April 16, 2025. One year ago today. Zoe and I took speed (Elvanse) for the first time.

Less than an hour later - “oh”.

The profundity of that one word; when everything changed. Everything.

Because suddenly you KNOW.

The thing that was there your entire life. The thing that trapped you. Hurt you. Turned you into an alien amongst your own species. The thing you could never understand. Could never know WHY.

Suddenly you know.

All of it.

The force of the revelation was like a supernova.

Fifty one years after they formed, for the first time ever my synapses worked properly.

And they did what they should have done all along.

I’m still processing the grief.

But it’s not just grief. I’m also furious about the revolting way people treat us. The advantage they have over us and neurological power imbalance is immense.

And most of them use that imbalance to use us as convenient receptacles for their own frustration, knowing somehow that we are incapable of fighting back, and apparently revelling in the ease with which we can be made to experience unbearable emotional distress.

One thing that really seems to confuse people is when it just … stops working.

And for the first time in your life you assert boundaries.

Every day now I take four times the amount of amphetamine than was in that starting dose.

And I hope I will for the rest of my life.

Because if I ever stop, I will be what I was again, within days. I will KNOW, all of it, and I will know WHY; and I will know what’s coming, and I will be utterly powerless to stop it.

It’s not something I like to contemplate.

Knowing is a cursed gift.

But it’s still a gift.

Amphetamine not only saved my life; it started it. I woke up for the first time ever a year ago today, at the age of 51.

I’ve recently learned there’s a name for a thing I have encountered all my life and been actually quite traumatised by: The Double Empathy Problem.

In a nutshell, if you’re a neurodivergent person you start from a very young age, before you can even speak maybe, trying to work out how to interact with pretty much everyone else using a system of rules and procedures which nobody ever explains to you and which seem Byzantine and inconsistent. The amount of effort you put into this is exhausting, and yet no matter how hard you try to behave exactly the same way everyone else does, and try to clarify things when you don’t understand, or try to join in with “smalltalk”, most of your interactions are judged as malicious and get you yelled at.

Then you eventually get diagnosed and work out that you basically have complex post traumatic stress from decades of this.

And so you find your people and you limit interaction with people who hurt you. You still have to exist in their world because you have to buy things and pay taxes, but otherwise … you back off for your own sanity because it seems no amount of effort to try and accommodate them will ever be acceptable to neurotypical people.

Meanwhile when neurotypical people encounter you they tell you that you are incapable of empathy, have no theory of mind, and are rude and annoying. They have tried nothing to understand you, and are all out of ideas.

Apparently I don’t understand their social rules, but unlike them I do understand irony.

I’m increasingly understanding why the idea that some of us with neurodevelopmental disorders are considered “high functioning” is basically crap.

Recently, by myself, I managed to unmask pretty much completely and … in that moment had anyone seen me they would not have considered me “high functioning”.

I speak two languages and yet I felt like speaking none. I gave up any pretence of trying to act like *them*, and it was liberating.

And it gave me a level of relaxation hitherto only achievable on amphetamine (I’d dropped into the unmedicated state when I did this).

And that’s when it hit me. There’s no difference in kind between me and a “rain man” stereotype. No. Some of us in infancy are pushed into masking as a necessary but ludicrously expensive survival mechanism and some are not.

And masking works, and they call us “high functioning”, but the cost is astronomical. I realise that now.

I think it’s where the idea of the “savant” comes from as well. As our NT peers develop the executive functioning that we never do, our differences increasingly paint a target on our backs.

And so we try to fina an acceptable way to escape. If adults were going to help us, we wouldn’t have had to start masking in the first place and one of the first lessons many of us learn is that indeed, the adults in our life are just as dangerous as our former friends.

But they mostly approve of book learning. And it gives us a way to keep ourselves apart.

And it hits our novelty and interest triggers.

And thus the path we are on reinforces itself. We spend the following decades using all of our intellectual and emotional capacity to bolster this survival mechanism and turn to things like alcohol or worse to manage the stress.

And then finally, some of us eventually find help. It took five decades in my case. I was exhausted.

To see me now, many would think me “regressing”.

I’m not. I’m just starting to live my truth. I deserve that. I need to rest. I’ve more than earned it.