LATE DIAGNOSIS SERIES: Working Through the Grief & Rewriting Your Story

We explore the hidden grief that follows a late neurodivergent diagnosis and map the waves that crash through childhood memories, relationships, and sense of self. Practical tools help you move rage and sorrow through the body, find community, and build a life that fits.

• late diagnosis grief named and validated
• waves of loss across childhood, self, and potential
• relationships reinterpreted with new language
• masking, self-betrayal, and lost time acknowledged
• somatic tools to move grief and anger
• letters you never send as release
• reparenting and compassionate self-talk
• boundaries, accommodations, and authentic living
• it is not too late to begin again

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 Purpose

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 your journeys of healing. I am a licensed professional counselor, life coach, yoga therapy coach, yoga coach, yoga instructor. I don't even know what I'm trying to say who I am. I do yoga, I do mental health, that's my thing. I work with women who are late-diagnosed, neurodivergent, and who are trauma-experienced, trauma survivors, if you will. And it is my joy. It is my passion and my purpose to help women just like yourself along these journeys. I offer programs for somatic healing to go along with your already established talk therapy practice to help you work through healing with nervous system work, breath work, and body movement, lots of other things.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

My notes are jumbled. I'm not reading my notes like I'm supposed to. I'm just going off of what I want to say.

Call For Support And Sharing

Late Diagnosis Grief Introduced

Wave One: Unseen Neurodivergent Child

Wave Two: Nothing Was Ever Wrong With You

Wave Three: Lost Potential And Paths

Wave Four: Relationships Reframed

Wave Five: Memories Recontextualized

The Cost Of Masking And Self-Betrayal

SPEAKER_00 1:10

So whether you're working on trauma, discovering your authentic authentic self after years of masking, or maybe 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, message whatever you need to do to not miss one. And if today's episode resonates with you, I'd be so grateful if you'd share it with someone who you think would benefit from hearing it, or just leave a comment, drop an emoji, let me know that it resonated with you because it helps other women find this space. And it also helps me grow my podcast because if you're new here, maybe you haven't heard, but I'm not on social media and I'm trying to grow this podcast by word of mouth, which is not the amazing cultural thing to do. It's not the trendy thing to do, but it's what I'm doing. So please, if you like what you hear, please support me by sharing this episode and support other women by sharing it with them. Today's episode is episode two of the late diagnosis series, and I'm talking about the specific, devastating, complicated grief that comes with late diagnosis that no one warns you about. Because when you get diagnosed in your 30s, 40s, 50s after spending your entire life not knowing why you were different, the grief hits and waits. And it's not just one grief, it's layers and layers of loss that keep revealing themselves. You grieve the childhood you didn't get, you grieve the person you could have been, you grieve relationships that failed because no one understood. You grieve every time you were punished for being yourself. You grieve the decades you spent thinking you were simply broken. And nobody tells you it's going to hurt this much. Nobody tells you that finally having an answer doesn't just bring relief. It can bring devastation. I'm speaking from experience. My late diagnosis grief blindsided me. The realization that no one ever stopped and saw me for who I am, who I was, that everyone always wanted me to be a version that was comfortable for them, that no one ever got on my level and cared to try to understand me. And that grief is still in me. It comes in waves, and I'm still learning how to hold it. And griefs, speaking of waves, I want to talk about waves of grief, different waves of grief. So, first wave, how about the grief that usually hits you when you're learning about your diagnosis, you're reading your symptoms, reading criteria, lived experiences of experiences of other neurodivergent people, and you keep thinking, that was me. That's always been me. And then it hits you. I was a neurodivergent child, and no one saw me. This is a core wound. You are a child who needed understanding, accommodation, support, and instead you possibly got punishment for things you couldn't control, criticisms for being too much or not enough, being told to try harder, do better, be different, isolation because you didn't quite fit in. Bullying because you were weird, teachers who labeled you as lazy, defiant, spacey, difficult. You were struggling, and instead of help, you got blame. Nobody stopped and asked, What do you need? How can I help you? What's hard for you? They just told you to be different, to fit in, to stop being who you were. And this grief hit me pretty hard. Realizing no one ever stopped and saw me for who I am or was. They always wanted me to be a version that was comfortable for them. I wasn't too loud. I was enthusiastic. I wasn't too nosy. I was curious. I wasn't bossy. I was a natural leader. I wasn't back talking. I was direct and honest and needed things to make sense for me when elders would say