LATE DIAGNOSIS SERIES: What The First Year Post-Diagnosis Really Feels Like And How To Move Through It

We open a new series on late diagnosis with a frank look at the first year after learning you’re neurodivergent. Relief, rage, grief, and an identity shift arrive in cycles, and we share real tools for feeling it, naming it, and building a life that fits.

• relief and validation after ADHD/autism diagnosis
• anger at lost years, misdiagnosis, and systems
• grief for unlived paths and masked identity
• reframing old labels into accurate language
• unmasking in relationships and setting boundaries
• deciding what to share and with whom
• practical supports, therapy, meds, and accommodations
• building systems that match your brain
• moving from storm to rebuilding to thriving

Here is the link to the episode on ADHD v Autism v AuDHD v Trauma

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/18440753-adhd-autism-audhd-and-trauma-how-to-tell-them-apart-and-what-to-do-next

Here is the link to the Unmasking Episode

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/18287637-unmasking-the-hidden-cost-of-being-easy-going-and-low-maintenance

About Me:

I’m Autumn Moran, a Licensed Professional Counselor and Life Coach specializing in trauma-informed care for neurodivergent women and trauma survivors.

Therapy (Texas residents only):

I provide individual therapy in my private practice for women working through trauma, late diagnosis processing, relationship challenges, and healing from narcissistic abuse or toxic family systems. My approach is neurodivergent-affirming and focuses on helping you understand your patterns while building practical tools for nervous system regulation and authentic living.

Life Coaching (available anywhere):

For women outside Texas or those wanting support alongside therapy, I offer:

•Somatic Healing Coaching: Bridges the gap between cognitive understanding and embodied healing through nervous system work, movement practices, and practical integration tools. Perfect as a complement to talk therapy or for those ready to work directly with their body’s wisdom.

•Unmasking Journey Coaching: Specialized support for late-diagnosed neurodivergent women learning to reconnect with their authentic selves after decades of masking. We work on identifying your real needs, rebuilding your sense of self, and creating a life that fits who you actually are.

Whether you’re healing trauma, discovering yourself after late diagnosis, or both, my goal is to help you not just understand your story, but feel genuinely safe and at home in your own body.

Subscribe & Share:

New episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday. If today’s episode resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it or leave a comment—it helps other women find this space and know they’re not alone. Check me out on Apple Podcasts and many other platforms.

Work With Me:

Ready to start your healing journey

Book a free 15-minute consultation: (http://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub)

Listen to my DIVINE WOMAN Playlist (Apple & Spotify): Empowering songs for women healing through softness and strength - links are on the linktree link! 

