Sometimes I think fitting into the world around me is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. At least the social situations. Each community has a different image, and then within that community each person has different amounts of the puzzle.
A neurotypical person not only has the box with the picture on it, they have all the pieces and enough space to sort by colours etc. By the time they reach adulthood they might not have all the pieces in place, but they have enough of them that they are able to get by pretty easily. They get help filling in the gaps, and by the time they reach 30 or so they have a completed puzzle and are starting to help their kids complete puzzles.
Different types of neurodiversity are like different challenges to doing the puzzle. ADHD, depending on your severity, is like having seen the picture on the box when you were given the puzzle, but now the box has been thrown away and you are working from memory. If your ADHD is really bad you might add colour blindness. Not only are you working to build a picture you briefly saw in childhood, you are doing so knowing that some of these pieces which look identical are actually different colours.
Autism is simply not having been given all the puzzle pieces. If you have good support as a child you will be able to start collecting the pieces. Every time someone re-frames the world in a way that finally makes sense to you, they give you a few more pieces to the puzzle. Where they all fit in is up to you, but hopefully they will give you related ones. It is incredibly frustrating being able to see the shape that you should be trying to build, but knowing that there is no way you have enough pieces to put it together. It is one of the greatest kindnesses one person can show to another to open their eyes to a new way of seeing the world, or explain what the expectation in a situation really is.
I won’t take this metaphor too much further except to point out that the intersection of autism and ADHD (AuDHD) can have big consequences. Now you are building a puzzle from memory, with pieces you can’t tell apart, knowing that you don’t have all of them. Are we surprised when we struggle to build the picture?
I can take it further and explain that media (social and traditional) give a distorted snapshot of what the picture on the box should be. Sometimes so distorted that it is entirely removed from reality. If we’re not aware of the distortion, we can find ourselves trying to build the wrong puzzle. So, if I, on the other side of thirty, seem like I am still figuring out how all this works, please offer me some puzzle pieces.
I lost track of the box with the picture on it years ago, and my mind is filled with so much other adult admin that I have to deprioritise remembering what it looked like. Add to that, I don’t actually know which pieces I am missing until you offer them to me. So if I seem distracted, distant, or just vague. That might be why. I do my best to avoid being rude, but I can come across incredibly odd.
These musings are based on my own experience. People will experience all of this differently, even within the narrow band I have described here. That’s okay.
Pippa Hillebrand 