A Childhood Moment

In primary school, during a handball session, I withdrew completely from the game. I stayed physically present but refused to engage. The teacher insisted that I’d join the game, but instead, my mind drifted into my inner world. Then the ball accidentally hit my leg, and my team received a foul. I wasn’t trying to sabotage anyone. I simply could not participate.

At the time, it looked like stubbornness.

Looking back, it was something else.

Handball wasn’t just a game. It involved fast-moving trajectories, spatial unpredictability, noise, team coordination, and public visibility of errors, without the option to opt out. For a nervous system sensitive to autonomy, coordination load, and sensory overwhelm, that combination can feel like a threat rather than play.

The Pattern I Didn’t Understand

Throughout my life, certain imposed tasks triggered an absolute refusal. Not reluctance, avoidance, laziness or rebellion. Just refusal.

When something felt meaningless, imposed, or misaligned, I lost my ability to be diplomatic and ignored future consequences. It felt like a shutdown.

To the outside, this was often interpreted as rebellion. The response was pressure, threat, or punishment. That response did not increase compliance. It increased threat encoding.

Over time, the loop wasn’t about one event anymore. It recalibrated my baseline sensitivity to demands.

For years, I summarised it as “I don’t like it,” or “It’s not for me.” While this answer is correct, it remains incomplete. Only later did I realise that this phrase was masking a much more complex internal state.

What Is Actually Happening

In this section, I’m trying to describe what is likely to happen, but I feel unable to summarise it, so I have separated them into subsections. Do not treat these as certainties but rather as hints.

The Two Locks

When a demand feels imposed, illogical, controlling, misaligned or manipulative, my nervous system can interpret it as a threat to autonomy.

Bandwidth narrows, flexibility collapses, and diplomacy disappears. This is not defiance but a loss of safety.

Even self-demands can threaten my autonomy: I’m learning to reframe internal requests from “I need to clean the kitchen” to “when the kitchen is clean, it’s so pleasant to use it”.

Lock 2: Low-Reward Task (ADHD Dopamine Depletion)

If a task lacks intrinsic meaning, novelty, visible impact, or urgency, the ignition system does not activate.

Without dopamine, there is no engine start.

When Both Locks Engage

Now combine:

PDA says: “You cannot make me.”
ADHD says: “There is no fuel.”

Add sensory load, inaccessible high-quality standards or trauma sensitivity, and the amplification increases.

The result is no motivation, no negotiation, and no concern for consequences.

It feels like “I don’t care”, “I’m inconsistent”, or “I’m incompetent”, but structurally, it’s closer to a system failure.

A recent example was when I was asked if I remembered a list of words; it felt like a costly, low-reward demand; my immediate reply was “no” even without trying. Later, once the pressure had eased, I was able to recall those words.

The Hidden Layer: Brain Freeze

I originally described what was happening as “freeze,” but that isn’t precise. It’s more like a temporary loss of cognitive access, which can result in different outputs:

Fight → rebellion, loss of diplomacy, indifference to consequences.
Flight → avoidance, procrastination, disappearance.
Fawn → “I’ll do it” and hope it dissolves. Time usually decides whether I can do it anyway or will divert to fight-or-flight.

The surface behaviour varies, but the internal state is the same: processing lock.

Why I Can Do Hard Things But Not This

I can cycle long distances, troubleshoot complex issues, manage emergencies calmly and endure all types of storms.

Those contain autonomy, meaning, structured problem-solving, and/or competence.

The limit is not the difficulty; it is a violation of autonomy combined with the absence of meaning. I’m very curious, and I love exploring complex topics, but they must be meaningful.

When “I Don’t Like It” Was Actually Overload

Driving school is a good example. I wasn’t interested in driving, but people insisted I should get a licence to remove the access barrier if I need to drive later in life. I tried, I disliked driving, and I gave up. It confirmed my initial disinterest. Also, I didn’t have to worry about stopping active transportation and switching to a sedentary life, so giving up felt like relief.

That was the end of the story until I learned about neurodivergence, which allowed me to interpret what was happening internally.

Driving requires:

multi-limb coordination (dyspraxic load)
constant wide-field monitoring
rapid task switching
unpredictable stimuli
real-time correction
social evaluation

My attentional style is monotropic: I focus deeply rather than broadly.
My coordination under pressure requires conscious effort and demands all my attention, which should be on what’s happening on the road rather than driving itself.
My interoceptive signals are delayed.
My emotional labelling is imprecise.

The internal experience wasn’t “This is unpleasant”; it was more likely sensory overload, coordination strain, subtle threat activation, and cognitive friction.

But because my internal telemetry was blurred (alexithymia + interoceptive lag), and the whole map was blank, the only accessible summary was: “I already knew I didn’t like it, and the experience confirmed it”. That sentence protected me from overload, but it also disguised its source.

Signal Detection Failure

When emotional and bodily signals are muted or delayed, overload does not announce itself clearly. It doesn’t say: “You are dysregulated,” but “Nope.”

That compression algorithm likely shaped many of my decisions. What looked like demotivation may often have been unrecognised overload.

Selective Refusal, Not Global Defiance

If this were ego-driven rebellion, I would refuse everything, and I don’t. I refuse misaligned, meaningless, autonomy-violating, or incoherent demands. That is selective.

It’s more of an integrity defence than opposition.

The Double-Lock: When “I Don’t Like It” Isn’t About Motivation