I read something this week that made me cry.

Not the polite, dignified kind of crying. The kind that catches you off guard at 10am on a Friday, sitting at your desk, when someone else’s words reach through the screen and grab something you didn’t know was still raw.

A successful entrepreneur, someone I know and respect, wrote honestly about becoming a unicorn and feeling empty. About chasing a goal for a decade and arriving at the destination to find nothing there. About burnout, depression, gaining a hundred pounds, missing weddings and birthdays. About running on what he called “dirty fuel” – fear, ego, scarcity – and the engine eventually breaking.

I cried because I felt every word of it. Not the unicorn part. But everything underneath it.

The Break

My crash didn’t arrive all at once. It started over six years ago, slowly, steadily gaining momentum and intensity, the way a storm builds on the horizon before it finally hits.

My heart broke first. Then my mind along with my body, because bodies are loyal that way, they carry what we can’t process until they simply cannot anymore.

I didn’t go on an ayahuasca vision quest. I fled the US. I crossed an ocean looking for something I couldn’t name, safety, maybe. Or just distance from the wreckage.

What followed was my complete crash. I lost my ability to live. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t sleep. I was in so much pain, physically and emotionally, that all I wanted was for it to stop. In Germany, I found a doctor who actually wanted to get to the bottom of things, which led to three weeks in an acute psychosomatic clinic, and another seven weeks in a psychosomatic rehabilitation clinic the following year, where I learned to rebuild myself from the ground up. A year of cognitive behavioral therapy. Medication that finally – finally – worked. Daily meditation. Yoga. Mindfulness. The slow, unglamorous, extraordinarily difficult work of rewiring a brain that had been running on the wrong fuel for decades.

And then: a diagnosis. AuDHD. Hypersensitive.

Suddenly, everything made sense. The alien feeling. The minefield world. The people who couldn’t hear me or understand me no matter how hard I tried. The burnout that wasn’t laziness or weakness but a nervous system that had been screaming for years and finally gave out.

I was told, at various points in my career, that it was “unnatural to have that much empathy.” That my sensitivity was neurotic. That I was too loud, too quiet, too direct, too combative, but most importantly, that my way of thinking, creative, lateral, human-centered, couldn’t be measured in KPIs and therefore had no value.

I believed them. For a long time, I believed them.

The Dirty Fuel

I have spent 20 years in fraud prevention. I have built departments from nothing. Served on global industry boards. Presented on international stages. Won awards. Trained teams. Consulted companies across continents.

And for most of that time, underneath all of it, ran a quiet, relentless conviction that I was not enough. Not smart enough. Not successful enough. Not whatever enough.

That is the dirty fuel he wrote about. Fear. Scarcity. The need to prove. The goalposts that move the moment you reach them.

For him, it was chasing a valuation. For me, it was chasing belonging. Chasing the moment when someone in a room would finally look at me and see, not just tolerate, but genuinely see, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

I found it, sometimes. There were leaders who saw me. Environments where I could breathe. Moments where I felt, briefly, that I had found my home.

And then they ended. Leaders moved on. Companies changed or went under. The safety disappeared and I was back to being an alien on a foreign planet, learning their language all over again, hoping that this time I would finally be understood.

What the Diagnosis Changed – And What It Didn’t

Understanding that I am AuDHD and hypersensitive changed everything about how I understood my past. The burnouts. The conflicts. The pattern of being brilliant in one environment and then suddenly, incomprehensibly, the problem in another. The way certain managers made me flourish and others made me disappear.

It explained why I always thought in ways that couldn’t be easily measured. Why I cared too much, felt too much, gave too much, and why that was consistently treated as a liability rather than an asset.

What the diagnosis did not change: the world I still have to navigate every day.

I am writing a book. I write on LinkedIn. I still get on stages and talk about the importance of humanity, intuition and heart in fighting fraud. I meditate every morning. I do yoga. I have built this blog, myneurodivergentmind.com, where I write honestly about what it is to live in this brain, because I spent too long thinking I was the only one.

I am proud of my tender heart. My different brain. My empathy. My desire to advocate, to make a difference, to never give up. These are not flaws I am learning to manage. They are who I am.

And yet.

Still Looking

I have not yet found my place.

