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.

Recently I had a conversation that lasted an hour and a half and felt like five minutes with another fraud fighter.

We met briefly at a professional event about a decade ago. Barely fifteen minutes of conversation, and yet we both knew immediately. He works in the financial industry in Germany. He is warm, funny, straight-forward, and someone I would call a genuine friend. After my LinkedIn series went live, he reached out and asked if we could make a little more time to talk.

What followed was one of those rare conversations where someone holds up a mirror and you see yourself clearly for the first time in a while.

The Stare

I knew from the moment I met him that he was like me.

Not because of anything he said. Because of the way he looked at people. There is a particular quality to the gaze of someone whose brain processes the world at this depth, a kind of focused, unguarded attention that goes straight through the surface of things. People notice it. It makes them uncomfortable. They tell you to stop staring.

I asked my friend if that had ever happened to him. He confirmed immediately. I laughed and told him: that’s how I knew you are “one of my kind.” That’s the stare. It’s what you see when someone is genuinely, completely present, not performing attention, but actually there, reading everything.

Recognizing Your Own Kind

There is something that happens when two people like this find each other. No warm-up required. No small talk necessary. You are simply, immediately, on the same frequency, and you both know it without saying so.

In our call we talked about the things we have quietly learned to hide. With people he has a close connection to, he can sense physical pain, where it is in the body, and what would ease it. He has learned to ask permission before placing his hand on where someone is hurting. The relief, he said, is immediate and real.

I used to do the same, but didn’t ask. I just instinctively, and almost absent-mindedly, reached out and put my hand on the spot that hurt. Then I learned Reiki. When you have an unexplained ability that unsettles people, finding a recognized framework for it is the most practical solution available. It gave people a name for what I was doing, and names make things less frightening.

In professional settings, it works differently but through the same mechanism. We can both spot, within minutes, the person who is derailing a meeting, the one rambling to sound important, the one who doesn’t actually have a solution but won’t admit it, the one whose confidence is performance rather than substance. It’s the same antenna that detects liars. The signal is slightly different but the receiver is identical: something doesn’t add up, the words and the reality don’t match, and we know it before we can explain how we know it.

We talked about the unusually high sense of right and wrong that makes it impossible to stay silent when something is unjust, even when staying silent would be considerably more convenient, or safer. About becoming eerily calm in situations that would send most people into panic, real danger, genuine crisis, while simultaneously losing our minds over a pretentious person in a meeting who has been making the same point for fifteen minutes and could have been interrupted and redirected ten minutes ago.

The fear inversion. Completely calm when it actually matters. Completely intolerant of pointless noise.

We laughed hard about that.

The Morning Pipeline (and What Ambushes It)

I told him about my mornings. The autism ritual is non-negotiable and runs in a specific order: get up, brush teeth, yoga, meditate, go to the kitchen, make coffee and breakfast, because my medication needs to be taken with food, and then start working.

This is the plan. The plan is logical. The plan makes complete sense.

Yesterday I got to the kitchen and noticed the cutlery drawer was dirty. So I cleaned it. While cleaning it, I noticed the tops of the cupboard doors needed attention. While doing that, I noticed the front doors were grimy. While sorting those out, the dishwasher’s stainless steel front looked terrible by comparison. Thirty minutes later, I had a spotless kitchen and had not yet taken my medication.

He nodded at this with the recognition of someone who has lived this exact experience, in his own kitchen, on his own version of a Tuesday morning. “If anyone watched me,” he said, “they’d think I’m not all there.” But to him, the chain of logic is completely clear. To me too. The drawer was dirty. Everything followed from there.

The difference between us, I noticed, is what happens next. He still feels off. He still experiences the detour as evidence of something wrong.

I do not. I shook my head, sang “The Funk Soul Brother” at my reflection in the kitchen window, made a spectacularly stupid face at myself, laughed out loud, and went to work.

