I’m OK with Autism, but ADHD is f***ing me up.

If Autism is solitary confinement, ADHD is purgatory.

I’ll be honest, I can’t be anything else but that’s the phrase that starts this particular thought, I don’t know what bits of me are from which ‘condition’ but I’ll do what I can to iron this out.

What I understand from various sources, mostly anecdotal evidence from other people, is that Autism is the bit that ‘makes me weird’. Allegedly some of the greatest inventors, scientists, thinkers, and polymaths were Autistic. I get that, I truly do. To think differently, to go deeper, further, weirder than anyone else takes a different mentality. I think I would have, could cope if I were just Autistic. No shade here, just me thinking out loud. However, today was a good illustration in how my ADHD takes my weirdness, amplifies it, and puts it on show.

Today I was outside the hospital with my sister, regulars here will know I am her transport, health coach, spiritual support, and general dogs’ body for her as she goes through radio and chemotherapy. I don’t say this for any reason other than information, I don’t give a small rodent’s behind what you may think of me supporting my sister, mentioning it here or detailing what happens. My sister is pretty much neurotypical, and in that she has become my mirror. I always took umbrage at how she reacted to me when I said something, I still do, but I have learnt to listen more and be offended less. Yes, being offended is a choice.

I was talking, thinking out loud, as we stood outside to vape, and me to drink orange juice, about the potential for power cuts this winter. I’m not a doomsayer, I’m not what my Atlantic cousins would call a ‘prepper’, I don’t consider myself a pessimist, optimist, or even a realist. If I had to label that side of me, I would call myself a ‘Long View Historian’.

BBC Radio 4 has an excellent programme called ‘The Long View’. It is, sadly, one of the few remaining really good programmes left on Radio 4 or indeed any channel. The Long View takes a look at something ‘current’, say the ‘Cost of Living Crisis’. Experts are gathered, and yes they generally are really well informed although I feel that some ‘woke’ experts have been hired recently, and what we get is a view from a time in history where similar events took place. The parallels are often amazing. It might be from just a few decades past, for a couple of centuries, maybe even a millennium or two, but there was at least one, and often many, times in the past where we were faced with the same circumstances.

This is how I tend to view current affairs. Nothing is genuinely new; we have done this before. People are no different now than they were ten thousand years ago. We like to pretend, each generation, that we are different, unlike our parents we know the truth, our parents are old and stuck in their ways, we are enlightened.

Okay, rant over.

Bollocks. I’m sorry to have gone off on a bit of a rant filled tangent here but really. My mother told me how ‘fixed in his ways’ her father was. I’m sure he thought the same about his parents. My mother was born in 1934, her father would have been born in the late Victorian period. His parents would have been born in a world without electric power. That’s just four generations from candlelight to a world where we can see something happening anywhere on the planet in ‘real-time’.

Technology may have progressed, but we haven’t. Every generation that comes along sees the world in three ways; history is everything before they started remembering things, now is everything that is new, and to them, everything is new, and the future that will be like now but better because they know what must be done.

ADHD takes me down the Rabbit Hole

Anywho, I am concerned about power cuts this winter. Now I know that the National Grid has contingency plan upon contingency plan, but as someone who has read, and written contingency plans, they only go so far. If the Grid gets close to its limit, then some large industry will be ‘stepped down’, I’m not sure what large industry that would be, but it would be the first ‘casualty’. In the UK, given normal conditions, we don’t generate enough electricity for peak demand, we import it from the continent. Sometimes however, we export. Unfortunately, electricity is not something that can be stored efficiently at scale. Not yet. So, if UK demand exceeds domestic supply and the continent can’t spare any, we would be faced with ‘Brown-outs’. Brown outs are worse than Blackouts. They occur due to the way electricity operates. Electricity isn’t so much ‘supplied’ as it is ‘consumed’. Every electrical device ‘demands’ an amount of electricity to operate in the way it is required to.

Think about your mobile phone. Charge it to 100% and leave it on the side and hours later it would probably still be more than 90% full. Watch a movie whilst downloading five others and it will probably be under 20% full. You haven’t supplied any power, it just demanded it and got it from the battery. The Grid isn’t a battery though, every watt of power demanded has to be generated at the same time. Power stations ramp up and down all day long, well some do. Nuclear doesn’t, its constant but reliable. Wind, Solar, and Wave are condition dependent. We switched from Coal to Gas, so that is the only thing we have realistically to offset ‘renewables’ when they aren’t available and to meet peak demand.

Brownouts occur when demand exceeds local supply. There is generally a drop in voltage due to excessive demand. Old technology, that which I grew up with, can generally cope with it, however digital circuits can become ‘confused’ and result in actions that were never even considered in their design. Most modern electronics rely on digital circuits. LED lights have circuits, mobile and laptop chargers have circuits. TVs, home appliances, heating systems, all have digital circuits.

Blackouts, generally, are the ‘controlled answer’ to Brownouts. Rather than risk unintended consequences, the Grid may ‘cut power’ to an area, similar to throwing the breaker switch in your home. Digital circuits have been tested for this and respond well.

If we have some seriously cold weather the Grid may implement ‘rolling blackouts’. We will be informed beforehand when we will not have power. This might be an hour or two in the evening, or it may be an evening each week. The rolling part will be that each area will be Blacked Out for a different time / evening so as to ‘spread the pain’.

Phew! I’ll stop there. That was only the opening salvo which I wanted to share with my sister. I got about as far as ‘I’m thinking about how I need to prepare in case we have power cuts this winter’ and my sister said, ‘Wow that’s cheery.’ ‘Why would you say / share that.’ Then she used the nuclear weapon. ‘You sound like dad.’

My Dad had ADHD

Yes, I’m pretty sure my dad had ADHD. He was forever in the middle of a ‘new project’ one in which we would be ‘millionaires’ this time next year. A lot of them were good ideas. Some where great and ahead of their time. Not one was brought to fruition, well not a successful fruition.

My dad could have been successful many times over. If he had had money behind him, and a team or several to execute his vision. He would have had a lot of failures, but when you are successful in some ventures, and at least one or two go big, then ‘that’s the cost of being an entrepreneur’.

So, yes, that shut me up. I spent a lot of time growing up helping him with his projects. I got involved from an early age, looking over designs, budgets, schedules, whilst I was still at school. I was young, naïve and enthralled to be helping. I came up with ideas myself, improvements, we would talk for hours, run through the scenarios. Develop, design, refine.

In some ways I am different to my dad, in some ways I am not. I’ll write down an idea, plan, project, or inspiration but I’ll leave it there. I don’t have the resources to do any of them justice.

I will make and execute a small-scale plan for loss of electricity at home. I have the basis for an idea of how I can keep our house warm and well lit in the event of a power cut. If needs be, my sister and her dog can live with us as and when needed.

My Autism sees the value in doing this. My ADHD however has grander plans. It can fuck right off.

Enjoyed this article? Please consider becoming a Medium Member.