Ep 11: AuDHD Psych Q&A Part 2 - Menopause, Gender & Why You Feel ‘Too Much’ And ‘Not Enough’

🎙️ Episode 11: Q&A Part 2

Episode Summary

In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, Aaron Howearth continues the community Q&A, responding to several commonly asked questions about neurodivergent experiences and expanding on themes raised in previous episodes. The conversation covers topics including perimenopause and menopause in neurodivergent people, the relationship between neurodiversity and gender diversity, how diagnostic impairment levels can change across life circumstances, and the internal tensions often experienced by people with both autistic and ADHD traits.

Aaron explains how hormonal fluctuations during perimenopause and menopause can influence neurotransmitter systems linked to attention, sensory processing, and executive functioning. For some neurodivergent people, these biological changes can amplify existing cognitive and sensory differences, particularly for individuals who may have previously relied on masking or compensatory strategies.

The episode also revisits the intersection between gender diversity and neurodivergence, exploring how autistic cognitive styles that question inconsistent social rules may contribute to different experiences of gender identity. Aaron further discusses how sensory processing differences, attention, and interoception can intensify experiences of gender dysphoria or body-related awareness.

Finally, Aaron answers several frequently asked questions about AuDHD experiences, including the tension between ADHD novelty-seeking and autistic needs for routine, the dynamics of hyperfocus versus task initiation difficulties, fluctuations in social energy, and how masking can sometimes be adaptive depending on context. Throughout the discussion, he emphasises that many challenges attributed to neurodivergence arise from mismatches between individuals and their environments rather than inherent personal deficits.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Hormonal Changes & Neurodivergence - Fluctuations during perimenopause and menopause can amplify attention, sensory, and executive functioning differences.

• Masking & Late Recognition - Biological or life changes can reduce compensatory capacity, revealing previously masked neurodivergent traits.

• Gender & Neurodivergent Thinking - Autistic cognition often questions rigid social rules, including traditional gender binaries.

• Sensory Processing & Dysphoria - Attention, sensory sensitivity, and interoception can intensify experiences of gender dysphoria.

• Contextual Impairment - Autism support levels and ADHD severity reflect environmental demands as much as individual traits.

• AuDHD Internal Conflict - ADHD novelty-seeking can coexist with autistic preferences for routine and predictability.

• Hyperfocus & Task Initiation - Interest-based attention allows deep focus on engaging tasks but makes boring tasks difficult to start.

• Planning vs Panic - Detailed planning tendencies can interact with ADHD overwhelm, leading to procrastination and last-minute urgency.

• Social Energy Fluctuation - Socialising can feel energising or draining depending on stress, sensory load, and available energy.

