelions: hardy and adaptable across a wide range of conditions. A smaller group, roughly one in five, are orchids: extremely sensitive and wired to react to their environment in both directions.

In poor conditions, an orchid individual does significantly worse than a dandelion. But in good conditions, they don’t merely catch up. They outperform everyone.

Sensitivity runs both ways.

You don’t get one without the other. The nervous system that registers wrongness acutely is the same one that registers rightness acutely. And that’s the half the standard mental-health story quietly drops.

It stops at the harm.

Sensitivity Is a Strategy, Not a Glitch

If sensitivity costs so much in the wrong place, why hasn’t it been bred out?

Because sensitivity isn’t a malfunction that persists by accident. It’s a strategy that keeps reappearing because it works.

Elaine Aron’s review of the evolutionary evidence found the same trait (roughly one in five, reactive to the environment in both directions) recurring in over a hundred other species.

The sensitive one is the sentinel. It reads the weather before the herd does, the tension in a room before it breaks, the shift in the landscape everyone else misses until it’s a crisis.

Every group needs some of its members running at full fidelity. It’s a critical role.

What Curation Needs

An orchid nervous system reads the world at full volume. But give an orchid a curated environment (noise stripped out, the right inputs let in) and the raw feed becomes material.

A brain that is easily shattered by noise is the very same brain capable of capturing exquisite, subtle beauty.

The tremble of light most people filter out is a painter’s entire palette.

The pattern-noise that overwhelms is a writer’s sentence rhythm.

A coder’s architecture, a naturalist’s map.

And this is not because suffering necessarily makes art. It’s because art is made of high-fidelity input. And only a curated nervous system can afford to keep the dial turned up.

Sensitivity doesn’t need to be cured. It needs to be curated.

Curation is what turns the signal from siege into craft.

The High-Fidelity Mic in a Loud Room

The Orchid Hypothesis describes high-reactivity nervous systems in general. It happens to describe the AuDHD brain on two separate channels.

1. The Autistic Channel Runs the Raw Signal

Most brains are prediction machines. Every fraction of a second, they model what input to expect and filter out whatever matches, so only the unexpected reaches awareness. That’s how a typical system survives the sheer volume of the world.

Pellicano and Burr proposed that autistic perception works with weaker top-down priors: the top-down model that usually pre-edits sensory data has less say over what gets through. So more of the raw signal arrives.

The Markrams’ Intense World Theory describes the underlying circuits as hyper-reactive and hyper-plastic (built for receptivity, not dampening).

So, the office fluorescent flicker your colleague stopped noticing years ago still lands on your system, every cycle. Asking it to stop is like asking a studio microphone to stop picking up sound. It's impossible.

That doesn’t mean it’s malfunctioning. It means it’s doing exactly what it was built to do.

What’s more, Tang and colleagues at Columbia found that autistic brains undergo far less synaptic pruning in childhood. By late childhood, typical brains had cleared roughly half the synapses in the brain regions studied; autistic brains had cleared about sixteen percent.

Meaning, more connections kept, more pathways live, more of the world arriving at once.

2. The ADHD Channel Adds the Dopamine Axis

Under-stimulation is to an ADHD system what sensory overload is to an autistic one: a real, physical wrongness.

But drop the same system into genuine interest, urgency, or autonomy, and it produces a depth of focus no dandelion can ever reach.

The wiring is the giveaway. The DRD4 7-repeat allele (one of the most-studied genetic associations with ADHD) is also one of the original plasticity genes the Orchid Hypothesis researchers built their theory on.

Carriers are measurably more shaped by their environment. For worse and for better.

And the AuDHD combination is structurally distinct. Charting more than four thousand brains, Bedford and colleagues found that the co-occurring AuDHD profile carries a unique structural signature that shows up in neither condition alone.

An orchid twice over, through AuDHD neurology.

We Are Not Sensitive to Everything

Orchid nervous systems are not sensitive to everything. They’re sensitive to mismatch.

This is also the thing most people get wrong about Orchid plants, too. Wrong humidity, wrong light, wrong airflow, and an orchid struggles dramatically.

They are not difficult. They’re specific.

So the work is paying ruthless attention to what specifically registers as wrongness. What registers as rightness. And, treating those readings as data instead of dismissing them as preference.

Interestingly, AuDHD wrongness is detected in one thing more reliably than anything else: artificialness.

Why the modern, indoor, manufactured world reads as wrong to AuDHD nervous systems, and why the outdoors reads as home, is a topic for next week’s newsletter. But for now, it’s enough to know the sensitivity isn’t random. It has a direction, and that direction is the tell.

