The Long Version
A person at a normal volume.
I run a small operation, all the time, to be a person at a normal volume.
Jen
Late 30s
Pharmacy technician
AuDHD
15 minute read
I'm in the car in the school pickup line at 2:15 for a 3:05 pickup, which is fifty minutes, and I do this four days a week. I tell Dan it's because the line gets bad. The line does get bad. But the real reason is that it's the only fifty minutes where nobody can ask me anything. I put the seat back. I don't listen to anything. Sometimes I fall asleep and wake up when the car in front of me moves.
I've been doing some version of this since I was about twenty. Parking lots, mostly.
2:15–3:05
The only fifty minutes where nobody can ask me anything.
Tights, doorframes, the library
The first thing I remember is tights: the seam across the toes, my mother telling me to stop it because we were going to be late, and me crying in a way everyone agreed was disproportionate. That was my dad's word for me later, too. Disproportionate.
I ate a PB&J sandwich with the crust cut off, cut diagonally, every school day from second grade through sixth. Straight across was wrong. I couldn't explain why then and I can't now.
At home it was "Jen's in a mood" or "she's just sensitive," usually said kindly. At school I was a pleasure to have in class who did not work well in groups. By sixth grade I was "anxious in unstructured settings," which was a nice way of saying I didn't go outside at lunch. I talked the librarian into giving me a pass by offering to shelve books. I did that for two years. It was the best part of school.
I said I got homesick at sleepovers. Really, I couldn't sleep in a room with other people breathing. I had small rules I never mentioned: touch the doorframe, count the stairs, don't step on the metal strip in a doorway. I assumed everyone had their own version.
Every school day
PB&J. Crust off. Cut diagonally.
Second grade through sixth.
The hard thing and the phone call
I'm a pharmacy tech. I know hundreds of drugs by sight, generic and brand, and I catch the ones that get mixed up, hydralazine and hydroxyzine, and I've caught real errors that would have hurt somebody. I can run a twelve-hour shift, hold four things in my head at once, and stay steady while a guy screams at me about his insurance.
And I have not made my own dentist appointment since 2019. It's a phone call. I have the number in my phone. My tooth has hurt on and off for a year and a half.
That's the version people can't square: reliable with the thing that could hurt someone, unable to begin the ordinary thing that is hurting me. Dan can't square it either, and he's on my side.
Laundry system
Two baskets. One clean. One dirty.
Dentist appointment
The number is already in my phone.
What daily life looks like
There are two laundry baskets in our room. One is clean and one is dirty and I get dressed out of the clean one. When it's empty I do laundry and refill it. That has been the system for six years. The dresser holds things I haven't seen since we moved.
Showering is a project, not a fifteen-minute thing. I plan around it and usually do it at night. If I know I have to shower in the morning, I sleep badly.
Texts have a four-minute window. If I don't answer inside it, I write the reply in my head for days or weeks. Eventually the reply needs an apology attached, so I don't send either one.
Grocery pickup changed my life. I did not go inside a grocery store between 2020 and 2023. There are always three or four glasses around the house with a little water left in them.
The school forms are worse: field trips, picture day, the reading log. I once paid a late fee on a $12 field trip because I could not make myself open the envelope.
Field trip form
Due Friday
Student name
Parent signature
Payment: $12.00
Late fee added
The work I fell into
I was going to be a nurse. I got through a year and a half and washed out in the second year. It wasn't the science; I did well on the exams. It was the care plans: open-ended, no template, due on a rolling basis. I could sit with the laptop open for four hours and not begin. I failed one course, then let an incomplete in another turn into an F because I did not answer the emails. I told everyone it was money. It was partly money.
I fell into pharmacy work and stayed for eleven years. Honestly, it fits me better than nursing would have. It is checking and pattern matching. There is a right answer.
I take the 6am shift. The store is closed for the first hour, the lights are half on, and I can set up before anyone talks to me. I trade away the phone queue and take extra fill work; the other techs think they're getting a great deal. I also arrive twenty-five minutes early and sit in the car.
People who stayed curious
Dan and I have been married fourteen years. Our recurring argument used to start when he made plans with another couple. I would agree, then cancel on the day or go and be terrible company. He thought I disliked his friends. Once he said being married to me was like having a great time with someone who then leaves the room for three days and doesn't say why. That was fair, actually.
My mother is the hard one. She says "well, we're all a little like that." Every time. She says it about the noise thing, the food thing, all of it.
My sister did the opposite. She asked questions for two hours, read a book, and called back with more questions. We weren't especially close before. I didn't expect that.
Ro, my friend from the pharmacy, told me she had ADHD before I knew anything about myself. She is the only person I can cancel on without inventing a story. I say "not today." She says, "ok, Thursday?"
“Not today.”
“Ok, Thursday?”