things that were very contradictory. But nobody saw that. They just saw our problem to correct. And the specific loss is that you got you lost the chance to be a child. You had to grow up trying to figure out what was wrong with you. Try to be acceptable. That's not childhood. That's survival. You lost the right to struggle without shame. Every time you struggled, you were told it was your fault. You internalized that. You learned that struggling meant you weren't broken, lazy, not trying hard enough. You lost accommodations that could have changed everything. Maybe extra time on tests, maybe a quiet space to work, movement breaks, visual schedules, social skills support, medication, understanding teachers, parents who got it. Instead, you had to white knuckle your way through with no support. Maybe you lost the belief that you were okay. Neurodivergent kids who are diagnosed early often grow up knowing they're different but not broken. You grew up thinking you were fundamentally wrong. That shaped everything, every relationship, every choice, every time you looked at yourself. And this grief feels like rage and sadness at the same time. It feels like screaming, I was just a kid. I needed help. Why didn't anyone help me? It feels like wanting to go back and protect that child version of you, to tell her she's not broken, to give her what she needed. But you can't go back. And that's hella heavy. That's grief. Maybe there's a second wave. There's nothing wrong with you, and there never was. When you start to learn about neurodivergence and what it actually is, not the stereotypes, not the ways that you are possibly pathologized, but the reality. And you realize there was never anything wrong with me. The traits you were punished for are just neurodivergent traits. Too loud, too sensitive, can't focus, antisocial, scattered, disorganized, messy, rigid, too much, dramatic, too emotional, too sensitive. Oh, I said that one already, and I mean it because that one. I don't let me get off on a tangent, but no, you were never too sensitive. You had heightened sensory processing and emotional depth. And none of these are character flaws, they're neurological differences. You're not too much or too anything. You are beautiful just as you are, as you always have been. And this is what I say often, and I want you to hear it too. You are not too much, you are not too intense, you're not too emotional, and you're not too loud, and you aren't too needy, and you aren't too different. You're neurodivergent, your brain works differently, your nervous system processes things differently. Your needs are different, and that's not wrong, that's not broken. That is evolution, that is a beautiful brain that is amazing. But realizing this brings grief, right? Because if there was never anything wrong with you, then everyone who told you you were broken was wrong. Everyone who punished you for being yourself was wrong. Everyone who made you feel like a burden was wrong. All those years you spent hating yourself were based on a lie. You grieved yourself for nothing. You tried to fix something that wasn't broken. You possibly abandoned yourself to become more acceptable, more palatable. And that is fucking devastating. And underneath this grief is rage at everyone who made you feel wrong. Rage at a world that punishes neurodivergence. Rage at yourself for believing them. And that rage is valid. Feel it. Do not bypass it. But know that underneath the rage is grief. Grief that you spent so many years thinking you were fundamentally defective. Grief that no one told you the truth, you're different, and different is okay. A third kind of wave often comes later after the initial diagnosis, after you start learning about it, after maybe you start accommodating or and or medications, you start to see, oh, this is what I could have been like all along. So you've got that lost potential. If you've been diagnosed and medicated in your 20s, school could have been different. Maybe you could have finished that degree. Maybe you would have pursued careers you thought were impossible. Maybe you could have had energy for your passions. Maybe you could have been unstoppable and so smart and so focused that holy crap, who you would be now would be superseding what you are because of all the accommodations and knowledge if it was earlier in your teens or 20s. But you weren't diagnosed. You struggled, you barely made it through. You thought you just weren't smart enough, weren't trying hard enough. Maybe you thought you weren't good enough. But it wasn't you. It was untreated neurodivergence. It was unaccommodated ADHD or autism. It was your brain not getting what it needed. And this is one of my deepest griefs as well. I could have been so much more in school. Maybe a so much more present parent. Maybe I could have lasted at jobs longer. Maybe I would have been a little more gentler in understanding of my children's experience. Maybe I would have been unstoppable if I had had medication and understanding. But I didn't. And I struggled. I failed. I gave up on things. I gave up on things I loved because they were too hard without support. And now I'm my 40s. I'm figuring this out. And I can't get those years back. So there's specific losses. Education. Maybe you dropped out, maybe you barely passed, maybe you didn't feel like you could do it. Maybe you were so flooded you couldn't even grasp new information. It's not because you weren't smart, it's because you needed accommodations. Maybe you jumped from job