A collection of thoughts and musings about what we now call ADHD and autism. From the perspective of someone who got both diagnoses, knows the medical literature is still missing at least half of the story, and spends far too much time trying to understand the missing half. --- I have often pondered the labels with some amusement. If the definitions have changed so much even over my short lifetime, as different writers wrest control of the [DSM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders) and [ICD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Classification_of_Diseases), it makes little sense to lend them credence as empirical truth. Adding insult to injury is the overlap in symptoms, and the incredibly high comorbidity, which are shared with a few other conditions too. And then there is the ongoing [replication crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_psychology) in psychology. I realised that these separate diagnoses (both the two mentioned above, and many others) capture different symptoms of a single, underlying human quality that we don't seem to have any good literature or description for. So I have called it the "spark". --- Whenever I read anything modern about mental disorders and diagnoses, I am reminded with some amusement of the stories my Nanna told me about my great-grandfather. "Silent Jim" was a train driver; he spoke very little, and developed a reputation among the maintenance workers. If a locomotive reached him with subpar work, he would not hesitate to send it back to the yard until it was done properly. They quickly learnt that cutting corners would do them no good in the long run. At least when Jim Fleming was around. It's not hard to illustrate the rest of the story in your mind. Jim probably didn't make many friends like that. And the other drivers may not have been sticklers for good workmanship, but their trains still got where they needed to go and they still kept their jobs. So why act that way? Why speak so little, and demand so much? I never met Jim. He died a long, long time before I was born - and before modern psychiatry and psychology. But in stories like this, it becomes possible to distill the "spark" from the labels that now surround it. --- So what is this "spark"? Good question. I first began noticing it in the people around me, before I had a word for it. Birds of a feather flock together. I have had the privilege of working with many people who grew up before these labels existed, and nevertheless exhibit the same traits that saw me hauled into a shrink's office when I refused to sit down and shut up. (And sees many others, who grew up less fortunate, hauled in front of a magistrate or worse). At some point I realised there is an overarching quality capturing all of the nuance between these supposedly different conditions. It's not useful for medical or diagnostic purposes. But I believe the first step to fully understand what is going on is to understand the common thread between them. You have probably met someone with this "spark". In its simplest and purest form, it is what drives a person to *do things and to do them properly without regard for the difficulty of doing so*, time and again without fail. They do not do things properly because someone has paid them a vast sum of money; indeed I don't think anyone in history ever has. They don't even do it that way for the love of the craft; sometimes, often, the sheer quantity and difficulty of the work required will drive them to hatred or bitterness, and yet the work must still be done. They do it that way because that is the way it should be done, regardless of what the social cues around them might say to the contrary. Every human has the ability to know what a job looks like when it has been done right, and when it has not - even if they do not have the spark that would drive them to do it right themselves. Many of those people bury that recognition, or downplay the difference in value between the two. Many more people who do have some essence of the "spark" are haunted by a guilt they cannot identify, or answer to, as they see themselves forced to sacrifice a job done right for the pressures of the world around them. If you are one of those people, perhaps these have been the words you were looking for.