Audhdistically Me
Questions after a late diagnosis
Have I been having meltdowns instead of “losing my shit”?
The short answer
At the time I called it the social hangover, the comedown from everything. It was only years later that I looked back and thought, that was a meltdown. It was a meltdown because of all the change and transition happening at once.
When I got married in 2011, I had no idea I was AuDHD. We had a traditional wedding, kind of. We got married at the side of a football pitch in my hometown, because we both wanted something non-religious and something outdoors, and in Scotland that is obviously a bit of a risk. The sun shone on the day though, thank God! It was kind of epic, because all our friends and family sat in the stand to watch, and that was really cool. We got married somewhere between three and half three in the afternoon. I can’t remember the exact time now, which is terrible, but the day itself has gone soft round the edges in my memory in the way big days do.
Then we had the post-ceremony drinks and then the dinner. We had to walk into the room together as a couple while everyone clapped, and I found that wildly embarrassing, even though it was my own wedding and every single person there had come for us. It was just that walk through the room with all eyes on us. Oh, this is awkward. The party itself was great. We had a brilliant ceilidh band and it was really super. People danced until their feet gave out!
And then we got back to the accommodation we were staying in that night and I just felt so overwhelmed that I burst into tears. Sobbing. The kind that comes from somewhere you didn’t know was full. I think the realisation that my life was now different hit me square in the face. I had taken on a new name and with it a different role in society and in the relationship. It was also the summer I had just resigned from my first proper full-time teaching job, the one I’d been in for five years, and I was heading off in September to do other things. Supply teaching, and a little two-day-a-week job teaching music in a primary school. It felt like all the solid ground I’d been standing on had fallen away at once. Not to mention that eighteen months of wedding prep had just concluded in a single afternoon! My husband was a bit freaked out by it all, understandably, and between sobs I kept saying to him, I’m not sad, I’m not sad, trying to reassure him it wasn’t about him, that I hadn’t just made some terrible mistake marrying him. It was just a lot. It was very overwhelming.
The next day I had the worst migraine. My head was in so much pain, I was so nauseous and I felt disgusting for a couple of days afterwards. At the time I called it the social hangover, the comedown from everything. It was only years later that I looked back and thought, that was a meltdown. It was a meltdown because of all the change and transition happening at once. All the endings. The end of my job at that school. The end of being a Miss. The end of the maiden name I’d carried my whole life. The end of all the wedding planning that had been coming together for months. No wonder my system was overloaded 👀.
I really want people to understand this, because I didn’t until recently: You can grieve something you wanted. The good days can be the ones with the least room left to hold you, precisely because you’ve decided you have no right to struggle on a day this happy. So instead of understanding what was happening, I apologised for it. Sorry for crying on the best night of my life. Sorry for not being able to say why. That reflex, the apology that arrives before the explanation ever does, turned out to be the subtle backing track to most of my adult life.
If you’re late-diagnosed, or you’re somewhere in the long strange process of working out that you might be, I suspect you know exactly the reflex I mean.
Because this is one of the many things nobody warns you about a late diagnosis. It doesn’t just explain the present, it reaches back and, often quite brutally, rewrites your entire history. You start going back through your own life with the new information in your hand and moment after moment reorganises itself into something that finally makes sense.
The job you left, not because you were flaky, but because the open-plan office and the strip lighting and the endless unstructured social demands were dismantling you, and you’d assumed everyone else was simply better at tolerating it than you were.
The friendship that drifted because you cancelled one too many times, and you spent years believing you were a bad friend, when actually you were a depleted one, running on a battery nobody could see was flat.
The school reports that said bright but doesn’t apply herself, or too sensitive, or needs to try harder to fit in, which you internalised so completely that trying harder to fit in became a whole personality rather than the survival strategy it actually was.
The way you’ve always needed things written down, or needed to leave the loud room, or needed a beat longer than everyone else to answer a question and apologised every single time, as though your own nervous system were an imposition you were inflicting on everyone around you.
The exhaustion after ordinary social events that other people seemed to find energising, which you took as proof something was wrong with you, rather than a sign something was simply different about how you were built.
There is a specific grief that comes with all of this and it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. You mourn the version of yourself who could have understood so much sooner. You mourn the years spent apologising, over-functioning, and deciding you were the problem. You feel a strange, disorienting relief that turns up tangled together with anger, because the explanation is a gift and also an invoice for everything it cost you not to have it. All of that can sit in one body at the same time. It’s a lot. And it’s allowed to be a lot.
But. Recognising all of this is not the end of the process. It’s the beginning of a much kinder one. Once you can look back at that crying woman in her wedding dress, or that overwhelmed kid in the too-bright classroom, or that so-called bad friend cancelling plans again, and see a nervous system doing its honest best rather than a person who kept failing, something starts to loosen. You stop apologising quite so fast. You start asking what you actually need instead of what you think you can get away with needing. You’re not behind, you’re unmasking, layer by layer, and part of unmasking is learning to read your own signals without judging them first.
Fifteen years on, I still can’t go back and tell that woman in her wedding dress that nothing was wrong with her. But I’ve stopped apologising for her. And if you’re just starting to have these revelations of your own, I would love to help you get there a good deal faster than I did.
Questions this speaks to
- Have I been having meltdowns instead of “losing my shit”?
- How come I didn’t know?
- Grieving who I could have been if I’d known sooner.