Transcript

Welcome And Series Kickoff

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women, a place where your voice matters, your body is sacred, and your journey home to yourself is honored, no matter how winding the road. I'm Autumn and I am passionate about supporting women on their healing journeys. If you are a repeat listener, welcome back. Thank you for joining me. If you are new here, I want you to know that I am a licensed professional counselor. I provide trauma-informed therapy for clients in my private practice, specializing in work with neurodivergent women and trauma survivors. In addition to therapy and those looking for additional support alongside their therapy, I offer life coaching programs including somatic healing coaching and an unmasking journey for late-diagnosed neurodivergent women. My somatic coaching is designed as a complement to traditional talk therapy, helping you bridge the gap between cognitive understanding and embodied healing through nervous system work, body movement, breath work, and other integrational tools. Whether you're working through trauma, discovering your authentic self after years of masking, or both, my goal is to help you not just understand your story, but to feel genuinely safe and at home in your own body. New episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday, so be sure to subscribe, like, follow so you don't miss a one. And if today's episode resonates with you, I'd be so grateful if you'd share it with someone who needs to hear it, or just simply leave a comment because it helps other women find this space and know that they're not alone and they're healing. And today I'm starting something new. This is my first series of the year, and it is a series on late diagnosis. And I want to begin with the first year after diagnosis, because that first year is unlike anything else you'll experience. When you get diagnosed with ADHD or autism in 30s, 40s, or 50s, after spending your entire life not knowing why you were different, everything shifts. Your past makes sense in a way it never did before. Your present suddenly has context, and your future looks completely different. But it's not just relief, it's also rage, grief, confusion. Maybe rewriting your entire life story. Maybe it's realizing everyone saw you wrong. And it also could be understanding that you were never the problem. And no one prepares you for how hard that is. I'm speaking from experience here. I'm late diagnosed, and that first year after diagnosis, it broke me open in ways I wasn't expecting. The anger at all the years I spent trying to fit into a box I was never meant to fit into. The grief over what could have been if someone had just asked me how I was feeling instead of telling me I was too loud, too excited, too bossy, too much. The realization that no one ever saw me for who I actually am. So today, that's what I'm going to talk about. The first year, what it's really like. Not this Instagram version where you get diagnosed and suddenly everything is better. The real version, the messy, complicated, painful, yet liberating, often devastating, and very much a hopeful reality of it all. So what about the relief? Because that's usually what comes first. When you first get diagnosed, there's this, oh, oh, that's why moment, you know? That's why I've always felt different. That's why school was so hard, even though I'm smart. That's why I can't keep friends. That's why I bombed after college or after high school once I got on my own and everything became overwhelming. That's why I'm always exhausted. That's why I can't organize my life. This is why I feel like I've been struggling and I have been struggling my whole life. There's a name for it. There's a neurological explanation. It's not a character flaw. I'm not lazy. I'm not broken. I'm not fundamentally wrong. I'm neurodivergent. And for a moment, that relief is everything. Finally, you have an answer. Finally, you can stop blaming yourself. Finally, there's framework that makes sense of your entire life. For the first time, someone is saying, Yes, this is real. Yes, you've been struggling. Yes, there's a reason. And no, you're not making it up. After a lifetime of being told you're too sensitive, too much, not trying hard enough, making excuses, someone is finally saying, This is a real neurological difference. It's valid. And that validation can feel life-changing because maybe for the first time ever, you're not the problem. The world's expectations were the problem. The lack of understanding was the problem. The system not designed for your brain is the problem, not you. But here's what nobody tells you: the initial relief is just the beginning because once the relief settles, everything else rushes in. The grief, the anger, the confusion, the identity crisis, the realization of everything you've lost, the rage at everyone who failed you. The relief opens the door, but what comes through the door is decades of unprocessed pain. Like, first and foremost, let's talk about the anger because it's coming and it's going to be big. This is anger that hit me the hardest. All the years I wasted, all the things I could have done in my 20s and 30s if I'd been diagnosed and treated, all the opportunities I missed because I was too exhausted, too overwhelmed, too confused about why everything was so hard. I always felt like I was doing so well, but behind everyone else, still, still didn't have the rules, even though I was killing it. If I'd had medication, if I had accommodations, if I'd understood my brain, if I had