When’s the last time things were “normal”?

When’s the last time things were “normal”? Honestly, if you ask me?

I can’t remember the last time I had a normal day. Maybe it was 17th March 2020, a day before MCO. Maybe it was 24th November 2021, a day before the iatrogenic medications.  Maybe it was the first day without medications, on 11th January 2026. Maybe there wasn’t a specific day, and life slowly changed and evolved.

And I can’t help but wonder if it’s because I think a lot of people assume a stable personality is one that never ever changes, but that is basically the opposite of what a stable personality is. According to Chopik and Kitayama (2018), a stable personality is one that evolves with stable core traits. These evolutionary changes of our personality happen due to social and cultural factors. There’s also a difference in how it evolves across different cultures.

As an autistic person with ADHD, there are many times I struggle with communication and how I socialize. I learn from mirroring, which is basically copying and pasting. There is a reason why even those who face less challenges externally actually have a lot more internal challenges going on, regardless of whether we’re neurodivergent or neurotypical. A lot of the time, when I enter a new social group, the first point of learning arises from direct mirroring.

Prior to my autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, I would also mask. Masking can very for a lot of people. For me, it included rehearsing conversations over and over again before executing them, simply trying to suppress my sensory needs such as overstimulation from music that is too loud or strobe lights that actually cause terrible headaches. I did that to appear more neurotypical.

Masking and mirroring can arise in situations where sometimes, people then view my behaviors and words as weird, difficult to understand, contradictory or even offensive. Now, some might ask, “If that is the case, why bother to mask and/or mirror?” The blunt answer? When I don’t mask and/or mirror, even around other autistic people or other ADHD people, or even fellow AuDHD people, most of the time, difficulties in socialization arise.

Some people even find me emotionless when I mask too much. Sometimes, I do that because I am genuinely intensely exhausted in having to think so much about every single social rule. For me, socialization and social rules do not come naturally to me. I will give a simple example. Many of us learn that if another person you are with looks at their watch, or perhaps the clock on their phone, they must be in a rush. From my point of view, this is how I process it. First, if I notice the other person looking at a watch, I map that as time tracking. And then internally, I think “What’s the reason for them looking at their watch? If it’s a smartwatch, they could also be looking at notifications. Otherwise, I could have been talking for too long, or they have to or want to leave.”

Usually when I cannot figure non-verbal social cues or body langue out, I bluntly ask. I have tried many ways to ask it, however, to this day, I have not figured out which is the best way to ask the question. The ways I have asked them include “Do you need to go?”, “Sorry, I must be talking too much.”, “Are you in a rush?”, amongst many others.

There are some non-verbal body language actions that I do not even register the same way as some others might. For example, to me, if you’re shaking your legs or fidgeting, it’s simply a normal form of self regulation. I do that a lot, it’s called stimming. It helps me regulate my own nervous system and focus better.

Even when it comes to verbal language and verbal social cues, there are things that many of us do not process the same way neurotypical people do. Some time ago, if you asked me “How are you?”, I would go and tell you how I really felt automatically, and if the internal state answer wasn’t “Good, you?”, I would respond with my actual internal state. Eventually, after my diagnosis, I began to realize that I could make things flow smoother socially by perhaps asking variations of “You want the honest answer or the small talk answer?”, or even “Good, you?”, even when that wasn’t the internal state answer I have, depending on the person and sociocultural context.

I can misinterpret tone, and that is why sometimes I put the tone or definition of things in brackets, like a narrative. Sometimes, I have to seek for clarification too. Not everyone likes that, understandably, so I have to learn new ways to communicate. To this very day, five months before I’m turning 25, I still need to learn socialization, social cues, verbal language and non-verbal body language alongside facial expression. I may entirely miss sarcasm, irony, or jokes, but that doesn’t mean I do not understand them at all. Sometimes, I may need to be pointed out with other cues like in text, “jk”, or an emoji, which, honestly, I have to Google definitions of emojis often.

As an autistic person who also has ADHD with a Bachelor’s degree having majored in psychology, who is undergoing postgraduate studies, I also feel the need to elaborate that autistic, ADHD and all neurodivergent people are not intellectually disabled by default. Especially with autism and ADHD, our IQ is independent of our neurotype.

There is also an assumption that just because some of us are verbal, that means we must be doing “better” than those who are non verbal. This is untrue. Some of us internalize our struggles, keeping them to ourselves, some of us externalize them and even project them onto others which is something I’m working on to avoid doing, and some of us question every single social interaction, try to reflect but end up doing a whole analysis instead, and still might not arrive at a concrete set of answers to questions like “What went right? What was neutral? What can I learn from this interaction? What could have been better or improved on?” For me, I try my best to not give up. Sometimes, though, it can get exhausting.

Sometimes, I also ask, “Why can’t things just be normal?”

Even in something as mundane as this street photography photo that I took earlier this year on 4th February 2026, my internal thought process before capturing the photo may be different from neurotypical people, and may also differ from other neurodivergent people. For me, I noticed the repetitive patterns of the floodlights, windows on both sides and trees would serve as a good anchor for street and landscape photography of this place in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur.

References

Chopik, W. J., & Kitayama, S. (2018). Personality change across the life span: Insights from a cross-cultural, longitudinal study. Journal of personality, 86(3), 508–521. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12332

written by Rain Lee Lin Jun

May 20th 2026