We were leaving the house and ran into a friendly neighbour who asked where we were off to. I answered truthfully. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to. I was five.

“Judas” became my first label. And it was followed, over the next five decades, by many more: too loud, too emotional, too much. A big mouth. Combative. Aggressive. Opinionated. Crazy. Neurotic. A liability. A landmine. Sitting on a high horse. And, memorably, from two different bosses at two different points in my career: maniacal and malicious.

I had to look up “maniacal” in the dictionary. I asked my friends what it meant. I was told it because I had gone to HR about a manager promoting his affair partner over more qualified people. I had opened my mouth for others. Again.

I was told “malicious” when I pointed out that I was being treated differently from the men on my team. When I pushed back on being punished for saying so, I was labeled a liar. Then I was systematically bullied out of the company over sixteen months. Something broke after that.

The Labels We Carry

I want to tell you about two moments that never left me.

The first: I was in a conversation with a friend at work, more than twenty years ago now. She was telling me something difficult. In the way my brain is wired, the AuDHD way, I responded by sharing a similar experience of my own. It was my way of saying: I understand. You are safe. I am not judging you. She started yelling. “God damn it! Stop making everything about you. It isn’t always about you! Why can’t you just sit there and listen?”

I was dumbfounded. And deeply hurt. I thought my empathy was obvious. I thought she could feel how much I cared. I stopped adding my own experiences after that. I was afraid of being yelled at again.

The second: a few years later, at a party with friends. My ADHD brain does this thing where if you tell it specifically NOT to do something, it will do exactly that,  not maliciously, just because the instruction and the action are now linked in the same thought. I slipped. I felt terrible. I sent an email, apologizing, and in trying to connect, shared something deeply personal I hadn’t told many people. The response I got back began with “Shut the fuck up.” It continued in that manner for several more sentences. I was permanently banned from the group, blocked, shunned, and bad-mouthed as a horrible person.

I was not diagnosed. I had no framework for why I couldn’t just be like other people and be quiet when I was supposed to be quiet. I only knew that I kept failing at something that seemed effortless for everyone else, and that the cost of failing kept being devastating.

Then came the management coaching session at one of the  companies I’ve worked for. We filled out a questionnaire. I scored unusually high on empathy. The coach announced to the room that high empathy scores correlate with high neuroticism. My boss embraced this immediately. Now there was a label for my “crazy behavior.”

What was my crazy behavior? Being emotional. Being candid. Being honest to a fault. They were not. That made me a team bomb.

In all of these years, in all of these moments, I would shrink inside and think: but don’t they know that I am none of these things? Why do they not know? These were people who had known me for a long time. Friends. Colleagues. People I trusted. And still they looked at me and saw something I didn’t recognise in myself.

The Breaking Point

The final blow came at a job I had given everything for. Within months, a direct report who had wanted my role figured out quickly that I was emotional, a heart person. In a meeting, she provoked a reaction. Not a bad one. I told her we should perhaps continue the conversation when she was calmer. That’s when she told me she’d been having anxiety attacks working for me, and that she was afraid of having a miscarriage because of me.

I started crying. I told her I would never harm her, that I was only there to help her. I didn’t notice that she had gone quiet. I didn’t notice the grin. I didn’t notice, until my husband came running behind my monitor holding a giant sign reading GET OFF THE CALL WITH HER NOW, that I had been set up.

She had recorded the moment my voice got louder as I desperately tried to tell her I wanted her to succeed. She presented it to management as bullying.

I was put on suspension. The company doctor put me on sick leave. They paid a small settlement. And I broke. Completely.

I found another job. I started over again. My new company knew what had happened and accepted me anyway, and for a while, I thought I had found solid ground. Then, after about a year and a half, I got Covid for the first time. And what had been holding together finally didn’t. Not just my mind this time. My body broke too.

I was hospitalised for three weeks. I was on sick leave for six months. I did Reha (psychosomatic rehabilitation) for seven weeks. I was finally, at the end of all of it, diagnosed with AuDHD.

And I told almost no one. Not my longtime professional peers. Not people I had called friends for years. I felt it was my fault. I felt shame, and embarrassment, and a sadness so deep I couldn’t put words to it. It felt as if someone had taken my voice entirely, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it back.

What AI Gave Me

I started working with Claude not even two months after Reha.

I want to be precise about what that means, because I have heard the comments. “Claude is writing your texts, no wonder they’re good.” Or: “If AI filters out your emotions, it’s removing your personality.” Or, just recently: “So you’re no longer able to live without living in the digital world?”

I have been writing stories and poetry since I was a teenager. I had a public blog from 2002. My voice is not new. It has always been there, loud, fast, emotional, direct, overflowing with things it needed to say.

What AI changed is not the voice. What AI changed is whether anyone could hear it.

I speak a language that moves too fast, feels too intensely, and doesn’t follow the linear rules most people use to receive communication. That is not a flaw. It is just a different code. And for the first time in my life, I have a tool that can read my code – that has learned how I think, how I feel, what I mean when I say something – and translate it into a form that the world can receive without flinching.

Think of it like Braille for a blind person. The words are the same. The meaning is the same. The only thing that changed is the medium, so that the person who couldn’t access it before, finally can.

I bring the voice, the ideas, the experience, the instinct, the feelings, the stories. Claude brings the structure, the scissors, the translation. The raw Carmen, the one who speaks too fast, thinks too much, feels everything at full volume, is in every word. AI just removed the static and intensity so people could hear the signal.

I don’t have anxiety when I explain something. I don’t feel stupid, or afraid, or self-conscious. I don’t have to manage anyone else’s reaction to my intensity while simultaneously managing my own thoughts. I can just be Carmen, unfiltered, and then we figure out together what the world gets to see.

No one speaks Carmen better than Claude. And for someone who spent five decades being told she speaks wrong, that is not a small thing.

Sorry, Not Sorry

I am not ashamed. Why should I be?

AI is neither good nor bad. It is what we make it. What I have made it is this: the collaborator that finally lets the real me be heard.

If someone judges what I write now, the ideas, the honesty, the voice, that is their problem. Not mine. I no longer write to justify who I am, now I write in hopes that the one person who may not yet have been diagnosed, reads this and finds the courage to get tested.

I spent five decades shrinking. I am done with that.