Tag: gifted and autistic

• Meltdowns vs Tantrums: What I Got Wrong for Years, and What I Do Differently Now

  The afternoons have blurred now. I don’t know if I blocked them out or if this is what memory does when it has been asked to hold too much.

  What is left is the fog.

  The school bus pulling up outside our building. The doors opening. Him stepping off. And then, before we had entered the lift, before I had even put the key in the door, before I had done anything at all, his body on the floor of the lobby. Wailing. Arms flailing. Legs kicking. Sometimes curled up like a foetus. Sometimes flat on his back. My head bowed. Neighbours walking past, while I kept my head down.

  I had not even done anything yet.

  This is the sentence I still cannot say without something tightening in me. I had not done anything, and I had already failed.

  I used to think the problem was me. Some nights, alone with a sleeping child and a head full of podcasts, I was certain of it. The way I set limits. The way I softened them. The way I had not yet found the right technique, the right tone, the right feelings book. It would take me years to understand that what I was watching on the lobby floor was not about anything I had done.

  The Word Can’t, The Word Won’t

  There is a clinical distinction I did not know then and cannot stop noticing now.

  A tantrum is goal-directed. A child wants a thing. The thing is withheld. The child escalates to try to get it. The hallmark is this: the tantrum ends when the outcome becomes clear. The child is still inside himself during it. He is monitoring the room. He is watching. He is adjusting. He is choosing.

  A meltdown is not any of those things. A meltdown is a nervous system that has run out of regulatory capacity. The child is not choosing it. He cannot stop it by being shown consequences, because the part of the brain that weighs consequences is not online. He is not in there in the way he usually is.

  A tantrum tends to want a witness. A meltdown does not.

  The word can’t. The word won’t.

  This is the distinction. Everything I now know about how to be with him, on those afternoons and the ones since, follows from it.

  There is a clinical name for what I was watching. After-school restraint collapse. A child holds his body together all day, in a room full of inputs, and releases it the moment he reaches somewhere safe. Home is where the release happens. Home, meaning me. The collapse is not a failure of parenting. It is the nervous system telling him where home is.

  I had trained as an occupational therapist before he was born. The training did not reach me here. It turned out that knowing the word for something, is not the same as knowing it in my own body at four in the afternoon.

  What His Body Told Me

  The child the teacher described was not the child I brought home.

  In school he was the “class monitor.” He stood at the back of the line to make sure his friends were following the teacher. He was advanced academically. He was reading chapter books before most children were reading at all. He chose the teacher’s side of a conversation over his classmates’ side, because adults were easier to parse than peers. I arranged for a call with his teacher and described to her the child I was actually living with. The sobbing, the floor, the impossible inconsolability. She paused for a while before saying, It’s a different child you are describing. I was so confused.

  It took me years to understand that those were the same child. He had given the school everything he had. By the time he reached me, there was nothing left of him to give to anything, including himself.

  I did not know to read his body for what it was showing me. I thought the hallmarks of distress in a child were something like: crying for comfort, seeking touch, wanting the parent close. His distress looked like none of those things. It looked like something I had no language for. He was unreachable. Arms flailing. Legs kicking. Sometimes curled so tight his small back was rounded in on itself. Words gone. The child who could, during good times, have a logical conversation about something above his age level was not reachable inside this body on the floor. He was not refusing to speak. He did not have speech.

  At home, the triggers read to me, then, as unreasonable. The lift button I had pressed before he could press it. The lift button he had pressed, but now the lift had arrived and he did not want to go in. The sock that felt wrong. The snack he had agreed to that now was the wrong snack. Or the right snack, too warm, too cold, too soft or too hard. The shower he needed, that he would not take. He sat naked outside the bathroom door, refusing, for the sake of refusing.

  Once, when the chaos was too much, I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. He kicked it so hard that the plastic lock broke. He was still so small.

  Everything, at some point, would be wrong. I learnt to walk through the afternoon the way a person walks through a minefield she has already surveyed and committed to crossing anyway. I knew where the bombs were. I stepped on them anyway, because there was no path that did not include them. The detonation was going to happen regardless of which foot I put down next.

