Reflections on late-discovered ADHD and autism, motherhood, intergenerational trauma and healing within families.
There’s something very strange about writing a book about your life. Not because of the writing itself, although that can be emotional enough, but because at some point the people who know you best begin reading parts of you that perhaps they’ve never fully seen before.
Recently, while I was away on holiday, my daughter Ruby finally read my book, Meeting Myself for the First Time. Afterwards, she sent me a series of WhatsApp messages that honestly left me sitting in tears. Not tears of sadness exactly. More the kind that come when something lands deeply.
She wrote about finally understanding me differently. About seeing the little girl behind the woman she’s always known as “Mum”. She spoke about my struggles in school and work, the masking, the anger, the drinking, the grief I carried about how different life might have been had I understood myself sooner.
And then she said something that completely stopped me in my tracks: “I feel like I just met myself through you.” I don’t think I’ll ever forget reading that.
Because I think one of the hardest things about late-discovered neurodivergence – particularly for women with ADHD, autism or both – is the enormous amount of shame many of us carry for the years before we understood ourselves.
So many neurodivergent women spend decades believing they are failing at life somehow. Failing at coping. Failing at relationships. Failing at motherhood. Failing at adulthood in general, if I’m honest. We become experts at surviving whilst privately wondering why everything seems harder for us than it appears to be for everybody else.
Many late-discovered women have spent years masking, people pleasing, pushing through burnout and trying to override nervous system overwhelm without ever understanding why they felt so exhausted all the time.
And when you’re raising children at the same time, especially without understanding your own sensory needs, emotional dysregulation, hormonal changes or nervous system responses, that shame can become even heavier.
I think many late-discovered women quietly carry a fear that they somehow damaged the people they loved most. Not because they didn’t love fiercely enough, but because survival mode leaves marks.
When I wrote my book, I knew I was telling the truth about my life, but I don’t think I fully appreciated that my children would also find pieces of themselves inside it too. Ruby spoke about “breaking a likely generationally long cycle” and that phrase has stayed with me ever since, because intergenerational trauma isn’t always loud or obvious.
Sometimes it looks like generations of people living in nervous system survival without ever knowing why. Or emotional suppression, hypervigilance, people pleasing, perfectionism, shutdown, burnout, anger, anxiety or disconnecting from yourself in order to cope. And sometimes it looks like women who learned to keep going no matter how overwhelmed they felt because they simply didn’t have another option.
And often, particularly within neurodivergent families, nobody fully realises what they’re looking at. Traits get normalised, struggles get minimised, and people become “the difficult one”, “the sensitive one”, “the angry one”, “the dramatic one”, without anybody recognising the deeper story underneath.
What moved me most about Ruby’s messages was that she didn’t read my story through judgement. She read it through compassion and context. She saw the effort, the fighting and the love underneath the overwhelm.
I think that’s why this conversation affected me so deeply, because healing within families doesn’t require perfection. In fact, I’m not sure perfection has anything to do with it at all. What changes things is honesty, reflection, curiosity, being willing to look back with compassion instead of shame and have conversations that previous generations perhaps never had the safety, language or awareness to hold.
That is how cycles begin to shift. Not because one person suddenly becomes flawless, but because somebody becomes conscious enough to stop passing pain down unchanged.
Late-discovered ADHD and autism do not just affect the individual. They often reshape entire family dynamics, helping people finally understand themselves and each other through a different lens.
Late discovery changes people, of course it does. But I also think it changes families. It changes the way we understand each other, the way we understand ourselves, and sometimes even the way we reinterpret entire histories. And perhaps that’s one of the most healing parts of all.
My book was never really about having all the answers. It was about finally making sense of myself for the first time. What I didn’t expect was that it might help the people closest to me make sense of themselves too.