A late diagnosis of neurodivergence gave me self-knowledge but I wish I'd had it much earlier in life

A Gen X perspective and hopes for younger neurodivergent women

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

I don’t tend to think of myself as an advice giver, but perhaps an insight giver. I like to think that in sharing what I have learned from my 50 + years on earth, someone might find a kernel of something that helps them on their journey.

I didn’t have any inkling that I had a neurodivergent brain until my late 40s. I did have a very keen awareness of being different to other people. And that difference was seen not through a lens of individuality and uniqueness, but one of deficit and weirdness. I was forever out of sync with the world. A stranger in a strange land.

Receiving a diagnosis of autism at 48 (followed by ADHD at 51) was the most deeply transformative thing that has ever happened to me. It meant letting go of the person I thought I was and getting to know the one that had been submerged under it for decades.

Going through my adolescence, 20s and 30s and most of my 40s with unidentified neurodivergence meant I had no alternative but to adapt to neurotypical ways of doing life. I used every bit of strength, energy and will to try to meet the expectations of society that I had internalised as my own.

It’s left a massive legacy and sense of loss along with an unquenchable question of what might have been if I’d had the benefit of self-knowledge in earlier decades.

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I’m right in the middle of the catchment of Generation X. It’s a bit of a lost generation, caught between arch enemies, the baby boomers and millennials. Gen X women are especially lost, and unidentified neurodivergent women are more lost still.

We were probably the first generation of women who didn’t have to justify our choice to pursue further education and careers. But with our opportunities came expectations - not just to make the most of those opportunities but to maintain the raft of obligations we had to others in our lives just because we were women.

We didn’t have the support we needed to do any of it. We were still in the dark ages of self-awareness and reflection and growth, long before therapy was commonplace. We learned to get on with it and keep our problems to ourselves while they continued to simmer beneath the surface.

For many of us, awareness of our neurodivergence didn’t come until we were deep into middle age. We were so weighed down by the burden of expectation and decades of cumulative stress that the house of cards we built came crashing down.

What saved us was finding a language to finally explain what the hell was going on. We were at least luckier than women of previous generations who suffered in silence, their “breakdown” being spoken about in hushed tones while they recovered somewhere out of sight of polite society.

Far more than anything else, it has been the stories of other neurodivergent women that have awakened me to my own neurodivergence. Women whose lives resembled mine enough to be able to recognise myself in them.

And when I was at the beginning of my journey of discovery, I benefited from the insights they had gathered from theirs. And I became part of a growing community of neurodivergent women sharing our stories with each other.

There’s a lot of us but we still remain invisible in a society that stubbornly insists on a very particular and narrow idea of what autism and ADHD are.

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There are many women who like me are discovering their neurodivergence in their 40s and beyond. But there are many others now who are coming to it in their 20s and 30s because they have access to a world of information that didn’t exist two decades ago.

I imagine it must be a very different experience to discover your neurodivergence at a time when your adult life is still unfolding. When you still have to prove yourself in the workforce without a buffer of financial and housing security. When you’re trying to navigate increasingly complex relationships but without a toolkit of strategies and life experience.

Yet, I envy you. You have a chance to claim those decades of your life as your own. To stop pouring all your energy into servicing someone else’s version of you. To tune into what your heart desires and sort what you want from what society says you should want. And then to build a life on it with intention and unwavering loyalty to yourself.

With the wisdom of Gen-X hindsight, I can tell you that my life panned out the way it did because instead of driving it from a place of self-knowledge, I was reacting and adapting to life as it came at me.

With the gift of self-knowledge, you can have a very different life to the one I had. While I’ve had a few wins, it’s been a lot harder than it should have been and taken more out of me than it should have.

With the gift of self-knowledge, you can grow into the person you’ve always meant to be much sooner in your life. And you will come to learn things about yourself and your place in the world that have taken me until middle age.

My hope for you is that you will accept, embrace and nurture the unique beauty that is you and seek out others who bring this out in you. They are your people and they are where you will find the connection worth having.

That you will believe in what you have to say, a perspective that is unique, yet when expressed honestly will resonate with others because authenticity will always find somewhere to land.

That instead of trying to fit in with people and into places that make you feel uncomfortable, you will be drawn to people and places that let you be yourself. That you will no longer feel the need to make yourself smaller, to contain yourself against a world pressing down on you. Instead, you will dare to let yourself expand into the space and live large and bold.

That you will come to know that you are not flawed or broken or defective. But that house within you an ecosystem of cause and effect so that at any point in time, everything about you makes sense. You have done the very best with the knowledge and resources you have. You are a product of your environment and circumstances and you have worked hard to adapt and survive. You are stronger than you know.

That instead of asking what is wrong with me? you will ask yourself what do I need? To learn to tune into and honour your feelings after a lifetime of ignoring, minimising and dismissing them because that’s what you were taught to do. Limitations and boundaries are not an admission of failure but important tools to help you live the life that is best for you.

That you will find and tap into your power and let your strengths, passions and interests shape your path through life. That you will find the strength and resolve to lead from the inside rather than letting life be something that bombards you from the outside.

That you will discover that there is just as much joy to be found in solitude as in company and you need both at different times. That your hours don’t have to be filled with other people to make you feel like you exist. And that the deepest and most satisfying intimate relationship you will have is with your own mind.

That you will find a way through the complexity of relationships with someone who makes you feel safe enough to figure it out. I have few answers about relationships but one thing I’m sure of is that if something doesn’t feel right, you need to give yourself the space to stop and tune into what it is and what you need to do.

My hope is that in finding your true self, you will find the big, brilliant life that is meant for you.

Go forth, fellow truth seeker.