7 min read
For most of my life, I was asking the wrong question.
I just didn’t know it.
Like many people, I spent years trying to understand why life felt harder than it seemed to be for everyone else.
Why did I overthink everything?
Why did conversations leave me exhausted?
Why did I feel completely drained after social events that other people seemed to enjoy?
Why could I spend hours focused on one thing, yet struggle to start something simple?
Why did my emotions sometimes feel so much bigger than everyone else’s?
Why did I constantly feel like I was trying to catch up?
Without realising it, every one of those questions was really asking the same thing.
“What’s wrong with me?”
I don’t think I ever said those exact words out loud.
But they quietly shaped the way I saw myself.
Every mistake became evidence.
Every difficult day confirmed it.
Every moment of overwhelm felt like proof that I simply wasn’t coping as well as everyone else.
So I tried harder.
I pushed through.
I became incredibly good at masking.
I learned how to appear calm even when my mind was racing.
I learned how to keep going even when I was exhausted.
From the outside, it probably looked like I was doing well.
On the inside, I was becoming further and further disconnected from myself.
Then something happened that completely changed the direction of my life.
Not because I suddenly became a different person.
But because someone asked a different question.
Instead of asking what was wrong with me…
We started asking whether there might be another explanation.
That possibility had honestly never crossed my mind.
As I learned more about AuDHD, pieces of my life that had never made sense suddenly began fitting together.
The overthinking.
The masking.
The burnout.
The intense interests.
The need for routine.
The exhaustion after constantly trying to meet everyone else’s expectations.
For the first time, I wasn’t collecting evidence that I was broken.
I was discovering evidence that I had simply been misunderstood—including by myself.
Looking back now, I realise my diagnosis didn’t answer every question.
It replaced one question with a much better one.
Instead of asking:
“What’s wrong with me?”
I started asking:
“What helps me live well with the brain I have?”
That question changed everything.
It changed the way I thought about work.
Relationships.
Rest.
Success.
Health.
And perhaps most importantly…
It changed the way I spoke to myself.
I became less interested in trying to become someone else.
And much more interested in understanding the person I already was.
If you’ve found yourself asking the same question I asked for so many years, I want you to know something.
You’re not weak for asking it.
You’re not alone in asking it.
Many of us have asked it.
Especially before we understood ourselves.
But sometimes the most life-changing answers don’t come from trying harder to answer the old question.
They come from having the courage to ask a new one.
That was certainly true for me.
And perhaps, if you’re reading this today…
It might become true for you too.