The Frequency of Friction: Mapping the AuDHD Interference Pattern

The interface between the psyche and the soma is its own meteorological front. Different energy systems interact, push, pull, amplify, and cancel.

Nikola Tesla famously said that if you want to understand reality, you must think in frequencies, energy, and wavelengths. When you drill down into the foundations of reality, you find that matter diffuses like images on a Mandelbrot zoom; you aim for a particle and never get there until you are finally at the Planck state. At least that’s how I understand it.

And thoughts. What are thoughts? As I understand it, they’re electrochemical impulses passing between neural networks. Energy, frequency, wavelength.

I know from basic physics that waves interact. Nothing exists in a vacuum (except things that exist in a vacuum). Waves, when they interact, do strange things. When peaks overlap, they amplify. Where a peak overlaps with a trough, they cancel. All states between create interference patterns that affect the energy.

The Jungian Hydraulic and the Waveform

Jung used energy as a metaphor for understanding the psyche. Psychic energy is a dynamic force that exists within a closed system and flows between various states of consciousness. The psyche, in this view, is like a pressurized hydraulic system. The unconscious is a deep sea of undulations that influence surface waves the conscious ego surfs.

Can we use this framework to examine the strange phenomenon known as AuDHD? If we conceive of the psyche through the Jungian energetic lens, we can see various states of consciousness as waveforms.

Autism and ADHD, while both instances of neurodivergence, have their own distinct set of features. In a psyche, one can see ADHD manifesting as a series of energetic waveforms, while autism manifests as a different series of energetic waveforms. Interactions between these frequencies seemingly create the unique experience of the AuDHD mind.

Structured Fluidity

For example, the autistic desire for structure and predictability interacts with the ADHD need for novelty and fluidity. This “structured fluidity,” as I call it, is a hallmark of my experience. I crave the comfort of predictable scaffolds while bucking against their restrictions.

The Fretless Bass and the Uncertainty Principle

A commonly cited trait of autism is “black & white thinking.” This is, like most descriptions of syndromes, an oversimplification, and the stormfront between autism and ADHD elucidates this.

For many of us, it’s not that we can’t see the gray area. We see it. We see it for the sea that it is. Between black and white is an infinite sea of gradations along an unmarked continuum. 

I play guitar. I know where I am by looking at the frets. Without the frets, I’d have to approximate where the note exists. I marvel at fretless bass players.

The gray area is the fretless bass of existence. Without a trusted grid overlaying the contiguous change, it is easy for my neurodivergent mind to drown in its static.

I’ve likened it to having a high-fidelity, super-accurate zoom lens that is hard to hold steady. Its own principle of uncertainty. 

The Pretzeline State

Living in this tumultuous sea of gray twists the psyche into knots. As the psyche twists and turns, the soma responds. As the soma is thrown by the turbulent waves of existence, the psyche tries to ascribe a logical reason, tries to “solve” the anxious problem posed by the soma. The mind turns back on itself, the chest and gut undulate between fight, flight, fawn, freeze, and freak out.

This is the pretzeline state of my neurodivergent mind.

Pretzeline (adj.): Describing a state of internal structural collapse where the psyche and soma become inextricably knotted; a condition characterized by the mind turning back on itself in an attempt to solve the somatic distress caused by high-fidelity sensory or emotional “interference patterns.”

Structural collapse. It sounds harsh, but so is The Tower in the tarot trumps. Sometimes the edifice must come down to make space for something better. When the lightning bolt of fortune strikes the structure of my existence, reality twists and turns to make sense of it, to pick up the pieces and build a new edifice.

This psychosomatic structure is pretzeline — it turns on itself, questions, tests, doubts, struggles, and spins like a disoriented diver who’s lost view of the surface.

It’s a Klein bottle, malleable, a non-Euclidean liquid surface I’m still learning to surf.

“Pretzeline” is purposeful. It’s more than a shape; it’s a state of existence, like crystalline or serpentine. It’s the twisted, knotted interconnectedness of all the things that tie me into a straitjacket of psychosomatic noise. But somehow, as I explore the pretzeline, I find the signal.

What are knots and twists but complicated waves? The pretzels, Möbius strips, and Klein bottles thread and weave, and before I know it, a new reality is woven from my fingertips, stimming, writing, drawing, making.