This seems weird. Is there a reason why?

Normal is a moving target

I had a realization about my relationship with "normal": my AuDHD impacts me far more severely than I understood. Not because it suddenly got worse, but because for most of my life I had structure coming from outside me - family, school, work, marriage. Those relationships were load-bearing scaffolding. The past two years of bootstrapping alone made it visible.

I can do an impressive number of things. I can also lose the ability to do something astonishingly ordinary while remaining perfectly capable of something much harder. I can be headed fully non-verbal and still able to type - the keyboard stays online after my mouth shuts down. I can design a system for a problem before I can say out loud that I have the problem.

That is one of the things I keep trying to explain when I say that normal is contextual. What looks effortless from the outside may be heavily engineered. What looks ridiculous may be the thing making the rest possible.

The life that was functioning

I spent seventeen years as half of a "we." There were things I never had to discover I could not reliably do alone, because the relationship had already absorbed them. I mistook the fact that a life was functioning for evidence that I was happy in it.

I wasn't, really. I don't even know that I was all that content. But there was an enormous sense of duty wrapped around that realization. There was gratitude, too. Someone had built a life with me and carried things I did not always know were being carried. Who was I, then, to complain that I wasn't happy? It felt ungrateful.

And a neurotype-discordant relationship can drift into something neither person chose. The relationship can become parental without either person deciding that it should. One person remembers, anticipates, translates, prompts. The other becomes more dependent on that structure precisely because it exists. Eventually everybody is tired and nobody can quite remember when the roles changed.

I know how I want things done

One of the more annoying things about me is that I often know exactly how I want something done. I can usually tell you why, too. The reasons may be absurdly specific, but they are usually there because I have already discovered the failure mode the hard way.

Even when I don't know how I want something done, I'm pretty sure there is a way I don't want it done. That sounds fussy until you understand that a lot of my systems exist to keep small failures from cascading into large ones. The request is often not aesthetic. It is structural.

This is why "taking me seriously" matters so much to me. Not agreeing with everything I say. Not treating every preference as sacred. Just starting from the assumption that when I tell you something about how I work, I am probably giving you information rather than setting you a puzzle.

The strange economics of asking for help

I don't know how to ask for help. That is not the same as not needing it. The words "I need help" require a voice, and the voice and the need have an irritating habit of going down together.

The particularly me part is what I do instead. Give me a need and I will build infrastructure around it. I will make a system, a shortcut, a form, a recurring reminder, a label, perhaps an unnecessarily competent little database, all before considering the possibility that the solution might be telling another human being, "I need help with this."

I was recently given some business advice after presenting an elaborate plan for managing a customer base of, at most, ten people: don't build the machine before you have demand. Quite right. Bit embarrassing. But it occurred to me afterward that I do this everywhere. I build the machine before I admit to the demand. The elaborate scaffolding is genuinely useful - I need a lot of it - but sometimes the system is also a very sophisticated way of avoiding the much simpler and considerably more frightening sentence: "Could you help me?"

Why I like things I can lose

There is another version of this that explains why I am weirdly attached to tangible things. If I lose my keys, I can tell somebody I lost my keys. We can look under the couch. We can retrace my steps. The object has weight and location and, crucially, a name.

A dismissed notification is different. Once it is gone, the thing I lost is effectively the knowledge that I lost something. I cannot point to the empty place on the table where it should be. I cannot ask someone to help me find a reminder I no longer remember existed.

So I carry little bits of external memory. My keyfob. A Popl for exchanging numbers, because losing numbers is a real problem for me. Labels. Objects. Things that can be seen by another person and therefore can become shared problems instead of private disappearances.

What am I like?

This has all made me think differently about the question "What am I like?" Not what are my diagnoses, or what am I good at, or what is charming on camera. What conditions make me work? What happens when those conditions disappear? What do I build without noticing because I need it?

I have spent a lot of my life trying to look low-maintenance by becoming extremely high-maintenance behind the scenes. The system is invisible, so the person looks easy. Until the system breaks.

The better goal, I think, is not invisibility. It is legibility.

A bright yellow light

The same principle I keep arriving at elsewhere in my life: say what the thing is, don't ambush anybody with it, and let people decide what they want to do with the information.

I think of myself as a bright yellow traffic light. Not a warning label, exactly, and certainly not an apology. Just very conspicuous information. I am what I say I am. Here are the things that are easy for me. Here are the things that are weirdly difficult. Here are the accommodations I've built. Here is the guy operating the controls. You can stop. You can keep going. You can decide what you want to do with the information. That's fine. What I don't want to do anymore is be a green light for everyone — that's how you cause a crash. And I don't want to be green for a direction nobody's coming from while a line of cars sits at my red. That doesn't make much sense either.

The rule was never don't be weird. God, that ship sailed years ago. The rule is don't be weird about it.

Taking people seriously

There is a small example of this that feels bigger to me than it probably looks from the outside. I was interviewed for a Styles piece, and somewhere in the process I said, in substance: I go by Logan, especially when my adult work is concerned. Then I opened the paper of record and read Charlie Nuttall described as having performed in both Bear and mainstream pornography.

I am very open about what I do. That was not the issue. The strange part was seeing a clear piece of information I had given about myself treated as apparently optional. It is hard not to become introspective when the story being written about you quietly demonstrates the thing you have been trying to articulate.

I do not need every person to understand the architecture. I do need people to believe me when I hand them the map.

Normal enough

A lot of the Himbo philosophy I keep accidentally building comes back to this. Strength, simplicity, momentum. Not simplicity as in having fewer needs. Simplicity as in making the real need obvious enough that I can act on it.

That is also why I keep thinking about furniture on wheels. If something is hard to move, put wheels on it. Do not spend years becoming morally better at dragging the couch across the floor. Change the interface between the couch and the world.

Maybe that is what accommodations are at their best: not excuses, not special treatment, not proof that a person is incapable. Wheels.

Furniture on wheels.

The goal was never to become perfectly normal.

Not perfect. Not polished. Just here. Trying. And me.

Which, come to think of it, is probably normal enough.