support instead of criticism, where would I be now? Who would I be? What could I have accomplished? And now I'm in, I'm 45, and I'm just, I mean, I was diagnosed around 38, 40. And I'm just, I'm, it takes time to figure this out after decades of struggling alone. That's rage. That's grief disguised as rage. That's the loss of potential of time of who you could have been. Your parents, your teachers, your doctors, every therapist you saw who treated your anxiety and depression without ever asking if there was something else going on, or better yet, they gave you borderline and bipolar instead of like really being educated on women and neurodiversity. Every person who told you to try harder, who called you lazy, who said you were making excuses, who punished you for things you couldn't control, they all missed it. They all failed you. And now you're left dealing with the aftermath of decades of being misunderstood and mistreated. I was told I was too loud, too excited, laughing too loudly, too nosy, bossy, a backdogger. I can still remember as an adult managers getting mad at me because I was having a good time at work. I needed to be quiet and serious and not laugh. I was just like, this is so dystopian. They don't like me because I'm having a good time. And all those things that they told me I was, I wasn't any of those things. I was enthusiastic, curious, strong-willed, passionate, direct, have a strong sense of justice, can read patterns really well. But instead of anyone asking, How are you feeling? Why are you having big feelings? What do you need? They just told me to be quieter, smaller, less, more controlled. Go to my room, go outside. They tried to fit me into a box I was never meant to fit into. And I spent my whole life trying to squeeze myself into that box, thinking something was wrong with me because I didn't fit. But there was nothing wrong with me. The box was the problem. And then there's anger at yourself for not figuring it out sooner, for believing what everyone told you about yourself, for internalizing all that shame, for trying so hard to be someone you're not. Why didn't I see it? Why did I believe them? Why did I spend so many years hating myself? And this one is complicated because you were doing the best you could with what you knew, but the anger is still there. So what to do with this anger? First and foremost, feel it. Don't bypass it, don't spiritualize it away. Don't tell yourself you should forgive or let it go. You are allowed to be angry. You are allowed to be furious. And you have every right to rage about what has what was taken from you. Journal it, scream it, move it through your body, talk about it in therapy. Let yourself feel the full weight of it. Scream into a pillow, punch up mattress, go to a smash room, get a bowl of ice and go outside and throw it on the concrete as hard as you can. Have target practice, whatever it is to help you release your anger. Because I, a common theme I had yesterday in session were clients being afraid of their anger, minimizing their anger, compartmentalizing their anger, pretending that it meant something else where you couldn't just be angry. Because we've been taught for so long that anger is scary and that you'll lose yourself and all this shit. But anger is a valid emotion and it needs to be expressed just like joy, happy, sad, moody, emotional. It is an emotion and it needs to be honored. Because underneath the anger is grief, and you can't get to the grief until you move through the anger. And once the anger starts to settle, that's like I just said, the grief comes and it can be very heavy. Who would you have been if you'd been diagnosed as a child? If you'd had medication, accommodation, support, and understanding? What career would you have pursued? What relationships would you have had? What would your life look like now? You'll never know. And that's what you're grieving. The version of yourself that never got to exist because no one saw you. All the years you spent thinking you were broken, all the years you tried so hard and still failed, all the years you were exhausted, overwhelmed, confused, ashamed. You can't get those years back. And that is so, so much grief. You became someone to survive. You learned to mask, you learned to people please, to make yourself small, to be quiet when you wanted to be loud, still when you wanted to move, calm when you were bursting with energy. You became someone else to be acceptable. And now you're grieving the authentic self that got buried, buried, girls, buried under all that survival. How many friendships did you lose because you didn't understand your own needs? How many romantic relationships failed because you didn't know how to communicate what you needed? You didn't even know how to identify what you were needing or what you were feeling. You can't go back and repair all that with the knowledge you have now. Some of those relationships are just gone. And that's grief. If you have kids, you might be grieving that you parented them while undiagnosed, that you were exhausted, overwhelmed, sometimes short-tempered, sometimes checked out. Not because you didn't love them, but because you were drowning and didn't know why. If they're neurodivergent too, you might grieve that you didn't recognize it sooner, that they struggled like you did. And that's complicated grief, and that is real. And sometimes the grief shows up in unexpected ways. You're watching a movie and a kid is getting accommodations and you sob. You see a child being understood and supported and you fall apart. You