I was lying on the floor of my bedroom when it happened.
I don’t know why I was on the floor. I think I was just tired. The kind of tired that bypasses the bed and stops wherever gravity wins. A song came on — one I used to love — and I wasn’t really listening until I was. I’m a words person. I always have been. I don’t follow a melody so much as I follow language, and these words found me in a way that felt unreasonably specific.
When it is time to ask for directions, I should not pretend to play it cool.
I started crying. Not the polite, controllable kind.
I had been circling something for almost a year at that point. My son’s psychologist had planted the seed quietly, in the way careful clinicians do — a suggestion, not a conclusion. She had been noticing things in him, and she had said, gently, that some of what she saw had a way of running in families. She said the word ADHD. I cried then too.
I told myself I was overreacting. I was middle-aged. I was functioning. Whatever this was, it had not stopped me from building a life, raising children, working in a field that required careful attention to other people. I kept asking myself: does it matter now? Whether finding a name for it would make any real difference.
But the question kept coming back. And lying on that floor, I understood that the question was not going to leave me alone until I answered it.
Why ADHD Made Sense
I had been reading everything I could find about my son. The way neurodivergence tends to travel through families, the way parents often recognise themselves in the research. I started drawing parallels, then talking myself out of them. My story wasn’t as obvious as the ones I was reading. I didn’t fit the picture cleanly enough.
But there were things I couldn’t entirely explain away.
The procrastination. The difficulty sustaining focus. The disorganisation that required constant, deliberate management just to stay on top of ordinary life. I had built an entire system around myself — minimalism, intentional living, Google Calendar, lists upon lists, alarms for things most people simply remember. I had assumed this was just discipline. Good habits. I had not considered that the scaffolding itself might be evidence of something.
And then there was secondary school. I had gone from straight As to failing subjects, from a high-achiever to a student eating alone and spending every free period studying, still falling behind. I was in one of the top schools in the country. I wasn’t stupid. But something had stopped working, and I had spent decades attributing it to a failure of character — not enough resilience, not enough grit, not the right attitude.
The psychologist had told me that my son was highly masking. That his compensatory skills were holding, but probably only until the academic and social demands of secondary school exceeded his capacity to manage them. That when the masking fell short, he would likely cross the threshold.
I had crossed a threshold too. At roughly the same age. I just hadn’t known what to call it.
A Year of Going Back and Forth
Between that floor and the actual assessment, there was about half a year.
I would read something and feel certain. I would talk myself back down. I would read something else. The more I thought about it, the more real it felt — but that itself became part of the doubt. The more you think about something, the more it feels true. Was I researching my way into a diagnosis? Making a mountain out of a molehill, the way I had always accused myself of doing? Another example of overthinking, confirmation bias, catastrophising.
There had also been the burnouts. Several of them, over the years, each one explained away at the time.
The first came early in my career. I had gone into the work wanting simply to be a good clinician. What I encountered instead was the texture of office life — the politics, the social currents running beneath every interaction, all of it exhausting in ways I couldn’t articulate. I took three months of no-pay leave. Then I quit. What I remember most from that period is a particular flatness. Not sadness exactly, but a grey meaninglessness. A quiet and corrosive question about whether any of it was worth it. Whether I was built for this world at all.
The ones that followed were different in shape but familiar in texture. Postnatal exhaustion that went beyond what I could attribute to new motherhood. A period during Covid that brought anxiety and a kind of hypervigilance I didn’t recognise in myself at the time. And then the years we spent abroad — homeschooling, parenting two young children far from home, trying to hold too many things at once — then I started running evening fevers. I went for blood tests. Everything came back clean. Stress-related, I concluded. Which is another way of saying: something here is not sustainable.
Each time, I had a reasonable explanation. Office politics. New baby. Pandemic. Relocation. None of the explanations were wrong. They just didn’t account for why the recovery always took so long, or why the same pattern kept returning no matter how carefully I restructured my life.
That was what I kept coming back to during that year of circling. Not any single episode, but the repetition of them. The fact that I had been here before, and before that, and before that.
I finally decided to get assessed.
The Assessment Itself
It happened across a few sessions — an interview, two formal assessments covering autism and ADHD, and the WAIS for cognitive function. There were questionnaires I filled in myself, and a third-party questionnaire my partner completed separately.
I want to say something about what it actually feels like to go through this process as an adult, because I don’t think it gets talked about honestly enough.
I couldn’t sleep properly. I couldn’t eat. I spent the nights before each session running back through my own history, cataloguing symptoms, trying to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything out. I was terrified of two things simultaneously: that I would present too well, mask without meaning to, and come out the other end with nothing. And that I would discover I had, in fact, been imagining all of it.
The psychologist was experienced and warm and careful. That helped. What didn’t change was the vulnerability of the thing — sitting across from someone and being asked to be completely, unflinchingly honest about the parts of yourself you’ve spent a lifetime quietly managing. I have never been so unguarded with another person.
I still don’t entirely know where I found the courage.
