The Never-Ending Rehearsal: Masking, Facades & Overthinking
Overthinking from Brad Kelley's perspective, as a late diagnosed AuDHD adult.
In my teens, I’d get the bus into town most weekends. I’d stand at the same stop, with the same perfect amount of change in my hand. I’d run those coins through my fingers again and again, checking every two minutes that I had £1.85 in my hand still.
One pound coin. One fifty pence. One twenty, one ten, and a five. I’d stack them in size order and hold them tight, lest they blow away or disappear. They never had before, but better safe than sorry.
I know where I’m going—the city centre. It’s the same every Saturday, but I make sure I have the script nailed: “Single to town, please.”
It’s not just the words, it’s how you say them. I go over the exact tone and timbre over and over again, long before the bus is due. The delivery can’t be slurred or unclear, but it can’t be too placed either. It has to sound natural.
Of course, for most people, it does sound natural. It’s as natural as breathing. You just know the thing you need to say in the moment…and it comes out perfectly.
Deep down, I knew this, even as I practised saying those four words every weekend. So why couldn’t I just say them?
Good evening to all my overthinkers!
This is Overthinking Hour’s first guest post. This week, we welcome Brad Kelly from Life On Hard Mode, who shares his story of AuDHD and how overthinking affected him whilst in the unknown of his neuroemergency.
I always thought I was just a worrier.
I’m one of those people who internally narrates everything inside my own head, in my own voice. I would say it’s exhausting, but honestly, it’s all I’ve ever known, so I have no comparison to make.
What I can say has always been exhausting, however, is what that internal monologue says.
I know it’s only ever tried to help. I appreciate that you can’t just take things at face value and go into situations unprepared. But there’s such a thing as overplaying a strength and having it become your weakness. That’s how I would describe my experience of overthinking.
Social situations have always been my downfall. From the youngest age, interactions with other people have puzzled and confused me. I would look for patterns that weren’t there, and see my peers acting in line with invisible rulebooks.
In the absence of information and context, my brain went into overdrive.
It had so little to go on, but what it did have needed to be churned over again and again, lest there be some vital piece of information I’d missed the first time.
Overthinking was well entrenched by the time I reached my teens. I was on the fringes of my friendship circles—peering in from the sidelines, wondering what it was like to be in the middle, but scared at what might be expected of me if I ever got there.
I learned how to pass as a functioning member of society. I spoke the way everyone else did. I practised quips and jokes I could deploy in a variety of situations to make myself likable.
I chewed over the bones of benign conversations at 2 AM, wondering if there was a subtle hint I missed that might signal the end of a friendship was inevitable. It never was, but I could never let my guard down.
The world of work was no better place for a ruminator like myself. The social challenges persisted, and yet there was more for my mind to churn over.
I could see exactly what it was I needed to do. I could break down the big project into logical baby-steps, to be completed one after another. And yet I could not bring myself to start the first task. I physically could not pick up the phone to make a call because of the uncertainty about what might happen.
I’d already gamed out various possible outcomes for what might happen if I did one thing or another, and thinking of them all at the same time put me in a state of task paralysis on regular occasions. I always made sure to leave jobs before anyone found out I hadn’t actually done any work.
Then fatherhood hit me like a freight train. There’s so much to learn in such a short space of time, all without getting any sleep or sensory rest. Even at night when the baby was sleeping, I could not.
My mind would turn over and over with thoughts of what might happen if I wasn’t awake to stop the baby choking on her own sick. Every little noise the baby made in her sleep (and they make a lot) jolted me awake, triggering my fight-or-flight response nightly.
You want to do better than what came before you as a parent—I think everyone does. And so in the mind of the overthinker, every mistake you make and time where you lose your temper saddles you with yet more guilt and shame—as if an undiagnosed neurodivergent hasn’t got enough to carry around with them.
Eventually, the burden became too much. Sensory shutdowns and mood swings were affecting my relationships with my kids and my wife. I’m grateful I came to the realisation that autism and ADHD were both present in me—before the knowledge that they could co-exist, I couldn’t place myself in either camp.
To tell the truth, I still overthink post-diagnosis. It often leads me astray—even in the most mundane ways.
Buying a new toaster is not just buying a new toaster. It’s reading reviews, comparing the best heating elements, scouring review after review, making a shortlist, and buying three to test for myself, before making a final decision. Something that should take five minutes consumes my very being for days on end—just so I don’t make the wrong choice.
But now that I’ve learned more about the logic behind the neurodivergent brain and why we overthink, I can see it for what it is.
Our brains never learned to filter out the stuff we don’t need. In a world that doesn’t make sense to us a lot of the time, we have to process large amounts of information to decipher up from down and read between the lines.
A lot of the time, it makes things take longer or causes unnecessary stress.
But it also means our minds are incredible pattern-recognising systems. We see things that not many people do. We can be incredibly empathetic at times simply by noticing changes in our friends’ behaviour.
So yes, I still overthink. I still script interactions with shop assistants and bus drivers. I still count the coins in my hand.
But I now have empathy for that part of me, rather than shame.
I can’t turn it off or turn down the volume. But I can be my own filter. If a thought doesn’t serve me, I can thank my mind for offering it and cast it aside.
My mind doesn’t do it to hurt me. It just wants us to get to where we’re going.
And we usually do.
Thank you so much for reading, and thank you to Brad Kelley for sharing his story so openly.
Next Monday, we will be joined by another guest who will discuss the connections between neurodivergence, overthinking, and the subconscious.
I’ll see you here on Friday at 8 PM (GMT+1) for the next paid post and on Monday at 8 PM (GMT+1) for the next guest post.
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