I am autistic, and I live with mental illness. Together, these two features of my mind mean that I have to navigate a totally different landscape to neurotypical people.

For a neurotypical, able-bodied, middle-class person living in, say, Australia, daily life might look something like:

Okay, a new day. If I get the gym now, I don’t have to feel guilty about the wine tonight. Did I move the laundry to the dryer? Yes. Hopefully today won’t bring any unexpected expenses (a car service, a school excursion fee) or annoying admin (a broken dishwasher). […] Right, I’m at work. Parked in the ‘B’ level—must remember that, otherwise I’ll be wandering around like an idiot at 5:10. Do I go to the kitchen or the cafe downstairs? If I go to the kitchen, I have to talk to Dave about his weekend hiking trip. I don’t have the bandwidth for Dave yet. Downstairs it is. $5.50 for a flat white is a crime, but it’s a ‘sanity tax.’ I’ll tap the phone, don’t look at the balance.

(An admission: I wrote that monologue with the help of an AI chatbot, because I literally could not imagine what a neurotypical person thinks about all day!)

This form of daily life has its rewards (a glass of wine, a successful work meeting), its challenges (avoiding unexpected expenses), and its currency (dollars, time, guilt).

As an autistic woman, I feel like I am facing a totally different landscape. There are also unique challenges and currencies due to mental illness (for me, depression and anxiety).

For me, a typical day might look more like:

Okay, a new day. I have football training on Wednesday, so I only have to survive until then. I’ll do 45 minutes on the exercise bike to settle my nerves and pre-emptively minimize the risk of a depressive episode. Did I move the laundry to the dryer? I’ll check the spreadsheet — yes. Hopefully today won’t bring any serious mental triggers or unplanned social interactions. […] Right, I’m at my desk. My mental batteries are at 80% but I’m still a little bit tense from a big work meeting yesterday, so I’ll begin with some data entry to build small wins before I turn to the most essential work on my to-do list.

This form of daily life has its rewards (engagement in a special interest like football), its challenges (avoiding unplanned mental triggers), and its currency (mental battery, social energy, risk of depressive episode).

It’s interesting to me that these are totally different mental landscapes. To an outward observer, they might look similar, but the internal arithmetic is totally different. I also want to emphasize that a different landscape is not better or worse; that would be elitist and misguided. Rather, neurodivergent minds (and mentally ill minds) simply navigate a landscape of rewards, challenges, and currency that is foreign to neurotypical (and mentally healthy) minds.

Of course, this will not be a new idea to disabled people, who are often accustomed to thinking about the physical environment in terms of stair-free pathways and sufficiently wide doors, and who are sometimes accustomed to thinking about their daily life in terms of the timing of medication. This concept is explored for dysautonomia, mitochondrial disease and chronic fatigue syndrome in The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey; for Parkinson’s disease in Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist by Michael J. Fox; and for spinal injury, as well as disability in general, in the masterpiece Accompanying Disability: Caretaking, Family, and Faith by Topher Endress.

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