I find myself genuinely hilarious. This took years to get to. It is worth it.

The Formula One Principle

Here is the thing about the detours: they don’t actually cost what they appear to cost.

He and I have both been faster than everyone around us for our entire lives. Done first in school. Done first in training. Done first in every job. Not sloppily, actually done, properly, just at a speed that consistently surprised the people around us.

So yes, I lost thirty minutes to a kitchen cleaning spiral. But I will make that up before lunch without noticing, because my baseline processing speed means I am operating in a different gear to begin with. A Formula One car can make an unscheduled pit stop and still win the race.

The medication adds another layer to this. I take my Lisdexamphetamine first thing, still in bed, before I even get up, along with my blood pressure medication. By the time I reach the kitchen, it is already working.

What it does is not what most people assume. It doesn’t prevent me from noticing the dirty drawer. It doesn’t stop the chain of logic that leads from the drawer to the cupboard doors to the dishwasher front. What it does is give me back choice.

Without it, the detour is a compulsion. I notice the drawer and I have to clean it, regardless of what else is waiting. With it, I notice the drawer and I can decide: do I have time for this right now? Yesterday, I did. So I cleaned it. On a different morning, with a call in twenty minutes, I would have closed the drawer and walked away. Same brain, same drawer, same impulse, but now with a pause button in between.

That is what medication gave me. Not focus exactly. Agency. The difference between something happening to you and something you choose to do. The ability to direct your focus the way you want to.

My friend is still in the guilt phase, still measuring the detours against some imagined standard of how things are supposed to go. What I wanted to tell him, and what I hope he reads here, is that the guilt is doing math with the wrong numbers. You are not behind. You have never been behind. You have been running a different race.

What Science Hasn’t Named Yet

I want to be honest about something.

Not everything he and I talked about fits neatly into clinical language. The ability to sense where someone is in pain and ease it. The knowing that arrives before the evidence. The recognition of kindred spirits across a crowded room. The eerie calm in genuine danger. These things are real, we have both lived them, independently, for decades, and science is still catching up to what they actually are.

What I believe is that these are not separate from the AuDHD and HSP picture. They are extensions of it. A nervous system calibrated to receive more signal than most. Pattern recognition operating below the threshold of conscious thought. An antenna so sensitive it picks up things that haven’t been spoken yet. He and I are not alone in this. Every person I have talked to with ADHD and its cousins has stories like this. Even in clinical settings I’ve learned about the extraordinarily high sense of right and wrong. This is why many of us work as first responders, doctors, nurses. Just think of my friend who literally had a gun held against her temple by a guy who dared her to repeat her words. Without hesitation she dared him back to pull the trigger, as would I.

Whether you call it intuition, hypersensitivity, or something that doesn’t have a name yet, it is real, it is consistent, and it tends to show up in people whose brains were never standard-issue. It makes neurotypical people uncomfortable at times, because our abilities appear “supernatural.” But slowly science is catching up, and what I have learned is that something extraordinary takes place in our brains that proves the opposite of what was once believed. We are not stupid, crazy, insane or impaired. We are simply wired differently. This is neither a mental illness, nor a deficit or malfunction.

Nine years ago I met someone across a forum and recognized him by his stare. Last week we sat down and discovered we have been quietly carrying the same things all along.

If you recognize yourself in any of this, the stare, the knowing, the detours, the speed, the guilt you probably haven’t earned, you are not alone. And you are not, despite what you may have been told at various points in your life, “not all there.”

You are entirely, extraordinarily there. Just on a different frequency.

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.

• Bright or flickering lights (like fluorescent bulbs in an open-plan office) cause discomfort or pain.
• Sudden loud noises or constant background sounds (like overlapping conversations, air conditioning hums, or even the ticking of a clock) are not just distracting but intrusive and overwhelming.
• Crowded or chaotic environments (like shopping malls or public transport) trigger intense anxiety and can lead to withdrawal or meltdowns.