Forgetting You're Neurodivergent
and how it's helpful to have people in your life who remember
I am at the nail bar having gel nails done. They last a long time so I don’t have to be distracted by chips in my nail varnish. And give me a stimmy hit of colour. Blue in this instance because I’m going somewhere with blue sky and blue sea even though it’s not summer. As she files my nails I internally clench. It feels like the skin around my nails is being rubbed off with sandpaper and its resonating into every cell of my body. But soon it will stop. And I’ve worked out that most people don’t feel like this when they’re getting their nails filed. But this nail technician is observant. Maybe she can feel the tensing in my fingers as they rest against hers. Maybe my face gives more away than I think. “Does it hurt?” she asks. “I just have sensitive skin” I say. This is an instance, one of many. where I think that saying “It’s one of my neurodivergent sensory sensitivities” isn’t going to add anything to our interaction. In the past I’ve sometimes said in nail appointments: “My skin’s quite sensitive, please could you try not to touch it with the file?” but it makes me feel a wimp, and the whole process then takes longer anyway.
A few days later, I am in the security queue at the airport waiting to go through one of those new scanners where you stand in front of a body outline while your bags are going though a machine that looks like a space shuttle. Distracted by the palaver of putting my bags into boxes and manoeuvring them onto the conveyor belt, I don’t see what happens as other people go through the body scanner. For a second I feel a stab of panic as I stand where I’m told. Will it flash? Will it beep? I tense. Nothing happens and I look to my left questioning what to do next. I work out that one of the security guards is motioning me forward with their hands, then one of them is patting the top half of my body down as I prickle in shock, then is nodding, I can go. “Don’t you have to ask people if you can touch them?” I think, disorientated by the multitude of non verbal signals I’ve just managed to read and the instructions that are not conveyed on a sign or in any words. Later I will wonder if they would have given me warning they were going to touch me if I’ been wearing a sunflower “invisible disability” lanyard. Last time I was at an airport I thought I should wear one at airports. And the time before that. But when I’m packing, I’m just thinking about what I needed to take for swimming, what I needed to take for writing and how I could fit it all into a medium sized rucksack.
I wasn’t packing as an autistic or ADHD person. I was packing as a writer and a swimmer. A lot of the time those AUDHD parts of my identity are ones I only need to name when I’m encountering the outside world and other people. But I think I need to be more aware. I already have a sort of double-consciousness. The one that many of us late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults must have. Not the imposter syndrome one (“Am I autistic enough?”) that is a thing for so many of us. But the double-seeing where we are simultaneously our developing neurodivergent selves, but are also still the masked selves that we previously were. The ones who were just making a fuss, or determinedly not making a fuss, about the things that were too loud or hard or confusing or chaotic. Actually, as I write that, I realise it is a triple-consciousness and a triple-seeing because much as neurodivergence permeates all of our experiences of life and the world, it’s not necessarily how we see ourselves to ourselves. So sometimes we just-forget.
The day before I set off, my autistic friend had asked about my trip and about how I feel in airports and airplanes (and I knew she meant- AuDHD-wise). I said I’m mostly okay except when either of them get crowded. (So it proved when I happily passed the flight amid the muffling white noise of engine throbbing but felt a rising of panic when we landed and everybody stood up at once and there was what felt like a tsunami of babble and the doors were still shut. Then we, and my panic were released as the doors opened). I also told my friend I was feeling quite disorientated and out of sorts, even though I didn’t think I was anxious. But despite seeing myself as someone who enjoys travelling, they’re always short trips. Two or three nights with home in easy reach in time and space. Five at the most. This is to be for two weeks. Far away. The next day when she wished me a good trip I said I was now feeling surprisingly okay as I did my last-minute packing and she said it sounded like it had been apprehension the day before- the feeling that arises before something happens but dissipates once you’re immersed in it. It was helpful that “noticing and naming” of a feeling she was able to do with me and that I’d been too busy running round finding swimming earplugs and spare notebooks to actually engage in. It was also useful that she asked about the trip the AuDHD me was taking. Not just the writer or the swimmer me. Our identities are formed relationally with others. Our social identities develop in tune with our earliest caregivers and then the wider interactions we have with those around us. For late-diagnosed neurodivergent people, those parts of our identity are still developing in expression and awareness and it can be healing and powerful to sometimes have them “held” for us by other people who recognise and care for those parts of ourselves.
It’s not that other people don’t sense them anyway. Like the nail technician, they might well feel the clenching or tremor or tension as some part of us encounters them. (Maybe airplane security guards do as well, though they’re trained to to care ). Which is where it’s difficult. Because “noticing and naming” is good for our self-understanding but might be confusing for others in a world where there is still so much misunderstanding, stigma and prejudice about what these labels and identities actually mean. Here then to those people in our lives we trust enough to notice and name things with, who can be a third space between the constructions of “Neurodivergent self” and “Masked self” and help unfurl and unfold this interesting and challenging process where simultaneously of us, and none of us, fits the labels we might have.
Hi Kate thank you for describing the complex experience I have when travelling but hadn't been able to articulate in such detail. I've just come back from a month long trip to India where I packed as a writer and adventurer but also as a late diagnosed woman who ‘needs’ certain items in my daily life to fulfill routines and the end result was a ridiculous amount of planning and anxiety inducing to-do lists - yes I did take my own smoothie maker to the Himalayas 😂 I take longer trips as it takes me so long to assimilate to new surroundings and calm my nervous system after the airport and flying (it took 13 days this time) that I don't feel like I've had a holiday unless I can have a few settled days in the place I so desperately want to explore and enjoy. Of course, taking such lengthy trips means I can’t have many and they take months to prepare. I idenitify with everything you describe and particularly that moment when everyone stands up on the plane frantically trying to get their overhead luggage and the cabin doors are still closed - it’s a tension I find extremely hard to tolerate! Thank you so much for sharing 😊
Thank you for this. I’ve had the hardest time since I realized I was masking, and in recent days I’ve found it so exhausting. My husband is the person I mask around the least, and he has been so kind and patient while I navigate this late diagnosis. I’m still learning about myself and my brain, and I don’t think I am autistic but my ADHD definitely comes with sensory issues I didn’t realize impacted me as much as they do.