Questions after a late diagnosis

How do I avoid burnout while managing everyday life?

By Jenny Lucas. From my essay I was supposed to be in Birmingham, first published 10 July 2026.

On Tuesday I was meant to be in Birmingham.

I’m part of a mastermind, a group of business folk I meet with and Tuesday was our in-person day. I’d shifted three things in my diary to be there. I’d built the whole day around train journeys to and from New Street, laptop out, working as I went. A good plan. A sensible one.

It did not survive contact with the morning.

First, a lineside fire took out my cross country route, with no trains likely up that line for most of the day. So began a reroute via London that turned into a full saga: a ticket I’d been assured would be accepted but couldn’t quite trust, a moment on the London train where I stood up to get off because I genuinely didn’t know if I was making the right call, and the doors locking before I could. Then, because the day was committed to the bit, I got trapped in the train toilet! Door wouldn’t lock, then the buttons wouldn’t open it, and I ended up pressing the button to speak to the driver, who turned out to be the only member of staff on the whole train. Freed from the outside by a kind stranger. Never did get my wee.

By Euston my onward train was cancelled, the next delayed, my ticket suddenly not valid on the fast services, and animals on the track on the slow ones with no promise of arrival. So I made a decision that a few years ago would have felt like defeat. I stopped. I turned around, went back to Paddington, booked a co-working space for the day, got myself something warm to drink, and sat down.

And this is the thing I’ve been chewing on ever since. The day fell apart completely, and I didn’t.

Two kinds of pressure

For most of my life, undiagnosed and confused about why everything felt harder than it seemed to for other people, I thought I was managing my neurodivergence. Looking back, that isn’t quite what I was doing. I was managing pressure. Two kinds of it, both running at full volume, all the time.

The first was the pressure I aimed at myself. The internal drumbeat of should and more and faster, absorbed over decades of falling short of standards I’d never actually agreed to. The second came from outside: the judgements and opinions of other people. Most of that second kind was never said aloud. It didn’t need to be. I felt it in my body regardless, this constant low-level accounting of how I was coming across, whether I was too much, whether I was managing to look normal enough to get away with it.

Carrying both at once is exhausting in a way that doesn’t show up on any to-do list. It’s the labour underneath the labour.

Over the past few years I’ve worked, slowly and imperfectly, to put both down. Not the neurodivergence. That isn’t going anywhere, and I’ve stopped wanting it to. What I’ve been setting down is the pressure wrapped around it. And doing that has genuinely changed what I’m able to do.

Capacity isn’t fixed

Here’s what I think we get wrong when we talk about capacity. We treat it like a fixed tank, a set amount we’re born with, that we either have or don’t. Some people are just resilient, we say, as if it’s a personality trait handed out at birth.

For a lot of us, it isn’t fixed at all. It moves. It expands when we’re looked after and it shrinks when we’re stretched too thin somewhere else. And a huge amount of it gets spent, invisibly, on things that were never ours to carry. What other people think of us. How we’re supposed to look while we cope. Whether we’re allowed to stop.

Every scrap of energy I was pouring into performing “okay” was energy I then didn’t have for the actual work of looking after myself. Ease that pressure and the energy comes back, and with it, room. Room to think, to plan, to feel, and yes, to meet a Tuesday that decides to set itself on fire without going into full shutdown.

The day the trains collapsed, I had something underneath me. Not because I’m made of tougher stuff than the next person but because I’d spent a long while, in the background, taking weight off myself that I’d been hauling around for no good reason. So when the day demanded more, there was a reserve to draw on.

Abandoning the plan was the self-trust

The bit I’m proudest of isn’t that I stayed calm. I didn’t, entirely. There was real overwhelm in there, and I’m not going to pretend that there wasn’t.

What I’m proud of is that I stopped. I looked at a situation that had become a fight I’d already lost, and instead of grinding myself down trying to force a way to Birmingham, I gave myself somewhere to regroup. Four walls. A chair. A warm drink. A small pocket of okay carved out of a chaotic morning.

A younger version of me would have kept pushing. Would have arrived hours late, wrung out, feeling like a failure for a set of train fires and animals on the line that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Would have read the whole thing as evidence of not coping.

Knowing when to abandon the plan is its own kind of self-trust. It’s the capacity to hear your own system saying this one isn’t rescuable and to believe it, rather than overriding it out of habit and guilt.

What I’d want you to take from it

If you’re neurodivergent and you’ve ever come home from a day that “shouldn’t” have been that hard feeling completely flattened, this is your reminder that the reroute itself costs something. A sudden change of plan isn’t a minor inconvenience for us. It’s a full system rebuild, done on the spot, while the nervous system is already flashing red. That work is real, and it’s invisible to everyone around you.

You’re not behind, you’re unmasking. And part of unmasking is noticing how much of your capacity has been leaking out onto other people’s expectations. Take even a little of that weight off and you may find you can handle more than you thought. Not because you’ve toughened up. Because you’ve finally got some room to breathe.

Rest is your birth-right, not a prize you earn by surviving. And a day where nothing goes to plan can still, somehow, be a good one.

I never made it to Birmingham. I got a co-working space, a good lunch in the sun, a full afternoon of work done, and this, whatever this is. I’ll take it.

More questions after a late diagnosis