hear someone talk about the diagnosis as a child, and you feel a punch in the gut because that could have been you, but it wasn't. So what do you do with the grief? First and foremost, let those tears flow. Let yourself feel it. Don't rush it. Grief takes as long as it takes. There's no timeline. Talk about it with people who get it, not people who say, but at least you know now. Because fuck that. Write letters to your younger self. Tell her what she needed to hear. Tell her it wasn't her fault. And get some therapy or life coaching, lots of therapy. Because this is grief. It's traumatic work. And for late diagnosed people, this can be traumatic. This can be very grief-ridden. You need to work through the stages of grief alongside of learning accommodations and skills and being able to identify your neurodivergence instead of making it small or ignoring it. And I want you to know that grief isn't linear. It comes in waves. You think you're through it, and then something will trigger it again, and that's all normal. Excuse me. Now let's talk about the identity crisis because getting a late diagnosis fundamentally changes how you see yourself. You thought you were lazy, you're not. You have executive dysfunction. You thought you were too sensitive, you're not. You're a neurodivergent in a world designed for neurotypical people that play games and make lies and pretend. You thought we're you were bad at relationships, you're not. You just need different kinds of relationships. You thought you were broken, and you're absolutely fucking not. You're different in one of the most beautiful ways. But if all that was wrong, who are you actually? It's like you have to go back through your whole life and reframe everything through a new lens. That time you got in trouble in school, that was ADHD impulsivity, not being bad. The time you had a meltdown, that was autistic overwhelm, not being dramatic. The job you got fired from or that you couldn't handle and you quit, that was executive dysfunction and lack of accommodations, not being incompetent. That relationship that failed, that was unmet. Talk about jobs. From an early age, when I realized that I'm gonna have to work, I decided to collect jobs. I would just work places that I thought were cool until I found one that stuck. And I left so many jobs because there were not accommodations, there were toxic workplaces. I didn't stay. You don't have to either. Every memory, every experience, every failure, every struggle, it all means something different now. And that is exhausting. You're literally rewriting your autobiography in your head. But what happens, and I think it's beautiful what happens in the first year, you start seeing yourself in a different, more graceful light. Instead of I'm a failure, it becomes I was trying to run a race with weights on my ankle that I didn't know were there. Instead of the I'm broken, it becomes I'm different, and the world didn't accommodate that. Instead of I'm too much, it becomes I'm intense and passionate, and that's not a flaw. I am dramatic. I love it. I'm not gonna not be dramatic. I say dramatic things, I get very dramatic about topics. It's not a bad thing. The shift from shame to guilt is powerful, but it takes time because you've spent decades internalizing the shame. You can't undo that overnight. And here's the hard part. You start realizing that the people around you, families, friends, partners, many of them kept you small. They benefited from you being people pleasy. They like that you didn't have boundaries. They preferred you accommodating and easy. And now that you're starting to understand yourself and advocate for your needs, they don't like it. You're changing, you're unmasking, you're setting boundaries, you're asking for what you need, you're taking up space. And some people want the old you back, the small you, the easy you. And you have to decide do I shrink back to keep them comfortable or do I keep growing, eat growing even if I lose them? Simple, not easy question. And if you've been masking your whole life, which you might not actually know who you are underneath it, and if you're undiagnosed and you're just late diagnosed, you've probably been masking. So, what do you actually like? What do you actually want? How do you actually feel when you've spent your whole life performing, presenting the version of yourself that gets accepted? Stripping that away leaves you with, I don't know who I am. And that's terrifying. But it's also the beginning of actually finding yourself. Sorry if there was a blip into the way the sound is going. I pause, I recorded earlier, paused, and I'm coming back. So this is the new version. If it sounds any different, my apologies. So, like, you don't have to figure out your identity immediately. You don't have to know who you are now. You're allowed to be in the messy middle. You're allowed to be discovering, you're allowed to try on different versions of yourself and see what fits. You're not a before and after, you're a person in process. And you know what? Something that no one really warns us about when it comes to late diagnosis. You don't just feel relief, then anger, then grief, and then you're done. It's cycles. And the cycle can look like relief, like, oh, thank God, there's a reason I'm not broken, like this makes sense now. Thank goodness. Then there's the rage, but I'm so fucking angry that it took this long, that I suffered for decades, that everyone failed me. And then you have grief. I'm so sad about what I lost, who I could have been, the life I could