We Are Not Meadow Plants

Notice who is served when your sensitivity gets filed as a personal defect.

It’s whoever would otherwise have to change the environment. The employer who’d rather you medicate to stay stable. The industry that sells you coping tools for a mismatch instead of naming the mismatch out loud.

A forest holds millions of species. Each one has its own needs. But somewhere along the way, we decided the whole world should run on dandelion logic.

So we built dandelion offices. Dandelion schools. Dandelion cities. Dandelion timelines for when we should be working, sleeping, socializing, and recovering.

To be clear, this landscape isn't actually healthy for the dandelions, either. They still get sick, burned out, and depressed by the modern grind. But their biology allows them to endure it far longer, which fuels the illusion that the system works. Orchids don't have that buffer.

They try to cure us in the meadow. But failing in the meadow is not the same thing as being broken. Because we are not meadow plants.

The cost of orchid individuals staying in the meadow has been paid in burnout, shame, and decades of trying to fix the wrong thing.

We can only borrow time in the meadow. Eventually, we have to find or build the rainforest.

— A.

Read the Research

Aron, E. N., Aron, A., & Jagiellowicz, J. (2012). Sensory processing sensitivity: A review in the light of the evolution of biological responsivity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(3), 262–282. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868311434213

Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2011). Differential susceptibility to rearing environment depending on dopamine-related genes: New evidence and a meta-analysis. Development and Psychopathology, 23(1), 39–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579410000635

Bedford, S. A., Lai, M.-C., Lombardo, M. V., et al. (2025). Brain-charting autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder reveals distinct and overlapping neurobiology. Biological Psychiatry, 97(5), 517–530. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2024.07.024

Belsky, J., Jonassaint, C., Pluess, M., Stanton, M., Brummett, B., & Williams, R. (2009). Vulnerability genes or plasticity genes? Molecular Psychiatry, 14(8), 746–754. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2009.44

Boyce, W. T., & Ellis, B. J. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: I. An evolutionary–developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 271–301. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579405050145

Ellis, B. J., Boyce, W. T., Belsky, J., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2011). Differential susceptibility to the environment: An evolutionary–neurodevelopmental theory. Development and Psychopathology, 23(1), 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579410000611

Markram, K., & Markram, H. (2010). The Intense World Theory — a unifying theory of the neurobiology of autism. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, 224. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00224

Pellicano, E., & Burr, D. (2012). When the world becomes ‘too real’: A Bayesian explanation of autistic perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(10), 504–510. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.08.009

Tang, G., Gudsnuk, K., Kuo, S.-H., et al. (2014). Loss of mTOR-dependent macroautophagy causes autistic-like synaptic pruning deficits. Neuron, 83(5), 1131–1143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.07.040

Subscribe now

Each sign below comes in two settings: the same nervous system, two opposite outcomes. You've likely experienced both halves at some point in your life. But which side represents your actual day-to-day right now?

Are you spending your daily energy fighting your environment, or is it refueling you?

Subscribe now

The Signs

1. Overhead fluorescents feel like a physical attack and actively drain your energy. Natural indirect daylight soothes and acts as a functional battery recharge.

2. Spaces with unpredictable noise drop your working memory to zero. In a quiet, acoustic sanctuary, your focus is absolute.

3. Dry indoor air gives you a physical urge to climb out of your skin. Near moving water or natural humidity, you’re comfortable in your body.

4. Concrete views put your nervous system in a constant state of low-grade panic. Visual connections to nature put you at ease.

5. Behind closed cabinet doors, out-of-sight items trigger executive paralysis. On highly visible, open shelving, you execute tasks seamlessly.

6. Monotonous, linear activities are physically impossible to initiate. High-interest, complex challenges lock you into hyper-focus.

7. Forced to sit at a desk all day, your brain falls asleep. In a workplace that permits dynamic movement, your mind sharpens.

8. In a crowd, your personality flattens. One-on-one, you’re fully, vibrantly articulate.

9. With NTs, you spend massive cognitive energy translating your thoughts. With NDs, the need for social translation drops away.

10. In some parts of the world, you are considered “too intense.” In other parts, your volume is just right.

11. On someone else’s rigid clock, your operational capacity is near zero. Working in intense, non-linear bursts, you are formidable.

12. Places governed by arbitrary, unspoken bureaucratic rules trigger intense Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). Places governed by transparent, logic-based systems feel safe.

13. In a car-dependent, asphalt-heavy suburban sprawl, you feel irritated. In a highly walkable, green-mapped neighborhood, you’re untroubled.

14. In a fast-paced, achievement-obsessed culture, you lag behind. In a relationship-driven, slower-paced culture, you’re just the right tempo.

