University of Brighton fine Art (Painting) submission

It’s like everyone else has taken the blue pill except me. Unless it’s all in my head.

[This is a slightly different article, focussing on my personal experience, rather than sharing advice. Let know your thoughts on it.]

One of the challenges with being AuDHD is that you may feel you sit a bit outside social structures. Not only is it the involuntary exile caused by your social awkwardness (for such a heinous crime that is), but it’s your ability to see patterns in society that others don’t – and who also, for some reason, don’t want to hear about. For me it’s like people choose to live in a dark that harms them, so long as it’s easy, and they are quite happy to collectively punish those who try to switch the light on.

You might have your own patterns that you’ve been noodling on; these are 3 of mine, as a social justice warrior:

• Working in an office has taken on a moral narrative. Despite hundreds of studies showing vast productivity and wellbeing benefits of being able to choose where you work, there in an emerging insidious narrative linking home working with selfishness and laziness. This moral discourse has been fostered and normalised by leaders – whose values are generally more olden timey due to age and having benefitted from the previous system – at the expense of anyone who doesn’t agree.

• Social justice is silenced through being re-badged as ‘political’ or a danger to society. Trans rights, Middle East crisis, protests, unions – bring them up in conversation and you now risk being shut down or ‘cancelled’ for being ‘political’ (whatever that means), overly sensitive, or somehow offensive. Such social silencing comes when the powerful feel threatened and make topics taboo – most certainly helped by making taking action (like protesting) a criminal offence.

• People really do seem to be more selfish. Be it talking in the cinema or playing a phone out loud on the train, the collective experience appears to have been forgotten. People blame Covid, but it’s a much longer trend. We’ve had the better part of two decades of social media and institutions encouraging us to focus intensely on ourselves. We’ve seen the world-changing impact of echo chambers via Cambridge Analytica, and AI is surely intensifying our addictive solipsistic utopias – and exposing us to having our beliefs moulded in unhelpful ways.

It is both a blessing and a curse to be a pattern-seeker. I don’t really do it on purpose; I just seem to unconsciously pick up little nuggets of knowledge as I go about my day. Before I know it I’ve got a complex theory about something – normally about how power dynamics play out in society, because that’s one of my special interests. However, as with my other special interests, no-one really gives a crap and I regularly gaslight myself into believing it’s all in my head. But is it though? I mean, it’s not like I can do anything about it. Sometimes I wish I could switch my little brain off and just enjoy life, but here we are.

What about you? Do you have pattern-seeking thoughts that others don’t see?