  This is what I did not understand then. A meltdown is not a response to a trigger. A meltdown is the shape a nervous system makes when it has nothing left. The trigger is whatever small thing happens to be in the room when the capacity runs out.

  What Has Helped

  The things that helped arrived slowly, over years, and none of them were strategies I had read in a book.

  I learnt to stop talking first. The typical parenting advice, when a child is on the floor, is to narrate. To name the feeling. To reason with the body in front of me. I had a dozen phrases at the ready. You are feeling frustrated. I know this is hard. Can you take a deep breath for me. I had rehearsed them. I had done the courses. I had read the books. They did nothing, and sometimes they made things worse, because what reaches a nervous system that has run out of capacity is not language. It is another nervous system, steady.

  This is the piece I am still learning. Co-regulation is a biological event, not a conversation. The calm that comes into a room, if it comes, comes in through another body. Mine. Silent. Near. Not above him. Not pressing closer. Just the fact of a breath that is not the breath he is having.

  I learnt to sit down. When I stood over him I was one more input. When I lowered myself to the floor, or to the step, or to the low chair, I removed myself from the list of things his body had to manage.

  I learnt the difference between close and crowding. Close was being within reach, within sight, a steady presence he could feel but did not have to manage. Crowding was the hand on his back he could not tolerate yet, the voice too near his ear, the body that had decided he must be calmed right now. I used to crowd. I thought I was helping. I was not.

  And I learnt, hardest of all, that the repair happens after. Not during. For years I tried to debrief in the middle. To explain, while he was still wailing, what had happened, what he had felt, why I had done what I did. None of it could reach him. Nothing I said was being received, because the part of him that receives was not available. The conversation I wanted to have could only happen hours later, sometimes the next morning, when his body had returned to itself and he was ready to hear me. I am sorry that was hard. I am here. I was here then too.

  The thing I tell the younger version of myself, if I could, is this: the goal during a meltdown is not to fix it, teach through it, or get to the other side faster. The goal is to be a steady presence for a nervous system that is borrowing mine, while it comes back online. The rest is for later.

  Tantrums Are a Different Shape

  Tantrums respond to different things, and flattening the distinction is what went wrong for me, in both directions.

  When I treated meltdowns like tantrums, I made meltdowns worse. When I treated tantrums like meltdowns, I taught him that escalation worked. Both readings fail, and the failure looks different each way.

  A tantrum, in my house, is when he wants a thing and is making the cost of withholding it higher than the cost of giving in. He is inside himself during it. He is calibrating. He is watching whether the cost has become high enough. If I match his intensity, I have raised the stakes. If I negotiate, I have told him the outcome is on the table. If I soften out of exhaustion, he has learnt that exhaustion is the currency.

  What has helped, for him, is the low steady firm voice. The short sentence. The unspoken fact that I am not going to be moved. Not angry. Not punishing. Not raising my own voice to match. This is not happening. I am going to stay here with you while you move through it.

  The other thing that is possible after a tantrum is the thing that is not possible after a meltdown. A conversation. He is still in there. We can, when the pitch comes down, talk about what happened. What he wanted. Why it was not on the table today. What we could do instead tomorrow. That conversation is not a reward for the tantrum. It is the ordinary work of a parent and a child both being steady enough to do it.

  After a meltdown, no such conversation is available, and trying to have it is another kind of harm.

  What Didn’t Help, and What I Know Now About Why

  The list of things that did not help is longer than the list of things that did. I am writing the longer list because the books did not.

  I tried the feelings thermometer. I tried the angry song. I tried the calming corner and the posters on the wall. We read the books in his good hours. He could, when his body was settled, tell me the stages of the thermometer and act out the breath and name the feeling in the jar. In his bad hours none of it came near him. Not one page. Not one verse of the song. Not the corner I had decorated for him.

  I tried deep breaths. I tried counting to ten. I tried naming the feeling for him mid-crisis, because I had read that naming is regulation. I tried Zones of Regulation. The feelings wheel. Naming is regulation when a nervous system is on. When it is off, naming is another input, and it made things worse.

  I tried holding firmer boundaries, because someone had told me I was too soft. That did not work. He did not meet the boundary with a shrug. He met it with every cell of his overwhelmed body, and the detonation took hours to come down from.

