Neurodivergence Without Shame, Part 2: Honoring Your Bodymind

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcription of a conversation between myself and Rachel. It is the second of four posts made out of this conversation. We encourage you to read part one first if you haven’t already. Anything in brackets is content I have added in editing. Occasionally, I left in our repetitions, stutters, and verbal idiosyncrasies to better reflect how we both talk. —Ashton 

In this post, we talk about the differences between what’s expected versus what’s interesting, and ways that we get ourselves to do the expected things. We highlight medical appointments, routines, and the important fact that no two brains work the same. The conversation ends with a section about how to listen to, honor, and care for your bodymind.  

The expected and the interesting 

Rachel: I’ve been appreciating, in the AuDHD literature, how much they talk about this struggle: half the AuDHD personality loves routines and the other half is like I need novelty, I need stimulation, I need to create something new. So I’ve settled down about the fact that after around six to nine months, I recreate my organizational system because I get bored and stop using it. I was trying to find the perfect app, and I gave up on that. I just accepted that I’m going to change it. That works for the ADHD side–and for the Autistic side, I’ve tried to have the same set of things for leaving the house. When I get it just right, the creativity happens inside the routine. The routine is that we do this set of steps, but the creativity is: what am I going to put on? What am I picking out to wear? Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Ashton: That’s a very good highlight of the fact that no two neurotypes, no two brains match. What works for one person might be wildly difficult for somebody else, or just not work as well.

Rachel: Yeah, I definitely cannot just do routine, even though part of me craves it. And when the parts work together well, the part that loves routine supports the part that loves creativity and novelty. When that falls apart, it’s a mess.

Rachel:  I was listening to a Hannah Gadsby talk, and she said one of the neurotypical-neurodivergent differences is focusing on what’s important, versus focusing on what’s interesting.  My partner clarified this in a way I love: perhaps it’s that neurotypical people focus on what’s expected while neurodivergent people focus on what’s interesting. That framework makes better sense to me, because each brain will find different things important. To me what’s interesting is what’s important. And I am not great at doing what’s expected if I have no interest in it. 

Rachel: The reverse hack for that is to get myself to be interested in the expected things I need to do. Like oddly enough, my taxes have turned out to be kind of fun for me. I let myself get curious about it. Now, they’re not hard to do because I’ve made it enough of a mini special interest. I will admit that paperwork is my downfall. I cry about paperwork. But now that I can do taxes online, it’s started to feel enough like a weird video game I play with the IRS. One of my best life hacks is making something interesting if it is expected and I really do have to do it; there’s a lot of stuff that’s expected that you don’t have to do.

Ashton: What are some of those expected things that you aren’t as interested in, and how do you approach those? Be as specific as you want. 

Rachel: I’m not a fan of doing the dishes. One thing that’s incredibly important for me is having good dishwashing gloves, because it’s a sensory problem when I touch food things. With any task I’m resisting, it’s important for me to ask myself: Is there a sensory barrier of some kind? Am I being overwhelmed by sensory input? My other hacks for doing the dishes are good podcasts or music, and I also spent a long time noticing how… not-long it takes? If you’d asked me a year ago how long it takes to do dishes, I’d say, “Oh about half an hour.” Actually, it usually takes less than 10 minutes. 

Rachel: I also used to resist laundry a lot. Now that I have shirts that match my gender expression, laundry is an opportunity to continue to be in love with these shirts. And I bought good hangers. For me, tactile sensations are incredibly important. If I can make my tactile environment better, I will do things that are the expected thing. 

Rachel: Also on the list of what I dread: medical appointments. Sometimes what gets me there is generous and sweet self-talk. I like the internal family systems model where we have younger parts active in our psyches. I have a bunch of younger parts who don’t want to do this appointment, but we’re going to have a real gentle conversation about it: I understand. You don’t want to do this, you’re scared. It’s important that we do this. And afterward we’re going to play a lot of games and recover from doing it. 

