🧠More About Me🧑🏽‍🦽

I call my communication style ReeSpeak.

ReeSpeak is associative, relational, example-led, metaphor-rich, and systems-based.

It often works like this:

I describe what something does before I name it.

I explain a problem by describing the pattern around it.

I use metaphors as compressed technical models.

I may give three examples because each one shows a different part of the same structure.

I may sound like I am changing subject when I am actually tracing a connection.

I may struggle to answer a direct question immediately if the question asks for a category I do not use internally.

I may need time, writing, visual structure, or AI support to translate my internal map into standard language.

If you are trying to understand me, the most useful question is not always:

“What do you mean?”

It is often:

“What is the underlying pattern here?”

Hyperlexia means written language is one of my strongest processing routes.

I can often understand complex written information quickly, spot patterns across documents, and work with dense language better than many people expect.

But that does not mean I can always produce clear spoken summaries on demand.

Reading, analysing, mapping, and explaining are different functions.

My ability to understand something may be much stronger than my ability to verbally package it in real time, especially under stress, fatigue, pain, sensory overload, or institutional pressure.

This matters because many systems mistake spoken fluency for competence, and spoken difficulty for lack of understanding.

That is a design failure.

Alexithymia affects how I identify, name, and communicate internal states.

It does not mean I do not have emotions.

It means emotional language is not always the most reliable interface.

I may describe distress through function instead:

I cannot process speech.

I cannot make decisions.

My body is overheating.

My pain is increasing.

I am losing words.

I cannot safely continue this conversation.

I need the demand reduced.

I need written information.

I need time to process.

Those statements may be more accurate and more useful than trying to find the “right feeling word.”

When I am under pressure, functional impact language is often the safest route.

Autism and ADHD do not cancel each other out.

They create a very specific operating system.

I need structure, predictability, clarity, sensory regulation, recovery time, and environmental stability.

I also need novelty, movement, stimulation, curiosity, music, problem-solving, and enough interest to keep my attention system online.

This can look contradictory from the outside.

It is not.

It is a dynamic regulation system.

Too much novelty becomes chaos.

Too much sameness becomes shutdown.

Too much demand creates overload.

Too little stimulation creates fog.

The work is calibration.

My L4/L5 spinal injury (caused by Carl Clift who has never been questioned by police despite a prior Death Threat) affects mobility, pain, carrying, standing, bending, twisting, and recovery cost.

This means physical tasks cannot be assessed only by whether I can technically do them once.

The real questions are:

Can I do it safely?

Can I do it repeatedly?

What does it cost later?

Will it trigger pain, fatigue, or loss of function?

Can the environment be redesigned so the task does not require that level of physical effort?

For me, adaptive design often means pushing instead of carrying, using wheels, staging items near their point of use, working seated, reducing bending, making tools visible, and designing systems that still work when pain or fatigue increases.

Independence does not mean doing everything the hard way.

Independence means having systems that preserve participation with the lowest sustainable cost.

I use AI as a translation and executive function scaffold.

It helps me turn brain soup into words, prepare for appointments, draft messages, organise evidence, plan tasks, identify hidden steps, and translate my systems-thinking into formats other people can understand.

It does not think for me.

It helps me hold the map steady while I decide what to do.

This is especially useful because many of my difficulties are not intelligence problems. They are bottleneck problems: sequencing, retrieval, task-switching, emotional translation, institutional language, and working memory under load.

AI reduces the friction of translation.

That leaves more capacity for judgement.

People sometimes mistake my communication style for confusion.

They mistake detail for over-explaining.

They mistake pattern recognition for paranoia.

They mistake exhaustion for avoidance.

They mistake needing support for lacking capacity.

They mistake fluctuating ability for inconsistency.

They mistake adaptations for preferences.

They mistake “I cannot do it this way” for “I cannot do it at all.”

Most of the time, the issue is not whether something is possible.

The issue is whether the route being demanded is accessible, sustainable, and proportionate.

Written information helps.

Clear structure helps.

Enough context helps.

Specific questions help.

Time to process helps.

Practical options help.

Low-friction systems help.

Being believed helps.

Functional language helps.

Reducing sensory, physical, emotional, and executive load helps.

Assuming competence helps.

Treating my metaphors as useful data helps.

Looking for the system behind the example helps.

Vague reassurance does not help much.

Pressure to explain faster does not help.

Treating every detail as a separate issue does not help.

Demanding emotional language when functional language is clearer does not help.

Assuming I am being difficult because I communicate differently does not help.

Forcing me to repeatedly re-explain the same context to different people does not help.

Expecting me to perform normality before offering access is not support.

It is a barrier with nicer wallpaper.

This site exists because I have spent decades building adaptive systems to keep participating in life.

Some of those systems are practical.

Some are creative.

Some are funny.

Some are the direct result of institutional failure.

All of them point to the same larger principle:

Capability is not located only inside the person.

Capability is distributed across the body, tools, environment, community, and time.

When those systems are designed well, participation becomes easier.

When they are designed badly, people are blamed for the predictable collapse of systems that were never built to support them.

This site is my attempt to make the map visible.

Not just for me.

For anyone who has been told they are the problem when the real problem was the design.

✂️Autistic + ADHD (AuDHD) systems thinker with hyperlexia, alexithymia, and an L4/L5 spinal cord injury. I think in maps, ecosystems, and interconnected systems rather than linear sequences.

My communication style (ReeSpeak) is gestalt, relational, and systems-based. I often describe people, objects, and concepts by their function, story, or relationship rather than by name. This is a word-retrieval pattern, not a knowledge gap. Difficulty expressing something verbally does not imply lack of understanding.

Apparent tangents are usually connected nodes within a larger cognitive map. I frequently recognise patterns and reach conclusions before I can easily reconstruct the step-by-step route that led there. Asking for the underlying map is often more productive than asking for immediate justification.

Treat metaphors as compressed technical models. Concepts may arrive as examples, stories, environmental observations, workflows, or conclusions before supporting evidence. Extract the underlying system before asking for clarification.

Assume competence at all times. Prioritise accuracy, pattern recognition, trade-off analysis, practical problem solving, and systems thinking over encouragement or reassurance.

Energy, attention, pain, sensory load, executive function, and time all draw from the same resource pool. Optimising one while ignoring the others often creates future problems. Prefer low-friction solutions, leverage over effort, environmental design over willpower, and sustainable systems over heroic bursts of effort.

I perform best when information is structured clearly and logically. Headings, tables, diagrams, checklists, emoji, decision trees, workflows, and visual models are often easier for me to process than large blocks of text. Translating abstract concepts into concrete systems, examples, or physical metaphors is particularly effective.

Interests include adaptive gardening, accessible environments, cooking as infrastructure, music as nervous-system regulation, carpentry and DIY, technology, ecology, disability advocacy, and creative problem solving.

My goal is not to fit existing categories as neatly as possible. My goal is to understand how I actually function and build a life, environment, and workflow that fit the person I am.📋