I frequently hear a poignant question from clients exploring their identity: ‘What will a diagnosis actually change?’
The answer is highly nuanced and entirely individual, whether someone is seeking clarity for themselves or for their child. Speaking from my own experience as a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult, I can say it was life-changing.
It wasn’t about finding an excuse for ‘bad behaviour.’ Instead, it provided an explanation for things I had never understood. My entire life beforehand, I felt somehow different, could not easily relate to others and found scripts in television shows and movies. Once I understood my neurodivergence, the word ‘weird’ no longer applied, instead, it was replaced by a profound sense of liberation.
The Reality of Masking and Burnout
At the start of the 2020 lockdown, I experienced an unexpected, deep sense of peace. Initially, I rationalised it by thinking I must have been living with such high baseline anxiety that when the ‘worst’ finally happened, my system simply settled.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight and clinical insight, I know the truth: the daily commute and the traditional office environment were draining my energy reserves. So was my need to mask – the constant, exhausting effort to hide my traits to fit into a neurotypical world.
Uncovering my diagnosis felt like coming out all over again. It was a process of unlearning who I thought I was supposed to be and discovering who I actually am. Suddenly, there was a reason for my sensory differences – like why a shower can feel so overstimulating (takes a while for me to enter a shower), while a bath is comfortable and grounding.
Managing Executive Dysfunction and Dysregulation
Understanding my brain changed how I navigate daily life. I now understand why ‘simple’ tasks can feel monumental on heavy days, why cooking can feel incredibly difficult, and why I have an intense cognitive need to finish a task completely before stepping away.
It also allowed me to implement practical accommodations without shame. I discovered weighted blankets and weighted soft toys, which provide vital proprioceptive input to ground me when I feel dysregulated – a true blessing during long, stressful phone calls.
Similarly, my initial fears regarding ADHD medication proved ungrounded. Despite stimulants being colloquially labeled as ‘uppers,’ they had the opposite effect on my nervous system: they calmed me. Medication allows me to be fully present in meetings and social situations, freeing me from the exhausting brain galloping and obsessing over what to say next, or planning my exit strategy.
Navigating Invalidative Reactions
Of course, diagnosis doesn’t make everything easy. Recognising how hard I had been swimming against the current for decades brought its own wave of grief and frustration.
That frustration can become intensified when encountering casual invalidation. Hearing people say, ‘Oh, we’re all a little bit on the spectrum,’ minimises the reality of my neurodivergent struggles. Equally frustrating is the reaction from those who claim, ‘Well, if that’s ADHD, I must have it too.’ (To which my clinical and personal response is: perhaps you do; it is worth exploring properly).
When I stopped masking, people who have known me a long time resisted the change, claiming it ‘never showed before.’ In reality, it was always there – it was just hidden behind an invisible, energy-consuming wall of masking.
The Role of Professional Assessment and Therapy
Choosing to pursue a formal diagnosis is a deeply personal decision. For some, the labels carry a stigma of weakness, particularly if they grew up in environments where neurodivergence was viewed as a deficit. Also, the current state of the NHS means waiting lists stretch from several months to many years, leaving many in limbo.
While lockdown gave people the quiet space to realise their ‘quirks’ were actually neurodivergent markers, I advise caution regarding purely relying on rapid online screening tools. The danger of casual self-diagnosis is that it can obscure a multitude of other explanations, different neurotypes, or co-occurring mental health conditions. It can also risk someone building a rigid identity around a single label rather than understanding their unique system.
This is where therapeutic support is invaluable. For myself, therapy was the key to moving from a diagnosis to true empowerment. It provided the insight needed to stop viewing my traits as deficits and start looking at them as a specific blueprint.
Being AuDHD brings distinct cognitive advantages (identifying micro-patterns that others do not see, implement operational systems and the ability to solve problems in a non-linear, creative way). My formal diagnosis did not take away the challenges, but it gave me the right toolkit to finally make my life work for the brain I was given.