I Don’t Think AuDHD Is Contradictory

One foot on the gas, one foot on the brake. I handed people that metaphor for years and watched their shoulders drop every time. I don’t say it anymore — because contradiction is an interpretation, not an observation, and I think the seam runs through the map rather than through us.

I used to be the person who explained it.

Someone would get diagnosed at thirty-eight, or forty-five, or sixty — often after a child of theirs was diagnosed first — and they’d show up holding two words they hadn’t had the week before and no idea what to do with either of them. Eventually they’d ask the question everyone asks, in one form or another. How can I be both? How can I need everything to stay exactly the same and also be unable to tolerate anything staying the same?

And I’d hand them the metaphor. One foot on the gas, one foot on the brake. Autism builds the system, ADHD burns it down. One brain, two drivers, both reaching for the wheel.

I watched people’s shoulders drop when I said it, every time, an…