📎 A quick note before we get into it: Videos on AuDHD Journeys are now free for all subscribers. No more paywall. I want this content to reach the people who need it, and I don’t want a subscription tier to be the thing standing between you and feeling less alone. So welcome, all of you. I’m glad you’re here.
P.S. Thank you to our paid subscribers who have been supporting this space over the past few months. FYI, we’ve paused your subscriptions for now and are figuring out what the paid tiers are going to look like going forward. We will be transparent with you about the whole process.
Thanks for being here y’all.
There are two of me, and they want opposite things.
One of them wants the next thing. The next project, the next retreat, the next course, the next community, the next speaking gig, the next idea that lights up like a pinball machine. This is the part that built a business in 2016 I never expected to build, then a group practice, then the podcasts and courses and summits, one stacked on the next. This part is allergic to boredom. For this part, boredom isn’t neutral, it’s the trapdoor to a dark, fast depression, and it would rather burn than sit still.
The other one wants the dark on purpose. Stillness, sameness, a cottage in the Irish or New Zealand countryside with animals and nature and no emails and no “can we jump on a quick call.” This is the part that needs structure and routine and sensory safety, the part that feels like an exposed nerve ending getting shocked all day long. This part is tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch. It wants to hibernate. It wants the world to get small and quiet.
In this video, I’m talking about what it’s like to live between those two. The AuDHD tug of war, as an entrepreneur and as a human. For years I let the first voice run everything, because chasing the next dopamine hit feels like flow, feels like creativity, feels like proof that I’m okay. I never once sat still long enough to feel proud of anything I made. And the second voice just kept getting louder, in the only language it has: I got sick more. I got more chronically fatigued than I’ve ever been. It started taking me longer and longer to recover from every launch, every conference, every yes.
I get honest about what happened when I tried to override the second voice anyway. I talk about the grief in finally listening and coming to terms with disability, with capacity, with limitation. And I say the part I don’t usually let out loud. I’m 39 and I feel like I’m a hundred. I look at the whole list of things I’ve made and I ask if it was worth it, and the honest answer is no.
So I’m not making a how-to video, because I don’t have the how. What I have is the work of trying to get both voices in the same room without one strangling the other. Trying to find the gray between all-or-nothing. Leaving the creative part somewhere real to live while not letting it sign future-me up for things he won’t have the body to do. Being cautiously optimistic about the reset I’m attempting, and realistic that it’ll help a little, not all at once, not like magic. I hope you’ll watch or listen to the full episode over on Substack, or bookmark it for your next walk or commute.
And if something in this one resonated for you, I’d love to hear about it. Whether you’ve got two voices pulling at you too, or you watched this and finally felt less alone in it, share below. That’s what this space is for.
And if you know someone caught in their own tug of war, telling themselves to just push through, send this their way.
As always…Doubt Yourself, Do It Anyway.
Until next time,
Patrick
