The last few days have been strange. Nothing in life is permanent, and absolutely nothing is guaranteed.

Heatwaves have a way of putting life on pause. But actually, three days spent indoors with the curtains closed, the fan on high, and getting completely lost in a fantasy novel was incredibly relaxing. I must have been one of the few people who actually slept well through it all, purely by using physics to know exactly when the ambient outdoor temperature dropped enough to open the windows and let some air flow through.

Outside of hiding from the sun, chess club and tutoring are going well, though a few recent pushbacks on the tutoring front have been frustrating. I posted on Facebook and got loads of interest, but no bites just yet. On top of that, some sad family news in the last 24 hours has thrown another rock into the pool, sending unexpected ripples through everything. And annoyingly, my start date for the new job I was supposed to start on July 1st has been pushed back due to a misplaced medical form on HR their side, despite me submitting all my forms 1.5 months ago, withing hours of receiving them........ (though it better be soon, as money is running low!).

I'm used to living life with a constant sense of urgency, mind racing, chasing that dopamine. Systems, loved by the autistic mind, and ideas, loved by the suspected ADHD mind, are just constantly battling. One loves routine and stability, and the other loves doing something new and urgent. It’s a constant push and pull.

Teaching Ohm’s Law to a Year 10 tutee this month made me realise that physics has perfectly modelled this chaotic internal landscape. If you want to understand that exhausting friction, you just need to look at Ohms Law. 

V= I x R, Potential difference = Current x Resistance

• The Current (I – The Green Fella): This is me—the actual electrons—just trying to flow smoothly through life.

• The Voltage (V – The ADHD Yellow Fella): This is my battery. It’s a dopamine-seeking powerhouse constantly pushing out a high potential difference. It drives a racing mind, urgent ideas, and a frantic chase for novelty, screaming, "Let's start the new job! Let's get new tutoring clients right now!"

• The Resistance (R– The Autistic Red Fella & Life’s Bureaucracy): This is the bottleneck slowing down the flow. The autistic side of my mind craves routine, strict systems, and predictable stability. Right now, this resistance is being heavily reinforced by external factors completely out of my control, the blazing heatwave, delayed tutoring leads, and that irritating, misplaced medical form putting my new job on pause.

When you have a massive ADHD voltage pushing for immediate momentum, but life and a bureaucratic system throw up a wall of unexpected resistance, the current slows to an absolute crawl.

But as any physicist knows, you can’t fight the laws of nature. This month just has ways to crank up the resistance, slow things down, and tell you to stop for a minute. You just can't win.

Oh well. New projects will always start, more bites for tutoring will happen in time, and the new job will start when it does. For now, sometimes you just have to lower the voltage, close the curtains, turn the fan on high, and wait for the circuit to clear.

Monotropism refers to a brain's tendency to focus intensely on one single track or interest at a time. It is a defining feature of the autistic mind, yet the standard secondary school routine is structurally hostile to it.

In any single day, an autistic child is expected to interact with six different teachers, navigate six different classrooms, and handle the constant cognitive exhaustion of attention-switching. Just as they finally manage to settle their mind and get into the flow of a lesson, the bell rings. They have to pack up, disrupt their focus, and move through chaotic corridors to start the process all over again.

Worse still is the complete lack of emotional safety in this constant switching. A neurodivergent child often faces a barrage of conflicting, unpredictable demands as they move from room to room.

In period one, they might be told off for not having their equipment out. In period two, a different adult criticises them for fidgeting, even though it is the exact proprioceptive feedback their brain needs to concentrate. In period three, they are reprimanded for taking a question too literally.

They are systematically criticised for something completely different in every single lesson. And if these situations do lead to genuine disruption because the child is overwhelmed, the school's response is inevitably punitive rather than supportive. If a child is struggling, it is absolutely vital that the specific adjustments in their support plans—such as structured movement breaks or sensory timeouts—are strictly followed by staff. Instead, those plans are routinely ignored by teachers trying to satisfy management's rigid behaviour metrics.

When these legal lifelines are cast aside and a child's monotropic focus is abruptly, aggressively disturbed, their nervous system perceives it as a genuine threat. The child might start to swear or shout, exhibiting classic PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) tendencies. The shouting or swearing isn't "bad behaviour"—it's a nervous system in panic.

Instead of recognising this panic, the system doubles down. The punishments pile up—detentions, isolation rooms, suspensions—when all the child really needs is a quiet chance to cool off and reset. It is a vicious, exhausting cycle that so many brilliant kids get hopelessly caught up in.

From my experience, the secret to breaking this cycle is simple: you have to let that initial PDA panic response be water off a duck's back. When you refuse to take the shouting personally, de-escalate the situation, and give them the space to regulate, the child can be effortlessly reintegrated back into the lesson. By treating them with human empathy rather than institutional authority, you break the cycle and become that rare, safe teacher they know they can trust. And in subsequent lessons, the PDA response doesn't even occur, because they know their nervous system is entirely safe in your classroom.

Instead of learning, a child trapped in a rigid school spends their entire day under intense cognitive load, forced to guess the unwritten, shifting rules of six different adults just to survive. It is an executive functioning assault course.

When management demands absolute conformity across a school, they forget that a school is made of human beings, not machines. By forcing a neurodivergent child to constantly suppress their natural traits while simultaneously denying them the adjustments they have a right to, the system guarantees one inevitable outcome: severe, traumatic burnout.