Starting everything, finishing nothing.
Feeling everything too much.
Overthinking things that didn’t seem to affect anyone else the same way.
I could be the loudest one in the room and still feel completely separate from it.
Getting diagnosed at 36 didn’t fix those things.
But it did help take away a layer of shame I didn’t realise I’d been carrying.
Around the same time, I started writing at night because my brain wouldn’t switch off.
Not journaling exactly. More like fragments. Thoughts I couldn’t say out loud. I’d turn them into little poems just to give the feeling somewhere to go.
Somewhere along the way those fragments became songs. I wasn’t trying to make anything public.
It was just a way to process what was going on in my head.
But I realised I kept coming back to the same things:
The gap between knowing what to do and actually being able to do it.
Hyperfocus and the crash that comes after.
Trying to be a parent and a partner and a functioning adult at the same time.
Not really knowing which version of you is the real one anymore.
The older I get, the more I realise how many of us are walking around carrying these things and just calling it being bad at life.
I’m sharing it here because I had a feeling this community would understand it in a way most people in my life don’t.
If you got diagnosed later in life, did it feel like relief? Grief? Or some strange mixture of both that you still haven’t quite named? I definitely mourned for my younger self that didn’t know what it was but felt she had a broken brain. And also the relief from the confirmation this isn’t all in my head, well it kind of is but I’m sure you know what I mean!