• Different, Not Defective - Many neurodivergent difficulties arise from environmental mismatch rather than inherent personal deficits.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello friends, welcome back to the Audi HD Psych Podcast. I'm Aaron Howard, Clinical Psychologist, and we are different, not defective. Well, thank you everybody for your support so far. I cannot say it enough. I really appreciate everyone tuning in, subscribing to our podcast, following our Instagram, following us on your streaming platform, Spotify Apple Podcast, and leaving comments and reviews. We really appreciate it. And if you haven't had a chance, please jump online, follow us, subscribe, and leave us a review if you like what we're doing. We really appreciate it, and it helps us get the word out there. Well, this week I wanted to follow up with last week's QA and do a bit of a QA part two. Pick up on a couple of questions that we didn't get to last week and just a couple of really commonly asked questions. For everybody who noticed, we are shifting to a weekly release schedule now. So we've had so much support. I just I wanted to bring a bit more in to get a bit more information out there, and hopefully it's helpful. So please let us know in the comments or reach out to us and let us know if you find it helpful, if there's anything in particular that you'd like us to cover, and we will get onto that as soon as possible. So today I'm going to talk about a few things. I'm going to have a quick tap back into perimenopause and menopause. As I said before, my knowledge base isn't amazing in that. But between last week and this week, I tried it off and I did a little bit of reading. And so I'll just speak to that for a couple of minutes. Then I'll have a little chat about gender, body, and neurodivergence in an Audi HD context. I'll touch into levels of impairment. I didn't really touch on that last week, but I did talk about it in a previous episode. But I think that's a really important thing to sort of reinforce and come back to. And then I'll tack, I'll answer a couple of common questions about autistic versus ADHD traits and how they can seem kind of like an internal conflict. So with the perimenopause and menopause, I guess the really important thing that stands out to me there is that ADHD autism, there are really differences of cognitive and executive function that underlie or underpin those characteristics that we express. And when those who are assigned female at birth go through perimenopause and menopause, what happens there is there's fluctuations in hormones, particularly estrogen. And estrogen modulates or changes the amounts of GABA, dopamine, and serotonin that are flooding around our bodies and brains. Why does that matter? Because they're the neurotransmitters and the chemicals in our bodies that actually influence things like inattention, influence things like sensory experience. And so we see that a lot of biological females reach perimenopause and may have been really high masking and been able to cope up until that point. But then suddenly I'm becoming more forgetful, not me, might be getting a lot more brain fog. Processing speed might slow down, and sensory gatekeeping, that ability to block out what I need to and pay attention to what I need to, that becomes the difficulties of that become amplified. And so throw in a hot flush or two, and we can really see how either A, if I've been high masking and been able to pretend to be typical up until this point, how overwhelming that might become, or B, if I've been diagnosed because of difficulties related to my characteristics, we can really see how that could be amplified spectacularly, leading to a lot of mood and mental health and well-being concerns more broadly. Throw in a dose of stress hormones, and it's a nice little trip down physical health as well that can be impacted by our stress levels and ongoing cognitive differences. So, I guess too, you know, I touched on hot flushes just there. If I've got an attentional difference and already have sensory differences related to my autistic and ADHD characteristics, then it's likely that hot flushes are going to be so much more impactful for me. But also, if I'm used to my body functioning in a certain way and I have that cognitive rigidity that is so helpful in many settings, but is really a core trait of autistic characteristics, or a core autistic trait, then I might really struggle to adjust to this change in what my body's doing, how I present because of the body changes and those chemical changes within. I once heard somebody say they felt like their body was letting them down, and I can completely understand that. So what can we do? And again, I should highlight that nothing I say here is specific medical or therapeutic advice to individuals. This is very general information only. But if I if I'm getting to any point in life where those cognitive differences are being amplified, you know, there are really simple things we can do to help try and manage attentional differences. We can have really visual schedules and reminders so that no matter what's happening with my working memory, I've got a visual reminder in front of me so that I can remember to do the things. We can have reminders. I love a reminder on my phone. Pardon me, we can do body doubling and get that social accountability involved to help us get through and motivate for things. And of course, in good supportive workplaces, we can seek reasonable environmental accommodations. If my sensory differences are being amplified and the lights are too bright, I can ask for lights that can be turned down. I can ask to be able to wear headphones in the workplace if that's not usual in my workplace. I can ask for heating or cooling to be adjusted to compensate for the differences and the difficulties that may be associated with those. So I have another little note here, but I have no idea what it says, so I'm going to pretend I was able to read my own writing. Uh, and I'll move on to the next uh the next theme, which was uh related to episode seven, I think, the intersection of neurodiversity and gender diversity. So we had a lot of people um comment after that episode, and I really appreciate that because it's