The AuDyssey: AuDHD Setbacks & Persistence

Odysseus takes ten years to get home from a war that already lasted ten years.

He does not travel steadily forward. He gets lost. He becomes trapped. He makes mistakes. He loses people. Forces beyond his control work against him. Sometimes his own choices make the journey harder.

Yet he keeps moving.

I did not always love how Christopher Nolan’s version portrayed Odysseus. At times, he seemed like a bumbling man staggering from one disaster to another. If we see only his failures, we lose sight of what makes him heroic.

His greatness is not that he avoids setbacks.

It is that, across twenty years of war and wandering, some part of him continues to believe he can still make it home.

That kind of persistence feels familiar to me.

The AuDHD Odyssey

Being AuDHD has often felt less like a steady path of growth and more like an odyssey.

I learn. I adapt. I build systems. I gain confidence. I begin to believe I have finally figured out how to navigate something that once overwhelmed me.

Then an old struggle returns in a new form.

That recurrence can be brutal. If I can still end up here, what exactly did I learn the last time?

But perhaps that is the wrong way to measure growth.

Odysseus does not become heroic by reaching a point where nothing can knock him off course. He becomes heroic through his capacity to continue after being knocked off course again and again.

I would like to get knocked down less.

I would especially like to believe that enough reflection, preparation, and self-awareness could prevent me from ever returning to certain places. But my life has not worked that way. There have always been gains and setbacks, followed by new gains and new setbacks.

There is no final win in which every old vulnerability disappears.

There is only the continued journey.

The Temptation to Forget

One thing I found revealing in Nolan’s portrayal was Odysseus’s eagerness to eat the lotus.

He did not merely seem imprisoned by Calypso. He became a willing participant in his own captivity. The lotus allowed him to forget, to avoid facing what had happened and what returning home might now require.

And yet, some part of him still knew.

It kept calling him back. He would move toward escape, only to be pulled back into forgetting.

I understand the appeal.

Sometimes remembering where we were going forces us to confront the distance between that life and where we are now. Forgetting can feel easier than returning. If we stop thinking about who we hoped to become, we no longer have to feel how far away that person seems.

But some part of us remembers.

It keeps interrupting the forgetting.

Staying in the Underworld

I do not think I am refusing the return right now. I think I am somewhere deeper in the journey.

I am in the underworld.

This is the dark place where the hero descends beneath the ordinary world and encounters what has been buried. It is where old stories are reopened, contradictions emerge, and the self must be reconstructed from pieces that do not fit together well anymore.

Returning to my dissertation alongside my recent setbacks became the call that sent me back down.

My dissertation asks questions about identity, transition, neurodivergence, and how we construct ourselves through the stories we tell. Those questions no longer feel only academic.

I am living inside them again.

There is a part of me that likes it here.

I like collecting the pieces. I like exploring, learning, reflecting, and discovering connections I had not noticed before. For me, and perhaps for other autistic people, there can be a powerful temptation to stay in that depth. Understanding becomes absorbing.

Reconstruction becomes a project without a clear ending.

I can keep digging because there is always another connection to make.

But the purpose of the descent is not to live forever in the underworld. The hero is supposed to return with something.

The danger is not that I will fail to examine my life deeply enough. The danger is that I will remain in examination, endlessly preparing to return without ever deciding that I am ready enough to leave.

There Is No Final Win

I first learned this through sports. Football in particular.

You get knocked down. Hard. You make the wrong decision, sometimes at the worst possible time.

Despite all the practice, preparation, and determination, you lose.

But there is no time to remain on the ground. You get back up and return to the game. To the next play. Another opportunity.

Then another.

Sports taught me that strength is not measured only by how rarely I fall. It is also measured by what I do after I fall.

One of my greatest strengths may be a slightly irrational confidence that I can always get back in there. Some part of me continues to believe that next time could be better. Extraordinary, even.

That confidence may sometimes look foolish.

But it has carried me a long way.

Hero Psychology cannot promise a life without recurrence. It has to make room for regression, avoidance, exhaustion, reconstruction, and return.

The absence of a final win also means that no single loss gets to define the entire story. Finding myself somewhere painful again does not erase the distance I traveled.

That’s what Odysseus understood. Home is not reached through one uninterrupted act of courage. It is reached through the repeated decisions to continue, even after the journey has taken much longer than we believed it would.