The Results
The results came over a video call. I had chosen that deliberately. Going in person would have been harder, more confronting. I needed the small buffer of a screen.
Somewhere in my gut, I had suspected all three were possible. But I had ranked them in terms of likelihood: ADHD most probable, giftedness not impossible, autism almost certainly not.
I was wrong about the last one.
When autism came up, I stayed calm. I told myself I was accepting it. I wasn’t. What I was doing was processing it in layers, the way shock sometimes works — the first layer holds, and then the ones beneath it start to give way.
Because here is the part that made me laugh, softly, in the way you laugh at things that are also painful.
I am an occupational therapist. I have worked with people navigating illness, loss, the unwinding of everything they thought their life would be. I know what autism is. I am not a paediatric OT, but I know enough. I had spent years watching my eldest son struggle — the intensity, the asynchrony, the way the world seemed to land on him differently — and it had taken me years to get him to a formal diagnosis. Years during which I had already been quietly blaming myself for not seeing it sooner, not moving faster, not knowing what I should have known.
And then to find it in myself.
It was almost laughable. Almost.
The denial that followed was not loud. It was more like a quiet, persistent argument I kept having with myself. I have sensory issues with food, yes — but I had always explained that away. I was low energy — but who isn’t. Small social circle — but that’s introversion, surely, not something clinical. I had justifications for all of it, built over decades, and they were not unreasonable justifications. That was the difficulty. They weren’t wrong, exactly. They were just incomplete.
And I thought had a sense of humour. A sharp one. I could be sarcastic. I thought I could read a room. Surely that excluded me from the category, or maybe not?
It took time to understand that these things are not contradictions. That autism in an adult woman who has spent thirty-something years learning to compensate does not look like what you see in a textbook.
The Giftedness
The psychologist said it gently — that perhaps the giftedness had masked the autism. That the two together create a particular kind of invisibility. The capability compensates for the gaps so thoroughly that even the person living it cannot see the architecture underneath.
I sat with that for a long time.
Giftedness is not simply ability. It carries its own weight — a profound asynchrony, different parts of you developing at different rates, making ordinary life quietly harder in ways that resist explanation. I had felt that weight my whole life without ever having a name for it. And when the giftedness and the autism were named together, in the same breath, it reframed not just my present but everything behind me.
The secondary school years. The burnouts. The relentless sense of being slightly out of step with a rhythm I couldn’t locate.
I had always assumed the problem was me — my discipline, my attitude, my failure to manage what everyone else managed. That assumption turned out to be the most expensive thing I carried.
What followed the diagnosis was not relief so much as a long, slow reckoning. I’ve written about that more fully — the grief of it, the retroactive understanding, what it eventually opened up — in The Demon Marks Were Always Mine. If you’re somewhere in that aftermath yourself, that post might be where to go next.
What It Opened
I didn’t know that not everyone struggled in the same way. That what felt like swimming upstream for me was, for others, simply swimming. That the extra cost I paid for every ordinary thing was not a tax everyone paid.
I just didn’t know. And not knowing meant I was never gentle with myself about it.
When the denial finally settled and I let the diagnosis land, what came with it was not relief in the simple sense. It was something slower. A kind of retroactive understanding — being able to go back through the years and finally see the shape of what had been happening. The burnout that wasn’t weakness. The social withdrawal that wasn’t coldness. The secondary school collapse that wasn’t a character failure.
The autistic burnout framework, in particular, changed something. All those episodes I had chalked up to stress, to bad circumstances, to my own inadequacy — they had a different explanation now. I had been running at full capacity for years, operating in environments that were not built for the way my nervous system works, and periodically the system had simply exceeded its limit. The fevers, the meaninglessness, the constant questioning about whether any of it was worth it. Not weakness. Not failure. Something structural.
That is a different kind of grief than I expected. It is not the grief of loss, exactly. It is the grief of retrospection. Of looking back at a life of effort and finally understanding its shape.
All that time. All those years of pushing and burning out and pushing again. The quiet shame of feeling perpetually behind — not the shame of hiding something, but the older, more corrosive kind. The shame of not understanding why everything cost so much, and turning that unknowing, year after year, into a verdict about your own adequacy.
I didn’t know. And now I do. And knowing changes how I carry it.
What I wish is not that I were different. What I wish is that I had known earlier — so I could have helped myself. So I could have given myself so much more grace.
If you came here because you typed something like I think I have ADHD into a search bar and weren’t sure what you’d find — I see you. That’s exactly where this started for me too.
And if what you find, at the end of your own assessment, turns out to be something you didn’t expect — something bigger, something older, something that reframes years you thought you already understood — I want you to know that the reframing is worth it.
Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of this journey — wondering whether to get assessed, or sitting with results you’re still making sense of — I’d love to hear where you are. Leave a comment below, or reach out directly.
Want to keep reading?
If you’re thinking about getting assessed: What an Adult Autism and ADHD Assessment Actually Feels Like
If you’ve just received your results: The Demon Marks Were Always Mine
Grow with their Flow 
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