In today's episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on my everyday experience being AuDHD (Autistic and ADHD). I share how trapped I feel in this body, how overwhelmed I am by my own mind, and how masking & giftedness play a role in it all.

Discovery resources for you:
🎙️ Free audiotraining: https://www.livlabelfree.com/free-audiotraining
✨ Existential Autistic Membership: https://www.livlabelfree.com/membership
💗 1-1 Coaching: https://www.livlabelfree.com/coaching
📚 Neurodiversity-Affirming Books: https://livlabelfreebooks.com

Mentioned episodes:
Second Puberty & Feeling Trapped in a Body https://youtu.be/xKygJ1lExJg
Are Eating Disorders a Form of Autistic Masking? https://youtu.be/6uvYhhN3Bzk
Existential Nausea (go on a walk with me!) https://youtu.be/cSbmVDWHHQs

Episode transcript:
Hello my friend and welcome back to the next installment of the Dopamine Diaries, AKA we’re continuing our conversation on ADHD! Because if you listened to the previous motherfucker of an episode on the relationship between autism, ADHD, and anorexia, you know that I’m all about being comprehensive. Because I am a DEEP learner. When I learn, I LEARN. I want to know everything there is to know about the topic I’m interested in. Which is of course why school was so hard for me, why I was quietly dying inside with my perfect grades and constant studying but struggling to keep up with it all because there was never enough time to truly go deep into the material. 

And while I had SO many questions, a huge part of masking for me was hiding my curiosity. I was SO afraid of not being liked and of people thinking I was not smart enough, that I didn’t ask questions and just tried to figure everything out on my own. Of course, this can make you feel very lonely, because you’re constantly trying to suppress everything that you are. And while I feel like I’m just going off on a tangent here in sharing how I’m a deep & independent learner and how I grew up masking my curious self, I actually do feel this is super relevant to today’s topic. Because in the last episode I was really focused on the restrictive eating disorder manifestation of ADHD traits, but today I want to pull back the curtain on my personal life and talk about my everyday experience of being an AuDHDer, which is of course the combination of Autism and ADHD. I’ve got SOOO much to say so this is enough of an intro, time to dive in!

Okay so where shall we start? Let’s just start at the beginning, I mean that just makes sense, right?

But you don’t look like you have ADHD!

Well for any of you that know my story and perhaps have read my memoir Rainbow Girl, you know I was the “good girl.” I was the star athlete in all my sports, I got good grades, I was one of the favorite students of all my teachers, and well, from the outside, my life was quite perfect! My middle sister Mae, by contrast, was the troublemaker. She was always losing her homework, going to the principal’s office for not listening to the teacher, and she would make us late for everything. The apparent contrast between me and her could not have been greater.

This is why, when I started exploring ADHD for myself after being in the neurodivergent community for a few years after my autism discovery in 2020, my whole family said I *couldn’t* have ADHD. Because whereas my sister would start school assignments past midnight on the due date, I would start 3 weeks in advance to give myself a “buffer” because you know, just in case anything goes wrong. I never misplaced things and I got straight A’s, so how could I claim I had difficulty focusing? Well, I hope you realize I’m being sarcastic because these are precisely the myths that often cause ADHD people to go undiagnosed, especially when autism is also present. Because the thing is that ADHD will present differently in an AuDHD person.

For me personally – and it’s actually funny saying this out loud because we often talk about masking in the context of hiding our autism – but I believe that my autism masks my ADHD. And the most prominent way in which this shows up in my life is that my autism has routines that make up for my ADHD challenges. To give a concrete example, there’s the stereotype of ADHD people always losing their keys. Well for me, it’s not that I’ve never lost my keys or always lose my keys or in the grand scheme of things can never find anything, it’s that my autism has routines to always put everything back in the same place. Or to get even more specific, my autism is really good at finding patterns. So if I notice I’ve lost my keys three times in a week, my pattern-seeking-brain will go “Oh no, this has happened three times already! We better create a routine around the keys to prevent further mishaps.”

This is why autistic traits are inherently adaptive; because in this example, it’s not that we’re being “rigid” about where we’re placing something, it’s that it probably makes us anxious to do something different every time because then you naturally increase the chances that something could go wrong AGAIN! Speaking of anxiety, nothing makes me more anxious than time pressure. When I was growing up, my family was always rushing, and we were always late to everything (and just to be fair to Mae, this wasn’t only because of her. My mother and father are also ADHD). I despised this so much because I was always ready to go way in advance, and in retrospect, even this seemingly insignificant aspect of our family dynamics could have been part of my feeling like I had no control, which is of course where the eating disorder so conveniently came in. I couldn’t control what people thought of me and I couldn’t control whether we’d be on time, but I could control what I ate and how I moved. Going back to not being able to handle time pressure, this is again where my autism is super adaptive. Because I don’t want to rush, my autism ensures I always have a buffer to be way on time, or as we say it in Dutch, “ruim op tijd” which literally translates to “roomily on time” (yes, I totally just made up the word “roomily” for the sake of a precise translation!).

From this perspective, I have often wondered whether someone who presents as autistic and ADHD can even be labeled with the simple amalgamation “AuDHD” – because our experience goes way beyond “pure autism” plus “pure ADHD.” I don’t solely resonate with either label, meaning I feel like it’s almost a unique condition, or rather, a unique way of being. And maybe it’s just me, but don’t you feel that merging two existing conditions – or again, two ways of being – misses the point entirely? Because the point is to represent a unique human being? Anyways, here I go again with my semantic rabbit holes and this is why I always come back to liv label free. Because the truth is, no matter what we call anything, words can never even begin to encompass the complexity of the energy that has coalesced to create the unique human that is you.

And as I’ve said before on this podcast and in my books, I’m not against labels. It’s all about the intention behind the label. For example, the label “anorexic” or “disordered” is not helpful because you’re essentially intertwining someone’s identity with something that is not a core part of their being. However, when I use the terms autism, ADHD, and AuDHD to explain my experience so I can connect with you, well now the labels are serving a really important function, right? That being said, this is actually a perfect transition into the next thing I want to discuss which is what I like to call the autism vs ADHD battle.

The Autism vs ADHD Battle

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt an internal tug-of-war. My autism craves safety, predictability, routines, and stillness. But my ADHD constantly wants the complete opposite. My ADHD is constantly chasing movement. It wants novelty, which, for me, looks like NEVER being satisfied with what I’m doing. When I’m walking, I want to be writing. When I’m writing, I want to be biking. When I’m biking, I want to be eating. But when I’m eating, I want to be writing! For me, this is where the existential claustrophobia comes in – which, on previous podcasts, I defined as the acute awareness of being a boundless creative that’s confined by the limitations of physical reality.

Because I want to do so much and I want to do it all at once, realizing that I can’t actually do multiple things at once AND that this body I inhabit has limits to how much it can do at all causes me to feel really claustrophobic in this human body costume. I literally cannot handle being bored because in moments of stillness, my soul feels like it’s pressing against my physical skin which is obviously so painful. But I think the most painful realization for me is the innate sense of my soul being pure energy – so the concept, dream, vision, soul experience, whatever we’re gonna call it – of being able to create and move and flow all at the same time does not match the physical laws. I know that’s kind of abstract, so what I mean by this, is that in my dreams (or rather, in my soul sense, if you know what I mean, like the part of me that is not bound by physical constraints) that part of me is most creative and writes best when I am running at the speed of light. My most creative ideas come when I’m working out, which has so of