Hi friends

As the title suggests, I do mention suicidal ideation in this newsletter. Please skip this if you find this subject triggering and I hope to see you next week.

For those of you who are staying, although I’ve just mentioned an incredibly heavy trigger warning, the post ends on a lighter note, and I do hope you enjoy.

A reminder pops up in my phone at midday, every day, that simply says ‘Eat lunch’.

Regular notifications nudge me to drink water.

Despite getting easily bored by routine, I have a strict evening schedule so I go to bed at the same time every day.

This is just a small selection of the scaffolding that holds up my life as an AuDHD person who struggles with interoception. Interoception means ‘the sense of the internal state of your body, allowing you to feel physical and emotional signals like hunger or thirst.’

If a neurotypical person’s internal signals are at a normal volume, mine are basically whispers that I don’t tend to hear well.

They are particularly quiet if I am lost in hyperfocus. My monotropic mind can’t handle more than one input at any one time. If my thoughts are consumed with, say, learning about the Bee Gees (don’t laugh), then it makes sense that I don’t have much capacity to clock my own internal hunger signals. I can be so engrossed in a task that I won’t notice my hands shaking from low blood sugar.

My woolly sense of interoception leads to bizarre situations. The headline of this newsletter - ‘Do I want to die or am I just dehydrated?’ - is a funny question that I have often asked myself seriously, as ridiculous and overdramatic as it sounds.

This is what usually happens:

• Naturally, if I am very hungry or thirsty, I may tend to be in a bad mood (what some people call being ‘hangry’)

• I can’t easily tell that I am hungry or thirsty, though I can tell that that I’m very down and don’t understand the reason why.

• I experience alexithymia - I struggle to identify my emotions - so all I feel in these situations is just a big muddy wave of awfulness that I can’t break down into anything clearer.

• I tend to forget I have problems with interoception, and I also genuinely forget I am AuDHD sometimes (because I spent 29 years of my life just thinking I was a bit strange. I’m still getting used to knowing I am neurodivergent!)

• Rather than remembering that my bad moods could be related to interoception, I tend to interpret my bad moods as some sort of depression that doesn’t have a root cause.

• The depression gets worse as I get more and more hungry/thirsty. The spiral grows further and further until I’m spinning out of control.

I can’t express how awful I have felt, the states I have got myself into, the meltdowns that I have been at the centre of, all because I have not realised that I have not met one of my very basic needs.

To go from very close to the edge and seeing no way out, to then have someone give me a glass of water and for it to suddenly be alright again, it’s almost a joke, except it isn’t.

To genuinely have serious thoughts of ending it all, and then eat something and realise, ‘Oh no I was literally just hungry.’ As with any meltdown, the shame and embarrassment is off the charts. I often think “Was that just me? Was that me with my supposed rational, logical brain?”. Shame is a whole other subject that maybe I’ll write more on in future, because it has taken a whole lot of work to get to a point where I can almost, almost keep the shame from really getting to me.

I once experienced this scenario at a gathering where I was trying my utmost to suppress a shutdown. I don’t think I was very successful at hiding it, by all accounts. After the moment had passed, I ended up eating something. Apparently, according to some people who were there, the way I was visibly brought back down to earth by the food was borderline hilarious. Someone even remarked “Was this….was all this because you were hungry?”

When I am very low it can feel like I will be stuck like this forever. I can’t picture the future easily. My ADHD raises an eyebrow at that common mental health related saying: ‘This too shall pass’. When? When will it pass? All I can see is now.

It’s got to a stage now where I have to stop myself in these moments, physically stand still and mindfully go through a basic checklist when I feel very low:

• Have I eaten something in the last few hours?

• Have I drank water in the last few hours?

• Do I feel tired - are my eyes struggling to stay open, are my muscles aching?

• When was the last time I had a shower?

• Am I too cold or too hot right now?

These are all things I generally don’t think about unless I force myself to consider them. Factoring this little checklist into my life recently has helped enormously. It is easier to rationalise why I feel the vague awfulness a lot of the time. It can and does pass.

Obviously, eating a cookie isn’t going to solve every bout of depression I experience. I’m a human, not a Jim Henson creation.

However, just to make sure I don’t become sad as a result of hunger, I’m going to go eat the cookie anyway, just in case and because it’ll make me happy regardless.

Let me know what you think of this one in the comments.

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Take it easy,

Ren