Stop Telling Late-Identified Neurodivergent People We “Didn’t Struggle Enough” -“If You Were Really Struggling, You Would Have Been Identified Sooner”… And Other Lies
As many of my long-time readers probably already know, I am a late identified Neurodivergent person.
I was diagnosed as Autistic at the age of 29. A few years later, I was formally identified as ADHD when I was in my mid-30s.
There is a lot of talk in Neurodivergent spaces about how much relief late-identified Neurodivergent people find when they finally learn the truth about themselves. However, there’s not as much discussion on the pain and grief late identification can bring.
Don’t get me wrong, being diagnosed Autistic (and then later ADHD) did bring me relief and was a critical turning point in my life. Yet, early on, as I learned to sit with that new information, joy and relief were not my only (or even primary) emotions.
People who join me in this chapter of my life, when I am confident, happy, and proud of my multiply-Neurodivergent identity, might falsely think I’ve always been this way, or that getting here was easy. However, they’re missing out on the first thirty-eight chapters of my life’s story, and nothing could be further from the truth.
It happens too often:
People see a Neurodivergent person who is successful, thriving, or who has adapted well enough to the world around them to move through spaces with more ease than one might expect them to, and automatically assume they’ve always been this way or there were minimal struggles in their life before they got to this point (when the reality is often much more complicated).
I see it a lot when people talk to or about late-identified Neurodivergent people (the assumption that being late-identified automatically means a Neurodivergent person had fewer struggles than those who were identified earlier in life).
Through these comparisons of early vs. late-identified people come a multitude of assumptions and falsehoods. It’s not that we struggled more or less, but that we struggled differently from our earlier-identified peers.
As unidentified Neurodivergents, our efforts were often ignored, and many of us were punished and scorned for our differences (rather than supported).
Many of us were pressured to keep up, figure it out, and we may have been shamed and reprimanded for struggling, without understanding why things our peers seemed to do effortlessly felt so hard, or even impossible for us.
In my case, the not knowing led me to internalize a lot of shame about things beyond my control.
I hated myself for most of my life, believing I was inherently a flawed and broken person who was unworthy of respect, love, and compassion (from other people and myself).
My life (especially before learning the truth about myself) was full of struggles, but I did my best to downplay or hide those difficulties, because I was deeply ashamed of having battles the people around me didn’t seem to have.
Over the years, thanks to not knowing my own Neurodivergence, I grew very good at suffering in silence, believing it was my duty to do so, and not burden or inconvenience the people around me with my troubles and pain.
“If you were really struggling, you would have been identified sooner.“
In reality, many of us were struggling in significant ways, but found no help or support for our hardships, so we learned to ignore, hide, blame ourselves, or compensate for the pain and difficulties we had in life.
“Your Neurodivergence must not have been that bad, if nobody noticed it.”
…. but our Neurodivergence likely wasnoticed but attributed to other things.
My Neurodivergence was undoubtedly noticed.
My teachers noticed (referring me for assessments my family refused), my peers noticed (bullying, mocking, and shunning me), and when others repeatedly referred to the ways I stood out (because I was often picked on, punished, and blamed for it), I, too, began to notice that I was different.
Growing up, my AuDHD (Autism and ADHD) were not seen as Neurodivergence, but instead viewed as character flaws, boredom, laziness, and behavioral problems that I needed to overcome somehow (even though this expectation was unrealistic and unfair).
Despite doing my best and trying my hardest, the effort I was pouring into things went unrecognized by the people around me, who were comparing me to peers with brains and experiences very different from my own.
Phrases like “If you would only try a little harder“, “If you would just apply yourself,” and “I expected more from you“ tormented me for much of my life.
My best was all I had to give, but it never seemed to be enough for people, which, in turn, led me to believe that, as a person, I myselfwas not enough.
Because people all around me were constantly pressuring me to compare myself to (and keep up with) the non-autistic and non-ADHD people of the world, eventually I started to do the same.