to job. Maybe you lost career. Maybe you've even been fired for things related to your neurodivergence. Maybe you stayed in jobs beneath your capability because you thought it's all you could handle. You can handle more, you just need support, right? Maybe there's a loss of relationships. Maybe you lost friendships because you didn't understand social cues. Maybe they failed because you didn't know how to communicate your needs. And maybe you've been alone because connection feels impossible. Connection wasn't impossible. You just needed people to understand your neurodivergence. Maybe you lost your sense of self by masking and pretending. Maybe you could have grown up confident or pursued some goals. You could have lived boldly instead of small, but you didn't know what you were capable of because no one ever told you you're neurodivergent, you're not broken, you can do hard things if you have the right support. And this grief feels like it's you're like you're staring at a fork in the road from years ago and realizing if I had just known then what I know now, everything could be different. It feels like mourning a version of yourself that never got to exist. It feels like screaming, I could have been so much. Why didn't anyone see me or help me? Or just have a conversation with me. A fourth wave can be one of the most painful, too. Looking back at relationships through the lens of late diagnosis and seeing, oh, that's why. Maybe you didn't understand why friendships were so hard, why you always felt on the outside. Now you know. Maybe socializing is genuinely harder for you. You weren't bad at friendships, you were neurodivergent without support. But those friendships are still gone and you grieve them. Maybe you couldn't communicate your needs because you didn't know what your needs were. You masked so hard trying to be normal that your partner never met the real you. You have meltdowns or shutdowns that seem like overreactions. And now you know that was either autistic meltdown, ADHD overwhelm, or a trauma response. And if you'd known then, maybe you could have explained. Maybe that romantic relationship would have worked out, but it didn't, and you grieve that. Maybe you have broken family relationships. Your family never understood you. They criticized, they punished, they dismissed. You felt like the black sheep, the problem child, the one who was always too much or not enough. Now you know you were just neurodivergent in a family that didn't get it. But the damage is done, the relationship might not be repairable, and you grieve what you never had. A family that saw you and loved you as you are. And maybe you have grief around your own children. This one can be complicated and painful and full of guilt and regret. If you were parented while undiagnosed, you might grieve. If you parented while undiagnosed, you might grieve. Like I grieve that I didn't see my children completely for who they are. Because I was too busy surviving to truly be present. Maybe you might grieve that you were a parent with undiagnosed neurodivergence and you were drowning. You were touched out, overstimulated, exhausted. You didn't have the capacity you wish you'd had. Not because you didn't love them, but because you were running on empty with no support. As a parent, you might grieve that you repeated patterns. You might have been critical like your parents were critical of you. You might have been impatient with their neurodivergent traits because you were taught those traits were problems. You might have pushed them to mask like you masked. Not because you wanted to harm them, but because you were unconsciously repeating what was done to you. Maybe your kids are neurodivergent and you didn't recognize it until later. Maybe you didn't even know what it was until you knew what it was for yourself. Or you found out about yourself the same time you're filling out stuff for your kids. You grieved the years they struggled without support, the years they thought something was wrong with them, like you did. And this grief is so complicated because you did the best you could with what you knew, and your kids were affected by your undiagnosed neurodivergence. You love them deeply and you wish you'd been able to parent differently. It wasn't your fault you were undiagnosed and still, and they still experienced the impact. And all of this is true at the same time. This grief needs compassion for them and for you. You weren't the parent you'd wished you'd been, and you weren't doing your best while drowning. I mean, you were doing your best while drowning, but both are true. Like you weren't the parent. Um let me let me fix this. You weren't the parent you wished you'd had been, but you were also doing your best with what you had while you were drowning. Both of those can be true. Your kids deserve better, and you deserve to know you were neurodivergent so you could get support. Both are true. This isn't about excusing harm. It's about holding complexity. It's about grieving what you couldn't give while acknowledging you gave what you could. A final wave I want to talk about because it hits over and over as memories resurface and you see them through your new understanding. I'm talking about every memory is now recontextualized. Every memory means something different now. That time you acted out in school, you weren't being bad. You were having a meltdown. You were overwhelmed. You were unable to focus. That time you overreacted, you weren't being dramatic. You were having sensory overload