The Fifteen-Month-Old Brain

Note for Letters from the Quiet Half The Fifteen-Month-Old Brain I’ve been neurodivergent for sixty-seven years. I’ve understood I’m neurodivergent for fifteen months. Which means my relationship with my own brain is barely into toddlerhood. Still figuring out what it needs. Still getting it catastrophically wrong on a regular basis. Yesterday someone suggested to me I should work in complete silence. Let buried thoughts surface. Make deeper connections without the distraction of podcasts or music. Laster, someone else told me that’s disastrous for AuDHD brains. Under-stimulation leads to the brain manufacturing its own chaos. You need background noise to regulate. Both people were experts. Both were confident. Both were completely contradicting each other. And I’m sitting here thinking—I don’t know which one’s right. For me. For this specific brain I’m operating. Some days music helps me focus. Other days it fragments my attention into seventeen directions simultaneously. I can’t predict which. Can’t see the pattern yet. Some days I need absolute quiet to think. Other days the quiet becomes this vast empty space my anxiety immediately rushes to fill with catastrophising. Fifteen months of knowing I’m autistic and ADHD. Still can’t reliably predict what my brain needs on any given morning. And here’s what exhausts me: the constant experimentation. The perpetual troubleshooting. The fact that what worked yesterday might sabotage me today and I won’t know until I’m three hours into a task and realising I’ve achieved nothing except elevated cortisol. Neurotypical people seem to just… know what helps them concentrate. Or they don’t think about it much because their brains mostly cooperate regardless. I’m sixty-seven and still running A/B tests on my own nervous system. Some days that feels like fascinating self-discovery. Most days it just feels knackering. I’m doing the best I can with a brain I’m still learning to decode. But some days the learning curve feels vertical and I’m just bloody tired of being my own research subject. No wisdom here. Just the exhaustion of still being a beginner at operating myself. And right now I am crying with exhaustion. Literally. If you’re also stumbling through this—trying to figure out your own brain whilst everyone confidently tells you contradictory things—you’re not alone in the confusion. I write more about this navigation process in Understanding AuDHD (4th ed., in its final edit process), though I’ll be honest: it’s more ‘here’s what I’ve tried’ than ‘here’s what definitely works.’ Still learning. Still exhausted. Still showing up. That’ll have to be enough some days.

– Lee Hopkins