Without even realizing it or having a language for it, I adopted the belief that ‘neuro-average‘ people were the ideal norm I should be molding myself after, and every way I deviated from those norms was a moral failure, or something I needed to overcome (or hide from the world).
I identified as a bad person.
I believed I was deeply flawed. That’s just who I was, and who I had always been… or so I thought (until I was diagnosed Autistic, and then started to learn about and view myself through the neurodiversity paradigm).
Being diagnosed Autistic a few months before my 30th birthday shattered my worldview – and how I had identified myself as “bad“ and “inherently flawed“ for most of my life.
I thought I knew myself, but my late diagnosis brought about confusion and the realization that I actually didn’t know myself very well at all.
I didn’t know what I needed or wanted in my life, or even who I was beyond who other people had told me I should be and what other people had encouraged me to become. This not knowing had led me to fit myself into a life I didn’t really want or enjoy, one that met very few of my needs.
Shame and self-hatred were core to my identity. However, once diagnosed, I was confronted with the fact that many of the things I was ashamed of and hated about myself were actually Neurodivergent traits (things the people around me had systemically taught me to repress and be ashamed of).
Upon realizing I’d been trained to hate myself, ignore my needs, and been blamed for things beyond my control for most of my life, I was immediately hit with waves of grief and years of repressed rage.
Relief and self-acceptance of the diagnosis and my Neurodivergence (which at the time felt heavy due to its finality) would come much later.
Grief and sadness
In the wake of learning about my Autistic brain, I was drowning in the aftershocks of grief, sadness, and regret that kept surging through me.
Nobody in my life understood what I was going through.
Most of the people closest to me weren’t safe to talk to about Autism or me being Autistic (largely because many of them were also Autistic, but weren’t ready to confront those parts of themselves yet due to all the misconceptions and stigmas around what “Autism“ was).
“You can’t be Autistic, I do that, and I’m not Autistic“ – these unidentified Autistic people in denial about their own Autistic minds would say to me, shutting down conversations (early on, I had no idea what to say in response to such comments).
I was sad that I finally had the answer to a lifetime of pain and suffering, but nobody to talk to about it, and that those closest to me didn’t believe what I had to share with them. It was isolating, and I felt very alone.
I was sad for younger me, the sweet kid who was doing their best, only to repeatedly be told it wasn’t enough.
I was sad for all the missed opportunities of support, and sad that I’d spent so many years hating myself.
It wrecked me to think about what could have been if I’d only found out sooner.
But here is the part I don’t talk about often: the quiet, unexpected moment when the rage stopped carrying me, and something else stepped in (how I went from mourning the life I lost to building the life I actually wanted).
You can subscribe on Patreon or Substack to unlock the rest of this story, if you would like to find out how I finally let go of the ‘what ifs‘…
This post was written with the assistance of Focused Space (a sponsor of the Neurodivergent Rebel blog).
What is Focused Space?
Focused Space is an ADHD-focused, Neurodiversity affirming, goal‑setting, and online co‑working / body‑doubling platform designed to help people prioritize, stay motivated, and bust through procrastination (and it is something I believe in and personally use every day).
More info:
Learn more about how I use it here!
I get requests (that I mostly ignore) to do brand partnerships all the time, because I don’t want to partner with products unless I actually find them useful and high-quality. I also want to work with brands whose owners and processes align with my personal standards and ethics.
That’s why I’m excited to announce that the Neurodivergent Rebel Blog is officially partnering with Focused Space, and our community members can now get access to Focused Space at a special rate of 20% off forever when you use the code “NEURODIVERGENTREBEL” at checkout via the button below or at get.focused.space/neurodivergentrebel:
Now when you Get Focused Space via the link above you’re getting discounted access to a great tool as while supporting the work I do here at the NeuroDivergent Rebel Blog.
Also, if you ever join a 7am CST wakeup call, or pop into an un-hosted Quiet Owl session on a week day, you might bump into me.
Not sure if Focused Space is for you?
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