have had. Then there's relief again, but at least I know now. At least I can move forward with understanding. And then comes rage, but I should have known sooner. This is bullshit. And then grief. I can't get those years back. And around and around, up and down, ebbs and flows, it goes, sometimes multiple times in the same day. Because there's no neat progression through these feelings. This is what grief is. They're all happening at once, and they're just taking turns being the loudest. You can feel relieved and angry, grateful and angry, grateful and grieving, hopeful and furious. All of it is true at the same time. So honestly, what do you do with the up and down cycle? What do you do with this? I encourage you to stop expecting yourself to be done feeling things. This is not a linear process. When anger comes back, feel it. When the grief resurfaces, honor it. When relief returns, enjoy it. You're not backsliding, you're just processing something so massive. And massive things take time. So what about the practical side? Because you have this diagnosis now and you need to figure out what to do with it, right? Do you? Do you not? I mean, you do. Accommodations in the sense is what I am talking about when saying you need to do something with it, like learning to accommodate, learning to advocate, learning to set up your environment, your life, your relationships to accommodate you. So what about do you tell people? This is one of the first questions. Who do I tell? How much do I share? What if they don't believe me or if they don't take me seriously? What if they're just one of those that say, oh, we're all a little ADHD now? There's no right answer. Some people tell everyone, some people tell no one. And most people land somewhere in the middle, telling safe people who will understand and support. And I'll cover this more in the next episode of this series about telling your family, telling your support system, telling your people. But for now, you get to choose. This is your information to share or not to share. But if you want to hold on and get some more insight, next Wednesday's episode will be just about telling your family. What about the age-old question? Do I try medication? For ADHD, medication can be life-changing, but it's also a process. Finding the right medication, the right dose, dealing with the side effects, figuring out, figuring out if it actually helps. So that's a process. Some people have dramatic positive responses. Some people have no responses, depending on the dosage. And some people have bad reactions. Some people can't handle stimulants. And if you have an issue with stimulants, I would encourage non-stimulants. They are they can be just as helpful at getting you to a place of homeostasis, so to speak, so that you can start building your accommodations and systems. And a lot of the times, a lot of the times I get the question or I get the comment of I don't want to be on meds, I don't want to be on a stimulant, I don't want to do drugs, I don't want to be on legal speed. I get it. I get it. I totally understand it. And this is not a forever thing. The way I see ADA ADHD medication, it's a way to accommodate yourself so that you can even out so that you then can see where you need systems, and then we'll have the executive functioning to create the systems. And then once you have systems into place, maybe a year, two years down the road, you can taper off the meds and see how you are with just your systems. So it can be a complement to your daily life, and you can take it for however long you want, or you can use it for a short burst of time in your life to help you just get equilibrium. And there's grief here too, right? If medications help, if medication helps, you might think this is how other people feel all the time. And I've been functioning at 30% my whole life. It goes back to where I found out I had sleep apnea, and then when I was late diagnosed, like at each part that I've gotten these diagnoses, I thought I was doing my best, just having a hard time. But the more I unfold, the better I'm becoming. The more accommodations, the more systems, the more understanding, grace, and compassion I have for myself, the better life has gotten. The easier my neurodivergence is to accommodate. And yes, let's talk about accommodations. Do you need them? Yes. Whether it's at work, at home, in relationships, you need accommodations. You need systems designed for your brain, not against it. But asking for accommodations is hard when you're just figuring out what you need. And I'll cover this also. We'll have a whole episode on accommodations and all the things that come along with asking, work, home, relationships, environments, all of it. But we'll cover it in a couple of a couple of episodes, a few episodes down. And if you're not already in therapy, this is a good time to find a neurodivergent affirming therapist, someone who gets it, someone who won't pathologize your neurodivergence or try to make you more normal. You need support processing all of this. You need space to grieve, to be angry, to figure out who you are now. And I'm going back to about telling the family: how do you explain this to your parents, your kids, your partners, your friends? Because this is complicated. Because you're still learning about it yourself. How do you explain something you're just starting to understand? And you can start with something like this. I got diagnosed with ADHD, autism, or both, bipolar, dyslexia, OCD, under the neurodivergence umbrella, right? I'm still learning what that means, but