The Right to Be Me: What a Neurodivergent Diagnosis Gave Me

 

For most of my life, I thought the goal was to be easy. Unbothersome. Low-maintenance. I thought discomfort was just part of being alive, and the noble thing to do—the right thing to do—was to power through it. Everyone else seemed to manage, so why couldn’t I? 

So I learned to suppress. 

When certain foods triggered pounding headaches or nausea, I ate them anyway, because I didn’t want to make a fuss. 

When my clothes felt unbearably itchy or wrong, I just squirmed quietly, spending the day hyper-focused on the sensation while pretending everything was fine. 

When someone spoke to me and I couldn’t process what they were saying—because 50,000 other sounds were crashing through my brain like a sonic tsunami—I’d nod along, afraid of looking rude or inattentive. 

When I was given instructions, and my brain instantly turned them into an indecipherable jumble, I’d smile and pretend I understood. Because obviously, everyone else could follow. 

I didn’t want to be the difficult one. 

The sensitive one. 

The weird one. 

So I powered through exhaustion and emotional overload and impossible days jammed with too many tasks. I stayed quiet when I had ideas—afraid they were stupid or off-base, especially if they weren’t aligned with the room’s energy. I hid the parts of me that wanted to act things out, or talk aloud to process thoughts, or get up and move to shake the stress loose. Because “normal” people don’t do that. 

I swallowed rejection and criticism like bitter pills, convincing myself that feeling the sting made me weak or too sensitive. And I did all this thinking I was doing the right thing. 

But eventually, I broke down. I burned out. I got angry. Ashamed. Depressed. And for the longest time, I thought those were personal failures—signs that I still wasn’t trying hard enough, that I needed to get better at life. 

But now I know: they were signals. Alarms going off inside a system that had been overloaded for years. Getting diagnosed as neurodivergent didn’t magically solve everything, but it did crack the foundation of all those unspoken expectations I had internalized. It gave me a name for the fog and the friction I’ve felt my whole life. It gave me language to understand my struggles—not as moral failings, but as very real neurological differences. 

It gave me permission to stop pretending everything was fine. It gave me the right to speak up when something doesn’t work for me. To ask for what I need without apology. To accept that my brain works differently—and that’s okay. 

That I can move through the world in a way that makes sense to me, even if it looks strange to others. I’m still unlearning decades of shame. Still figuring out what I need and how to ask for it. Still making peace with the parts of me I used to hide. 

But now I understand something that would’ve meant the world to me as a kid: Being different isn’t a flaw. And surviving isn’t the same as thriving.