Uncovering Neurodivergence

A Therapy Journey to Late-Diagnosed Autism

Admitting I Needed Help

I had to face a long-resisted fact: I needed help. I was self-reliant to a fault and wanted nothing more than to solve everything myself. But you can’t fix a problem with the mind that created it.

The sharp humiliation of admitting defeat, of showing up to therapy, felt like another failure pinned to my self-critical belt. I no longer seemed to have a choice. My lack of emotional regulation had undone me. I was completely adrift.

The First Sessions

The first several sessions were nothing but release. I couldn’t stop the tears, spilling from one thought to the next, from the story of my constructive dismissal to the aching sense of being a fraud.

A theme emerged: the quiet war between good and bad. Righteous and indignant.

As the sessions unfolded, I confessed my failings like free association. Never enough. Never simply allowed to be. Always under the weight of worthlessness. And then the anger would rise: everyone else moved so easily through life, light-footed, untroubled. Why couldn’t they see how hard it was to wade through this treacle of critique and performance?

I realised I was grieving an impossible version of myself, one forever out of reach.

A Lifetime of Exposure

My whole life had felt like an accidental exposure therapy programme. Childhood shaped by silent drills of survival. Sneaking out at night to face the dark, forcing myself into busy spaces to fake ease, picking up insects until the shudder faded.

Always this tension: what I felt against what I should feel. What I thought against what I should think. The exhausting task of training instincts that never came naturally.

I was kind, but simmering.

Patient, but worn thin.

Wise to others, but lost to myself.

The Question That Changed Everything

After weeks of untangling this mess, my therapist finally said:

“I’m not saying you are… but have you considered that you might be neurodivergent?”

I groaned inwardly. How very modern. But the words hit hard. Obvious. Unavoidable. Somehow, I’d missed this completely.

Maybe reframing how I saw the world could ease the strain. Maybe knowing the world wasn’t built for my kind of mind would bring relief. Could this be the mountain I had been climbing all the while, obscured by my own clouds of ignorance?

It was a clean answer. But I didn’t want it. Stereotypes and doubts swirled in the space the words had opened.

The Thirst for Knowledge

I went home and fell into research. Online tests, podcasts, articles and books. I tried to disprove it, even softening my answers, but the results held firm. The scores were high and unmistakable.

Digging into hours of other people’s truths lit connections in my mind like the flickering of fluorescent lights in a dark warehouse.

How could I have been so blind? Autism had always been there, an unnamed thread running through my life. It took burnout to break the denial.

It wasn’t introversion, principle or depression in itself. It was a different way of seeing the world, a way most people never would.

Listening to others speak of burnout, self-hate, obsession, oddity, it was a revelation. But there was no quick fix. I couldn’t leap back to work, cured. My mind had fractured. My memory was breaking down. I lost thoughts mid-sentence. Forgot entire days. I couldn’t plan. Couldn’t keep control.

The Lens Shifts

Looking backwards through this new lens was unsettling.

The urge to destroy myself hadn’t been real, it had been the desperate urge to escape the weight of feelings I couldn’t process. My calm surface was only armour against a chaotic world built for neurotypicals.

Even my obsession with human behaviour had been survival. Learning instincts I hadn’t been born with.

I saw the clues in my parents too. The rules. The rituals. The tiny fixations. Why decimals in daily temperatures mattered. Why packing and order were sacred.

No wonder I grew up feeling slow, clumsy and thick. I wasn’t meant to follow their version of perfect. I wanted to work out my own way, but there was always a ‘right’ way already decided. No room for difference.

There it was: an inherited neurodivergence, gift-wrapped in perfectionism. And here I stood, sorting the receipts with no refunds.

A Quiet Relief

It didn’t solve everything. But it softened something.

I was who I was. I had always been trying. The world wasn’t against me. It simply didn’t know me.

How could it, when I hadn’t really known myself and kept hidden?

Maybe this is what relief feels like, not fixing, not changing, but allowing. Letting inner monologue argue with itself, but no longer tearing myself apart for it.

It was time to move and live again. Alone, I went into the mountains for a month.