You’re making dinner. Pasta water on the back burner, onions softening in the pan, a half-chopped pepper on the board. There’s music on. You aren’t thinking about the order of things, because you don’t have to. Your hands know the sequence. The evening is working.
Then someone walks in and says, “We have to leave in ten minutes. Can you hurry?”
Nothing about the task has changed. The onions are the same onions, the knife is the same knife, and ten minutes is honestly enough time. Yet something shifts behind your eyes. The music is suddenly too loud. You can’t remember whether you salted the water. You pick up the pepper, put it down, and pick up a spoon for no reason. Your face is getting hot. You hear yourself say something sharp, and then you’re standing in the middle of the kitchen unable to decide what to do next. Your body has simply stopped taking orders.
Ten seconds ago you were fine.
Or maybe it’s a Tuesday at work. You’re forty minutes into a report, deep in the flow of it, when a message pops up from your manager: Need this by 2, can you prioritize? It’s 1:15. You were going to finish by 1:45 anyway. Now the sentence you were writing has dissolved, you’ve reread the same paragraph three times, and part of your brain is drafting a reply about how it’ll be fine while your chest tightens.
If you’re autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, gifted, masked, or some layered combination of all of it, you probably know this moment in your body. Most of us have spent years believing it’s a character flaw: we can’t handle pressure, we’re too sensitive, we fall apart over nothing.
What’s actually happening has a shape, and once you can see the shape, it gets much easier to be kind to yourself about it.
Urgency is a Second Task
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