My name is CJ, and I’m a late-diagnosed AuDHDer who collects auto-immune conditions for a living (as well as being the founder of Off The Couch and occasional writer!).
I’ve owned the domain offthecouch.com for a decade and it started out as a marathon-training blog, which I was super enthusiastic about. Looking back on it, running was almost a stim for me, but of course I didn’t know it at the time – it really helped me manage the stress and anxiety during years when both were at a full-time high.
But no matter how hard I trained, I always felt just.. tired, like I couldn’t keep up with everyone else. I’d been picked to train with a lovely bunch of ladies, all paid for by a sponsor – here I am in 2016 feeling delighted at having been picked to train in the first place. Unfortunately that delight didn’t last and came to an abrupt end when began to develop chronic pelvic pain. The next 3 years were a constant battle of 24/7 pain, being gaslit by multiple medical professionals, and the neverending lifelong struggle of feeling like something about me intrinsically “wasn’t quite right” but not knowing what that was. I felt like I wasn’t being believed by consultants because maybe I wasn’t communicating in the right way, or maybe because I wasn’t holding eye contact, or because I was under so much stress from the pain and the gaslighting that autistic meltdowns were frequent. For a long time I blamed the lack of decent healthcare on myself.
The chronic illness bit (why do we all have at least one of those?!)
I’ve always had an inquisitive brain, and am also pretty stubborn 🙂 I refused to accept that this chronic pain was “a lifelong condition”. I moved away from Western Medicine that wasn’t interested in root causes of chronic illness, and started along a path of discovering functional medicine and studied nutrition and health coaching. I absolutely loved the course, but I found during my studies that I struggled to follow the advice given, like “eat a rainbow of fruit and veg”, and I didn’t feel confident in giving people advice that I just couldn’t quite resonate with, so I never pursued it further as a career as I just didn’t feel confident in doing so. Again, I felt lacking in a way I couldn’t put into words to explain.
In addition the last decade for me has been a litany of one health issue after another, culminating in having brain surgery and managing a daily chronic migraine which I still manage to this day (some days are good, some are not so much!) Here’s me in 2018 with what I called a Brain Prong – which basically told me the pressure in my brain was far too high. Frankly with all this going on, I pretty much abandoned Off The Couch, and felt more like I was permanently on the couch or in bed. So this web address was never fully developed into any specific project, pretty much mirroring my life trajectory that was frankly all over the place, but with no explanation for the haphazard (and exhausting) road my life had taken.
AuDHD Diagnosis
In 2023 I was on TikTok, and saw that some of my FYP very slowly began to fill with late-diagnosed autism content. Around the same time my psychologist suggested that I could be autistic, and with the strong desire to be 100% sure that that was the answer to All The Questions, I broke my credit card and paid for a private assessment. 18 months later and after an extensive amount of unmasking, I was, on the recommendation of my therapist, reassessed for ADHD and found I met 7/9 DSM criteria for Inattentive ADHD (which also explains why this website has taken close to a year to put together!)
Since then, it’s been a bit of a wild ride. There is a distinct lack of any services for diagnosed autistic and/or ADHD adults and after the assessments, I felt like I was sort of thrown into the natural unmasking phase that happens, but with no support, and no idea how to navigate it all. But I slowly began (after 40 years on this earth) to find My People. I’m grateful for the invention of Threads, where I’ve found so many people who think, feel, and experience things the same way I do.
offthecouch.com now
I’ve always wanted to use the domain name offthecouch.com for a project that I feel is really worthwhile, and that at it’s core is simply going to help people somehow. I’ve personally found that the online and in-person community of other neurodivergents has been the absolute best find ever. I’m hoping that Off The Couch will become a helpful resource for all things adult neurodivergence (and I mean all types of neurodivergence under the umbrella, not just Autism and ADHD), and in some way gives back to the community that has given me so much.
I want to celebrate all the neurodivergent people out there, who are just doing their thing – being wonderful parents, writing amazing books, starting their own businesses, creating tools and art and all manner of wonderful things for the neurodiverent community to enjoy and benefit from.
One final thing – the name Off The Couch has, ironically, turned into satire. I’m writing this intro bumph while firmly lying down On The Couch. But you know what? Life as an ND person is tiring, and if you want to do bits of work, reading, coffee-drinking, social media scrolling, music-listening while On Your Couch, I’m all for it 😊
If you have any questions, feedback, suggestions – anything at all, my inbox is always open. Drop me a line at cj@offthecouch.com any time.