difficult for marginalized groups like neurodivergent people or trans and gender-diverse, non-binary, agenda people to comment in public because often we worry about what other people are going to or how they're going to respond to our comments. But when we sit at the intersection of those two groups, there's even more pressure. And so I just want to say to everyone who comments, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I appreciate it because it can be truly effortful and it's not an easy process for many of us. So, gender body interception attention. Uh, one question that uh somebody popped up to me recently was why are there so many trans and gender-diverse people in the neurodivergent community compared to the neurotypical community? And why are there so many neurodivergent people in the trans and queer community more broadly, but particularly the gender-diverse community compared to the cisgender community? And I couldn't specifically tell you exactly why, but I've spoken about my own experience of gender in the past and my rejection of rules that don't make sense, which ties into that. For me, uh for those not really versed in gender discourse, a really brief description of gender as a social construct is you know, those things we call masculine or feminine changed by the group that we're in. So the colour pink is a really good example. I was reading something a while back, and pink was deemed to be a very masculine colour many moons ago, because it was bold and confident. Whereas, you know, as a young child in the 80s, it was still considered to be quite, it was considered to be quite a feminine colour. And it's only relatively recently, certainly less than half of my life, that guys in Australia have been wearing pink boldly and without it being sort of questionable in regional areas. So pink being a masculine or feminine thing is a socially constructed um concept. It's the group that I'm in, the social group, we agree that this thing is that characteristic or this uh item has that characteristic, and that changes by group. So the rejection of rules, uh, if I'm autistic and I like to understand the system, and the rules around gender are historically um, if you are born biologically male, you are a man, if you are born biologically female, you are a woman. But that doesn't really sit logically with the idea of intersex, uh, which then tells us that male and female, biological sex are not binary notions. And so if biological sex aren't binary notions, then the socially constructed gender are unlikely to be binary notions. And I think, you know, I can speak for myself, I have some really central characteristics that I identify with, that are core parts of who and what I believe I am, that are really feminine. But that's my internal identity. In a physical sense, I know, um, and to use the language that I've heard in the past, I know men who have child-bearing hips, they have that really feminine shape. And I know really muscular women who have, quote, masculine characteristics as well. So if we accept those two things, then man and biological male, and woman and biological female, they don't make sense as standing rules. How does that impact us? So, in terms of our gender, I touched on this in the podcast episode. Um, if I have a sensory difference and perhaps an attentional difference, so I notice certain areas of my body more, and I struggle to control my attention in the way that the average person would, I might have a sensory difference that draws my attention to it. My attentional difference means that I can't take my attention off that thing, maybe the way my chest feels. Um then if I have gender dysphoria, that's going to be amplified. Pardon me, but if I'm already, if I have gender dysphoria, it works in reverse as well. I can have gender dysphoria about a part of my body, brings my attention to it, and that amplifies the sensory difference that I may experience. What about um introsphen? So I guess the way I feel inside my body, like what my do body is doing on the inside, can also impact my experience of gender or body dysmorphia. Um, somebody commented about their experience when they ate, bringing their attention to their body, and again amplifying difficulties they have around those physical sensations. And I've already spoken about attention there. So this is a lovely little segue and menopause and perimenopause into the conversation around levels of severity and levels of impairment when we diagnose autism or ADHD. So I mentioned last week that somebody had suggested that by self-identifying as autistic, we're mocking the difficulties that that person has. And again, I refuse to tell people what their experience is, but I don't share that point of view because the difficulties that we have change by context. And menopause is a really good example. You know, I used the example of perhaps a high-masking and biological female who then reaches menopause, and then all of a sudden, what I've been able to compensate for, and my social differences and my cognitive differences, attentional differences, I may have been really high stress but able to cope and manage those and pass as neurotypical. But when I hit perimenopause or menopause, that estrogen changes, serotonin, dopamine fluctuates, all of a sudden I've got more brain fog. I have more inattention, more forgetfulness. I'm thinking a little slower than I normally would, and I've got sensory differences. So my level of impairment is going to increase. I may not be able to hold down the 50-hour a week job and raise the family and be a homemaker, like some of the powerhouses out there I know do. Not that I want to live that 1950s fantasy. Um, but sadly, we do still live in that world where biological females tend to hold the most of the family responsibilities and homemaker responsibilities. And thank you to you all for doing that. Um, if I've been able to hold all of that down, all of a sudden my cognitive function changes because of the chemicals in my body. My level of impairment changes. And so I may have received a diagnosis of autism, level one support needs initially, roll on those hormonal changes and the associated cognitive and sensory changes, and I might actually be at level two. And the same