It’s Never Too Late To Understand Yourself

Discovering Neurodivergence Later in Life: Making Space for Grief, Relief and New Understanding

More and more adults are discovering their neurodivergence later in life. The discovery is being made throughout the entirety of adulthood – people in their twenties to their seventies and beyond. For some people, one of the strongest responses to this new understanding is grief. There’s often a sense of how things could have been different if they, and those around them, had known. They may have had accommodations that they never knew they needed. There’s a question that forms; ‘Why didn’t anybody notice?’ This is completely understandable and it’s a question that can come up as you recall struggles you might have had throughout your life that suddenly have a name.

Whether your understanding comes through a formal diagnosis or your own careful exploration, your experiences deserve to be taken seriously. You may have seen something and started your own exploration, curious about why so much sounded familiar, why something somebody else had said had resonated so deeply with you. Whether you have a diagnosis or have identified for yourself, your experiences, both positive and challenging, are valid.

When you look back over previous years and experiences in your life and you gain better understanding of yourself, there are often things that you find never made sense before. These could include school, friendships, relationships, work, parties, food shopping. Suddenly all the years of confusion start to fall into place and you see a much more complete picture of you. This can be both a comforting and devastating experience. And it can be both at the same time. Seeing that fuller picture of yourself isn’t the completion of the journey though. It’s the beginning of a brand new path.

There can be comfort in learning that the things that seemed harder for you than they did for everyone else had a reason. It wasn’t just you. You weren’t broken. You weren’t a problem or doing relationships, school, work or life wrong. You were and are wired differently and you were trying to navigate a world that was never designed with you in mind. You were carrying more than anyone else could see.

There can be pain, sadness and grief when you think of how different things have been for you. The what if questions can hurt a great deal; ‘What if I had had the support?’, ‘What if they had recognised it in me as a child?’ The sense of what could have been and the regrets, anger and disappointment are completely natural feelings to have as well.

We can’t change the events of the past but we can understand them from a different perspective now. The times when you might have suspected you were lazy, disorganised, stupid, clumsy, anti-social, messy, you can now look at with the possibility you were never those things. You might begin to recognise that you worked hard and to the best of your ability but might have been working against your brain which created additional challenges that nobody else could see. This changes the narrative considerably. There’s now the opportunity to take that new understanding with you into the future.

You might begin to recognise what you need, where your boundaries lie, or which environments allow you to feel more comfortable being yourself. You might start making choices that reflect who you are rather than who you've spent years trying to be.

So, when is the best time to get this understanding? As we go through life we are on a constant journey of learning. While it may have benefited you to know certain things about yourself from a younger age, there’s no perfect age to better understand yourself. While thoughts like ‘too little too late’ might pop up, the information arrives when it arrives. What you do from there matters. It’s okay to feel all the feelings that come with learning something important about yourself that affects not only your entire life but your understanding of yourself. Feel the sadness, regret, the comfort, the clarity, the anger, the hope. Remember that understanding yourself isn’t the end of the journey. It’s often the beginning.