I never thought I’d be the kind of parent who would sit awake at night, reading research papers and listening to podcasts, wondering — why is this so hard? I thought parenting would be challenging, yes, but not in this particular way. Not in the way where I’d question if the problem was me, or my child, or the way we both seemed to respond so intensely to the world.
I was doing it all for him, at first. Trying to understand his diagnosis, his wiring, the particular way his mind worked. That was the door I walked through. What I didn’t expect was what I found on the other side of it.
It was a podcast that started it. A series about ADHD — real people describing the moment they finally understood themselves to have ADHD. I was listening for him. And then one episode stopped me.
A woman describing her diagnosis at thirty. The perfectionism. The all-nighters — how she wouldn’t sleep a wink to finish an assignment on the day it was due. How she pulled it off, just barely, every time. How from the outside it looked like she was managing. How from the inside it was the only way she knew how to function.
I sat with that for a moment.
That was me. That had always been me.
I couldn’t explain it away. I’d tried — I was a procrastinator, I worked more effectively under pressure, it was just my style which I carried around with shame. But hearing it described in someone else’s words, in a clinical context, with a name attached — something shifted. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way things shift when a word finally fits a feeling you’ve been carrying for years without knowing what to call it.
My son’s psychologist had said something I couldn’t stop turning over.
Children like him who are highly intelligent, she explained, often mask well. They compensate, they adapt, they hold it together through the early years. The difficulty is that their strategies only carry them so far. When the demands of life exceed their capacity, usually around the time they enter secondary school — the academic load, the social complexity, the loss of structure — that’s when things begin to unravel.
I heard her say it, and something in my chest went very still.
Because that was my story. That had been my story for twenty years, sitting in the back of my mind like a question I’d never been able to answer.
Before secondary school, I made sense to myself.
I studied hard and the effort matched the results. I had friends. I was confident in the particular way of a child who finds the work manageable and the world navigable. I was cheerful, even. That word sounds strange to me now — I was cheerful — but I was.
Secondary school broke something I didn’t know how to name.
The results fell and kept falling. The physical symptoms arrived — gastric pain, shoulder aches that had no clear cause. My world shrank to the size of a classroom. I brought food from home so I could stay in at recess and revise. I left the moment the bell rang, no detours, no socialising, straight home to study more. While friends talked about shopping and karaoke and the gatherings everyone was making plans for, I was somewhere else entirely — not because I had nothing to say, but because I couldn’t muster the energy to be present in it. I thought I was just focused. I thought I was just serious. I thought the problem was discipline, character, effort — the same explanations I would reach for, reflexively, for the next twenty years.
I never understood why everything had suddenly become so hard.
Sitting in my son’s psychologist’s office, listening to her describe his probable trajectory, I finally had a word for the shape of that break. I just wasn’t sure yet whether the word belonged to him, or to me, or to both of us.
The argument against was long and well-rehearsed.
I was organised. I had systems — elaborate ones, built carefully over years. I had friends. I was not scattered, not visibly struggling, not the picture of neurodivergence I carried in my head. My son and I were nothing alike in our presentation. He was intense and asynchronous in ways that were harder to miss. I was — fine. I was managing. Everyone struggles. Life is not perfect. Surely this was just anxiety, just perfectionism, just being a particular kind of person in a particular kind of world.
But the counter-evidence kept nagging.
The all-nighters. The way I could write a report but fell apart in exams. The anxiety that never fully explained itself. The procrastination that coexisted, somehow, with a perfectionism that wouldn’t let anything be submitted less than completely done. The sensory preferences I’d always called just preferences. The picky eating I’d always called stubbornness. The exhaustion I’d always called personality.
And the smaller things, further back — the ones I’d never thought to question. Rehearsing my order before stepping up to the food counter at school, afraid of stumbling over my words. Counting the number of students ahead of me in class to predict which question I’d have to answer, so I could prepare and not be caught off guard. The way I went internally frozen when someone spoke to me unexpectedly — not anxious exactly, just suddenly very far away from the surface of myself, needing a moment to find my way back.
At the time I thought these were just quirks. Just personality. Just me.
I started to categorise the challenges carefully, the way an occupational therapist would — sorting them, looking for the pattern underneath. And the pattern kept pointing in the same direction.
It was scary. It was confronting. It was confusing in the particular way of something that makes too much sense.
The heredity thread kept appearing too — in articles, in research, in the stories of other parents who had gone looking for answers for their children and found themselves instead. It kept showing up until I couldn’t look away from it.
My son and I are not the same. We never will be. He wears his wiring closer to the surface. Mine learned, over decades, to stay hidden — even from me.
But something in his story had unlocked something in mine. And now that the lock was open, I couldn’t close it again.
Something else shifted too, quietly, alongside the self-recognition. The way I saw him changed. Not because I suddenly had answers, but because I finally understood from the inside what it costs to be him in a world that wasn’t built for the way his mind works. I had been living that cost my whole life without knowing its name. When he needed predictability, I understood why — not theoretically, but from the inside. When he struggled to find words for what he was feeling, I recognised that particular distance between knowing and being able to say. When he hyperfocused on something he loved, I knew the specific quality of that immersion.
Knowing it now made me a different kind of parent. Not better, necessarily. But closer. More honest about what I was actually asking of him.
The picture was starting to come together.
I just wasn’t sure what I was looking at.
If the wondering is getting louder — if you’re starting to ask whether you should actually pursue this — Is It All in My Head? — Deciding to Get Assessed for Autism and ADHD as an Adult is where that question lives.
And if you want to read the longer story of what the assessment actually found: I Went In Expecting an ADHD Diagnosis. I Came Out With Autism: A Late Diagnosis Story
The childhood thread — the longer retrospective of growing up undiagnosed — lives here: The Threads of Life — Growing Up as an Undiagnosed Neurodivergent Woman.
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Grow with Their Flow 