Never Quite

The day I watched a video about AuDHD for the first time, I felt an immediate kinship.

The internal warfare I’d lived with for years suddenly had a name, and for the first time, I felt seen.

Then I watched another video, and doubt crept in. Did this really describe me? Were these challenges actually mine?

That, I’ve learned, is part of the neurodivergent reality.

You can share a diagnosis with others and still feel wildly inconsistent. Some days, your coping feels worse than everyone else’s. Other days, you wonder if you have it “too easy.” And then there are rare moments when everything clicks; when your brain feels aligned, capable, even calm.

For a long time, I wished for a day when the doubts would disappear. A day when I’d fully feel like I’d earned my AuDHD diagnosis. A day when I’d finally uncover the magic formula to manage it all.

But I’m realizing something harder and more honest: The doubts probably aren’t going away. And “managing” neurodivergence never means “curing” it; no matter how much I sometimes wish it did.

Some days will be hard. Some days will be less hard.

And my mind will keep challenging everything in a world where neurodivergence is still treated like an inconvenience that too many people would rather not deal with.

I also don’t fit what many people expect autism or ADHD to look like. I don’t bounce off the walls. I’m not non-verbal.

I’ve heard people say I seem “normal.”

Yeah. I’ve gotten pretty good at masking.

Usually.

But decades of feeling like an outsider didn’t come from nowhere. My masking may have made it seem like I didn’t have a disability, but it didn’t make me fit in. It just made me different enough to be judged, mocked, or quietly excluded.

Too disabled to belong. Not disabled enough to be believed.

So who am I?

I often live in a space that feels never quite.

Never quite normal.
Never quite autistic.
Never quite belonging.
Never quite included.

But also:

Never quite ready to give up.

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