I heard the music before I watched the film.
The songs found me at a strange time. I had just received my diagnosis — autistic, and gifted — and I didn’t know what to do with myself. That is the only way I can describe it. I didn’t know what to do with myself. The results sat on the table. I sat with them. There was nowhere to put any of it.
The lyrics kept replaying in my head. Not as background noise. Something more insistent than that — finding the cracks, circling back, saying the same thing over and over until I was ready to hear it.
I got on the treadmill. I had never been a runner. I am still not, really. But I ran, and I kept running, because my body needed somewhere to put what my mind couldn’t hold. I ran until my knees hurt. I ran until one of my toenails turned black, and eventually fell off. The songs played on repeat and I let them, and somewhere in the running and the looping lyrics and the strange grief of those weeks, something was slowly working itself loose.
I don’t watch shows. I get too absorbed, too wrapped up — the boundary between the story’s emotional world and my own is too thin, and I don’t like the feeling of living inside something I know isn’t real. I have always been this way.
But I had been living inside this music for weeks. So I watched K-Pop Demon Hunters.
It moved me in a way I didn’t expect.
Rumi hides her demon marks. There is shame in carrying something the world around her does not understand, and so she covers it, performs around it, becomes so practiced at the covering that it starts to feel like the truth. And then, slowly, she stops. Not because the world has become safe. But because she decides that what she carries is hers, and that there might be something in it worth claiming.
I recognised something in that. Not the hiding exactly — because my story is different. I didn’t hide my marks. I didn’t even know they were there.
I was 39 years old when someone handed me a report and told me I was autistic.
I had gone in expecting something else — ADHD, probably. The inattention. The scattered mornings. I had always felt like I moved to my own beat, a little out of sync with the rest of the world, but I had no name for it. I thought I was eccentric. An overthinker. Others seemed to move through life spontaneously, going with the flow in a way that never came naturally to me. I always felt stuck. Out of step. But I had learned to call that a personality quirk, not a pattern worth investigating.
Not this.
Here is the part that made me laugh, quietly, 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 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 turned that over for a long time.
Giftedness, I have come to understand, is a double-edged thing. It is not simply ability. It comes with a profound asynchrony — different parts of you developing at different rates, pulling in different directions, making ordinary life quietly harder in ways that are difficult to explain and easy to dismiss. I had spent my whole life feeling the weight of that without having a name for it.
The question that kept surfacing was a quiet one.
Why did I not realise this earlier?
I thought about all the years of pushing through. The burnout that kept returning no matter how carefully I tried to live. The way I always assumed the problem was my attitude, my discipline, my failure to manage what everyone else seemed to manage. I kept telling myself that all of us struggle, that no one leads a perfect life, that suffering is just part of being human. I wasn’t wrong about that. But I was missing something.
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.
What I felt was not I wish I were different. It was softer and more specific than that.
It was the sadness 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.
There is a way of understanding this that has brought me some peace.
I couldn’t have seen the pattern while I was living it. That is simply the nature of a life — you only understand it looking backwards. The burnout, the exhaustion, the particular way everything was always a little harder. It makes sense now. It didn’t then. And I couldn’t have made it make sense any sooner than it did.
I think of a sunflower. It doesn’t map the light. It just turns toward it, steadily, because that is what it is made to do. I want to live like that. Not with a plan for how the grief resolves, but with my face turned toward what is good and worth growing into.
I have sat with enough people living in the shadow of dying to know what a real loss looks like. A late diagnosis is not that. It is not the end. What I make of it — that part is mine.
I am more at peace with it now than I was on the treadmill, trying to run away from something I couldn’t yet name.
The experiences were not in vain. The struggle was not meaningless. The late diagnosis — my son’s, and then my own — taught me to look more carefully, to ask better questions, to extend to others the grace I was slow to give myself. Nothing is wasted if you are willing to learn from it.
The toenail grew back.
Slowly, so did I.
Songs referenced: Golden and This Is What It Sounds Like, from the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack.
If this resonated, you might also want to read:
- The Threads of Life — Growing Up as an Undiagnosed Neurodivergent Woman — the life that finally made sense, looking back
- Twice Exceptional — Grieving My Diagnosis as Gifted and Autistic — on giftedness, grief, and what comes after the diagnosis
Grow with their Flow 
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