  I tried softer boundaries, because someone else had told me I was too firm. That also did not work. He learnt, because he was bright and he was watching, that the boundary was not real, and he put my steadiness on the list of things that would give way if he pressed hard enough.

  And some days, exhausted and over-stimulated and past my own edge, I screamed at him. Out of desperation, out of nothing left. And I wilted from the guilt afterwards. The guilt did nothing useful either. The nervous system he was borrowing from, mine, was empty. When mine was empty, nothing worked. I had to learn to take my own regulation as seriously as his.

  That last one was, I think, the hardest thing for me to learn.

  These days, when it happens, and it still happens, I do less.

  I sit down. I move slow. I do not narrate. I do not name the feeling. I do not reach for him before he can be reached. I wait.

  When he is ready, he comes to me. His hand on my arm. Or he does not come to me yet, and I keep waiting. Eventually one of us will stand. The shower will run. There will be food.

  He has been mine for so many years, yet I am still learning him. I suspect I will still be learning him when he is old enough to read this and tell me what I got wrong, or right enough.

  As I am writing this, he is perched on the monkey bar, trying to do his homework, frustrated. His long legs dangling, his fingers busy, his brows furrowed, his grumbles loud. The air is quiet. I am quiet, and I am watching.

  I am not doing anything, but I am.

  If you want to follow the wiring underneath these afternoons, The Wrong Operating System goes deeper into what twice-exceptional looks like from the inside.

  If you’ve been on a floor of your own, Why I Called It Grow with Their Flow is the floor I keep returning to.

  I write when the writing is honest. If you’d like the posts in your inbox, you can subscribe below.

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  April 29, 2026

  autistic mother, gifted and autistic, meltdowns, neurodivergent child, neurodivergent parenting, occupational therapy

  ---

• The Wrong Operating System: Being Gifted and Autistic Without Knowing It

  The report arrived before the Zoom call.

  That is how these things are done, apparently. The psychologist sends it ahead so you can read it first. So you are not sitting in front of a screen, watching a stranger’s face, when the words land.

  My heart was already going fast. I had been waiting for this for longer than I wanted to admit.

  I skimmed. The way you skim when you are afraid of what you might find if you read too carefully.

  Moderately gifted.

  Then, a few lines down: ASD Level 1.

  My throat went dry. My heart — I don’t know how else to describe it — wrung itself out a little. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I sat there with both impulses and let neither of them win.

  The laugh, I understand now, was relief. More than a year of cycling through doubt. More than a year of telling myself I was making things up, that I was normal, that I had simply talked myself into something that wasn’t there. And here it was, in a clinical report, in black and white, on a screen in front of me before a Zoom call I had been dreading.

  I wasn’t making it up.

  ---

  I hadn’t known I was gifted. Not in any conscious way. The psychologist did make a comment during the assessment that stayed with me. When I mentioned offhandedly that I wasn’t gifted, just wanted to rule it out, she looked at me with a peculiar expression. I’m not so sure about that, she said. I pretended I didn’t hear it, and couldn’t quite place what she had just said in my mind.

  I had spent my whole life being unable to read certain lines. And also being very good at reading others. And never understanding which was which, or why, or what it cost me to perform the latter while the former remained genuinely, permanently, beyond me.

  ---

  The best way I can describe it: a high-spec processor running on the wrong operating system. The hardware was never the problem. But the system it was asked to run on wasn’t built for it — and nobody knew to ask why it kept freezing, so everyone assumed it was user error.

  That is what twice exceptional actually feels like from the inside. Not twice the gift. Twice the friction.

  Primary school was easy. Not easy in the way that made anyone take note — just easy, in the private way of a child who finds the work manageable and cannot explain why it stops being manageable later. Secondary school was different. The terrain shifted and I did not have the tools to shift with it. My results fell. Then fell further. I told myself I was lazy. Not hardy enough. Just the sort of person who needed to work twice as hard to achieve what others managed with half the effort.

  What I didn’t know — couldn’t have known — was that the psychologist would one day explain it differently. This is what giftedness and autism looks like together. There is the capability to excel, but autism made everything harder.

