There’s a strange kind of grief that comes with late discovery.
Not the dramatic kind people expect, but the quiet, internal kind, the one that happens when you realise you’ve been working twice as hard as everyone else just to be perceived as “normal”, and nobody ever noticed the cost.
For most of my life, I believed I was simply too much.
Too intense. Too sensitive. Too anxious. Too reactive. Too “deep”.
And the worst part wasn’t feeling different, it was the belief that I was different in a faulty way.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I discovered I am Autistic and ADHD (AuDHD). And that discovery didn’t just explain my characteristics – it rewrote my entire life story. It made sense of experiences I’d spent years blaming myself for: the overwhelm, the burnout, the social confusion, the masking, the trauma responses, and the constant feeling that I was trying to translate myself into a language the world could understand.
That’s why I wrote my autobiography: “An Autistic-ADHD Journey: Building a True Identity Post-Discovery.”
This book isn’t just my story – it’s a reclaiming.
It’s about what happens when you look back at a whole lifetime and realise you weren’t broken… you were unsupported. Misread. Mislabelled. Expected to cope in environments that punished your nervous system for being honest.
It’s also about identity.
Because late-discovered neurodivergence doesn’t only come with relief, it comes with a huge question:
If the version of me I’ve presented to the world was a mask… who am I without it?
I’m writing about the raw realities people don’t always talk about: how it feels to realise your supposed “personality flaws” were actually neurodivergent characteristics, how trauma can knot itself around neurodivergence until you can’t tell what’s you and what’s survival, and how friendship, work, parenting, and relationships change once you finally understand your own brain.
But this book isn’t a tragedy. It’s not a sob story.
It’s about clarity.
It’s about learning how to separate shame from truth.
It’s about finding language for experiences you couldn’t explain and then using that language to rebuild yourself from the inside out. For me, that meant unlearning years of internalised ableism, stopping the constant self-blame, and finally understanding that my intensity was never the problem.
The problem was the environment.
If you are late-identified, perpetually questioning: am I not enough, or just exhausted from trying to be “palatable” – I wrote this for you. And if you love someone who is neurodivergent, I wrote this for you too, because understanding isn’t pity. It’s empowerment.
This autobiography is my attempt to tell the truth, not the polished, socially acceptable version… but the real one.
The one where I stop apologising for existing.
