Listen to Executive Director Gabriel Nathan read this post aloud:

Chaos Comes to Light — A Therapist’s Life With AuDHD and Eating Disorder Recovery

by Melanie du Preez

So here’s the thing no one ever tells you about being a clinical psychologist and a Life Coach with AuDHD and in her twenty-sixth year of remission from an eating disorder—you spend most of your life feeling like a fraud. Not because you are terrible at it (I’m not terrible at it), but because you’re constantly grappling with this bizarre cognitive dissonance when you are talking to someone about choosing self-compassion while your inner monologue is eviscerating you for your empty cupboards in the kitchen and your chaotic house.

I was diagnosed with AuDHD at 52. If the term is new to you, an AuDHD person is someone who has both autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder—a combination that clinicians once saw as impossible. Conventional wisdom said autism and ADHD were mutually exclusive; you couldn’t have both because their symptoms appeared to be opposites. As it happens, you really can exhibit both, in no small part because they are shockingly common comorbidities. And when you do have both, the two disorders can interact in ways that produce a neurological experience of its own—sometimes combining the traits amplifies them, at times it clashes with them; other times it creates a whole new pattern that doesn’t fit neatly into either group.

I know, I know—how on earth does a psychologist miss neurodiversity in themselves? Well, it turns out masking is one hell of a drug, and I’d been super good at it. I grew up in an era where no such diagnosis existed, and everyone just told me I was either disorganized, highly inhibited, or chaotic (very confusing, contradictory labels, right?).

I was ‘disorganized’ when I’d lose track of time researching something that fascinated me and forget I had dance rehearsal. I was ‘highly inhibited’ when I couldn’t make small talk at parties and would hide in the bathroom. And I was ‘chaotic’ when my bedroom looked like a tornado had hit it, even though I knew exactly where everything was in the piles.

But here’s the important thing about masking—it’s exhausting and unsustainable. When my then-boyfriend (now husband) came to visit my apartment for the first time, everything was pathologically neat. I’d spent hours making sure every surface was perfect, every book spine aligned, every dish put away. He was impressed. Then he opened the hallway closet looking for a towel.

An actual avalanche of stuff tumbled out. Shoes, unopened mail, shopping bags, random kitchen gadgets still in their packaging, clothes I’d shoved in there to avoid dealing with. He just stood there, staring, while I tried to explain that this was my system—everything invisible had to hold all the chaos so everything visible could look normal. He married me anyway, bless him.

The worst was being called ‘careless’ when I’d show up to ballet class with mismatched leg warmers because getting dressed that morning felt like navigating a sensory nightmare, and I’d already burned through all my decision-making capacity at breakfast. Or being labeled ‘spacey’ when I’d miss what someone said—not because I wasn’t listening, but because I was still processing the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and couldn’t separate their voice from the background noise. No one said, ‘Maybe her brain works differently.’ They just said, ‘Try harder.’ Fortunately/Unfortunately (as it turned out), it’s easy to put your own stuff on the back burner when you’re hyper-focused on everyone else’s problems for 8 hours a day.

The eating disorder thing? That has been my unwelcomed friend since my teens (I was a ballet dancer), although it took me far too long to call it what it was. My eating disorder didn’t resemble those tidy little boxes in the DSM-5 (or at that stage, the DSM-3). It was messier than that.

In my 20s, it looked like this: I’d go days eating nothing but coffee and rice cakes, telling myself I was ‘too busy’ to eat properly, while my brain felt like it was wrapped in cotton wool. Then I’d find myself standing in front of the open fridge at 2 a.m., eating everything I could reach—not even tasting it, just shoveling it in to quiet the screaming hunger I’d been ignoring. The shame hit before I even swallowed the last bite.

I’d spend hours frantically collecting recipes—tearing them out of magazines, bookmarking websites, filling a kitchen drawer with meticulously organized meal plans I’d never follow. It felt like (eating disorder) recovery might be just one perfect recipe away. But I never cooked any of them. The gap between the fantasy of nourishing myself and the reality of actually doing it felt insurmountable. The recipes were a monument to everything I couldn’t make myself do.

I’d schedule my entire life around food—or the avoidance of it. Declining dinner invitations because I couldn’t handle the unpredictability of restaurant menus. Lying to friends about having already eaten. Wearing oversized clothes to hide a body I couldn’t even feel properly, thanks to interoception issues I didn’t yet have words for.

The worst part? I was functional. I went to work, I smiled, I performed ‘normal’ so convincingly that no one—including me—fully grasped how much energy it took to keep all those plates spinning. In my 20s, I was ashamed to admit it. I never got formally diagnosed or treated. I white-knuckled my way into remission through sheer willpower, which is both a testament to my stubbornness and probably not the healthiest way to do it.

That lightbulb moment came when I was three months into my internship, sitting in my office. You know that wonky 20-minute window between clients where you’re meant to be doing notes, but you’re just staring at the wall? Yeah, that moment. And all of a sudden, I’m staring at my treatment plans for eating disorder clients, going …hang on a minute. This is all wrong!

Not wrong wrong. The research is solid. But incomplete. It’s like trying to complete a puzzle while half the pieces come from a different box.

​EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Gabriel Nathan | EDITOR: Kavita Sarmah | DESIGN: Leah Alexandra Goldstein | SITE ORIGINATOR: Bud Clayman