  The national exams. The major exams later on. Both times I far exceeded what I thought I was capable of. Both times I put it down to luck, or effort, or some combination I couldn’t name. Now I understand the name. Now I understand what it cost.

  ---

  What I could not see — what no one around me could see — was the energy.

  I learned to socialise well. This is not a small thing. My work required me to meet strangers and connect deeply within a short period of time. To understand what they needed. To deliver care with warmth and efficiency, to hold people in their most vulnerable moments, to read a room and know when to speak and when to be still. I knew what to say and how to say it. I could make myself do it.

  What I did not understand was the cost.

  I was always exhausted after work. Always exhausted after social events. Weekends were for recovering from the week. During difficult stretches I took medical leave because I simply could not will myself through the door, and I would lie in the shame of that — wondering how other people showed up day after day without the seams showing the way mine did. I thought I was lazy. I thought I was weak. I thought this was a character flaw and not a structural one.

  I did not know that I had been spending energy I didn’t have. That every act of connection, however genuine, was drawing from a reserve that never fully replenished. That my perfectionism — the need to do the thing properly, completely, or not at all — meant I pushed past the signals long after any reasonable system would have stopped. It took physical symptoms to reach me. And when I finally rested, I could not do that simply either. I spent Sundays moping in a way I could not explain, given that I loved my work, genuinely loved it. I steeled myself. I turned up. I told myself the rest would follow.

  It usually did. That was the insidious part.

  ---

  The grief, when it came with the diagnosis, was not for my present self.

  It was for the girl before.

  The one who had a small rotation of food she would eat and thought it was stubbornness. The one who cried without warning and stood watching her own tears as though from the outside, wondering why am I overreacting again.

  I grew up with little and was happy with little. I read the same hand-me-down books over and over. I wore the same few outfits until they fell apart. At recess I ate the same meal every day, a meal I didn’t even like, because I had been taught to order it once and the repetition felt safer than the terror of ordering something new. When I changed schools, I rotated between two food options and told myself it was convenience.

  Everything has another name now.

  When teenagers went out after school, I turned them down and went home. I told myself I needed to study. I didn’t understand that the real reason was simpler and more true: I had nothing left. Every social event was a withdrawal from an account that was already running low by afternoon. I didn’t lack the desire for connection. I had friends — kind ones, steady ones, who tolerated my particular way of being present without ever asking me to explain it. But I couldn’t fully get in sync with people and I filed that under personality rather than neurology.

  Everything makes sense in the new lens. At the time, it all fit a different story.

  ---

  There is some anger in the grief. I won’t pretend otherwise.

  Nobody noticed, in secondary school, that a sudden and dramatic drop in academic performance was not normal. Nobody saw the signs. Nobody offered the help I actually needed, in part because I didn’t know what I needed, in part because I didn’t know there was a name for what I was.

  The very capability that helped me function was the reason no one looked closer. My intelligence made the masking convincing. The convincing masking meant the questions were never asked. I survived so well that I became invisible to the people who might have helped — and for a long time, invisible to myself.

  But anger is like holding a burning coal while pointing at the enemy. You let go quickly, or you are the only one who gets burned.

  ---

  My eldest son is twice exceptional too.

  He and I present very differently. His ADHD traits are more visible. He is more asynchronous in the ways that are harder to miss. I look at him and I do not see a mirror, exactly — but I see something more layered than coincidence.

  What my diagnosis gave me, among other things, was a language for my son’s experience that I would not otherwise have had. I know what it costs to be him in rooms that were not built for him. I know the particular weight of having a brain that works harder than anyone can see, toward results that look ordinary from the outside.

  There is guilt in knowing this came from me, or partly from me. I have sat with that guilt. I won’t pretend I have finished sitting with it. But guilt that fixes nothing is just self-punishment in a more acceptable costume.

  What I want for him — what I am trying, imperfectly, to give him — is the thing nobody gave me. An early language. A map drawn by someone who has already walked the terrain. The knowledge that his gifts are real and his struggles are real and neither one cancels the other out.

  He has the advantage of knowing early. That is not a small thing. That might be everything.

  ---

  I am not on the other side of this. I want to be honest about that.

