Something I've been dealing with lately is how difficult it can be to unmask both ADHD and autism later in life. Like...trying to heal oblivious damage dealers who won't move out of the evil puddles of doom in video games levels of difficult. Especially as a creative person.
On the one hand, masking so heavily that not even I suspected I was neurodivergent meant that I was never held back by other people's misconceptions of what an autistic person with ADHD "should" be able to achieve. Nobody in my family or support network ever told me that I couldn't excel in school or graduate college with honors or earn a Master's Degree or sign a six-figure book deal with a major publisher. All personal goals of my own that I'm proud to have accomplished.
On the other hand, not having a clue that I was on the spectrum means I never got the resources I deserved that could have made so many things in my life significantly less stressful. And those stressors only got exponentially worse after I went through the hormonal changes of pregnancy in my late 20s before continuing to deal with the typical ups and downs of working full-time, raising a child, and having mental health struggles.
Add in a period of grieving the loss of several close family members in a short number of years to my first book series being cancelled, and it's no wonder I kept feeling this vague sense of self-loathing for no good reason. And that made finding my joy in creating so I could write consistently exceptionally hard. Sometimes downright impossible.
I may have been a seemingly successful person with a loving family who always tried to be kind and caring. But I was also a neurodivergent square peg trying to fit in a world designed for neurotypical round holes.
In hindsight, I needed a lot of those masking skills and coping mechanisms to simply navigate this challenging world that was most definitely not designed for neurospicy folks. Having those layers of masking stripped away all at once after first one--and then a second--extremely painful physical injury over the past few years was...overwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.
But while I wouldn't have chosen to break either of my ankles (0/10 do not recommend), those injuries are what helped me finally figure out the missing piece to my mental health. I'm not only an ADHD person who deals with OCD and anxiety (and having to wear those "fall risk" wristbands at hospitals now)...I am also on the autism spectrum. My brain processes things much differently than most people. Especially sensory input. And that's okay.
The difficult part of unmasking isn't realizing that I have autism. It's learning the fine art of balancing simple mechanisms that can help me better process sensory input and discovering who I can trust to be my fully authentic self around. It's figuring out when I want to deliberately mask around other people for my own comfort, not anyone else's--and when I just say to heck with it and go right on being my authentic weird self.
Going through this process late in life is reinforcing something that I've always believed: It's never too late to learn something new, even about yourself. That saying about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks is most definitely not true. Knowing now that I'm AuDHD is helping me rearrange some of the areas of my life in a way that better supports me as I am, and that in turn is leaving me more mental health energy to get back to something that is vitally important to me: Rediscovering my joy in being creative.
And expressing my creativity through writing makes me happier as a person and that, in turn, helps me better handle those everyday stressors that can feel a dozen times more intense for neurospicy folks. Making it just a little easier for this neurodivergent square peg to continue navigating a world designed for neurotypical round holes.
So what about you? Are there any new things you've learned about yourself later in life? Or if you're still pretty young, what's the most surprising thing you've learned about yourself so far?
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