Sometimes Success is the Symptom
In my mid 30’s I told my therapist something I’d never told anyone, that I was falling apart and while that wasn’t new… it was the first time that not only could I not rebuild the rigid systems I’d put in place to function - I didn’t want to.
She wanted to know what I meant about having “systems that were broken” because I was articulate - hyperlexic as a young child, independent, analytical, “good with people”, and not just high functioning but overachieving. On the surface I was amazing… but for the first time in my life I wanted to talk about how carefully I had to plan every moment just to do basic things that everyone else took for granted.
Sure, I didn’t love large groups or crowds or being around people I don’t know or feel safe with - but I told everyone I was just a very private person who made a point to curate my life to avoid such encounters. And when I couldn’t avoid a social event, most people—if asked—might remember that I made sure to be seen. What they wouldn’t remember is that I was gone for long stretches - I would tell you it’s because I was mingling or had a headache or drank too much coffee and just needed to “un-hydrate” a lot… because I didn’t know how to explain that I had to keep hiding in the bathroom, stockroom, or even closet to cope with the overwhelm of the people, the lights, and the sound. I can perform. I just can’t sustain it indefinitely… but it never looked like a barrier as long as I sold it as just needing a break.
At work I constantly spoke with strangers, it seemed effortless… but I never showed anyone the pages of hand written scripts where I planned out not just every possible conversation I could think of but included tone markers and practiced them out loud to myself in my free time. It looked like a social skill but it was exhaustive premeditated survival.
With people I felt comfortable with I was - am- verbose and overtalkative to a fault. An absolute chatterbox who I know people avoided because they don’t want to be trapped in a multi-hour conversation… I could spend hours engaging on my favourite subject or whatever my current focus was without any awareness of how much time was passing or understanding the cues that my audience might not be quite so enamored with my information dump. As long as it’s presented as passion, its not a problem, right?
I’d spent so many years in Theatre and Forensics that I didn’t have to agonize over any issues I may or may not have had with eye contact because I just constantly employed a technique that allowed me to appear like I was making eye contact even if I wasn’t. And everyone knew I just wasn’t a hugger - it never dawned on me that most people didn’t feel like their skin was simultaneously shocked by electricity and lit on fire when another person got too close or came in physical contact with them. Certainly, It’s not sensory struggle if no one else can sense it.
I wore headphones 24/7—blasting music loud enough that I permanently damaged my hearing—because it was the only way I could turn down the intensity of the world around me. Light, sound, people… everything layered on top of itself until the only way to regulate it was to drown it out with something predictable. At some point, I stopped being able to separate sound cleanly. I can hear that people are talking—I know words are happening—but it all blends together into a single layer of noise I can’t always pull apart. Between that and everything else, I taught myself to read lips and defaulted to subtitles just to keep up. But I was just a moody teen and music enthusiast - not a maladaptive behaviour.
I could wax for hours on all the other things I’d done to hide how hard I worked to cope with the world around me… I actually did for many, MANY clinical hours with a degreed profession conducting several assessments before she revealed my scores for Autism +ADHD. (AuDHD). In retrospect, the ADHD part made sense. But - that’s certainly not what Autism looks like. I took the same psych classes as people my age in the early 2000’s - back when the DSM wouldn’t even allow a consideration of Autism or ADHD if the other was already diagnosed. Back when ADHD and Autism were both diseases little boys who couldn’t talk had. Wasn’t that what Autism was supposed to look like?
So when shown those scores - I scoffed and joked “yea but like Autism Lite, right?” … and my therapist deadpanned a simple reply “you’re too good at math to believe that.”
It took a while, but eventually I was willing to accept the internal wiring that made my struggle with transitions feel like system failures—disruptions big enough that even as an adult they could escalate into full, rage-filled meltdowns. I was willing to see why ambiguity wasn’t just uncomfortable but destabilizing—why not understanding something could consume me to the point of skipping meals, losing sleep, and running the problem in loops until I found resolution.
And I finally had language for something I had never been able to explain: I wasn’t disconnected from emotion because nothing was there—I was disconnected because I couldn’t access or label it until it breached containment. By the time it showed up in a way I could recognize, it was already overwhelming. I had been having panic attacks for decades and didn’t know it. I could sit in front of you, hold a normal conversation, and simultaneously observe my body escalating—heart rate spiking, breathing changing, everything tightening—while having no internal label for what was happening.
Eventually, I got to a place where I could accept that maybe this is what Autism could look like. And if that was true, then maybe—for the first time—I could be something other than “broken.”
