Shedding skin (will I ever shut up about neurodiversity?)

I’ve often gone through these cycles; I’ll get restless and bored and seek and find a new focus. My cycle of obsessions are often observationally subtle; going through different fashion trends, binge watching specific types of shows I’ve become obsessed with or bingeing everything a certain actor has been in, I’ll deep dive into YouTube rabbit holes researching “how to find your body shape” to find the perfect style for me or go mad on Pinterest looking at a haircut or colour I want (but likely won’t dare try)… I’ve always got something I’m keen to verbally vomit onto you if you bring the topic up. My restless obsessions and hyperactivity tend to be VERY internal and unseen much by others, but in classic introvert style if I get on the right topic with people I trust and have opened up to, then I literally won’t shut up.

Yet occasionally, I will find myself feeling an obsession slip away from me without a new one on the horizon and I’ll feel strangely empty, and the restlessness feels so much more unbearable.

Lately I’ve been feeling this feeling surge within me, it’s like craving a meal but not knowing what it is you crave, resulting in a stagnant emptiness in the pit of your stomach that leaves you in an unexplainable bad mood. 

But on top of those feelings I’ve also been stressed at work. I have spent years feeling like the title of dyslexia didn’t fully describe all my weirdness and wondering why I had ongoing struggles that were centred around time blindness, poor memory, and procrastination, more than my phonetically difficulties and my information processing difficulties - after all, I’ve spent years developing the perfect systems to manage and compensate for my dyslexia. But still I was going through these cycles where all my coping strategies would just fail, where I’d become obsessed with a new organising method until the novelty wore off, then my progress would unravel and I’d be left feeling deflated and my thoughts echo with feelings of never being good enough.

I’ve only had three OT jobs in my career now, but I still already see the pattern - when the challenge disappears, the novelty wears off, and workload increases, but there is an expectation for me being well versed in the role with consistent results - yet I’m repeatedly overwhelmed with the workload and behind on paperwork. Stuck in an endless cycle of being amazing until suddenly I’m even less than my average, and feeling so defeated that I just want to leave. The first job was 4.5 years, the second job was 2.5 years. I loved each job for various reasons but ultimately left because I felt the role and the environment didn’t support my dyslexia and neurodiversity anymore. This job is much more supportive but I still feel the cycle repeating... 

It’s hard for anyone to speak out against a previous employer and that is not the intention of these comments, so I will simply clarify that my perspective of my experience is just that - my experience. The difficulty with being neurodivergent is that (as the word indicates) we think differently. My experience of communication, my experience on being given instructions, my experience of rules - it’s all different to how a neurotypical person is likely to experience it. Alongside those cognitive differences, I will also have to contend with the more commonly experienced personality differences. It is inevitable that within our lives we will experience miscommunication and disagreement with peers and superiors, but as a neurodiverse person I have to add an extra layer of interpretation onto that to sift through - the hidden meanings of words and instructions that don’t translate to my language?! It just feels like I am being set up to repeat doomed failures and mishaps through these mistranslations. 

I may use the analogy of my neurodiversity being like a different language, similar to how we use the expression ‘now, you’re speaking my language’, but it couldn’t be a more appropriate analogy. I have spoken with several people in my life who have English as a second language and I’ve always felt some empathy for their difficulties with how stupid our language is (so many words spelt so similarly, or spelt non-phonetically or words that have multiple meaning or meanings that have multiple words), but I recall a specific conversation with a non-native speaker that I was getting close to and learning more about on deeper levels, when they described in much more detail about how difficult it is to have thoughts in one language, to then translate them to another and then to try to speak with a tongue that doesn’t want to move in that way. They went on to explain various other difficulties language barriers they have, and inside I remember feeling heard by him and also confused by how relatable his experience was. I realised that my dyslexia makes it so that my own native language feels like it’s a second language for me when I communicate with others. I stumble on words, misremember their meaning, will incorrectly use words or mispronounce them (with an extra helping of my mild speech impediment often contributing to this). And with my ongoing self discovery of my more ADHD traits I realise this neurotypical dominated society speaks a very different language to me; while I understand most of the words I struggle to fully understand the meaning of what a lot of neurotypical people are saying.

The foundations of my cognition and the hardwiring of my brain set me up for these reoccurring difficulties at work. I will struggle to understand instructions and information like English is my second language and I will seek support, only to face a further difficulty in not being able to translate those difficulties into a language they understand. Thus I find myself repeating myself as I explain how I literally cannot overcoming my difficulties with neurodiversity and how no matter how hard I try the suggestions they make its just not going to work for me - I can't out-logic the problems I have with interest, focus and time awareness. 

