I feel like I've spent years fighting my own brain instead of actually living
I don't really know how to summarize the last several years of my life except to say that I'm exhausted by my own mind.
I'm 24, autistic, have ADHD, and have struggled with anxiety. Some of these problems have existed for as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, things that were supposed to be fun could feel like work. I'd tune out during movies, struggle to finish books, get overwhelmed in places like toy stores, or disappear into my own imagination instead of paying attention to what was actually happening around me.
Instead, I became incredibly focused on two things: animals and art.
For years those were basically my world. I daydreamed constantly and became so absorbed in those interests that I barely explored anything else. I eventually convinced myself that art had to become my career.
Now I look back and wish I'd had a much broader childhood. I wish I'd tried more things, developed more practical skills, and been able to enjoy ordinary books, movies, games, and other things without constantly fighting my attention.
High school made everything more complicated. I went through a huge existential crisis that completely changed the way I thought about life, suffering, death, and what actually mattered to me. Eventually I decided I wanted to move away from the narrow world I'd built around myself and become a much more normal, grounded, independent person.
Instead, the next several years felt like my brain exploded.
My family started regularly traveling back and forth between California and New York. I don't think my parents ever intended to hurt me, but I feel like the constant disruption made problems I already had dramatically worse. I've dealt with racing thoughts, overstimulation, insomnia, anxiety, mood swings, rumination, concentration problems, old memories resurfacing, and endless random thoughts that sometimes feel like they're all demanding my attention simultaneously.
It feels like every rule I tried to establish for myself eventually collapsed.
Stop retreating into old interests? They came flooding back.
Stop daydreaming? I kept doing it.
Stop looking at pornography? I repeatedly went back to it, including material I now really wish I'd never gotten into.
Stay away from AI character chatbots? That turned into one of the worst loops of all.
I initially used Character.AI thinking I could vent some of what was going through my head without becoming emotionally invested. Instead, I ended up repeatedly going back, typing prompts, deleting conversations, feeling awful, promising myself I was finished, and eventually doing it again. Some conversations affected me emotionally far more than I ever expected an AI conversation could.
What scares me is how often actively trying not to do something seems to make my brain latch onto it harder.
That pattern isn't limited to AI or porn. I've done it with old interests, memories, random things I've encountered online, music, regrets, and questions I feel like I absolutely have to resolve. Sometimes something I haven't thought about in months suddenly reappears and feels important all over again.
I've accumulated an absurd number of browser tabs and ChatGPT conversations trying to understand everything that's happened to me. Sometimes looking at the sheer amount of material I've generated trying to understand my own brain makes me feel worse. It feels like an archive of years I desperately wish had gone differently.
And the frustrating thing is that this isn't confined to obviously unpleasant things.
Even things that are supposed to be enjoyable are difficult.
It recently took me weeks to finish Project Hail Mary, even with an audiobook. I've been trying to improve my French and Spanish by watching movies with subtitles, but I'll constantly tune out, open another tab, start searching for something completely unrelated, and realize I've barely been paying attention.
Sometimes I look at people my age happily watching Marvel movies, playing video games, reading books, going places, working, and generally getting on with their lives, and I feel incredibly jealous.
I don't necessarily want their hobbies.
I want their apparent ability to be present for them.
I'm also still dependent on my parents in ways I desperately don't want to be. I'm learning to drive, trying to become better about chores and responsibilities, trying to manage school, and trying to prepare myself for employment and independence. But even driving has turned into another source of conflict because I can become overwhelmed by instructions and criticism and then get angry.
I resent my parents for some of this, which is difficult to admit because they're not monsters. They genuinely try to help me. At the same time, I feel like I've spent years bouncing between being lectured or yelled at and being coddled. I also resent decisions they made that I believe destabilized me, and I get frustrated when they bring up interests I'm desperately trying to leave behind.
At the same time, I know I can't blame them for everything. This is my life, and ultimately I'm the one who has to figure out what to do with it.
I'm in therapy. I've been given plenty of strategies. But here's another embarrassing problem: I frequently tune out during therapy itself.
I'll take half-finished notes, understand something vaguely while it's being explained, and then when I'm actually stuck in one of these loops, I can't remember what I'm supposed to do. It's incredibly frustrating to know that someone has literally taught me techniques for dealing with the problem and still be unable to retrieve them when my brain is overwhelmed.
One particularly strange thing I've realized is that, when I was younger, sometimes getting yelled at actually brought a momentary sense of relief. I didn't enjoy being yelled at. It was unpleasant. But the sudden stress could temporarily cut through everything else. For a moment there weren't twenty different thoughts competing for my attention. I could just focus.
That realization really bothers me. I don't want stress, anger, or conflict to be what finally makes my head quiet.
More than anything, I'm tired of feeling like I've spent so much of my life inside my own head.
I don't want some extraordinary life anymore. I want to be able to concentrate. I want to drive. I want to work. I want to manage my own responsibilities. I want to learn languages consistently. I want to read a book or watch a movie without it becoming a project. I want to be able to encounter a random thought without spending the next several hours trying to figure out what it says about me.
And I'm terrified sometimes that if I eventually look back over my life, instead of remembering experiences I actually enjoyed, I'll remember obsessions, overstimulation, AI conversations, pornography, arguments, mood swings, browser tabs, random Internet garbage, and years spent desperately trying to control what was happening inside my head.
I know that fear may be catastrophizing. I'm also aware that plenty of people have problems far worse than mine. I can appreciate that now in a way I couldn't when I was completely overwhelmed. But knowing that someone else is suffering more doesn't magically make me able to concentrate or stop ruminating.
I don't know exactly how much of this is ADHD, autism, anxiety, my own decisions, my environment, or just years of different problems feeding into one another.
I just know I'm tired, and I want the next part of my life to be different.
I'm sorry for all the constant problems I've caused myself and for how many times I've fallen back into the same patterns despite knowing I wanted to stop. I'm trying to take responsibility for that now instead of spending the rest of my life replaying it.
If you've read this entire ridiculous wall of text, thank you.
And I'm not posting this expecting everyone to reassure me or tell me I've done nothing wrong. If you think I've handled things badly, you're free to say so. Judge me however you want. I just needed to finally put the whole thing into words.