The Same Engine

There’s a particular kind of evening I know well.

I’ve spent the whole day lit up. Some project, some person, some corner of the community that needed something — and I was all the way in it. Heart on my sleeve. Every spare thought pointed in one direction. By the time I walk back into my own house, I’ve already given the best of my attention away, and the people who live here get whatever is left.

They notice. Of course they notice.

This is a paradox I keep running into, and I want to talk about it honestly — because I don’t think I’m the only one living inside it.

I have AuDHD: autism and ADHD together. One of the ways that shows up for me is hyperfocus. My attention doesn’t work like a floodlight, spreading evenly across everything in the room. It works like a spotlight. Narrow, bright, and very committed to wherever it happens to be pointed.

When that spotlight lands on something I love, it is a gift. It’s the reason I can throw myself into building something for my community and not come up for air. It’s the reason I find the project, name the need, and start moving before most people have finished reading the email. The intensity is real. The care underneath it is real.

But a spotlight only lights one thing at a time.

When it is pointed at the work, my own kitchen is in the dark. Not because I don’t love the people standing in it. Because that is, mechanically, how the light works.

Here is what I’ve had to sit with. The same engine that lets me love my community hard is the same engine that lets my attention drift from the people in my own house. It isn’t two separate traits, one good and one bad. It’s one trait. One switch. Gift and cost, running on the same current.

For a long time I thought the answer was to feel bad about it — to catch myself and call it a failure of character. But I want to be careful here, because I write a lot in this newsletter about not being broken. I’m not going to make an exception for my own wiring.

My attention is not a flaw. It is not something I need to apologize my way out of.

What I’m learning instead is that moderation isn’t a defect I have to fix. It’s a practice. It’s a skill. It’s the daily, unglamorous work of moving the spotlight on purpose, instead of letting it get stuck.

And I’ll be honest about why this matters so much to me.

When I’m misaligned like this — pouring outward, running on intensity, attention everywhere except here — I’m not building connection. I’m leaving room for it to fray. The people closest to me start having to guess. Did she hear me? Is she actually here? They fill the silence with their own interpretations, and those interpretations are rarely generous — to them or to me. That’s how miscommunication starts. Not with a fight. With a slow, quiet drift.

For a lot of survivors, this part runs deeper than neurotype. Being useful to everyone is an old, well-practiced skill. Being needed can feel safer than being simply, ordinarily present — because presence asks you to be known, not just helpful. I’m not saying the advocacy work is avoidance. It isn’t. But the people who don’t pull at me, who don’t need rescuing, who are just steadily there — those are exactly the people my attention forgets to choose. And they deserve more than what’s left over.

So this is the alignment work for me right now. It doesn’t look dramatic.

It looks like closing the laptop at a set time, even when the spotlight is still burning.

It looks like noticing, in my body, when I’ve gone too far out — and turning back before anyone has to ask me to.

It looks like telling the people in my house what is actually happening inside my head, so my quiet isn’t theirs to decode. “I’m deep in something. It is not about you. I’ll be back at six.” One sentence like that can prevent an entire evening of misunderstanding.

None of this is a cure. I’m not writing from the far side of it. I’m writing from the middle, which is the only honest place I have to write from.

But I’ve stopped treating moderation like a punishment for being who I am. It isn’t the thing that makes me smaller. It’s the thing that lets the love actually land where I most want it to land.

You aren’t broken. I believe that — for you, and on the harder days, for me too.

You might just be misaligned. And alignment, it turns out, is something you can practice.

If this is familiar — the spotlight, the drift, the people quietly waiting for you to come back into the room — I want to hear how it shows up in your house. Reply and tell me. I read every one.

With love, always,

Bek