is true in reverse. I may be under a significant amount of pressure and stress and have a lot of post-trauma perhaps, mental health concerns, and I may be diagnosed combined type ADHD severe and autism spectrum level two support needs. But maybe I have an amazing therapist who runs a not-for-profit called the Iceberg Foundation, and maybe they do such a good job with me that I find my well-being and my mental health is actually much, much better. That gives me, when I'm not spending as much time on my anxieties and trying to manage my depression, that gives me more cognitive space to be able to maybe manage some of my rigidity or manage some of my impulses. So perhaps if I was reassessed, my level of impairment might come down from autism spectrum level two support needs to level one, and my ADHD severity might come down from severe to moderate. So our contact, our context is integral in our level of impairment and the severity of our diagnosis. So what does that tell us? That it's not just based in our characteristics. It's the interaction with the characteristics that we bring to the party and what the party requires, what's necessary in that environment, but put us in an environment that's suited to our characteristics, suited to our cognitive styles or our communication styles, and we find that we're not deficient and we're not disordered. I wonder how many of you might really struggle, like I do, to engage with people in a really typical sense in community. But put me amongst those with spicy brains, and I am in heaven. I can talk till the cows come home, like I do at the camera for this podcast. I love being around neurodivergent people. It's a simple, simple pleasure for me. And if we have social anxiety that stops us communicating in the way that's natural to us and creates difficulty for us in a typical setting, and then around one another, we communicate just fine. That tells us we are not characterologically flawed. It is an interactional problem, not a with me problem. So, my little sheet of paper that was directly in front of me, I have now touched on those points. So I'm going to touch in now a little bit about autistic Virtus' ADHD traits. So I was thinking about what are some things that we can talk about in episodes moving forward, and I found a lovely list of questions that are commonly asked by people who are autistic ADHDers or Audi HDers. And so I thought I'd touch on a few of those and that internal conflict that we can feel. One of the questions was why do I crave novelty, stimulation, and spontaneity, but also desperately need routine predictability and sameness? And that comes down to the clusters of characteristics that we are diagnosing with a diagnosis, but also that we just have as autistic people are ADHDs. ADHD comes with inattention and impulsivity. That's the two central characteristics that are diagnosed in ADHD. That novelty seeking is an expression of that inattention. Not unlike conversational tangentiality is a bit of an expression of that inattention. Stimulation, I can be, I can follow an impulse towards the interesting stimulating thing. Spontaneity is very impulsive. So those first three things, novelty, stimulation, spontaneity, they're very much ADHD characteristics. And I've said it before, ADHD and autism intuitively sound like the opposite things. So they lead to a lot of internal conflict. The flip side to those ADHD, novelty, and so forth, are our need for routine, our need for predictability and sameness. There's safety in that. I often talk about the autistic need for details or the autistic difficulty with missing details. And why is that? It's probably a safety mechanism. It's probably partly characterological. We see it run in families that suggest that it's uh a genetic characteristic, but there could also be family culture that leads to these things, this need for routine. Um but if I have a need for routine, pardon me, and I also crave stimulation for these other cognitive characteristics that I have, I'm gonna find myself probably feeling like a bit of an imposter because I'm not so rigid in the way I see myself that I look like all of the people that I've seen in the stereotypes of autism. But I also need routine, so I'm not really the impulsive backpacker that we sort of think about when we think of ADHD and impulsivity. So we can feel like we're not doing the two things right, but actually that's the way Audh D presents. We have these seemingly opposing experiences at the same time, and our context and how stressed we are will dictate which of those we lean into at any given point in time. I find myself the more stressed I am, the more autistic I am. However, when I've got more space in my life and in my mind, in my cognitive energy, uh that's when my ADHD comes out to play. That's when I go from being the introvert who barely leaves the house for two weeks at a time because I'm always working, to the person who's like, let's go and do the thing. So, um, why do I crave both ADHD expressions and autistic expressions? Because I'm autistic and an ADHDR. And those things will serve me in different ways at different times in my life. Our next question was why can I hyperfocus for hours on some things, but cannot start or finish basic tasks at all? So there's a couple of conversations around this. Why can I hyperfocus for hours on some things? We talk about many neurodivergent people having interest-based attention. Uh, and motivation is very much linked to attention. Uh when trying to manage my attention, what we can use is the nice framework. Novelty, interest, challenge, or emergency. I don't recommend leaning into emergency. That's what we naturally do when we quickly get the thing done at the last minute, right before the deadline, even though we've had four weeks to do it. That's using emergency to anchor my attention and get the thing done. We can also do it by doing new things, can grab our attention. Doing interesting things, and that's what we're talking about here, can be an anchor for our attention. And something that's challenging. So I like to try and beat the timer or try and beat how I well I previously did in something. Um, that helps me keep my attention on task. Hyper focus, uh, one could argue that that