I don’t mean this as despair; I have come too far for despair. I mean it as honest inventory. The place that doesn’t run on ego and insecurity. Where I don’t have to mask or hide or be afraid of showing who I am. Where my way of thinking is a feature, not a problem to be managed. Where the humanity I bring to everything I do is valued rather than treated as inconvenient.

I have caught glimpses of it. I have worked for people who saw me clearly and created space for me to be fully myself, and those have been the best chapters of my professional life. I know what it feels like. That’s what makes the absence of it so recognizable.

The entrepreneur who made me cry wrote something that I keep coming back to: “We should strive for greater heights, but from a place of love, service, and abundance, instead of fear, ego, and scarcity.”

I am trying. Every day I am trying to show up from that place, not because I need to prove anything anymore, but because I genuinely love this work and the people it serves.

What I am still learning is that I cannot create that environment alone. The right place requires the right people. Leaders who are secure enough not to be threatened by someone like me. Cultures that understand that performance looks different depending on who’s measuring it. I am a high performer, my teams don’t have turnover, I attract business with who I am, I inspire people to do their best work. But that kind of performance doesn’t always fit neatly into the KPIs determined by the loudest voices in the room. The metrics that matter most to me, integrity, trust, loyalty, depth of relationship, the willingness of a team to follow you into difficult territory,  rarely show up in a quarterly report. I need a place that can see those things. That values them. Spaces where a neurodivergent woman with a tender heart and 20 years of expertise doesn’t have to fight to be heard.

I haven’t stopped looking.

I don’t intend to.

And to the person whose words cracked something open in me this morning: thank you for writing your heart. You gave me permission to write mine.

I was called “Judas” when I was five years old.

My mother called me Judas. 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.

That 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. I was labeled a liar. Then I was systematically bullied out of the company over a period of over a year.

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, probably 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. 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. 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 quite some 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. I had never heard that from any previous employee.

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 a psychosomatic rehab 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 rehab.

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 2006. 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 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.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes not from being alone, but from being consistently misread by the people around you. From trying your hardest to connect, and watching it land wrong. From caring deeply, sometimes too deeply, and being told you are cold, arrogant, aggressive, or self-absorbed.

This is a story I know well. It is the story of most of my life.

“You always make everything about yourself”

One of the things I heard most often in relationships and friendships was that I made everything about me. Someone would share an experience, and I would immediately jump in: “Oh my God, that happened to me too!” or “I know exactly what you mean, once I…”

What I was trying to do was make them feel heard. Safe. Less alone in their experience. In my mind, sharing a similar story was the highest form of empathy, proof that I genuinely understood, that their experience resonated so deeply it triggered my own memory.

What they heard was: here she goes again.

It took me a long time to understand that for most people, empathy looks like silence and nodding, not enthusiastic parallel storytelling. And it took even longer to stop feeling hurt by that, because my intention was always the opposite of selfishness. I was relating. I just didn’t know that my way of relating looked, from the outside, like hijacking.

This is one of the cruelest paradoxes of AuDHD: I feel everything. Other people’s pain, joy, discomfort, excitement, I absorb it all like a sponge. And yet the very intensity of that feeling causes me to respond in ways that get misread as oblivious or egotistical.

Too Much, and Never Enough

I am animated. When I am excited, I get loud. When I am angry, I get louder. When I am passionate about something, I talk faster, my hands move, my whole body gets involved. I have been told I am aggressive, combative, threatening, intimidating, and half the time I didn’t even realize my volume had climbed.

I would walk away from conversations genuinely confused. Was I angry just now? I didn’t feel angry. I was passionate. I was engaged. I was, in my own internal experience, enthusiastic, and what landed on the other person was a wall of intensity they didn’t know how to handle.

So I learned to censor. To monitor my own volume in real time, to modulate my tone, to consciously soften edges that felt sharp to others but completely normal to me. It was exhausting. And it was yet another layer of masking – performing “calm” and “reasonable” while internally running at full speed.

At the same time, I somehow also managed to miss obvious signals. Hints. Subtext. The thing someone is really saying when they say something else. I can walk into a room and feel the tension before anyone has spoken a word, and yet completely miss that someone has been trying to tell me something for weeks because they never said it directly. If you don’t tell me clearly, there is a good chance I won’t pick it up. Not because I don’t care, but because my brain is wired for directness and tends to take things at face value.

