I have always hyperfocused to get anything done personally. I also switched to a collaborative headspace when the dynamics were lending the ability to remain engaged.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and visual processing LD at 25. But my life was getting harder and harder following just ADHD wisdom.
At 37, I concluded a comprehensive assessment confirming the missed ASD Level 1 that explained so much about my life.
I would forget to eat, and then I would crash and binge, but that was just until I learned I needed to mind what I eat, because a lot of food would actually trigger me. This can be due to sensory or metabolic differences.
There are a lot of adults, more so females, but even males, who learn to mask their autism, which can be co-morbid with ADHD, as it is the case for me.
At times, I will hyperfocus, but at times I cannot not break my focus when something that could be extremely subtle takes place in my environment which would almost be impossible for anyone to pick up on when they are too focused to notice those around them.
I am not saying this is the case for everyone, only that if I had gone with just what the doctors told me about myself, I would have ended up lost. This was an especially hard lesson to learn a bit late in the game, when everything in my life slowly fell to pieces and I ended up housebound since 2015.
With hyperfocusing, we always do it for a purpose, and that purpose can be to escape the purpose we don’t want to deal with, or the one we are not able to cope with, which was what I did between 2015 and 2019. I could not save myself from the system, and I needed to slowly learn more about myself, and the system, because everything I did left me in perpetual burnout.
If you are autistic and you hit the point of burnout, at least from what I learned so far, that is when our more fluid neuroplasticity kicks in for survival. It can end up debilitating, especially in today’s neuro-abrasive society when our mind starts to tap into aspects of our neurology that we are not used to, until it finds the right balance needed for harmony with our environment.
It turned out that in my case, most of the problems were in fact due to masked sensory differences that were causing me neurological and emotional trauma, and hyperfocusing was my only way to not be angry or complain.
Not complaining did not help, but complaining was not helping either, due to the differences in how I experience things, including pain, which left me with years of medical problems going missed by family, doctors, and everyone around me who found it easier to mistake their norms, or my difference thereof in the form of mental illness when they would hear me complain.
When my life fell to pieces, I hyperfocused to try to keep it together, until that left me in perpetual burnout, trying to cope with more of the same aspects of myself that were rejected by those around me since my childhood, until I was ravaged by endless layers of unresolved trauma, ie Complex PTSD.
Two years into my perpetual burnouts, in 2017, I discovered that I lost my ability to communicate with others, in writing, and in person, which I had started to overcome by hyperfocusing on Markout, my very own frictionless markdown-inspired renderer.
Somewhere in 2018, I was slowly starting to realize in retrospect, that my hyperfocusing was in fact not as mindless as I consciously thought. I was using Markout to retrain myself to articulate things, when no one in my world understood what was going on with me.
Since November 2019, I stopped hyperfocusing on code, I stopped going into my own mental sanctuary, and I opted instead to demand a sanctuary I and others like myself deserve as a human beings in a neurodiverse society. One where neurotypicality is merely one of many forms, not one that is arrogantly and ignorantly being coerced as we see today, in the ableist-first systematic dehumanization we all partake as a shared delusion we decree to be the civilized way.
This ableist culture is what leaves many neurodivergents invisible and forgotten. Those who are not illusioned or delusioned into thinking they are just lucky enough, when they are in fact traumatized and only lucky to be still able to mask it enough, to be their own worst enemy.
Those who burnout being coerced:
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To settle for the mediocrity of their own version pseudotypicality, because they never could fit into the mainstream of one-minded neurotypicality.
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To see their unique gifts lost to society, who finally learn to connect the dots, unconsciously, then consciously, to see society eroding only as a result of the varying forms of this same normalized audacity.
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To partake in the discrimination, even in how they and others may be acting when they themselves are fighting against the same, as if sacrificing the few was the forgone unspoken truth upon which societies must be built, if they are to endure.
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To buy into the mindless shortsighted selfishness, readily mistaken to be about survival, when it only ever leads to mutually assured desolation, as it leaves us with a society growingly being ravaged by nothing but fear and desperation.
When I used hyperfocusing as means to escape, it was due to a progressive and often co-occurring condition known as Alexithymia, where individuals lose touch with their emotions and feelings:
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This condition is what was commonly and mistakenly lumped into the mainstream stereotypical mischaracterizations of ASD, ADHD, and all other forms of neurodivergence, all while it applied to neurotypicals just the same, but manifested differently, and that too was still accepted in society, with all the damage it is ravaging in its wake.
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This condition is what left me readily promising what I honestly thought I should be able to deliver, instead of working on what was necessary to have delivered, and my mind ravaged in the disharmony, between my unconscious and conscious, in what was seemingly my own perpetual derail, when it was arguably so much more.
When I used hyperfocusing as means to escape, I was thinking I was just trying to work around the institutional prejudices and errors of the neurotypical looking-glass, but I was stuck trying to align with impossible aspects of my daily reality.
This is more or less the same hefty burden that every neurodivergent ends up trying to mask, sometimes even to narcissistic extremes, when we we are coerced to assume that others carry the same, that we:
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Mistake those and other burdens as our own.
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Displace the same and other burdens on others who suffer with less or more.
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Find it easier to deter away from thinking about all of that, with hyperfocusing, and with simple utterances of perseveration, until others start making that the problem, and we realize that the actual problem was that we were never safe.
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Then, forget that society is meant to be enabling, all while those who take it for granted enough get away with calling the gaps they don’t care for, the disability of those who do not fit their skewed definitions or norms.
As I started to turn things around, as I started to hyperfocus on what counts, as I started to unmask, I would not just utter words and phrases, I would sometimes utter sermons, all in the vacuum of my solitude (at least until COVID), and tomorrow it will be time to aim for more, to aim for what is fair, to aim for what is due, as long a journey as it takes.
If you hyperfocus, you may be ADHD, you may be ASD, both, or something completely separate. In all cases, you want to become more informed to know which one applies best to how you function, not just rely on self-report and subjective opinions of some doctor(s).
If you are interested, you can read more in Hyperfocus & distractions on embraceasd.com along with the collection of articles authored by adults on the spectrum, mostly late-diagnosed, aiming to correct the skews in the narrative that was once arrogantly coerced only by those who failed to mind skews of their own.