Ashton: I think that’s something really important for me too. I also dread medical appointments. I think that’s one place where my autism really comes out, and I just don’t have a grasp of the social situation. So I almost never plan to have something after a medical appointment. I have a few hours where I go home, I have my favorite stuffed animal and my guinea pigs, and I sit there and soothe my body because it’s overwhelming. Smell is a big thing for me, and there’s so many smells in a doctor’s office.

Rachel: I think taking care of ourselves afterward helps us educate all of our parts: this doesn’t have to be as bad as it used to be. When we’re kids, especially neurospicy kids, you get dragged to a medical appointment, and then you probably get dragged on some errands, and there’s no recovery time. There’s the difficulty of doing the appointment followed by the difficulty of doing a bunch of other overwhelming stuff– until you want to scream. 

Rachel: In my experience when I’m gentle with myself about something that’s difficult, it gets a bit less difficult. That said, getting myself together to leave the house is still a whole process. I accept that it’s going to be a process every time and that’s okay. I still want to streamline the parts I can.

Ashton: And they should also give lollipops and stickers to adults for going to the doctor. I don’t know why they stopped doing that.

Rachel: We can lollipop and sticker ourselves. Also important: I have left the service of medical professionals for other medical professionals who were a better fit for me. The way I grew up, you got assigned a doctor and you just go to that doctor. Which is kind of terrible in the cases where I’ve ended up going to a doctor who was not meeting my needs, sometimes for years. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about being an adult is finding healthcare providers that I trust. 

Ashton: It’s fantastic that you’ve been able to do that. And I know that for a lot of folks, it’s a really big struggle. Like, insurance can be really, really limiting, and geographical convenience can be limiting, not to mention the hassle of trying to find a medical provider on your own. 

Rachel: That is so freaking huge, yes.  

Ashton: It’s so much. 

Rachel: I want to add that the process took me over a decade. If you’re younger than me, maybe every other year pick one suboptimal provider, and let yourself look for a new one. Eventually you’ll be in a really good spot. And sometimes you can’t find a good provider, but it can still be important to acknowledge that your dread has a real cause and not blame yourself.

Ashton: A large part of how I deal with those stressful situations, as well as the chores and things I’m not as excited about, is a lot of routine. My brain loves routines. My laundry gets done because I do it every other Saturday. On the dot. My guinea pig cage gets cleaned because that happens every Saturday around the same time. I always have the same things I grab when leaving the house, and they’re all hung up by my door so they’re easy to find. And you know, I modify my routines, or add new ones, as needed. 

Ashton: Another thing I found really helpful is noise-cancelling earplugs, which I just started using a few months ago. And I’m able to do so many things with less stress now. Especially as somebody who gets migraines all the time, if I’m in sensory overload, I’m going to get a migraine. I don’t know what the connection is there, but it will happen. And my left ear is a lot more sensitive. My left temple is always where my migraines are. Now every time I go to the store, or if it’s a loud day at work, I just pop an earplug in my left ear. It reduces that noise and really helps with that sensory overload and has been, honestly, life changing. I can’t believe I didn’t have them before. 

Listening to your bodymind 

Rachel: One of our key points here is to pay attention to your body. Your body will often tell you what you need. Unfortunately, we both grew up in a culture that says to override your body and push past what your body’s saying. Instead, we can ask:  what if I take a breath and honor this sensation or feeling?

Ashton: There are a lot of folks who really struggle to listen to their body, to figure out what their body is saying. Have you had experience with navigating that? 

Rachel: I probably still do. It’s a very spiral growth path. When I got to Macalester as a student back in the early 90s, I wasn’t even good at identifying emotions a lot of the time, or how to process them. I had a friend group that was really helpful about that, and I appreciate that. So, through my 20s, there was a lot of, how do I have emotions? And how do I have emotions that are not overwhelming? Because with ADHD, there’s a lot of potential for emotional dysregulation, and with Autism, meltdowns. In college and after, I got good at breaking things that were not my most important things–because at that meltdown/dysregulation point, I was going to break something.

