Especially for autistic and ADHD individuals like me, there is this concept of perseveration. As long as something remains unfinished, we cannot do anything else. At the exclusion of everything else, we will try to finish this one task. Just the other day, I was trying to be on a call for work with coworkers, and basically the printer was not working. I could not continue the call until I got the printer fixed. Another day, I had to move my desk. I was taking my monitors down, and I lost one of the screws from the monitors. I could not finish the job or do anything else until I found that one screw. It took over an hour. Once I found it, everything else could continue. I literally could not do anything else. This concept of hyperfixation and perseveration, I feel, is really universal in a lot of ways among autistic and ADHD people, especially ADHD people who are also autistic. Basically, the problem is that we do not like loose ends of any kind. We cannot leave a task unfinished. It is the same problem where, a lot in school, I would be taking a test or doing a math problem, get stuck on one of the problems, and I would not go forward to another problem and come back to it later. I would just get stuck on it. I would raise my hand to ask for help. In a classroom with 33 kids, by the time the teacher gets to answer my question, the bell rings and class is over. People look at you like, “Didn’t you do any? You had a bunch of questions. Couldn’t you skip the one?” I just could not skip it. A lot of neurotypical people do not understand that skipping a problem or leaving a loose end untied can feel like a nag in the back of the mind—like a splinter in my mind, driving me mad.