Even right now as I’m taking my time typing these words, I am struggling to source the words that correctly portray the situation I’m trying to describe.

I am frustrated with myself for the lack of progress I feel I make in life; for the repeated mistakes, for the idiotically defiant side of me that passionately hates being forced to do things that I don't like or that don’t make logical sense to me, while also desperately needing to be spoon fed instructions step by step repeatedly, as I still haven’t learnt how to do said task. Logically, I question if I need to find a job role that is less complicated and has less steps and processes (i.e. less paperwork), but in my gut I know that I will be bored easily in such roles, or I’d have to resort to roles that have other undesirable aspects, such as the world’s most uncomfortable uniform ever, or being so fast paced that I cannot think on the spot or retain enough information in my working memory and consequently I become prone to making silly mistakes. 

These frustrations in my current work role and the ongoing workload and time management difficulties I’m stuck in at present, are making me understandably stressed. And in turn this stress makes me avoidant and crave more interesting and novel things - desperately seeking some escapism. 

Usually I can push through a day masking myself to fit into the neurotypical world knowing I can go home to embrace my current neurodivergent obsession (playing make belief about X, Y or Z in my head usually). But this recently surging emotion within me that I mentioned at the beginning, is amplifying my need and desire for a new obsession - and this surging emotion is none other than dread and fear. It is ‘dread’ as I feel myself on the cusp of losing interest even in my obsessions, with no hope of a new obsession on the horizon. And it is a ‘fear’ that I will not know who I am or like who I am without that obsession.

I have lived all my life inside my own little world in my head, playing side characters to other character’s stories or accidentally becoming a main character, but that’s all it has ever been - in my head. It’s not real. It’s not the reality you all know. I know it’s not real too (I am fully aware it’s just a daydream and do not struggle differentiating between what happens in reality and what I dream up).

I can live in reality, I can mask my diversity and fit in, so long as I know I have this little world to escape to at the end of the day or in the moments passing in between interactions during the day. Yet a few times in my life I have encountered this exact dread and fear, as I enter an existential crisis, when I suddenly think to myself how this ‘day dreaming’ isn’t real and that I ought to ‘end it’, like it’s a bad habit I can quit.

I touched on this topic in my recent youtube video, where I admitted 'publicly' for the first time that I do this daydreaming and playing make belief, and I talked about how I used to think I was mad and that I would end up being sectioned if I admitted it to anyone. I thought that I was broken, but I also know after deep diving into the knowledge of neurodiversity that this is, in fact, normal and a common trait amongst ADHDers and autistics. Yet I still find myself saying to myself “shut up, and stop this now. Grow up. Stop playing make belief. THIS isn’t real. And this will NEVER happen to you in reality. If you keep indulging in this daydream how will you ever live with anyone? How will you ever admit this and be able to fall in love and marry someone? Who would live and love and marry someone who pretends to be in love or fighting with/against with fictional characters in their head?” 

Logically I’ve always know it isn’t real, but a few times in life I will say that to myself and the words hold deeper meaning, 

"This isn't real". 

These words weigh me down like anchors tied to my feet and I try to swim to the surface of an ever darkening ocean. If I let go of the daydream my world darkens, but if keep indulging in it at some point will reality actually slip away from me? Will I actually break and the boundary between what is real and what isn’t will blur? Will I become delusional and clinically obsessed with people or topics to the point of being a danger to myself or others? Am I already on that path and totally in need of a shit ton of therapy? Is this even a thing that therapy can undo?

Is it even a thing I want to undo?

Maybe I want to fall into the alternate reality in my head forever. Maybe this is how I am reborn? By dying in reality a living as a robot/zombie and only ever feeling alive when I dive into the alternate reality. OR maybe I just need a new hobby and focus that’s within reality like how I felt when I started YouTube, so the indulgence in the daydream is simply reduced in frequency, but I don’t have to let go of this comfort blanket I’ve known since childhood.

So many maybes and so many more questions, but in amongst all this I need to find the theme, to find my next steps, to find the feelings and the words that can help me to write some sort of conclusion to this particular chapter of my self discovery and life. I guess until I can do that I wi remain stuck here in the cycle, spinning out of control while simultaneously growing more stagnant each day with my lack of growth and change.