Throughout your life you’ve felt like you don’t quite know how to be an adult, that you’re somehow failing at adulting, or like your head is always dipping just below the water level, never quite achieving the potential that you and everyone else expected. You have this undercurrent of fear that someday soon your mask will slip, and they’ll find out who the real you is.
Then suddenly something triggers a suspicion within you. You read about various different labels, and something, somewhere, feels so familiar. ADHD. Autism. Or even AuDHD. There may be some others too: dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, alexithymia, Tourette’s, OCD, PDA, ARFID, SPD. [1] You read more, and you start to feel a connection. But it takes a long time, because you gaslight yourself over and over again, “Oh, that can’t be me,” or “I’m just trying to make up a reason for why I am a failure at x, y or z.” Eventually you can’t ignore it anymore – perhaps things are getting harder, with a new baby, or peri-menopausal or andropausal hormones, or work is getting tougher. All the strategies you’ve previously used successfully seem to be failing you. Or you have an older child who gets a label, and you start to notice how similar they are to you…
Eventually you ask for your own assessment. For some of us this is a quick process, but for many it can take years – long periods throughout which we constantly question ourselves, whether we ought to be doing this, whether this could possibly be the answer. For many of us, even after we get a label, we start to wonder how good the assessor is, whether they could’ve got it wrong! We are so used to reading in the media that these labels – especially ADHD and autism – are just excuses for functioning adults to be allowed to fail or make mistakes, over and over again, and so we find it hard to accept that actually there is a real reason that we feel so different, and find some things so much harder. And it’s not that we’re failures or somehow less than. So, what does it mean?
All it really means is that our brains are wired differently. Perhaps we needed to be taught differently to what was offered, so we weren’t able to learn as easily or as well as expected, or we ended up not achieving what we’d hoped. No-one recognised fully who we were – not even ourselves – and so our needs were not met, and we experienced overload, overwhelm, stress, anxiety or depression at far higher levels than our neurotypical peers. Sensory overload and emotional dysregulation are often key areas that we struggle – and over our lives people may have described us too much, not enough, too emotional, too unemotional, flaky, unreliable, too rigid, too inflexible, lacking in empathy, blunt or rude.
Despite these negative labels, many of us will have found others who saw our strengths, and valued us for who we are – whether we could accept it or not – and they would have described us as highly empathic, having a strong sense of justice, creative, a free or lateral thinker, a visionary. Many of us pick up far more from our environment than our neurotypical peers, which is what leads to sensory overload; but which also make us amazing at pattern spotting or jobs like proofreading, research, or therapy. For the lucky ones among us, we found a career or created an environment that values our skills and supports our needs. For the less lucky ones, we ended up feeling like we’re swimming against the tide, always struggling; or we experience a constant low level of dissatisfaction or restlessness. For the least lucky among us (and often it really is just luck), we might end up with an addiction (often when we’re trying to self-medicate) or in prison – some figures suggesting that as much as half of the prison population [2] are undiagnosed neurodivergent in some way.
But these labels can be a lifeline. They help us to truly begin to know ourselves and our needs. To forgive ourselves our ‘failings’.
When we realise this, we begin to grieve for what could have been, or for what may never be. We may experience feelings of anger, loss, grief, sadness, disbelief – why and how did everyone miss this? It can take a long time and a lot of emotional processing to find acceptance and to create a new way forward, a new life for ourselves.
Of course, some ND people sail through their lives without difficulty, but in my experience these people are in the minority. There may also be ND folk who do need a diagnosis and sail through the stages of their diagnoses without any issues, but most ND people have challenges in their lives, and with processing the fallout of their new labels.
For many of us, once we know who we are and learn to love who we are, then we somehow leave the old world behind, and enter a new one inhabited by many other ND folk (whether they realise it or not!). We begin to unmask, and while this process can be challenging and may lose us friends or relationships, it can also be extremely liberating. We learn to navigate the world differently, and we become aware of our needs for the first time, which allows us to start getting these needs met. As we begin this process of unmasking, we can start to connect with ourselves, and then with others from a place of knowing our true selves, leading to more fulfilling relationships. We find a ‘smoothness’ to life, that we never knew existed.
For many neurodivergent people therapy is what leads to their diagnoses, as they learn to know themselves better. For others, therapy happens post-diagnosis, to help cope with the aftermath and what comes next. But whether or not you choose to have therapy, this journey will certainly need a lot of processing one way another.
(Based on my article on the Counselling Directory, published on 19 August 2025)
References
- OCD – obsessive compulsive disorder, PDA – pathological demand avoidance, ARFID – avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder , SPD – sensory processing disorder.
- Wainwright, L., James., Powell., C. (2024) Neurodivergence, specifically ADHD, in prison – a conversation. Prison Service Journal, Issue 272 (https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/default/files/PSJ%20272%2C%20Neurodivergence.pdf)