Rachel: Now I get into my body much more and ask: what emotions are happening, at what intensity are they happening? What is the likely trajectory? Do I need to pause and do self-care so that this doesn’t go into dysregulation/meltdown territory? 

Rachel: I’m working on a better understanding of hunger cues. And I’m not good at understanding when I’m tired, or when I need recovery time. Some of that is grind culture/productivity culture. We’re in a culture that tells us a lot of the time that we’re not supposed to be tired. Recently I’ve been learning that if I do something the day before that involves a lot of people, or I do something in the evening with a few people, I’m going to wake up tired. Interacting with people takes a lot of cognitive power. 

Rachel: What I used to do was drink coffee and eat sugar about it. Which actually works. You can do it sometimes. Long term, I don’t recommend it. When I do that, I just keep grinding on my tiredness. I wouldn’t get back up to good or great performance. I’d be at fair performance for days. Now when I wake up into that state of feeling depleted, I take a slow morning. I do less in my morning and do more recovery. I take a longer walk with the dog, I take my nap earlier and longer than I would normally. Usually by the afternoon, I’m back at good or great brain power because I took the time that I needed to recover all the way.

Ashton: I think my journey with that started out with having a therapist as a mother and having a lot of mental health education. I was pretty versed in identifying emotions by the time I got to college, but I grew up very much ignoring my body’s needs. Hunger cues, bathroom cues, pain, all of it, just survival mode, you know, shut that all down. 

Ashton: What actually changed that for me was getting injured and developing arthritis. All of a sudden, I was in pain all the time. I had to learn how to listen to that pain, so that I wouldn’t make it worse. But even by the time I got to college, I wasn’t great at doing that. I did so many things that I probably shouldn’t have. For a long time, I didn’t take my pain or my body’s needs seriously. Eventually I started learning how to do that. I think pain was in some way helpful for me to be able to learn how to receive my body’s cues, because pain is a very obvious cue. Especially when it’s persistent and sharp. 

Ashton: There are lots of other ways that a body can send cues that may feel similar to pain, or may be entirely different. I think a lot of times when we talk about listening to our body’s needs, we talk about those kinds of things: I’m hungry, I need to eat. But I think another side of that is asking, what feels good? When I’m in a moment where I’m like, oh, this texture is very nice. Or this activity makes this part of my body feel good. Paying attention to that and trying to remember that, as a sort of toolbox of ok, I feel bad. What are things that feel good? 

Rachel: And back to when we have to do something expected and we don’t want to, we can load more of the things that feel good into it. And remove more of what doesn’t feel good.

[We take a break and start a new recording.]

Ashton: I think that it’s good to share that in the switching of these recordings you have grabbed a new fidget, and I’ve grabbed an ice pack to help with the migraine I’m having. So we’re actively practicing what we’re talking about.

Rachel: Yes, I will be deploying the infinity cube, which is one of my favorite fidgets. I have one in most major rooms of the house.

Ashton: Your fidget collection is impressive. I have not built up as many and so I can’t wait for the day that I have enough to have full bowls everywhere. 

Rachel: I was pretty excited because, for those of you listening at home, this is a decorative wooden bowl full of fidgets. When I got the idea that I could just do that and have a decorative bowl of fidgets for guests. Just be like, welcome, here are some fidgets.

Ashton: We’ve got a drawer next to our table just full of ’em.

Rachel: They’re pretty great.

That concludes the second part of our conversation on neurodivergence without shame. In the next part, we’ll talk about our experiences with masking and meltdowns. Stay tuned for that, and if you want to know when it’s posted, be sure to follow Rachel on Instagram or Facebook. What are some ways you tackle the expected tasks? Let us know in the comments!