taps into cognitive rigidity. I am doing this thing that's really interesting, so it's a positive reward for me to do that. We know that ADHD is, we're not like the average person, in terms of the average person might get a reward, a gold star on their chart in school at the end of the day for doing the good thing. We need more frequent rewards because uh it just doesn't sit with us as a motivation factor as long as it does with the average person. If I'm hyper fixated on something that I love, I'm getting constant reward out of that. And if I've got cognitive rigidity that we often see in autism or difficulty set shifting, changing what I'm focused on or changing what I'm thinking about, that's going to keep me stuck in there as well, focusing on that thing that I'm really interested in. But then can't start or finish basic tasks at all. So I'll start with finishing. Can't finish basic tasks at all. ADHD is we're also not amazing with multi-step tasks. Probably partly because we get distracted from what we're meant to be focused on and we skip steps. But also probably because we're impulsive and we easily move off the thing. Pardon me, so organization is not one of our strongest points compared to the average person in the community. But also the starting of tasks. If I am inattentive, pardon me, and impulsive, and I have a long history of starting things and then getting distracted and then having some kind of negative feedback about it, some kind of punishment, some kind of feedback that I'm not good enough, that why can't you just do the thing? I'm slowly starting to lose my belief in myself that I can do the boring thing. And I'm also starting to have all of these aversive consequences make me not want to do the thing. So I'll probably have some anxiety about doing it to start with, leading to procrastination. But I'll also probably have a bit of lack of confidence in myself in being able to start and do the thing, which becomes a secondary barrier or another barrier. So why can I hyper focus sometimes and then struggle to start other things? That will also come back to interest. If I'm not interested in the thing, I'll have a lot of difficulty motivating myself to do it. If it seems aversive, I'm not going to want to do it. So I inherently lack motivation. Breathing in now and nice deep breath, Aaron. So the next question is why do I swing between over planning every detail and then doing everything last minute in a panic? Again, I talk about an autistic details orientation. We can start to plan something and need to fill every detail. But if I'm an Audi HD and I have had some shocking experiences planning things, I might also overcompensate, I might overplan. Okay, then I need to. Last time I forgot to organize the passport, so now I need to make sure I do that. Um pardon me. But also when my autistic brain goes, oh, there's three things that I have to do. Oh, but for thing one, I've then got thing 1.1 and 1.2 and 1.3 and 1.4, and then I've got 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 and 1.1.16 and 1.2 dot dot dot 15. That's pretty overwhelming. And then I start on two. What sounds like just three tasks, we then sit with our beautiful Audi HD brains linking all of the related tasks, and we don't view them as individual tasks often. We look at them as a massive overwhelming weight of tasks, which is inherently demotivational. And I'm more likely to leave it, not do it, procrastinate, and all of a sudden it's time for me to get on the flight to wherever I'm going, and I haven't booked all of the things, so it last-minute panic to get everything done. Often it's a reflection of or a parallel with our experience in the school system, often our work system and our private life when we're trying to organize things. So the overplanning can be, I need all the details, but it can also be compensatory for my experience of having not planned well in the past, and that can lead me to procrastinate, uh, and then all of a sudden I have no time left and I have to do the thing at the last minute. Why does socializing sometimes feel intoxicating and other times completely unbearable and draining? Uh so I would suggest that often for a lot of people it's to do with what are my resources at the time? How many spoons do I have for those of us who know spoon theory? Uh, how much energy do I have to give? If I've had a week where I've worked a hundred hours and then I've got two parties to go to, I am going to be much less intoxicated by the social environment and much more repulsed by it and the energy that I've already spent during the week that I just don't have to give to conversations with new people. But if I've just had a week off work, my health's really good, my sleep's been really good, and I've just got one social engagement, I'm gonna go there refreshed, energized, and have all the energy in the world to share with the people around me. My novelty seeking in ADHD is probably what underpins that kind of social butterfly stereotype. That's gonna come out to play when I'm well rested, well-fed, you know, I've really been looking after myself. But if I have sensory differences and cognitive differences and have high stress, my well-being is not going so great, uh, I want to stay in my lane where I feel safe. So the social environment, a lot of change, a lot of people coming and going, probably a lot of noise, a lot of light. If my eyes are a bit sensitive or I'm sensitive to sound, I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm sensitive to busyness, it is going to feel like the seventh circle, and I'm not going to want to be there. So it really can tap into how much of my energy reserves have I used in other things before going into that social setting? And we can apply that to non-social settings as well. Why can I work really well some days and not others? Why can I pay attention well and on some days and not others? Why can I manage my impulses really well on some days and not others? Because we are a really big complex system of interactions. And for those of you who've heard of the biopsychosocial model, this is what I'm talking about here. Every interacting part of who and what I am influences the others. And who I am at home, if I've got relational stress at