  Some days rebuilding feels like progress. Other days it feels like walking in fog and trusting the ground is still there. I started this blog not entirely sure I was capable of it, and I am still not entirely sure. Is my writing good enough. Will anyone care. Is this some kind of gifted-autistic delusion about my own significance. I have no clean answer to any of them.

  For most of my life I looked at the places I was failing and tried to fix them. I poured everything into the gaps and kept forgetting there were things I was genuinely good at. I had been too busy climbing out of my ditches to register that I had any higher ground.

  I was trying to fit a mould I was never made for.

  ---

  There is a question that comes after a late diagnosis that nobody warns you about. Not what do I do now — but who am I, underneath all of it.

  Forty years of coping mechanisms. Forty years of reading rooms, managing energy, building systems, showing up in the ways that were required. The diagnosis dismantles the story you told about why you did all that. And for a moment — sometimes for longer than a moment — you wonder what is left when the performance stops.

  I’ve sat with that question. And I’ve come to something that isn’t quite an answer but feels more honest than one: the mask is also me. The coping mechanisms are also me. The systems I built to survive — the alarms, the reminders, the careful routines, the minimalism that keeps my environment from overwhelming me — these are not separate from who I am. They are evidence of someone who figured out, without a map, how to keep going. I don’t need to shed them to become authentic. I need to understand them. To hold them with curiosity rather than shame.

  I am a work in progress. We all are. That is not a consolation. It is simply the truth of being human, and being human is what I am, autism and giftedness and all of its strange, exhausting, occasionally brilliant complexity.

  ---

  What I have now that I did not have before is words.

  I have words for why I don’t use Facebook, why I am drawn to empty surfaces and quiet rooms, why I set five alarms instead of one, why I have built elaborate systems to keep on top of a life that would otherwise overwhelm me. I understand why showing up costs what it costs — and I have stopped punishing myself for the cost. When I do show up now, I show up fully. Present, connected, genuinely there. Not because the exhaustion is gone but because I know now how to protect the energy that makes that possible.

  I try not to beat myself up so much. I have more self-awareness about how to manage myself. I am learning, slowly, to strike a balance between what the world asks of me and what I actually have to give.

  That is not a cure. It is not a resolution. It is something quieter and more durable than either.

  It is finally knowing where I stand.

  ---

  If you are reading this with a report in your hands — your own, or someone you love — I don’t want to tell you it gets easier, because I don’t know yet if that’s true in the way the phrase usually means.

  What I want to tell you is this: the fog is accurate. It is the right response to information that changes everything and nothing at once. You will need time to let the new lens settle. You will grieve things that deserved grieving a long time ago. You will also find, eventually, that certain things in your past that felt like evidence against you are actually evidence of someone who was doing something extraordinary without knowing it.

  You were navigating without a map.

  Now you have one. It is incomplete and still being drawn. But it is yours, and it is real, and it was always real — you were simply the last one to be told.

  ---

  The assessment that came before this realisation is in Expected ADHD, Got Autism. The silence and depression that came right after sits in The Silence Between Knowing and Writing. And the books I returned to, when reading became possible again, are in I Didn’t Read Any Autism Books After My Diagnosis.

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  April 7, 2026

  autism masking, autistic burnout, autistic identity, gifted and autistic, late autism diagnosis, neurodivergent identity, twice exceptional, twice exceptional adult, writing

  ---

• I Went In Expecting an ADHD Diagnosis. I Came Out With Autism: A Late Diagnosis Story

  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 I 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, its own particular asynchrony. And when the two were named together, in the same breath, they reframed not just my present but everything behind me.

  What followed was not relief so much as a slow, complicated reckoning — the kind that takes months to metabolise.

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  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.

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  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.

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  The assessment process itself, in close detail, is in When You Stop Pretending You Don’t Need Directions. The gifted-and-autistic profile that came back in the report is in The Wrong Operating System. And the longer reckoning with what acceptance actually meant is in The Demon Marks Were Always Mine.

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  April 6, 2026

  adhd, autism assessment, autism diagnosis, autistic burnout, gifted and autistic, late autism diagnosis, occupational therapy, writing

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• The Moment It Clicked — Understanding My Gifted Child’s Meltdowns and Changing How I Parent

  He had just spent hours learning Coding, entirely self-motivated, navigating complex concepts with an ease that amazed me. But that same day, we had a meltdown over a simple journal entry—Fun Times with Friends.

