Does It Interfere with Your Daily Life?
Image by @john_matychuk via Unsplash
I wrote an entire master’s thesis on sensory processing disorder. Literally. My topic was SPD and theatre. And I didn’t know that I had the disorder I was writing about.
Oh, I knew that I had sensitivities. I knew that I couldn’t deal with fireworks or certain food textures. I just didn’t know it was bad enough to “count.”
“It all comes down to whether it interferes with your daily life,” I told my advisor. “Like, I have some of these issues myself, but they don’t interfere with my life. So I wouldn’t say that I have SPD.” Except that I totally did.
How? How do you have a disorder and not know that it’s interfering with your life? Is that even possible? Yup! You can be mentally ill and not know it. Or neurodivergent and not know it. Or any number of things.
See, the key to these diagnostic criteria is that they have to interfere with your daily life. If they don’t interfere, then you don’t have a diagnosable condition.
But what if it is interfering with your life, and you don’t even know it? Here’s how that can happen.
Some Important Notes
A bunch of you are rolling your eyes at me right now. “Oh great, so more people can decide they’re autistic because someone on the internet says so.”
Nope. That’s not what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about is when real, diagnosable conditions go unnoticed because we misinterpreted what “interfering” or “impacting” actually means.
Some conditions, like autism and ADHD, cause black and white thinking. Which means that you might not think your disability impacts your life if it does so inconsistently. Some conditions cause alexithymia, or poor interoception, making it tough to connect to your own mind and body.
That being said, if you struggle with health anxiety, this is probably not the post for you. I won’t be offended if you need to skip this one.
Why You Didn’t Realize the Impact
Now, with the disclaimers out of the way, let’s talk about some reasons why you might not realize that your disability is impacting your day to day life.
It Doesn’t “Interfere” with Your Daily Life because It IS Your Daily Life
Imagine that your life is a meal. The “ingredients” include your experiences, job, social life, and all the other pieces that make up your existence. If you have a disability, that disability is one of the ingredients.
When someone says “does it interfere with your daily life?” they’re seeing the ingredients of your life as if they were ingredients in a salad. If you remove the tomatoes, it’s still a salad. If you removed the disability, you’d still have the same life, just without this one ingredient.
But some disabilities are less like salad ingredients and more like soup ingredients. You can’t just remove the cream from the soup once you’ve mixed it in. It’s part of the soup now. It can’t be separated. It’s going to be part of every spoonful, not just a few of them.
For my literal thinkers, what I’m saying is that some disabilities cannot be separated from your overall existence because they permeate every part of your existence. If you remove the disability, you’d get an entirely different experience.
So let’s use autism as an example. Your neurotypical assessor asks if your autistic traits impact your social life.
You say no, because they don’t. They don’t stop you from meeting with friends at coffee shops instead of loud clubs. They don’t stop you from staying home when you want to stay home. They don’t stop you from gravitating toward other autistic people. Or making connections based on special interests. Or listening to your friends infodump.
Autism doesn't “impact” your social life because it is your social life. It can’t be separated from your social life, just like it can’t be separated from any other part of your life.
Society sees non-disabled people as the default. So we assume that if you’re autistic, there’s this fictional version of you somewhere that would enjoy bars and clubs and neurotypical social norms, and the autism is taking that away from you. The question isn’t really “does it interfere with your social life?” It’s “does it keep you from living the ‘default’ social life? Does it stop you from doing what I’ve decided is normal and valid?”
By the way, this is one reason why so many autistic people prefer identity-first language instead of person-first language. Identity-first language acknowledges that autism is a part of who they are.
You Interpreted “Does It Interfere with Your Life?” as “Does It Interfere with Your Productivity?”
For most of my life, I didn’t know I had ADHD because I was the Responsible One™. I always finished my homework. I got good grades. I showed up on time. When I got a job writing articles, I met my deadlines.
Obviously, ADHD wasn’t interfering with my life. I was a student, my life involved school, and I was doing school successfully. I was a writer, my life involved writing, and I was doing that successfully, too.
The problem was that I was only looking at the end results, not the overall picture. I was conflating my life with my productivity.
I wasn’t doing all of those things because I was good at task initiation and time management. I was doing them because I drank too much coffee, stayed up all night, and used anxiety-fueled adrenaline spikes to finish my projects. I forgot that those things “counted” as part of my life, too.
But the end result was the same. If ADHD were truly impacting my life, I reasoned, then I wouldn’t be able to finish the projects at all.
You Have a System and It Works
Humans are adaptable creatures. We’ll make things work, especially if we have no other choice. And since we can make things work, we sometimes assume that our obstacles don’t count as obstacles. Because if they were real obstacles, then we wouldn’t be able to make it work at all. And that’s how we talk ourselves out of getting the help we need.
For example, you might put off seeking treatment for chronic pain. You might decide that it doesn’t impact your life because you have a system. Maybe you do most of your tasks when you have the least amount of pain. Maybe you’ve arranged your life to minimize movement on low-mobility days. Maybe you’ve scheduled naps into your day.
If the system works, you may still be able to do what you need to do. And if you work with it long enough, you may forget that you have a system at all. It just becomes part of your life.
If we look at autism as an example again, we may find a lot of systems here, too. An autistic person may say that they don’t have trouble wearing socks. And maybe they don’t. Or maybe they only buy a specific brand of socks that doesn't have weird seams.
Of course they don’t struggle with socks. They don’t own any socks that cause them discomfort. It’s a system. But if you took away the system, then yes, there would be a problem.
You Thought Everyone Dealt with This
The other reason why I didn’t realize I had ADHD is because I assumed everybody else was dealing with the same thing. I thought everybody struggled to start tasks, but other people just had more willpower than I did.
I mean, ADHD is a lifelong condition. My brain developed as an ADHD brain. So it’s not like I had any other experiences to compare it to. It wasn’t like depression, which I didn’t develop until my mid-teen years. I knew I was depressed because I knew what it was like to not be depressed. But I’ve never known what it’s like to not have ADHD, so how was I supposed to know that my brain was different? I didn’t have anything else to compare it to.
Plus, weirdos tend to find each other. We all gravitate toward people who share similar interests and experiences. So if you have ADHD, you may have a lot of friends who also have ADHD. Not to mention that these conditions are highly genetic. If everyone in your family has the same struggles, how would you know that these struggles weren’t “normal?”
Under those circumstances, it’s easy to believe that what you're going through is just the default human experience.
How to Tell if It REALLY Interferes with Your Life
So, next time you ask yourself — or a clinician asks you — whether something is impacting your day-to-day life, ask yourself these questions:
If it doesn’t interfere with my life, does it define my life? Is it baked into the life I’ve built for myself?
Do I make decisions based on its presence in my life?
Would it interfere with my life if I didn’t have a system?
If a non-disabled person had the same fatigue/pain/mobility issues/sensitivity as me for one day, would it interfere with their life? Would they need to make adjustments?
If it doesn’t impact my productivity, does it impact the methods I use to achieve that productivity?
If I ignore it for too long or “push past” it, do I experience consequences?
If it doesn’t interfere with my life, is that because I’m forcing it not to? If I stopped forcing it, would it interfere?
These questions might give you a more accurate idea.