home, that's going to impact on how I interact at work, uh, maybe how much I achieve, that's going to impact on how much stress I feel in social settings. So if we can think of ourselves as like really complex machines with interacting parts, every time one of the parts is a little bit underperforming because it's overperformed, if I've spent all of my energy masking, I'm gonna have much less energy to put into focusing on work. So that was a very tangential conversation, but I enjoyed it. Hopefully, you guys did too. And if it uh if you have any questions, feel free to ask. How do I tell if I'm masking or genuinely enjoying something when I'm on socially? So this is a really interesting question to me because I I don't think all masking is bad. I think masking is unhelpful when the cost outweighs the benefit. I can be anxious going into social settings and not speak to anybody. Um but if I know that a friend of mine's going to come, I might spend an hour uh really anxious because I don't know the people or I only know people in passing. But then I know my friend is coming and I love that friend, and the world disappears with that friend. Um I don't know if you guys have that friend uh as well, but for many years in Sydney, mine was Nicole, if you're out there. Um, that person that just is so easy to get along with. That benefit outweighs the cost of standing there for hours with people that I don't know feeling awkward. So that kind of mask of being in the social setting and putting the parish ma on and holding my posture the way people expect it to be, in that situation is really worthwhile for me. Um, if I'm going there and it's just stress all the way and there's no payoff, then the benefit is not outweighing the cost. But also, I sat and sat with that question: how do I tell if I'm masking or genuinely enjoying something when I'm on socially? I think whether I'm masking or not, if I'm enjoying something, I'm enjoying it because I can I can hold two emotional states simultaneously. I can love you and be angry with you for eating the last of the ice cream, and I can be masking to cope with some anxiety in a social setting, but also actually enjoying the positive interaction that some people are are having with me because of my masking? And so I wonder if that's a question that you ask. If another question that you might ask yourself is what's the point? What's the benefit, or what's the cost-benefit analysis? Is my masking just causing me stress and impacting my well-being negatively? Or is it a you know 30% stress cost, but actually I'm getting a 50% enjoyment and that 20% win, that's worth it for me. That's a question that I think is internal to everybody. For some people, if my stress is already at 95% and there might be a 50, a 50-point payoff for being there, but it's gonna cost me 6% of my stress tolerance, my resilience to be at that party, no amount of payback is worth reaching capacity, melting down, and my well-being completely being overwhelmed. And now the final question, because I just noticed that I've hit 30 minutes again, because I apparently love a chat. Why do I feel both too much and not enough for people and workplaces? Um, this one I would put down to certainly with myself in my past and a lot of people that I chat to. Why do I feel too much? Sometimes because we're ADHD is so we can be impulsive and we can sometimes be loud. It's a whole diagnostic criteria for ADHD, difficulty doing things quietly. Um but if I'm ADHD and I'm a bit loud, and maybe I'm also autistic and I will monologue at you and uh point in case, I might get that feedback socially. Oh, calm down, oh be quiet, oh just shh, you know, shut up, it's someone else's turn to talk. When I get that over and over again, it becomes a complex stressor. Um when we talk about um stress and trauma, we can have big T traumas, which are the the big immediate threats to my life and safety, or the life and safety of the people and things that I hold dear. Um kind of like uh being stabbed in the arm with a knife. Um that's the how I'm gonna metaphor that one up. Or we can have, we refer to it as little tea traumas, little tea stresses, and this is often can come into complex stress and trauma. Uh instead of a stab with a knife, it's like little paper cuts. It's being told I'm too much or I'm not trying hard enough over and over and over again. And so I can simultaneously internalize that and think I'm too much, I'm too loud, I never stop talking, and at the same time think I'm not enough, I'm not enough to meet these social expectations, I'm not enough to meet these academic expectations, I'm an inferior person because I'm too much. But if you experience that and you get that from the people around you, I want to say to you, you are not too much, and you are not not enough. You are enough and you are the just the right amount. Change the context and we change our experience and we change the way our the expression of our characteristics are perceived. If people say you're aware too much for never making a point for tangenting all the time, I say go into a room with other ADHDers who tangent all the time, and all of a sudden we don't feel too much or not enough. All of a sudden, we have people that latch onto that secondary point and that third point and fourth point, and they're there with us, and we're there with them as we have these rolling conversations. So if you feel too much, you're just enough, you're exactly enough. If you feel not enough, you're enough, you're perfectly fine. Your context will change how you feel in that situation. And slowly challenging those internalized ideas about being too much in a typical sense will help change that too much not enough sort of internalization. Well, I should wind up for that. Um thank you very much for listening, guys. I've had another little monologue tonight and it's been an absolute pleasure. Uh let us know if you have any questions or what you'd like to see in future episodes. I think I put a poll up on our last episode last week, so um I hope you're all doing well. I hope you all recognise that you are enough, that you're not too much, and that you are different, not defective. And I will uh talk at you all again next week. Thank you very much, friends.