15. In one setting, you sleep like a hunted, hyper-vigilant animal. In another, like an exhausted child, with no change to your workload or medication.

The second half of each sign (the version where you’re at ease, sharp, yourself) is not a lucky day. It’s you, in the right conditions for your AuDHD nervous system.

The first half is the location error. A misplanting — not a disorder.

The Silent Work

These signs are trying to guide us to spaces and places that match our needs.

We don’t have to fix every line on the list. We don’t have to win an argument with the world about whether we deserve accommodations.

The neurodiversity movement has spent years fighting to make hostile places 10% less hostile. That fight matters. But there is a faster, quieter power most of us forget we have: we can leave.

We can take our hyperfocus, our sensitivity, our loyalty, our depth, our care — and replant, elsewhere. Even if elsewhere is a micro-shift like changing furniture.

AuDHD minds are not high-maintenance. They are high-yield in the right conditions.

The work isn’t becoming someone who thrives in the wrong room. The work is finding the right room to thrive in.

Diagnose the Setting, Not the Soul

In psychology, “misplanting” has a name: person–environment fit.

A growing body of work argues that for neurodivergents, wellbeing depends less on fixing the individual and more on changing the conditions around them.

The diagnostics were late to this.

Sensory differences weren't classed as core to autism until 2013. Today, the diagnostic manual lists hyper- and hypo-reactivity to sensory input as a core criterion (American Psychiatric Association, 2022), and prevalence estimates run from roughly 60% to over 90%.

When an environment floods the nervous system, the body runs a continuous stress response that, sustained, tips directly into anxiety, shutdown, burnout, and chronic illness.

The ADHD evidence points the same way.

Researchers increasingly describe ADHD not as a fixed trait but as something deeply context-dependent.

In one study of 125 adults diagnosed as children, over half reported their symptoms were fundamentally influenced by their environment — easing in stimulating, self-directed work, and worsening in rigid, dull settings (Lasky et al., 2016). As the researchers put it, “a propensity toward distraction translates into dysfunctional behavior only in under-stimulating environments. In motivating contexts, distraction diminishes.”

The exact same trait reads as a disorder in one setting and pure drive in another.

The Social Evidence

This holds socially, too.

The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) reframes social difficulty not as a one-sided deficit but as a two-way mismatch between different neurotypes.

What’s more, autistics report more natural rapport, less masking, and a stronger sense of belonging with others wired like them (Crompton et al., 2020).

The framework is well-established for autism and still being consolidated for ADHD. But the core finding (that these nervous systems shift with their conditions) rests on solid ground.

There is a specific job, house design, social circle, culture and landscape where much of what you’ve been told is a problem with you, ceases to be a problem at all.

That’s not a life sentence. It’s an address change.

— A.

Read the Research

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

Lasky, A. K., Weisner, T. S., Jensen, P. S., Hinshaw, S. P., Hechtman, L., Arnold, L. E., Murray, D. W., & Swanson, J. M. (2016). ADHD in context: Young adults’ reports of the impact of occupational environment on the manifestation of ADHD. Social Science & Medicine, 161, 160–168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.06.003

Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V. M., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism, 24(7), 1704–1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008

Subscribe now

But the traditional talk-focused, emotional processing therapy format, with its clocked hour, and weekly cadence, has been mostly ineffective for AuDHD minds.

Nowadays, we have an interesting alternative.

The Session

Six months ago, I walked into my therapist’s office with a real problem.

For years, I’d been anxious around one specific friend — and only her. I’d done years of intentional work to move from an insecure attachment background into stable relational patterns.

My new life was full of secure, albeit a select few, connections. But around this one friend, I time-traveled. Back into the version of me who manufactured small crises just to be seen.

I knew the theory. Attachment styles are co-created. Secure-to-secure runs clean. Secure-to-anxious-avoidant grinds and burns.

I didn’t need to discover the problem. I needed help solving it. My therapist nodded.

She asked how I felt about it and I left more depleted than when I arrived.

Still frustrated when I got home, I sat down at my desk, and opened the chat interface where I do a lot of my real processing now.

I wrote out the situation (the friend, the time-travel, the feeling that my secure attachment evaporated with only her). I asked it to respond as a clinician, with peer-reviewed research to back any claim.

What unfolded was one of those processing bursts that carries on well into the night.

The synthesis wasn’t happening alone. I’d surface a finding, paste it in, ask what it meant for my situation. The chat would respond with the framework. I’d push back, ask the next question, pull another paper.

By midnight, I had names for what I’d been experiencing: extinction burst, attachment-style mismatch, regulatory capital, spillover effect.