It wasn’t that I was simultaneously Too Much and Not Enough.
It wasn’t that I was the Smartest Dumb Person or the most Brilliant Idiot in the room.
It wasn’t that I was lazy, awkward, or just not trying hard enough.
With AuDHD, that meant there was a structure to it - a pattern, a reason. And for the first time in 36+ years all the fucked up things that I had kept inside of me… too inconsistent, too difficult, too risky to try to explain-even to myself… those things made sense.
Once I’d internalized that I was excited to share this news with my close friends and family. I didn’t fear stigma because I was married to someone who was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder as an adult and whom had slowly disclosed their disorder to almost all of our family and friends and found a safety net of love and acceptance of their invisible illness. I’d worked so hard to help educate and build up most of our family and friends network to understand invisible illness and mental health struggles. I watched them embrace all of my partners parts as they slowly became comfortable enough to front as themselves for our social network… I was so confident I’d experience the same reaction. I was deeply wrong.
A few coworkers seemed to accept it instantly. Many were clearly skeptical but didn’t seem it worth debating my own diagnosis with me - see aforementioned fear of protracted conversation. But my friends, my family… absolutely not.
They said they knew me, so they knew I didn’t have any such struggles. They’d never seen me have any difficulty and I’d never mentioned anything. Plus like my first reaction, they knew what autism looked like - It wasn’t me. I should get a second opinion. Of course this was just a fad, how could so many people suddenly be autistic? They knew me and they were shocked I’d let myself be so taken in by some medical charlatan… I was too smart for that. They reminded me that in college I maintained a 3.7 GPA taking 24 credit hours of classes per semester while playing on the soccer team and competing in speech and debate plus working a local job and serving as a volunteer coach year round. High school was more of the same series of consistent overachievements… But no one wanted to be reminded that my struggles with food left me at 5’7 and 103lbs my freshman year of college. Or to remember that scars on my body were not in fact from sport or some other antic, but that I put them there myself. Or to reflect on the near psychotic outbursts and spirals, that at the time they wrote off as just stress - it certainly wasn’t substance abuse and mental health struggles. I wasn’t just able to function - I achieved. So nothing was ever wrong with me, if there was I would have told them or they would have seen it - because they knew me… Even when faced with the specifics of my reality they were unwilling to accept that I was possible they didn’t see the struggle because I engineered a system that hid those struggles in behaviors that made everyone else comfortable. To them I was smart enough that I should be able to see around this bullshit diagnosis but I couldn’t be smart enough to find a way to make internal systems that would make me seem okay - even when I wasn’t.
To say I was devastated is an understatement. The same people who worked so hard to ask me to teach them about my partners incredibly rare disorder. Who made sure to ask the most considerate and deep questions as soon as we informed them of what cPTSD was and how DID worked. Who protected and cherished each of my Partners Part that chose to front as themselves. Those same people crushed me with their dismissive and often visceral reaction to my diagnosis.
Now that we’re a few years in, some friends and family have come around to different degrees—but many still don’t see it. And to be fair… they were right about one thing. When I was younger, they didn’t see it. Not because it wasn’t there, but because I found a way to take a very system and process-oriented brain and build something that let me function in a world that doesn’t naturally work for me.
I know some people hear that and assume it means I didn’t want them to see. It’s not that simple—because when your brain works like mine (and like many others on the spectrum), it’s not just that you’re hiding something… it’s that you don’t fully understand what you’re experiencing in a way that can be explained to someone else in real time.
The systems, procedures, and rigid internal policies get built so early that they just are. There isn’t a clean line between what’s natural and what’s constructed—they blur into each other to the point that you don’t question them, you just follow them. And when you grow up being told you’re too smart to struggle, admitting that you are doesn’t feel like vulnerability—it feels like failure. Not just of yourself, but of everyone who expected you to be the one who could handle it. So you don’t say anything. You adapt. You make it work—until you can’t.
I don’t always feel things the way you expect me to, and I can’t always name what’s happening in the moment—not because nothing is there, but because it doesn’t show up in a way that’s immediately accessible. A lot of the time I only understand it after the fact, once I’ve had time to trace it back and make sense of it. Which means, yes—the signs were easy to miss. Especially when I was overachieving.
But “easy to miss” isn’t the same thing as “not there.”
And it’s worth remembering that sometimes success isn’t proof that someone is okay.
Sometimes it’s the system they built to survive.