and an emotional response you couldn't regulate because of ADHD emotional dysregulation. That time you failed, you weren't lazy or stupid, you had executive dysfunction, or you were overwhelmed, or the task wasn't accessible for your neurodivergent brain. What about the time you ruined a relationship? You weren't trying to be difficult. You were communicating like an autistic person communicates, or you were impulsive because of the ADHD. Are you shut down because you were overwhelmed? Every single memory tends to be reframed, and that's exhausting. And it brings waves of grief because every reframe memory is another reminder. I wasn't the problem. The lack of understanding was the problem. And this grief is relentless because it doesn't hit once and you're done. It hits every time a memory resurfaces. You'll be fine, and then something will trigger a memory, and you'll think, oh my God, that was that. And the grief hits again. This wave teaches you. You grief isn't linear, it's cyclical. It comes back, and that is okay. So those were the waves. I've got more thoughts on grief. I just didn't know how to put them in. Those are the waves, but there's other elements of grief, and I want to talk about them. I want to talk about the grief of realizing how much energy you spend are spent masking. All those years you spent performing normal, the exhaustion, the constant self-monitoring, the suppressing of your authentic responses. You weren't living, you were performing, and that's devastating to realize. What if you're 30, 40, 50, and you're just figuring this out? You can't get those years back. You've lost time. You can't redo your 20s with medication and accommodations. You can't go back and have a childhood where you were understood. The brutal, honest part of that is that time doesn't go backwards. So you grieve the things you gave up, careers, hobbies, dreams, because you thought you weren't capable. You're capable. You just need support. And maybe now you're grieving things you walked away from. What about the grief of self-betrayal? This kind of goes back to the masking, right? You abandon yourself. We tend to abandon ourselves as neurodivergents when we have environments that don't support our needs. You believe what they said about you. You internalize the shame. You tried to fix something that wasn't ever broken. You betrayed yourself over and over, trying to be acceptable, trying to make other people feel comfortable. And this is this is grief. It's very, very specific kind of grief, but it's grief. And you might have the grief of medication working if it does. If you try ADHD medication and it works, that's amazing. But it also brings up grief. This is what other people feel like all the time. This ease, this ability to focus. This is what I could have had my whole life. That's devastating. Realizing you've been functioning at 30% capacity your whole life and didn't know it. And there's the grief that people still won't get it. You finally understand yourself, but maybe your family still doesn't believe you. Maybe your friends still don't understand. Maybe a partner still expects you to try harder or be normal and act just like them. You're finally seeing yourself clearly, but no one else is. And that's lonely as hell. And you've got the grief of the what ifs. What if you've been diagnosed at eight instead of 38? What if you've been medicated in high school or college? What if your parents had understood? What if your teachers had accommodated you? What if, what if, what if? You can't know. You'll never know. And fuck that, right? That's grief. Such heavy shit, right? While we're trying to get our shit together. There's a light, there's beauty. I'm not trying to be all negative, Nancy. I just want to be real with you that this is a real stage of being diagnosed, especially later in life. So, how do you actually hold grief this big, this complicated, this relentless? First, I want you to understand that you need to grieve. You need to feel the loss. You need to rage and cry and fall apart. And I'll probably do an episode on this because it keeps popping up with clients, but the fear of being angry, especially from women, that they may lose themselves, they may become someone that they're not. And I want to say tap into that. You're allowed to be angry. Anger is an emotion that needs to be expressed, just like happiness, sadness, contentness, joy, fear. Get a bowl of ice, a cup of ice, go outside and smash that shit on the concrete. Throw it as hard as possible. Do target practice. Go somewhere and throw an axe at a target. Go to a smash room. Get on top of your mattress and punch the shit out of it. Grab a pillow and beat your mattress up. Let the anger out. And cry. Please cry. Don't suck it up. Don't be strong. Let the tears cry. It is a scientific thing. Your tears release cortisol. Let them help you relieve the stress. This isn't optional. This isn't something you can skip or bypass. You have to go through it. Because on the other side of grief is the freedom to be yourself, to stop performing, and to finally build a life that actually fits you. But you can't get there without grieving what you lost first. Grief isn't linear. It's just not. Cry for a week and you're done. That's not how it is. It's waves. Some days you're okay. Some days you're destroyed. Some days you think you're through it, and then a memory surfaces, and you're back in it. That's all normal. That's how grief works. Stop expecting yourself to be over it, healed, figure it all