In exchange for one evening and a cup of cold tea, I got total clarity on a problem I’d been circling for months and, more importantly, a solid action plan.

Most of my therapy sessions cost me frustrated afternoons with no resolution in sight, never mind the 100€ bill.

The mismatch wasn’t the therapist’s fault. But it also wasn’t mine. It was structural.

Subscribe now

Talk Therapy Architecture

Talk therapy wasn’t built to resolve. It was built to witness.

The therapy hour, open-ended exploratory dialogue, and multi-week cadence is designed to slow processing down and metabolize emotion incrementally, with a trained human holding the room.

That model fits NT nervous systems. It does not fit autistic, ADHD, or AuDHD nervous systems.

An autistic nervous system runs on monotropic attention (Murray, Lesser, & Lawson, 2005). Monotropic minds concentrate deeply on one thread at a time, intensely, until something coherent emerges.

The monotropic mind also focuses on resolution. So, stopping mid-thread isn’t a preference. It’s a structural mismatch with how the system finds rest.

An ADHD nervous system runs on interest-based attention. Volkow and colleagues’ established that the ADHD dopamine reward pathway under-activates for low-stimulation tasks and over-activates for engaging ones. Hyperfocused while interest is hot. No purchase on the topic once it cools.

An AuDHD nervous system runs both at once.

The monotropism wants to stay with the thread to resolution. The interest-based attention is hot only while the topic is hot. 

In a single therapy session, both engage hard, just as the timer runs out. By the next session, the autism is either past it or stuck in an unresolved knot, and the ADHD has no dopamine for the topic anymore.

That unresolved knot isn't rumination. It's a monotropic system still running its sequence, looping on incomplete data, waiting for the input the timer cut off.

This is a pure mismatch between nervous systems that process to resolution in concentrated bursts and a format that prevents resolution by design.

Built to Run in One Unbroken Arc

Before AI, I saw journaling as my real therapy.

Years of failed therapists drew me closer to my trusted journal. Not to vent — to think. I treated my journal almost like lab notes: observations on Monday, hypotheses by Friday, notes for psychological research to probe further.

Pennebaker and Beall’s 1986 expressive-writing research has shown for forty years that organizing chaotic experience into language reduces measurable physiological stress markers. The evidence base for journaling is settled.

I’d always do a lot of work prior to my therapy sessions so, they felt like presentations. I’d hand over my findings and want to know what to do next.

Most therapists were flustered. They wanted me to answer their questions about my feelings. Meanwhile, I was asking them questions about my conclusions.

Every single session would end without a path forward, and I’d go home to journal more. The page holds everything we pour into it.

To better understand the importance of “fit” in therapy for AuDHD minds, consider the germination of a seed.

A seed doesn’t germinate on a schedule you hand it. Once it starts, it runs its own sequence, continuously, to completion. Interrupt it midway, let it dry out between steps, and it doesn’t resume next Thursday where it left off. It rots, or stalls entirely.

Some processes in nature are built to run in one unbroken arc, and the cost of chopping them into intervals isn’t slower progress; it’s no progress.

The AuDHD processing burst is one of those arcs. The burst doesn’t book itself for next Thursday. The midnight spiral can’t wait twelve days.

What was missing was never the writing. It was something that could meet me inside the burst, the moment it arrived, and answer back.

Then AI arrived. And the two practices are now welded together.

The Journal That Talks Back

I built a therapy project inside a chat interface and began journaling there for my most pressing issues. I write the way I used to on the page but now the prompt running in the background answers as a seasoned clinician, with peer-reviewed research behind any claim it makes.

I write the situation. It writes back the science. I write the next thing. It writes back the framework. Some of my journal entries have become conversations, and the conversations arrive with citations.

For a nervous system whose natural drive is depth-to-resolution, the journal that talks back closes loops the silent page never could.

And the evidence is starting to catch up to the experience.

In March 2025, Heinz and colleagues at Dartmouth published the first randomized controlled trial of a generative AI therapy chatbot in NEJM AI. Across 210 adults with clinically significant depression, anxiety, or eating disorders, four weeks of access to Therabot produced symptom reductions with sizable effects.

Users also rated their alliance with the bot as comparable to a human therapist.

A 2024 meta-analysis had already shown AI chatbots reducing depression and anxiety at scale. And in August 2025, Allen Frances (the psychiatrist who chaired the DSM-IV Task Force) warned in the British Journal of Psychiatry that AI chatbots will soon dominate psychotherapy, adding that he often couldn’t tell whether the sessions he reviewed were run by machines or by experienced clinicians.

