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Doom boxes. It’s an apt name, coz that’s what I feel when I see one. Normal households might have a catch-all drawer, or one doom box in a box room for all the small things you cannot find a home for. You know, the left earring you seem to have lost the right one of, random cables, a diving licence from a country you no longer live in, your mother’s handwriting on an envelope, business cards for places you always wanted to check out but that have probably gone out of business by now, a river rock from some holiday, and more.
We are moving again, this time back to Portugal, and the house seems full of them, or at least I seem to have unearthed one or more per room. Toss them, you say. You didn’t even know you had them. And I guess if you had come into my house and done that without my knowledge, it would all be fine. But now I know they are there, and where some of my long-lost treasures have disappeared to, and now I need to deal with it.
I am good at moving. I have done it across more countries than I can list on one hand. What I am not good at is the doom box. Every one I open sets off a storm of memories and a small panic, a tightness in the chest that says you should have sorted this years ago, you should be further along, everyone else has a system. So I do what I always do. I open it, remember, get lost in the emotions, and sit in the mess, trying to keep going and make sense of all these homeless artefacts.
For most of my life I assumed that was simply what being a person felt like. The low hum of dread under everything. Bracing yourself to do ordinary things. Courage, I told myself, is not the absence of fear, it is doing the thing anyway, and I was very brave, all the time, about absolutely everything, including forcing myself to shower every day, eat at fixed times, and answer the phone.
Then I started actually listening to other people. It turned out most of them do not feel like that. They just do the thing. No bracing. No fizzing. No eight different streams of thought at the same time. They open the box and it is a box of stuff. A new day? Showering, eating, communicating. No big deal.
But I’m good at being kind to others and unkind to myself. I’m just lazy, or distracted, or … something. That is what I kept telling myself, reinforcing the story.
Hass had known he was neurodivergent for years, but as the research became more available, he hyperfocused on being sure which neurodivergence fitted his particular flavour of spice. He was assessed for autism last year, and somewhere in his own reading he started recognising me on the page, in the videos, and in my reactions when he watched videos meant for him with me. That is the thing about living with an autistic pattern-recognition machine. He clocked it long before I would admit it, and he said it the way he says most true things, without drama. The other day he handed me the line I have not been able to put down since. I am, he reckons, a Ferrari engine in a VW Beetle chassis.
So I got assessed. ADHD, combined presentation, with a recommendation to check myself for AuDHD, said the report, in the calm font of people who do this every day. And the rest of the pages more or less agreed with Hass. Strong on the reasoning, the ideas, the verbal stuff. Markedly slower on the working memory and the processing, the bits that actually hold the engine in the car. So I rev. I sound beautiful, and the promise of going places no one else has gone is in that sound. And then I stall at a junction because I have forgotten which pedal does what.
Here is the part I was prepared for: Everyone tells you a late diagnosis comes with grief. Mourning for the life you might have had if someone had caught it at seven instead of forty-four. I keep waiting for that grief and it has not yet arrived. And it should, because usually I have trouble letting the past be just that, the past. However, in this case the past IS the past. Could it have been easier? Probably. But easier is not a country I can move to any more, and so that part hasn’t hit me at all.
What I got instead is fully on brand for me though. I thought the diagnosis would make me feel less broken. A reason, finally. A clean explanation to hold up to the light, and maybe do something about it, even if only to see my own patterns and stumble a little less. Instead it handed me a torch and pointed it at the cracks in my own veneer, and now I can see all of them. The label did not wash away the impurities. It showed me, in high definition, exactly where I come apart.
And right now I do not have a tidy ending for that, a way forward, or a motivational sentence that makes it all worthwhile. I just sit here with the report, like I sit with my doom boxes. In a wave of emotions, and much more messed up than before. But with a hope that somehow some things find their place this time, and the rest gets put away the next time I tackle the box.
For those who do not have a neurospicy person close by but are curious:
From the outside I might look like I have most of it together. Maybe a bit distracted, a bit chaotic, but generally like I’m just a bit quirky.
I make beautiful lists, colour-coded and prioritised and genuinely useful. What you won’t notice is that, once I have made them, I never look at them again. Nor do I hear or react to my alarms and reminders on my phone. I can disappear into a piece of work for nine hours straight and surface having eaten nothing, three cats staring at me in offence because I didn’t notice them rubbing up against me and just petted them mechanically. I have what the professionals politely call time blindness, where an hour and a day weigh about the same until something external tells me otherwise, and that something is usually Hass. That’s how I get things done.
The cruel flipside is that when I am awake early, or still have some time before an appointment, I will not start the task I actually could do, because the second I start it I will forget the appointment, the meal, the fact that I live inside time at all. So I just sit there and actively wait for my shift to start, or for the time I should leave for the appointment. A Ferrari-Beetle idling in the drive, terrified to go for a scenic route, because I might forget to arrive at my destination.
Why look for a diagnosis at all so late in life? For fairly boring practical reasons. One is curiosity, an answer to a lot of the things I do. The other is that the stress of the last couple of years turned the volume up on all of it, and ADHD, unlike some of my problems, can actually be treated. Medication is on the table. So is therapy.
So, apparently, is a further look at whether the Beetle-rari has a few autistic features tucked under the bonnet too, but that is another doom box for another day.
Bottom line: even if I feel confused, overwhelmed and stressed to fuck, with this paper I might be able to dial the symptoms down to something manageable with professional help.
We are moving to Portugal. A farm to slow down life is still the plan, the studio and the daft dream of bees and sheep. None of that changed when the report landed. I am the same person I was the day before, just with better documentation and maybe a different way to handle things. We will see.
So, as is my way, I am oversharing this here, because I spent decades thinking I was struggling the way every human being does. And if you have read this far with a strange prickle of recognition, the pressure in the chest, the lists, the doom boxes, the engine that won’t quite behave the way your type of car suggests, then maybe you are not alone in this. Maybe neither of us is. We might not be typical, but we are more than we sometimes feel.
I am not a doctor. I cannot diagnose you and I would not want to. But I can tell you that finding out did not fix me, and I am still glad I know for sure now, and both of those things are allowed to be true at once.
If any of this sounds like the inside of your own head, I would like to hear from you. Not for advice. Just so we both know the other one is out there, comparing doom boxes and laughing about it.
Nicky
(Picture is AIs interpretation of me with my doom boxes)