In this blog, Georgina, one of our Trauma Ambassadors, explores what it’s like living as AuDHD.
They say AuDHD is autism plus ADHD.
But it isn’t.
It’s what happens when two different systems try to run on the same power source — when structure and spontaneity, stillness and motion, collide in one mind.
For me, it’s like drawing with a purple crayon.
Not red and blue sitting neatly side by side, but blended — fused together until there’s no way to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Autism gives me the need for clarity — for patterns, understanding, and calm.
ADHD gives me movement — the restlessness, the constant ideas, the spark that never quite settles.
Together they don’t balance. They compete, amplify, overlap.
Some days they create something vivid and whole — other days they tear through each other, leaving fragments and exhaustion in their wake.
It isn’t “a mix.” It’s a constant negotiation.
A brain that can see both the detail and the whole picture at once — and still miss the obvious.
A body that wants to move while the mind wants to stop.
Thoughts that sprint and freeze, sometimes in the same moment.
Living as AuDHD is holding contradictions that the world doesn’t see.
People expect either order or chaos, not both at the same time.
They see focus or distraction, calm or crisis — but rarely the shifting space between them.
This guide is my attempt to draw that space.
To show what it feels like from the inside — the noise, the patterns, the burnouts, the brilliance, the constant effort to translate yourself into something legible.
It’s not a theory or a diagnosis manual. It’s a reflection.
A way to make sense of the purple lines that don’t always stay inside the page — but still make something meaningful, something whole, something real.
Georgina,
Trauma Ambassador