Since the start of my AI journaling, my slow, meditative page-sitting has become rarer. It was its own practice and I sometimes wonder what I’ve lost by diluting that ritual.

This approach also assumes things not everyone has: a private device, unmonitored time, the literacy to write yourself toward clarity, twenty spare dollars a month.

There is an access gap, and it tracks the same lines every other mental-health access gap does.

It also isn’t a replacement for trauma work or crisis care. It’s a fit for one specific thing: the daily processing burst, and the drive to resolve it (the thing the talk therapy hour was never shaped to catch).

Neurodivergent-Affirming Therapy

I had my fair share of failed therapy attempts before my diagnosis, so I haven't yet retested the waters with a neurodivergent-affirming therapist. But the early reports from those who have are worth paying attention to — and they point at something structural, not at any single method.

Catherine, a working autistic EMDR therapist writing , perfectly describes three key reasons why her own session with another autistic therapist worked:

1. There was no autistic backstory to explain.

2. The sensory environment was considered. w

3. When she fell into the hyper-connected rabbit hole that autistic, ADHD and AuDHD brains run, the therapist pulled her back to a single thread.

EMDR is one example of why a change in format can change everything.

The work isn't done by talking but through bilateral stimulation (eye movements, taps, alternating tones), while the client holds a memory in mind.

Fisher, van Diest, Leoni, and Spain (2022) surveyed 103 EMDR therapists about working with autistic clients and found broad consensus on a single point: memories do not need to be put into words.

Clients who struggle to read their own internal worlds (alexithymic clients, clients for whom "what are you feeling, and where" is the wrong opening question) can do trauma work in a way that talk therapy structurally can't reach.

Whatever the modality, the approaches that fit AuDHD nervous systems are the ones that stop demanding fluent emotional articulation as the price of entry.

Other “Rooms” Exist Now

When we look at the type of therapy that fits us, a pattern shows up.

EMDR skips words altogether. The journal that talks back lets us work in the language we’re more fluent in (analysis, not affect). Even the silent page asks nothing of us but thinking.

None of them demand the one thing talk therapy demands: that we translate a feeling we can’t reliably locate into spoken emotional language, on cue.

The deficit was never expression. It was being made to express the one thing we can’t, in the one way we can’t.

Mark Manson (who has sold over twenty million books) launched Purpose in December 2025, an AI mentor at twenty dollars a month. He’s careful to call it coaching, not therapy.

The industry will resist what comes next.

The shape of the objection (AI can’t replace human connection, the risks are unknown) is what every disrupted industry produces when its core revenue is threatened.

Some of the objections are legitimate and worth taking seriously.

AI isn’t built for psychosis, suicidality, or active trauma where a human in the room is the intervention. The privacy framework is a mess. The companies building these tools optimize for engagement, not safety. The crisis-care exception is real.

The rest is rent-seeking.

The “human connection cannot be replaced” argument vanishes when the connection in question is fifty paid minutes bi-weekly with a stranger who is, by structural necessity, two updates behind. And the appeal to training rings strange from a field that never had to prove this particular format works for neurodivergent nervous systems in the first place.

The talk-therapy hour is simply a product and AuDHD minds were never going to grow inside it. Thankfully, other rooms exist now.

— A.

Read the Research

Fisher, N., van Diest, C., Leoni, M., & Spain, D. (2022). Using EMDR with autistic individuals: A Delphi survey with EMDR therapists. Autism, 27(1), 43–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221080254

Frances, A. (2025). Warning: AI chatbots will soon dominate psychotherapy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 228(5), 474–478. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2025.10380

Heinz, M. V., Mackin, D. M., Trudeau, B. M., Bhattacharya, S., Wang, Y., Banta, H. A., Jewett, A. D., Salzhauer, A. J., Griffin, T. Z., & Jacobson, N. C. (2025). Randomized trial of a generative AI chatbot for mental health treatment. NEJM AI, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.1056/AIoa2400802

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398

Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and reactivation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.95.3.274

Volkow, N. D., Wang, G.-J., Newcorn, J. H., Kollins, S. H., Wigal, T. L., Telang, F., Fowler, J. S., Goldstein, R. Z., Klein, N., Logan, J., Wong, C., & Swanson, J. M. (2011). Motivation deficit in ADHD is associated with dysfunction of the dopamine reward pathway. Molecular Psychiatry, 16(11), 1147–1154. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2010.97

Zhong, W., Luo, J., & Zhang, H. (2024). The therapeutic effectiveness of artificial intelligence-based chatbots in alleviation of depressive and anxiety symptoms in short-course treatments: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 356, 459–469. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2024.04.057

Subscribe now