Living With A Brain At Odds With Itself
How I strike a balance so I can use my gifts without my weaknesses getting in the way.
Imagine being told your working memory ranks in the 3rd percentile. That means 97 out of 100 people tested can hold on to and recall information more effectively than you. In plain terms: if memory was a bucket, I’d be holding a thimble.
Now add this: my verbal and language abilities are in the 99.6th percentile. The psychologist who tested me even said it would have been the 100th if I hadn’t hesitated on one answer. Words are my home turf. They fly out of me like sparks off a fire.
I have savant-like abilities to bottom-line the most complex idea in seconds. I can pull a metaphor out of thin air that nails the heart of an experience most people struggle to describe.
So here I am: living at the crossroads of extremes. A brain that forgets almost as fast as it learns, paired with a mind that can articulate thoughts and feelings like a scalpel.
What time is it when you don't feel time?
Time is not my friend. It doesn’t tick in steady, linear beats the way it seems to for most people. With time blindness, the past dissolves too quickly, the future feels abstract, and the present stretches and contracts unpredictably.
Hours can feel like minutes. Deadlines sneak up on me like ninjas, and I’ll swear something happened “a few months ago” when it was closer to a year. I need to have access to a clock at all times or I feel lost. The clash is constant.
Why is planning and sequencing such a mess?
Most people can plan a project step by step: A leads to B leads to C. My brain? It’s like trying to set up dominoes on a trampoline. I struggle to determine the best order for things, then once I have an order the steps don’t stay in order. I’ll jump ahead, forget the middle, or loop back to the beginning.
Cooking dinner might mean realizing halfway through I never thawed the meat. Writing an article might mean losing the thread because I don't know the best order to put the ideas in. Planning and sequencing aren’t just hard—they’re slippery.
What happens when sound becomes touch?
I also experience auditory-tactile synesthesia. I don't just hear sounds; I feel them as pressure, tickling, buzzing — any of which ranges from pleasant to painful depending on the volume and intensity if the sound.
Sitting next to a car pounding with bass makes it hard for me to breathe, because it feels like someone repeatedly punching me in the chest. If its too high a pitch it feels like jabbing like a needle in my ear.
Music can feel like light tapping on specific parts of my upper body. This blending of senses can be beautiful—it makes language and rhythm come alive in me. But it can also be overwhelming, like living with a radio wired directly into my nervous system.
I experience voices this way as well. Which means I feel the nuances of their words in my body. This helps deepen my empathy because to a degree, I feel how they feel.
Crowds can be overwhelming because I feel all the voices at once.
What do you do when you can’t picture things?
Here’s another twist: I have aphantasia, which means I can’t visualize. When people say, “Picture this,” I literally can’t. My mind’s eye is blind. If I do imagine something its for a few seconds and quickly fades.
I don’t see my childhood home in my head. I don’t replay movies. My imagination isn’t visual; it’s linguistic (what was said) and kinesthetic (how it felt). I build worlds out of words, metaphors and patterns/rhythms.
How do dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia complicate things further?
Layered onto all this are three old companions:
Dyslexia: Reading is work. I forget what I've read. My eyes skip words and sentences. I need to reread a page several times to understand it. Words often don't make sense to me the way their written. I like phonetic spelling more — go figure.
Dysgraphia: Writing by hand is messy, painful, and inconsistent. My hand can barely write a few sentences while my brain sprints right along.
Dyscalculia: Numbers don’t stick. Even basic math feels like trying to juggle oysters. Thank goodness for calculators and ten fingers to help me day to day.
Each of these creates friction in daily life. Bills, forms, notes, even simple calculations become small battlefields.
How does this affect my work life as a coach?
I’m self-employed, coaching people in the autism and ADHD communities. On paper, it sounds like a neat fit. In reality, I have to build scaffolding around every session.
I rely on notes, reminders, and structured tools so I don’t lose the thread while helping someone else hold theirs.
Time blindness means I can hyperfocus with a client and then completely miss the next appointment if I don’t have multiple alarms.
My high verbal ability helps me connect and translate complex ideas—but behind the scenes, it’s held together with sticky notes, timers, and sheer determination.
How does this impact my relationships?
At home, these same issues pop up in everyday ways. My wife might say, “Can you order the groceries, grab the mail, and feed the cat?” By the time I hit the kitchen, only “groceries” made it through the working memory filter.
Or I’ll be told “the house on the left,” only to find myself looking at the houses on the right and feeling anxious because I can't find it. It’s not because I don’t care—it’s because the details slipped through a trapdoor in my brain.
Even simple outings can turn stressful. Navigating a theater, estimating the space to merge into traffic, or even gauging how high or far away something is—all of it requires more effort than others can imagine.
What stings most isn’t the mistakes themselves, but how they can look like I’m not paying attention to the people I care about.
Naming what’s happening makes all the difference. It invites patience instead of frustration, and helps create shared strategies so the relationships aren’t weighed down by misunderstandings.
The strange gift of contradictions
Now here’s where it gets interesting. With all these executive function challenges stacked against me, how do I function at all? The answer is that my strengths—my so-called savant-like skills—compensate in surprising ways.
My memory may drop facts, but my metaphors hold meaning in ways people remember.
My inability to picture things pushes me to create vivid language that paints for others what I can’t see myself.
My struggles with planning and sequencing sharpen my instinct for cutting to the bottom line, because I don’t have the bandwidth for clutter.
In other words, my weaknesses force me to build strengths that wouldn’t exist without them.
Finding balance in the chaos
Living with these contradictions isn’t about fixing the broken parts or pretending the strengths cancel out the struggles. It’s about learning to stand steady in the middle of both.
I don’t live in a world where everything lines up neatly, and I’ve stopped trying to force it. Instead, I’ve learned to work with the rhythm of my brain. Some days that means giving myself grace when the steps fall apart. Other days it means leaning hard on the gifts that grow out of those same gaps.
Balance doesn’t mean perfection—it means knowing when to rest and when to rise. It means honoring both the limits that shape me and the strengths that surprise me.
If you’re wired like me, here’s the truth: you don’t have to choose between broken or brilliant. You can be both, often in the same breath. And that mix? That’s where the power lives.
The next time you feel like your struggles disqualify you, remember this: balance isn’t about erasing the hard parts. It’s about standing tall in the middle of them and saying, “I’m still here—and I have something only I can bring.”
Thanks for being you,
Brian
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