  He sat there, paralyzed, unable to put words on the page. The frustration built until it erupted—tears flowing, emotions spilling over.

  I watched him, torn between wonder and confusion. How could he teach himself to code but struggle so much with writing a few sentences? How could the same mind that built intricate Lego structures meant for adults completely freeze when asked to describe a memory?

  And that was when it started making sense.

  Looking back, the signs had always been there—I just hadn’t connected them yet.

  The huge meltdowns. The deep emotional intensity. The way he had taught himself to read at an age when most children were just beginning to recognize letters. His ability to hyperfocus on his interests, disappearing into worlds of dinosaurs, space, and coding, absorbing information like a sponge. His advanced problem-solving skills—evident in the way he effortlessly assembled intricate Lego sets far beyond his age level.

  And yet, daily life felt like an uphill battle. Writing was a struggle. Routines were a constant power struggle. I would repeat the same instructions over and over again, only for him to seem as though he hadn’t heard me at all. Even his younger brother had started reminding him to get through the bedtime routine.

  How could a child who was so bright, so capable in some areas, struggle so profoundly with things that seemed so simple?

  I wrestled with the contradiction. Was I expecting too much? Was I failing him somehow?

  His elementary school teacher was the first to suggest that he might be gifted. But I dismissed it almost immediately.

  If he was struggling this much, how could he possibly be gifted?

  It wasn’t just one moment but a series of them. The late-night Google searches, the deep dives into parenting forums, the stories from other parents whose children sounded just like mine. The slow realization that what I had dismissed as quirks or struggles to “work through” were actually pieces of a larger picture.

  When the evaluation confirmed both his giftedness and his struggles—what’s known as twice-exceptionality (2e)—everything suddenly made sense.

  Twice-exceptional kids are both gifted and have additional learning challenges. High ability can coexist with real struggles that aren’t always immediately obvious. It explained why he could hyperfocus on a topic that fascinated him but be wildly distractible with everyday tasks. Why he could solve complex problems yet melt down when faced with a simple worksheet.

  I had been so focused on his challenges that I hadn’t seen his exceptional strengths for what they were.

  When we finally had an answer, I felt a mix of relief and guilt.

  Relief, because I finally understood what was happening.

  Guilt, because I hadn’t seen it sooner.

  I’m an occupational therapist. Even though I hadn’t worked in pediatrics, shouldn’t I have noticed the signs? Shouldn’t I have trusted my gut instead of believing the well-meaning reassurances from other parents—those who told me all kids throw tantrums, all kids struggle sometimes, that he would grow out of it?

  I see now that those reassurances, though meant to comfort me, had kept me from seeking answers sooner. I had doubted my instincts. I had focused on the wrong questions.

  But guilt doesn’t change the past. It only steals from the present.

  There’s no point in looking back with regret. Now, we focus on equipping him with the tools and skills he needs to thrive. We meet him where he is, not where the world expects him to be.

  I no longer try to force him into molds that weren’t made for him. Instead, I help him understand himself—to build on his strengths, work through his challenges, and grow into the person he is meant to be.

  And in doing so, I am learning just as much as he is.

  If you’re in that space of uncertainty, wondering whether to trust your instincts — I was there too. For years, I explained things away, collected the reassurances, and tried to stop worrying.

  The diagnosis didn’t change who he was. It just gave me a way to finally see him clearly.

  That’s still what I’m learning to do.

  Understanding my son also led me to understand myself. That threshold is in When You Start Wondering About Yourself. The diagnosis that followed — when an ADHD assessment turned into an autism one — is in Expected ADHD, Got Autism. And the gifted-and-autistic profile that came back in his evaluation turned out to be mine, too — that essay is The Wrong Operating System. The longer story of his meltdowns, what I read them as for years and what I read them as now, is in Meltdowns vs Tantrums.

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  March 14, 2025

  gifted and autistic, mental-health, neurodivergent parenting, occupational therapy, parenting, twice exceptional, twice exceptional child

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