So I was simultaneously too much and not enough. Too intense, too loud, too honest,  and also somehow oblivious to the obvious. Another name for me „Captain Obvioius.“

The “Defect” Problem

I have spent my entire life learning everything I could about whatever captured my attention. When I was finally diagnosed with AuDHD, I did what I always do: I researched obsessively. I read everything. I learned about rejection sensitive dysphoria, about sensory processing, about the specific ways autism and ADHD interact and contradict each other in the same brain.

So when I was at a clinic and the therapists kept referring to AuDHD as a defect, a mental disability, and framing it as a psychological illness, I could not stay quiet. They had never heard of rejection sensitive dysphoria. They were telling patients that something was fundamentally wrong with them.

I argued. I corrected. I explained. AuDHD is a neurotype, not a disease. It is a different operating system, not a broken one. A neurodivergent brain is not defective, it is merely differently wired. There is a significant difference, and the language we use to describe it matters enormously, especially to the people sitting in that room trying to make sense of their own minds.

To their credit, they listened. “We didn’t know that,” they said. And that was that.

But that reaction was the exception, not the rule. More often, at work, in friendships, in countless conversations where someone asked for my opinion or advice, the pattern looked very different. I would research deeply, form a well-grounded view, and share it honestly. And I would be told I was arrogant. Lecturing. Too serious. Sitting on a high horse. The cruelest version of this was when someone specifically asked for my input, didn’t like the answer, and then made me the problem for giving it.

I have a sense of humor, by the way. A very good one. I can sit in a corner laughing at something ridiculous I said or did, completely entertained by my own brain. It is just that my humor tends to be dry, or specific, or internally referenced in a way that not everyone follows. I spent years thinking something was wrong with my sense of humor too. Turns out, I was just funny in a room that wasn’t tuned to my frequency.

The Honesty Problem

I still don’t fully understand why honesty is treated as a character flaw.

I don’t understand the social contract that says you should soften the truth to the point of unrecognizability, or stay silent about something that matters, in order to keep the peace. I find dishonesty, even the polite, well-intentioned kind, genuinely confusing. Why say you’re fine when you’re not? Why agree when you disagree? Why not just say the thing?

The answer, I now understand intellectually, is that most people are managing a complex web of social relationships where directness can cause damage and ambiguity preserves harmony. I understand this. I just cannot always execute it.

What I struggle with most is knowing when it is safe to speak. I book a seat in the quiet section of the train specifically because I cannot manage the sensory overload of noise and chaos. When someone sits down next to me and proceeds to have a loud phone conversation, I am faced with an impossible choice: say something and risk being attacked for it, or say nothing and sit in sensory distress for the next few hours.

I have tried both. Neither works consistently. When I speak up calmly, politely, I am mostly still met with rudeness or hostility that I did not expect and cannot regulate my response to. When I say nothing, I spend the journey white-knuckling it through the noise, blood pressure rising and desperately trying to control my anxiety.

The result is that I often feel voiceless. Not because I have nothing to say, but because how I say it tends to land wrong, and when I am already emotionally activated by someone being rude or unkind, my ability to regulate my tone collapses entirely. I become the problem, even when I wasn’t the one who created it.

What I Wish People Understood

For most of my life, I was made to feel stupid. By teachers who called me lazy. By people who didn’t understand me and assumed the fault was mine. By systems that mistook my intensity for aggression and my honesty for arrogance. That feeling never fully went away, even after I had every reason to know better.

The truth is that being misunderstood this consistently and this chronically does something to a person. It makes you doubt yourself. It makes you wonder if the problem really is you, if you are too much, or not enough, or simply wired wrong.

What I know now is that I was never too much. I was just in the wrong rooms, with people who didn’t have the tools to understand me, and sometimes, frankly, didn’t have the desire to try.

There were always people who got it. Who found my honesty refreshing instead of offensive. Who laughed at the same things I did. Who didn’t need me to perform a quieter, softer, more palatable version of myself. They were, unfortunately, in the minority.

But they were enough to remind me that the problem was never me.

It was the frequency.