If one part of you craves the new and another part needs everything to stay the same, and no single label has ever held all of you, there may be a reason. You might be both.
For a long time the rulebook said you could not be both autistic and ADHD, that it had to be one or the other, and a great many people fell straight through that gap, recognising themselves in each description and belonging cleanly to neither. That rule changed in 2013, when the main diagnostic manual finally allowed the two to be named together, and a word has since grown up around the experience, AuDHD, for the very common reality of carrying both at once. If you have always felt like two different sets of needs sharing one body, this may be the first frame that genuinely fits.
The reason AuDHD can be so confusing, both to live and to be understood, is that the two often pull in genuinely opposite directions. The ADHD in you tends to run towards novelty, stimulation and spontaneity, the new and the interesting, while the autistic part of you tends to long for routine, predictability and the deep comfort of the familiar. So you can be the person who impulsively books the trip and the person undone when the plan changes, the one who craves intensity and the one who needs the world quiet and known. That is not you being inconsistent or difficult. It is two real neurotypes sharing one nervous system, each asking for something the other resists.
Body cues and sensory experiences may also matter. Some autistic and ADHD people report hunger, fullness, thirst or arousal cues as faint, late or intense; evidence and individual patterns vary. Texture, smell, predictability, access, medication and executive demands can all add complexity to eating. That complexity deserves curious, non-restrictive support rather than judgement.
There is also the particular exhaustion of masking two things at once, of managing the ADHD parts the world finds too much and the autistic parts it finds too odd, often without realising that is what you are doing, until you are simply depleted and cannot understand why everything costs you so much more than it seems to cost anyone else. Naming the AuDHD picture does not add another problem to the pile. It usually does the opposite. It explains the cost, and it lets you stop demanding that you be only one kind of person running on only one set of rules.
And there is real beauty in this wiring once it is understood rather than fought: the pattern-deep focus of the autistic mind meeting the wide, associative, idea-jumping energy of the ADHD one, a pairing that can be extraordinarily creative and perceptive when it is supported instead of squeezed into a shape that was never yours. Whichever way your two neurotypes lean on a given day, you are not too complicated to be understood. You are simply more than one thing at once, which is a deeply human way to be.
If the AuDHD picture is the first one that has ever fit, you do not have to make sense of it on your own. Reach out whenever you feel ready, and we will hold all of it together.