When my words go
Sound is the main one. The kitchen fan, the ice maker, the specific pitch of the drive-thru headset at work. It isn't the volume. I can't stop hearing it; it stays at the front. By hour eight of a shift I'm holding my jaw shut. I've cracked a molar clenching and wake up with headaches that start behind my ear.
Past a certain point my words go. First I get short, then I answer with one word, then nothing. It took Dan about ten years to learn that this is when he should stop asking questions.
I often don't eat until 2 or 3, then eat standing at the counter. My best hours are eleven at night to one in the morning. Every job I've had has wanted the opposite.
The kitchen fan
The ice maker
The drive-thru headset
People talking at once
My son's sixth birthday
I booked the trampoline place because that's what the other parents were doing and I didn't want him to be the kid with the weird party.
Someone watching would have seen a mom set up the table, hand out wristbands, take pictures for twenty minutes, disappear for the last half hour, then return for the goodbyes looking fine. Dan cut the cake.
Around the twenty-five-minute mark I stopped hearing individual voices. It became one sound with the trampolines pounding underneath it. I went past the hallway and the arcade, out to the parking lot, and sat in the car with my hands over my ears. I cried, fixed my face, and went back in.
Dan found me at some point and stood in the doorway and said, you're missing it.
He wasn't being cruel. I was missing it. That's the part that still gets me. Not that he said it.
The hearing test
At 36 I was convinced I was losing my hearing. I couldn't follow restaurant conversations, and at work I caught maybe half of what was said if two people talked at once. The audiologist tested everything and said my hearing was above average for my age. I remember being annoyed. Then she explained that some people struggle to process speech through background noise even when their hearing is normal. It can go with ADHD, she said. Had I ever been evaluated?
I said no and drove home and did not think about it, and then thought about it for a year.
I read about ADHD in women. Autism kept appearing next to it and I dismissed that part hard, for months, because I made eye contact and had a friend and a husband. Then I read a woman's account of chewing the inside of her cheek during meetings and had to put my phone down.
The ADHD diagnosis came quickly from a nurse practitioner. The autism assessment took nine months and cost $2,200, paid in three chunks on a card. I was 37.
Hearing test result
Above average.
The sound was getting in. Following speech through everything around it was something else.
What changed, and what did not
I stopped assuming I was lazy. That's the whole change, and it is bigger than it sounds. I had been spending an enormous amount of every day arguing with myself about my own character.
I still can't make the phone call. Nothing about knowing has fixed the phone call.
The first six months were worse. I was angry at my mother, at the counselor I saw in tenth grade, and at nobody. I grieved nursing school because it stopped looking like a personal failure and started looking like something that could have gone differently. I don't know if that's better.
The marriage got harder and then better. Dan reads about it now. He overcorrected for a while and treated me like I might break. I told him to knock it off.
The small operation
I wear Loop earplugs at work under my hair. Nobody has noticed. I wear them in restaurants now too; I was embarrassed for about two weeks.
The fifty minutes in the car are not something I invented after diagnosis. I just don't feel guilty about them now, and I don't lie to Dan about why I'm there.
We rotate five dinners: tacos, chicken and rice, pasta, breakfast for dinner, and one takeout night. I stopped trying to be a person who cooks new things.
Our shared calendar has one rule. With 48 hours notice, Dan can put anything on it and I will do it. Under 48 hours, the answer is no. It isn't personal and we don't have to have the conversation anymore.
I text instead of calling whenever I can, including the dentist. Some offices won't let me.
Concerta doesn't make me organized and it doesn't touch the sensory stuff. It makes the first ten minutes of a task possible. I didn't know the first ten minutes was the whole problem.
At a restaurant I sit at the end of the table, facing the door. It sounds like nothing. It makes a two-hour dinner survivable.
Loop earplugs
Five dinners
48 hours notice
Text, don't call
Tuesday
- Up
- Out the door
- Out of the parking lot and into the shift
- School pickup line
- Home; on the couch
- Not a time when you talk to me
Dan handles homework. My son knows it. I'm not sure how I feel about him knowing it.
Still unfinished
I have Ro and my sister and that's about it now. I let a lot of people go by not answering. Some of them I would like back, but how do you open that after four years?
Work doesn't know. I've thought about asking for something in writing, some accommodation, but every time I get close I picture the conversation in a small pharmacy where everyone is stretched already. I don't do it.
My son is seven. He lines things up, he has one food, and last month he cried about the seam in his sock. I have a whole complicated thing going on about that. I don't want to see it and I can't unsee it. We're getting him assessed in the fall.
The earplugs, calendar, dinners, medication, and car all help. Keeping them running is its own job, and nobody counts that job. The earplugs have to be charged. The calendar works only if I hold the line with people who think I'm difficult. Five dinners still require somebody to place the pickup order. It isn't that I found the tools and now everything is fine.
It's that I run a small operation, all the time, to be a person at a normal volume.
About Jen
Jen is a pharmacy technician in her late thirties. She lives with her husband and seven-year-old son and was diagnosed with ADHD and autism as an adult.
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