Autistic Hyperfocus

The last weekend, I had three simultaneous days of what I would call “hyperfocus.” I had a day of work combined with a 4 hour workout, followed by a 5 hour drive. The next day was filled with driving kids around to do long runs while I played aid station in my car for about 7 hours, also trying to get food for myself and another aid person and a short writing session, followed by a hot tubs adventure and then dinner out. The third day of the trifecta was another 5 hour drive home, followed by a weight training workout, 2 hours of writing on deadline, a call with a kid who lives out of state and then picking up dinner for 9 people to take to another location to eat with a person recovering from surgery. And then bed.

Most of my life before my diagnosis with autism was days like this stacked one on top of each other for years on end. This is the reason I was able to graduate from college in two years and then get a PhD from Princeton at age 24. It’s why I was able to have five children in eight years and also write fifty novels until I got published, at which point my output slowed slightly, but then had training for Ironman added. And learning to play the piano as an adult. And working on quilts for my kids. And doing crocheting and knitting at church or while watching TV (because multi-tasking makes sure that idle hands can’t do the devil’s work).

Since I am learning to accept that I am aging and since I hit autistic burnout really, really hard at 45 (hence the diagnosis), I do not do hyperfocus for long periods. I generally try not to have a hyperfocus day stacked with another one. But one real problem here is that I LIKE hyperfocus. That is, in the midst of it, I like the sensation I have of time standing still and also moving very quickly at the same time. I like the sense of superior processing speed that I feel like I have, the invulnerability and the sense of being able to do superhuman things in an incredibly compressed period of time. You might say I am addicted to hyperfocus.

And yet, there are problems with hyperfocus that I don’t see while I am in hyperfocus. For instance, I thought I had packed well, but guess what? I hadn’t. I forgot to bring bras for some reason. Also a swimsuit for the hot tubs. Also a jacket for the first cold, very early morning in the mountains. And I ended up with a speeding ticket because I was short-cutting my normal process of putting an address into my phone and put in the wrong address and got confused and stopped paying attention to the speed limits.

These are less excuses and more me reminding myself that hyperfocus feels good because it cuts off parts of the world. I am only able to hyperfocus on a very limited range of my senses. I can’t take in everything at once. I can’t actually do more than is humanly possible. So there are things that go missing, in particular things that neurotypical people think are obvious, normal, and impossible to miss. They are not impossible to miss in autistic hyperfocus. They are, in fact, very,v ery easy for me to miss.

Hyperfocus is dangerous on many levels, especially for an autistic person who stops paying attention to social cues or body signals to stop and rest. Or eat. Or pee.

I will probably always have a tendency toward moving into hyperfocus mode. I like not noticing all the ways in which I am not neurotypical and don’t fit into the neurotypical world. Autistic hyperfocus lies to me, but it lies in a way I like. It tells me that my limited field of vision is all there is, all that matters. It allows me to pretend for a little while that I’m not autistic, or that if I am, autism is actually a superpower and enables me to perform like a superhero. Alas, I am not a superhero.