“Try a little harder.”
When I was very young, I believed I could do anything I wanted to do if I tried hard enough… so I tried my hardest.
When I was a little bit older, in school, my teachers told me I “could be anything” I wanted to be… if I “would only try a little bit harder.”
“Put in the effort,” they would say… and I “would get there.”
But there was a problem with how others assessed me and my capabilities… I was already trying my hardest… even if the people around me couldn’t see that effort.
Over and over again, despite doing my very best, adults kept telling me about all the things I “could do and become”… if I “would only” apply myself.
Nobody knew I was AuDHD (Autistic and ADHD) back then.
Some of my teachers suspected I was… different, but back then, the stigma was even worse around Neurodivergence than it is today, and my family wanted nothing to do with the screenings for learning disabilities that my teachers were suggesting for me.
They feared I might be labeled with something “that could follow me for the rest of my life.”
I remember overhearing my mother say, “There’s nothing wrong with that child!” and she was right…
There was nothing wrong with me, because there is nothing wrong with being Autistic or ADHD. However, since Autism and ADHD only had (and still often carry) primarily negative assumptions, they weren’t something those in charge of my care were willing to accept.
Without the right labels for my Neurodivergence, other labels were applied to me – labels I began to internalize and believe about myself, labels like: stubborn, lazy, difficult, sensitive, rebellious, weirdo, freak, and others that are too cruel or ignorant to repeat.
I hated myself because I saw myself as something inadequate, that needed to be built.
Not knowing I was Neurodivergent, or even what Neurodiversity was, left me thinking I should do my best to be more like the most successful people around me, the ones who seemed to move through life with ease and comfort, despite many of these people having very different brains from mine.
I saw neuro-normativity and blending in with neuro-average people as the gold standard, and everything within myself that fell outside of that “norm” (like many of my Autistic and other Neurodivergent traits) as things that needed to be overcome, beaten into submission, or hidden… but this mindset was unhelpful because it left me at war with myself.
What happens when your best effort still isn’t enough, and the struggle goes unseen?
Growing up, doing my best, and having that effort repeatedly dismissed by authority figures deeply wounded me. This wound was not a visible, physical wound, but a mental one—leaving invisible scars that have required years of deep self-work to heal.
At some point, hard to pinpoint, I transformed from an optimistic child with the world at my fingertips into a pessimistic adult who struggled to believe myself to be capable or worthy of much at all.
I’d been told my best “wasn’t enough” so many times I’d started to believe it, and eventually, this “not enough-ness” started to engulf my being.
If I, at my best and trying my hardest, wasn’t enough, in my mind it also meant that, by extension, I myself was not enough… so I was always trying to make more out of myself.
Comparison Brought Misery.
A few months before my 30th birthday, when I was finally diagnosed as Autistic, I realized something that would change my life forever…
That, in not knowing myself, I had been set up for failure from the beginning (because I’d been comparing myself to neuro-average people as if they were the mold I should shape myself after). The diagnosis also helped me realize that no matter how much I pushed myself, I was never going to be just like them… that I shouldn’t have to… and don’t want to.
Learning I don’t have to (and am better off if I don’t) compare myself to others (especially those whose minds and experiences are nothing like my own) has been one of the most important lessons of my entire life.
Learning the truth about myself—and, by extension, the world—has been profoundly liberating.
Looking back, before learning about Neurodiversity and my own Neurodivergent mind, I see now how conforming to neuro-normativity had become compulsory. It was something I did automatically, without realizing how much pressure and weight came with my (often failed) efforts to blend in.
The first thing I realized was how heavy that mask had been, then the weight of ignoring my needs, and pretending to be who I thought I was expected to be (instead of who I actually was) day after day.
Eventually, as my neurotypical mask began to crumble, I also realized the other wounds that camouflaging my neurodivergence had caused me… isolation and a decimated sense of identity and self.
