I sat down with my journal, the way I do every morning, trying to quiet my mind enough to put words to the mess of thoughts spinning inside me. But before I can even put pen to paper, my phone buzzed with another notification.
Another like on a comment I made on someone else’s Substack note:
Every time someone interacts with that comment, I feel it again—the weight of it, the grief, the recognition that I am not alone, but also the overwhelming realization of how many of us were left to figure it out on our own.
I think I knew before I knew. Before the formal diagnosis, before the language to explain what had never quite made sense, before the slow unraveling of everything I had built my identity around. I knew.
Because what else explains the exhaustion? The bone-deep, soul-wrenching fatigue of being the eldest daughter, the responsible one, the fixer, the emotional sponge. The girl who learned to read a room before she could read a book, who clocked every micro-shift in mood, every subtle change in tone, and calibrated herself accordingly.
What else explains the way I burned out before I ever really began? The way my nervous system has never quite known peace.
I used to think I was just bad at being a person. That my inconsistency, my forgetfulness, my inability to do things that seemed so easy for everyone else was some kind of moral failing. I could be so disciplined, so structured, so relentlessly on top of things—until I wasn’t. Until I lost time. Until the executive dysfunction set in like concrete, and the shame wrapped around my ribs, squeezing the air out of me.
And yet, I kept pushing. Because that’s what I had been trained to do. Keep going. Be reliable. Be useful. Be the one people can count on, even when you can’t count on yourself.
Then, the diagnosis came. ADHD, at thirty-one. And suddenly, my entire life rearranged itself in my head.
The things I hated myself for? The things I had been punishing myself over for decades? They weren’t personal failures. They were symptoms.
And still, the grief of it nearly swallowed me whole.
Because how do you reconcile the fact that the thing you built your entire sense of self around—the overachiever, the fixer, the one who had to be okay because other people needed her to be okay—was never really you? It was just what survival demanded.
How do you begin to grieve the version of yourself you might have been if you hadn’t spent so much time fighting against your own wiring?
And how do you find softness for the girl who never stood a chance?
I don’t have the answers yet. I just know that for the first time in my life, I am trying to hold myself differently. Trying to unlearn the belief that my worth is in my usefulness. Trying to make peace with the fact that I was never broken—I was just never given the right tools.
So this is me, in real-time, unraveling. Laying down the weight I was never meant to carry. Learning, maybe for the first time, what it means to be something other than responsible.
Maybe even… free.
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