Taking a week off work because I couldn’t cope, constantly losing friendships, and feeling like an outsider my entire life—none of these were signs that I was a terrible person. As it turns out, they were signs of something else entirely: autism and ADHD.
For most of my life, I believed I was unreasonable, inflexible, overly sensitive, too excitable, bad at communication, and simply too much for other people. And yes, I am all of those things—but not because I’m an arsehole. It’s because I have a neurodivergent brain.
Like many late-discovered autistic and ADHD adults, I spent years being misdiagnosed with mental health conditions that never quite fit. Bipolar disorder. Borderline personality disorder. Social anxiety. A carefully labelled collection of diagnoses that explained some things—but never everything.
I was never truly convinced. I didn’t feel mentally ill in the traditional sense. I just felt… odd. Misaligned. Like I’d been handed a human manual that was missing the pages I needed.
And then I met someone who changed everything.
A new friend casually mentioned she had autism and ADHD. We spent an afternoon talking, laughing, and unintentionally trauma bonding. After we left, my partner looked at me with wide eyes and said, “Holy shit. How am I supposed to cope with two of you?”
And just like that, the floodgates opened.
Talking to her felt like looking in a mirror. Her experiences matched mine in a way that nothing else ever had. Suddenly, the sensory overload, social confusion, and that deep, crushing burnout I’d lived with for years all began to make sense.
It wasn’t that I was broken. I wasn’t failing at life. My brain was simply wired differently. I was autistic. I had ADHD. I wasn’t lazy or dramatic or flaky—I was navigating life with a brain that processes the world in an entirely different way.
That moment was the beginning of everything.
The start of unlearning decades of shame, confusion, and self-blame. The start of rewriting the story I’d been told: from “What’s wrong with me?” to “Oh… this makes so much sense now.”
This is where my journey into the chaotic, glittery world of neurodivergence truly began.
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