it explains a lot about why I've struggled with whatever specific things you want to put in there. I'd love your support as I figure this out. And then give them some resources if you have them. Send them some articles, have them listen to podcasts like this one, the episode before this series, autism, ADHD, odd HD, and trauma. It explains all of them, what it looks like, how it feels. That's a good starting point. I'll put that show link in the show notes so that you can easily share it or refer it. Help them understand, essentially, right? Do you need to change your whole life? Maybe, maybe not. Some people make big changes, new careers, new relationships, new living situations. Some people make small adjustments, new systems, new boundaries, new self-understanding. I did a bit of a both. A bit of a both. I quit my job as soon as I realized that I never no longer wanted to work in an office. And that happened before my late diagnosis, but it led to my late diagnosis because once I got out of working with the hospital systems that only covered certain diagnoses, diagnoses because they were covered by the state or whatever, I was able to really get into the DSM and really get outside of depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, right? The top three PTSD, maybe. But people were way more quick to give somebody anxiety and depression before they would give them PTSD because it's not a billable service. It's it's the system shot, the system shot. So it happened slowly, but it was like a natural progression. So like one thing led to another. Had I never went private practice and stayed at home after COVID and went against what all my bosses and coworkers were saying that I would fail and it would never work, I would never have discovered what ADHD looks like, what it is beyond anxiety and depression. Because here's the truth. When it comes to neurodivergence, it's not something that's just huge in college, in the classes, you know, they're just now starting to find out that the brain's not fully developed till about 30 or 31. So the gap, and we're not even going to talk about how neurodivergence was studied. It was studied on boys who presented outright characteristics. Women, girls, were too much of a variable. They couldn't test us. So it's like, even with my education, because I know you might be saying, but you went to school for this. Didn't you study this? I didn't, I didn't. I didn't, I didn't. I did. I was a great, great student, but also I'm a very literal odd HD. If you tell me not to self-diagnose, I'm not gonna self-diagnose. I read the criteria, I studied the criteria, but I never stopped to think, hey, does this apply to me? Because I was taught, do not diagnose yourself. And after my undergrad experience with abnormal psych and almost convincing myself I was schizophrenic, I didn't do it anymore. Once someone said not to do that, I gave myself full permission to not do that. So life can change. I changed my job, I changed the way I practiced, I changed my niche. I then found out the population I wanted to work with. I wanted to work with late-diagnosed women who are also andor trauma survivors. Two things that I have personally experienced and have been formally trained on. I got a divorce. I moved locations to somewhere that I wanted to go. I eventually bought my own car for the first time that wasn't out of survival or necessity, but it was my choice. There's no should here. You get to decide what needs to change and what doesn't. And I want to wrap this all up, and I want to close this by telling you what I wish someone had told me in that first year. What I tell my clients when they're in the thick of it. Right now, exactly as you are, you're okay. You don't need to be fixed, you don't need to become someone else. You don't need to improve or optimize or heal faster. You're okay. Anyone that says otherwise can fucking kick rocks. This sucks. It sucks that you didn't know sooner. It sucks that you lost all those years. It sucks that you could have been medicated, accommodated, supported, and you weren't. It genuinely, truly, deeply in your soul sucks balls. And you're allowed to feel that. You're allowed to be angry and sad and griff-streaking all about all of it. Don't let anyone minimize that, but at least you know now. Fuck that. It sucks that it took this long, full stop. And I'm allowed to be angry because I'm allowed to feel anger just like every other emotion. And you're not being dramatic. If you've been diagnosed, if you had been diagnosed and treated in childhood, your life would be different. Probably significantly different. You lost something real. That's not catastrophizing, but that's acknowledging the reality. And you get to grieve that. You can be angry about that. You get to feel the full weight of what was taken from you. Both of these things are true. It sucks that you lost those years, and you can still build a beautiful life from here. You're not too old, it's not too late, you have not missed your chance. Maybe this is divine timing. You're starting now with knowledge you didn't have before, with understanding, with the ability to work with your brain instead of against it. That matters and that changes things. And I know this is hard to hear because I understand what it's like to be in your 30s, 40s, not yet in my 50s, but I understand. Feeling behind, feeling like I've run out of time, feeling like there's not enough days for me to live the life and become the person I have always dreamed I wanted to be. You're not behind some imaginary timeline. You're