Life After AuDHD Diagnosis
Diagnosed at 30, and now my whole life makes sense
When I thought “anyone can relate to this” about every video for AuDHD (Autism + ADHD), I should’ve known.
One day, shortly after I turned 30, I broke down crying in an EMDR session. I never cried in therapy before then. That specific session was about how I don’t think the world understands the things I experience, and that it was my responsibility to fix myself, not for the world to hold space for me.
I explained to my therapist that I’d been relating to a lot of AuDHD content, and that I was noticing how the world isn’t designed for anyone outside of the “norm” to thrive. She urged me to get tested so she could at least help me navigate the symptoms better. So I did, and got diagnosed with both on the same day.
I imagined I’d be in shock. That I’d walk away crying. That my life would get flipped upside down. But surprisingly, I experienced mostly the opposite. It felt like the lifelong mystery of my life was solved. Every single thing I experienced makes sense now.
My intense but quickly fleeting interests. The rush I feel when finding new music and listening on repeat for weeks. Why I discover a new meal and want to eat it daily until I can no longer stand the thought of it. The way my body struggles to regulate temperature. Why stadiums are unbearable (without earplugs at least). The reason the world feels so loud, and why I feel every sound reverberate through my body. Why I lack interest in going out. Why I visibly shake and have puddles of sweat under my boobs when speaking in meetings, even on Zoom. Why I sat outside my house in the car for an hour every day after coming home from work. Why I burned out so easily from things other people seem to do with ease.
This clarity was reassuring, but the realizations were heavy. Roaming the world while undiagnosed means that every symptom was internalized as a moral failing. I used to run through self-help books, looking for answers on how to just exist better. I wanted to learn every productivity hack. Anything and everything to help fix myself, when I never even knew what was wrong.
The biggest damage was from masking. I became a chameleon to whatever environment I was in. And I needed validation for everything, which only set me up for the worst. Set me up for inauthentic friendships and toxic romantic situations. Set me up to chase corporate jobs I hated. Primed me to live a life I felt so unhappy with. Masking fractured my sense of self and made me a ghost in my own body.
At one point, I didn’t even have hobbies. I had no personal style. I never had anything to share in ice breakers, so I would hurry to google what I could say before my name was called.
The worst part is I thought it was just anxiety. Every single discomfort, shutdown, moment of overstimulation, struggle to speak, I thought it was all just anxiety. And one thing about anxiety is that society has all the ways to “fix” it.
With all these realizations came grief, especially realizing how neglected I was growing up. How moments of discomfort or overstimulation were interpreted as attitude. How I constantly complained about being tired, but was labeled lazy. How hard I was pushed in school because I learned quickly, turns out english and math feed into my special interests.
The gift of diagnosis has been access to my identity and grace for existing as I am. The blanket of shame covering me was removed. I felt free when I got diagnosed a few months ago. I still feel free.
Another gift has been unlocking creative freedom. I now understand that creativity, real creativity, requires authenticity.
Shortly after diagnosis, I reread The Box, a collection of poetry I randomly released while on a career break 3 years ago. That collection was created with love for writing, intuition, and zero skill. Looking back post-diagnosis, it’s so obvious the collection was from the perspective of an undiagnosed neurodivergent black woman struggling to navigate the world. That’s why now, despite being educated in the craft and knowing the many ways I could rewrite those poems, I haven’t. That version of me deserves to exist without being fixed.
However, I want to expand it in the coming years to a mixed-genre memoir. More poems, adding prose, maybe even visuals. I now understand the box represents so many things that deserve more color and context. “The Box” I wrote about and was living in was the neurotypical world, corporate structures, capitalism, patriarchy, and realized in conversation with a friend recently, colonialism.
But I never would have dreamed the project this far, or any other projects over the last few months, without fully meeting myself first. The diagnosis contextualized my life and gave permission to many parts of me to, finally, freely exist.
Thanks for being here 🤍
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Reading this felt uncomfortably familiar in the quietest way. Especially the part about thinking “it’s just anxiety” for years — I lived there too, trying to optimize my way out of something that was never just a productivity problem. The masking piece… that slow disappearance of self while still performing a life — that one is hard to read without feeling it in the body. Diagnosis didn’t change who I was, it just stopped the constant self-blame from sounding like truth.