I’ve just finished weeks of assessments — IQ testing, autism and ADHD evaluations — and now I find myself in limbo, waiting for the results. Two weeks doesn’t sound long. But when you’ve carried questions about yourself for most of your life, two weeks can feel like standing on a shaky bridge between two shores, unable to move forward.
The waiting is not silent.
The thoughts keep circling, the same ones on rotation: What if nothing shows up and it was just all my overthinking? What if I’m not autistic, not ADHD — just flawed? What if I wasted all that money for nothing?
That last one stings the most. The financial cost of these assessments is significant, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve been foolish. But I keep coming back to this: whatever the report says, something has already shifted. The assessment process itself has been a mirror. It pulled up layers of myself I didn’t know I had buried. I have already gained something from that, even if I cannot name it cleanly yet.
What the process surfaced, more than anything, were the old explanations.
Maybe I just find adulthood hard because I’m immature. Maybe being an only child slowed me down — I never learned to handle conflict the way other people did.
Those stories worked for years. They gave the struggle a shape I could live with. But they always carried a quiet sting, because they made everything a character flaw — something I needed to try harder to overcome. What I’m beginning to sit with now is a different possibility. Not that I am behind, or immature, or not trying hard enough. But that I am simply different. And that the gap I kept trying to close was never mine to close in the first place.
The assessment itself was more confronting than I expected.
Not just the tests — the talking. Saying things out loud that had only ever lived in my own head. I cried more than I anticipated, and not always over the things I expected to cry about.
At one point I brought up an incident in my career — from a time when I was part of a team working to establish something new, defining boundaries and claiming ground that hadn’t yet been formally mapped. I documented something as falling within our professional scope. A colleague from another discipline had documented it too, and took offence at my framing. It escalated to my senior before I’d had a chance to address it directly.
What I remembered, saying it out loud, was the confusion more than the upset. I had hesitated before documenting it — I’d wondered how it would land, whether it seemed passive aggressive. But I also knew that if I didn’t claim that ground explicitly, it would quietly be absorbed elsewhere, the way it had happened before in other institutions, passing down through generations of practitioners. I did what I believed was right. I didn’t think it needed explaining. And somehow that was the problem.
In the assessment room, saying it out loud, something clarified.
This had happened to me often. Not just that incident — a pattern across years. I could not always tell how what I did or didn’t do would land. I chose what seemed right, and it came off differently than I intended, and I was left confused by the gap between the two. I knew in my heart it wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t thought that needed explaining either. It occurred to me, for the first time, that this might not be a personality flaw or a professional misstep. It might simply be how my brain is wired — operating from a clear internal compass, genuinely unable to predict the social weather around it.
Nobody told me that. The psychologist made her notes and held the space. The realisation came from the saying of it — from hearing my own words outside my head for the first time, in a room where I had permission to be completely honest.
That is what the assessment gave me before any results arrived.
The two weeks that followed were uncomfortable in the way that digesting always is.
I replayed things. What I had said and hadn’t said. What the psychologist had noted. Incidents I’d half-forgotten that had surfaced unexpectedly. It felt like ruminating — the same circling I’d done my whole life — but with a different quality this time. This time the circling was moving toward something rather than simply repeating. Each pass over the same ground left me slightly more certain than before, not about the diagnosis, but about the experiences themselves. That they were real. That they had hurt. That the confusion I had carried for years was not a character weakness dressed up in explainable circumstances.
By the time the two weeks ended I had something I hadn’t walked in with. Not a label. Not answers. A quieter thing — the beginning of being able to sit with all of it. The flaws, the patterns, the incidents I had spent years either explaining away or running from. I had spent so long trying to fix what felt broken, trying to get rid of the problems, that I had never really stopped and said: this is all me. And it is okay.
The report would come. It would say what it said. But the waiting — the uncomfortable, circling, slowly-illuminating waiting — had already done something the report could not undo.
Looking back, I notice how often I dissociated from people when relationships got closer.
Not in a dramatic way. I was never pushed out or ostracised. It was quieter than that. I simply felt that I didn’t quite connect or belong, so I gently drifted away. Sometimes I knew I was doing it. Sometimes it happened without me noticing. Either way, I became an expert at distancing myself before anyone could reject me.
That pattern was surfacing now too, in the space the assessment had opened. The self-doubt. The old ache of not fitting in. The familiar pull toward the edges.
The assessment didn’t create any of it. It just stopped the noise long enough for me to hear it.
I’m not sure what to do with all of it yet. But I am, for the first time in a long time, staying with it instead of running.
For now, I am just trying to stay on the bridge.
The assessment process itself, just before this waiting, is in When You Stop Pretending You Don’t Need Directions. The diagnosis that finally came at the end of the wait is in Expected ADHD, Got Autism. And the five months of silence that followed are in The Silence Between Knowing and Writing.
New essays, delivered as I write them. Quiet, occasional, no noise.
Grow with Their Flow 