exactly where you are, and where you are is where you start from. Let go of where you should be, because that's not real. Right now, this is real, and you start here. And when you stop masking, and we'll talk about unmasking, and if you want more before the series unfolds, there are episodes in my repertoire, if the catalog, if you will, I don't know what it is, my list of episodes of unmasking, and I will link that in the show notes as well to give you as many resources as I can. When you stop masking and start being yourself, you're gonna lose some people. People who only like the performed version, people who needed you to be small, and as hard as this is gonna be, let them go. Let there be space, let there be distance. Simple, not easy. I know that. But when you're authentically yourself, your actual people will find you. The ones who love the real you, the ones who get it, the ones who support you being exactly who you are. They're out there and they're looking for you too. This first year is brutal. It's the most intense processing you'll do. It's the deepest grief, it's the biggest identity shift when it comes to late diagnosis. But it gets easier, not easy, but easier. The second year, you're now rewriting your whole life story. You're not rewriting your whole life story anymore. Sorry. You're living forward with your new understanding. You're implementing what you've learned, you're building a life that actually fits. The first year is the storm, the second year is rebuilding, and the third year is starting to thrive. You'll get there, but right now you're in the storm, and that's okay. Even the years before diagnosis, you didn't waste them. You survived them. You learned, you became who you are now. I get it. No one asked me if I wanted to be strong. No one asked me if I wanted to be resilient. But here we are. You can grieve what you could have, what could have been different, and honor what you did with what you had. Because both are true. You don't have to have it together. You don't have to be inspirational. You don't have to have your shit figured out. You are allowed to be a mess. You are allowed to be falling apart while you put yourself back together differently. This is hard work, and you're allowed to struggle with it. So that's the first year. The relief and the rage and the grief, the identity crisis, and the cycling through all of it over and over. It's a lot. It's probably more than you expected, and it may be harder than you thought it would be. Sometimes you want to give up and go back to who you were, put your head in the sand. Maybe you want to just pretend like it didn't happen and just keep going putting yourself in those little boxes that you were never meant to fit in. Maybe you're quite not quite there with accommodating yourself, but you're doing better at accommodating others. But you're gonna look back a year from now and realize how much has shifted, how much you've processed, how much more you understand about yourself. You're going to look back and see that the person you were when you got diagnosed and the person you are a year later are different. Not because you're fixed or healed or quote unquote better, but because you're more yourself. And that's what the first year is really about. Not fixing yourself, but finding yourself, finding who you are inside without the performance, without the masking, without the minimizing, without the playing it small. All right, so more episodes are coming in this series. We're gonna talk about the grief more specifically, and we're gonna talk about how to move through it. We're gonna talk about RSD, PDA, rejection sensitive dysphoria, pathological demand avoidance, fear of being perceived, fear of rejection, gosh, what else? The strong sense of justice, the ability to see patterns, how to accommodate, how to create systems, how to talk to other people, how to advocate. Like I'm gonna go into every aspect I can think of to help you with your late diagnosis. But for now, if you're in your first year post-diagnosis, I see you. I've been you, I am you. You're okay, and it sucks because both of those can be true. I'd love to hear from you, got a question, please message me. Want to help more women hear this podcast, this episode, and support me in helping grow my podcast, please comment, please leave a review, please share this episode with someone because this helps me grow. This helps me show up in searches. If you want to work with me in my private practice, I work with clients on their healing journey through evidence-based therapy. I also offer life coaching programs for women nationwide, including an unmasking program for late-diagnosed neurodivergent women and a somatic healing program designed to complement your existing talk therapy. So Think Somatic Healing Life Coaching Program is an addition to your talk therapy. We're gonna move, we're gonna let the body heal while your mind is also healing. So a good compliment. Because healing isn't just about understanding your story, it's about feeling safe in your body again. If you'd like what you hear, please book a free 15 minute consultation on the link tree in the show notes. But until next time, my dears, I want you to know that you are never, were never, and will never be too much. and you're never too late and you don't have to figure it out all alone. I'm right here every Wednesday and Friday. May you be happy and free. May our healing ripple outward to bless the world with happiness and freedom. Take the gentlest care of your awakened heart and I'll see you soon.