Everyone around me was running the same meeting, the same email chain, the same 9-to-5 rhythm without breaking a sweat. I was running the same tasks on the same hardware and somehow generating twice the heat for half the output.

I spent 55 years being exhausted without knowing why. Turns out I was running a performance in the background 24 hours a day, and the terrifying part isn’t that I was doing it, it’s that I got so good at it I couldn’t even see it anymore.

Somewhere along the way, the performance became the person. Or at least, that’s what I thought. The scariest part of the AuDHD diagnosis wasn’t what it explained, it was what it revealed about how thoroughly I’d hidden the evidence, even from myself.

For decades I passed as a functional, competent adult. Turns out the energy cost of that performance was running a background process that never shut down, and I didn’t even know it was there.