The Grief Nobody Warned Me About

The ache of a lifetime of being seen wrong

I thought the moment I realized I was neurodivergent would feel like relief. Like this big exhale I’d been holding in my whole life. Instead I sat on the edge of my bed and cried in a way that surprised me, not loud, not dramatic, just quiet and stunned, like someone had reached into my chest and gently undone something I’d spent years stitching and holding together.

It wasn’t the word that broke me. It was the memories lining up behind it.

Every report card that said bright but inconsistent, or too chatty. Every job that started so enthusiastically energetic, and ended in burnout I couldn’t explain. Every time I tried to describe what was happening inside me and watched people nod politely while clearly not getting it. I always assumed the misunderstanding was my fault. I believed the gaslighting. If I could just explain better. If I could just try harder, just suck it up, or 'fake it till you make it'. If I could just be less of this tired mess.

I’ve spent my life translating myself. Smoothing out the parts that didn’t land well. Swallowing the reactions that felt too big. Smiling when I was overloaded. Learning how to look okay even when my brain and body was screaming. Somewhere along the way, I stopped checking in with what I actually felt and started checking in with what was acceptable.

When the truth finally settled in, I didn’t feel fixed. I felt robbed.

I grieved the child who was corrected instead of comforted. The teenager who learned to ignore my own needs, or shrink so she wouldn’t stand out. The adult who built a whole identity around coping instead of living. I thought about all the apologies I’d made for things that were never character flaws, just a nervous system trying to survive in situations not built for it.

What hurts most is how obvious it all is now. Of course I burned out. Of course noise and people felt like danger. Of course I could pour everything into what mattered, mostly for other people, and absolutely nothing into what didn’t. None of it was random. None of it meant I was broken. It was my brain doing exactly what it was designed to do, just without a map.

There’s anger in this grief too. Anger that I had to reach the edge of myself before anyone, including me, asked the right questions. Anger that resilience was praised when what I actually needed was understanding and help.

Some days early on after finding out, I wish I didn’t know. But mostly now I wish I had known sooner.

Now I’m learning to sit with the ache instead of pushing it away. To stop forcing myself into shapes that never fit. To let the part of me that spent decades hidden, being misread finally tell her story without apologizing for it. Finally dropping the mask. Finally loving me, just as I am. Unstoppable.

A person holding another persons hands in comfort over a table

The grief wasn’t about being neurodivergent.

It was about how long I lived thinking I was wrong, or bad, or 'crazy' when I was simply misunderstood.