I was kind of excited to learn that AuDHD was a thing, because I've failed both the autism test and the ADHD test, but the reality is that it is not a thing. The only thing that changed was you can be both fully autistic spectrum and fully ADHD. There's no official hybrid category to straddle the two.

It's a bummer for me because I think AuDHD perfectly explains everything that is horribly wrong in my life, mostly around work: I don't get along with coworkers, so I never get promoted and often I get fired. I see a problem, I point it out. I'm honest even during job interviews, which are very stressful.

On the attention side, I don't really do well with repetitive tasks. If I can listen to podcasts all day, I'm OK, but if it's just staring at a counter waiting for customers to come in, that's pretty hellish. I also don't have much in the way of special interests. Every once in a while, the fever will take me and I'll learn programming or kayak-building or instrument-making or instrument-playing or languages, but the drive to really crank that is more typical of autism is lacking, so when I'm faced with long periods of time, I do very little (averaging 30 comments/day for the last 5 months!). And during that long period, I sometimes pick up career books about "finding your passion," but I mostly put them down pretty quickly.

I've been unemployed for 3 months. I'm afraid to apply for jobs, not just because of the rejection, but because I'll be getting back on this treadmill of unbearable jobs where I will eventually fail, will make no friends, will garner no references.

I hate going to the mental healthcare system, which has done absolutely nothing to resolve or even acknowledge the root cause or even the root problem. I've been called very intelligent and promising and capable. I've also been saddled with harmful diagnoses like bipolar and put on meds which make me lose what little contact I have with my emotional world.

Just to put this into context: I'm over 50 years old and this is the same exact problem I had in high school and college and ever since, just a real inability to figure out what I want to do, even in my own spare time. And it's the source of everything else. I need to work to live, and if working is difficult, it is obviously hard to live, and that will obviously have an impact on my mood. "Great," says the useless mental health system, "mood is something we can easily diagnose and medicate!"

Yet, if that is the core problem, there really isn't any treatment for it, but at least a diagnosis would open up some benefits (and maybe a free train ride to a Kennedy-run camp in the future), but that is probably beyond my reach.