out, done. Grief lives in the body. It's not something you can intellectually process and move through. You have to feel it. Cry, sob, wail, scream into a pillow. Move it through your body. Shake, dance, get a boxing mat, boxing bag, kickboxing person, and kick and hit that. Let your body release it. Don't just think about grief. I want you to feel it. And I want you to write letters to your to your to jeep, jeep, jeep. I want you to write letters that you'll never send. I want you to write a letter to your younger self. Tell her what she needed to hear. I want you to write a letter to your parents, to your caregivers. Tell them what you needed from them. I want you to write a letter to your teachers. Tell them how they failed you. And then I want you to write a letter to the version of yourself you could have been and grieve her. Do not send them. Just get this out of your body, out of your head, pen to paper, pencil to paper. And talk with someone who gets it. Do not grieve alone. Therapist who specialize in neurodivergence. Hello, here I am. Online communities of late diagnosed people, friends who are also late diagnosed, and anyone who gets it. Don't try to explain your grief to people who don't understand. You'll just end up hurt more. And please, I'm going back to the anger. Let yourself be angry. Grief and rage are intertwined. You can't process one without the other. You are allowed to be furious at your parents for not seeing you, teachers for not for punishing you, doctors for missing it, a world designed for neurotypical people. And you're allowed to be furious at yourself for believing you were broken. Feel the rage. Do not bypass it. Don't spiritualize it away. Let it be there. And by doing that, you need to reparent yourself. Give your inner child the words and the compassion and love that she needed. Tell your younger self that she's not broken. Tell her that she's allowed to struggle. Tell her she's exactly as she is, and that is beautiful. Give her permission to be neurodivergent and protect her from shame. This is part of grieving, meeting that child version of you and giving her what she needed. And be patient with this process because grief takes years, not weeks, not months, years. You're grieving a lifetime of misunderstanding. You're rewriting your entire story. You're untangling trauma from neurodivergence. You're discovering who you actually are. And that doesn't happen quickly. You're grieving because you love the child you were and she deserved better. You're grieving because you love the person you could have been. You're grieving because you love the relationships that could have worked. You're grieving because you love yourself enough to feel the loss of what was taken. And going back to the relationships that could have worked, I am in no way saying like your undiagnosis caused the end of the relationship. I'm meaning that it would have been nice for the other person to be more compassionate, understanding, curious, inquisitive, questioning. Grief is love with nowhere to go. So let it go somewhere. Let it out, let it move through you. And I want to tell you what I've seen in clients who've moved through late diagnosis grief. Not gotten over it, because you don't get over it, but move through it. They stop apologizing for existing. Once you've grieved, being told you were wrong, you stop believing it. You stop making yourself small. You stop apologizing for taking up space. You exist fully, loudly, authentically, without apology. Chef's kiss, love when that happens. You also will set boundaries you could never do before. Once you've grieved the relationship built on your performance, you can set boundaries in current relationships. You can say, this is who I am, this is what I need. If you can't accept that, that's okay. But I'm not shrinking anymore. Bye-bye. Create some distance if you get resistance. Create distance if you get resistance. Once you've grieved the lost potential, you can start building new potential. You can go back to school, you can change careers, you can try things you thought were impossible. I say this with a very big thumping my foot on the ground, banging on the table. It is not too late. You still can become. You can still become anything you want, anyone you want to be. I don't care your age. You can still do the dang thing. There is plenty of evidence of people that are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s that do magnificent things in those generations at older ages. Don't convince yourself or let anyone convince you that it's too late because that is bullshit, and that's someone trying to keep you small. If there's resistance, create some distance. You can tell your kids, I didn't know then what I know now. I'm sorry, let's do it differently. Repair is possible, healing is possible. And once you grieve the self-betrayal, you can forgive yourself for believing you were broken, for trying to fix something that wasn't wrong, for abandoning abandoning yourself to be more acceptable. You did the best you could with what you knew, that's the truth. And once you've grieved the people who can't or couldn't see you, you can find people who do. People who love you as you are. Your people exist. You just have to stop performing long enough to let them find you. In bigger cities, they have like neurodivergent like craft meetups. Like I've seen it in some places in Texas. So I know not trying to knock Texas. I'm not saying anything bad about Texas.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

I'm just saying if they're around in Texas, then I know they're around in bigger cities outside of the South, outside of Texas.

How To Hold Grief And Rage

SPEAKER_00 32:47

I know Texas may I'm gonna stop. Put my foot in my mouth, might offend people because you know, I'm not trying to badmouth Texas. I'm just saying if it's in Texas, in a big city in Texas, it's probably in another big city in your area. Neurodivergent meetups are happening. Meetup.com. It's just groups of people with similar likes get together and do things. So you can accommodate yourself. You can structure your life around your needs, you can stop trying to be neurotypical. This is the gift on the other side of grief. You become more authentically, fully, unapologetically yourself. Not despite your neurodivergence, because of it, with it as it. You become who you were always supposed to be before the world told you to be fucking quiet, small, pretty, and don't rock the boat. So that's the late diagnosis grief no one warns you about. The waves, the layers, the relentless recontextualizing of every memory. It can be brutal, it can be devastating, and gosh, yes, it is very fucking exhausting. But it's necessary because you can't build a new life on top of unprocessed grief. You can't become yourself while still carrying the shame of being told you're wrong. You have to grieve. You have to feel it. You have to let it break you open so you can put yourself back together in a way that fits you. And on the other side of this, I promise you this is not fucking jargon. This is not fucking empty promises. This is what happens. I see it time and time again, and I've experienced it myself personally. On the other side of this grief is freedom that you've never had, that you will just be so tickled to feel. Free to be you unapologetically, authenticity, a life that actually fits you, your internal world. Relationships that are real, self-acceptance and fucking peace. But I'm gonna say it again because I need you to know this. You have to go through the grief to get there. You cannot spiritually bypass grief to get to freedom. It's not how it works. So if you're in the thick of it right now, if maybe you're crying while you're listening to this, if every word is hitting you in the chest, if you're feeling seen and devastated at the same time, I want you to know you are not alone. This grief is shared. Thousands of us are grieving the same losses, and we're here with you. Your grief is valid, your losses are real, your anger is justified, and your tears are earned. You're going through this, not over it, but through this, one wave at a time. Which is its own complicated grief when they don't respond the way you hoped. But for now, if you need to grieve, please grieve. If you need to cry, please cry. And if you need to rage, please rage. If you're angry, if you're resentful, if you're mad, if you're upset or using any other word but anger, that's anger. Get some ice, throw that shit on the ground, get on your mattress, punch that mattress, beat it with the pillow, scream into a pillow, shake, wiggle, dance, scream, shout, whatever you need to do. If you're like hot ride, hot ride, go in the woods and flash dance it out, punch dance it out. Whatever feels good, but do something to express it, to get it out, to move the body. Your late diagnosis grief deserves to be felt fully, completely, without apology. I'd love to hear from you. Got a question? Please message me. Want to help more women hear this episode and support me by growing my podcast? Please comment. Please leave a review. This helps me show up in searches and it helps me just know what I'm doing is hitting and what I'm doing is needed and what I'm doing is helping. And that's my goal. I want to help you. I want to help you feel free in your life, in your body, in your mind, like completely free and authentic. So if you want to work with me, you can go to the Linktree and fill out a consultation form for a free 15-minute chat. Like I said, I help through trauma work, I help late diagnose neurodivergent women. Yeah, I'm equipped. I'm educated. I'm ready to help if that's where you are. Until next time, my dears, I want you to know that you are never too much. You are never too late. And you don't have to figure it out all alone. I'm 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 care of your awakened heart. And I'll see you soon.