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.

In my last post I wrote about the difference between autism rituals, compulsion and OCD. But there is one more label that tends to follow people like me around, one that is just as misunderstood and just as unfair.

Let me tell you about a mirror.

It was hung in a hallway. Not centered on the wall. Not at eye level. Not at a height that would allow most humans to see their own face. It was hung directly under the ceiling, a placement that made perfect logical sense to the person who hung it, who stands at 6’4″ and could see himself just fine.

The rest of the world saw the top of their heads.

When I pointed out that this was perhaps not the optimal placement for a mirror, that a mirror’s primary function is to reflect faces, and that most faces were not located near the ceiling, I was told I was being too particular. Too critical. Too controlling.

I am, apparently, a control freak.

The Label and What It Actually Means

“Control freak” is one of those labels that gets applied to people whose standards are visibly higher than those of the person doing the labeling. It sounds like a personality diagnosis. It is usually a defence mechanism.

Here is what I have noticed: the people most likely to call someone a control freak are the ones who dust around objects rather than moving them. Who clean windows and leave streaks and consider the job done. Who hang things on walls without measuring, eyeballing it and declaring it straight, when it is not straight, and everyone who walks into the room can see that it is not straight, except the person who hung it.

They are not bad people. They simply cannot see what I see. And when I can see it and they cannot, and I say so, suddenly I am the problem.

The Spatial Intelligence Nobody Talks About

Every apartment I have ever decorated, every home I have put together, has been noticed. People walk in and feel it, the balance, the proportion, the way things relate to each other in a space. I have been told I should have been an interior designer more times than I can count.

This is not accident. This is a brain that processes spatial relationships, visual balance and aesthetic proportion at a level of precision that most people do not experience. When something is too high, too low, off-center or asymmetric, I do not think “that looks slightly wrong.” I experience it. It registers as a disruption, the same way a wrong note registers to a musician with perfect pitch.

This is, I have come to understand, an autistic trait combined with HSP sensitivity. I am not controlling the space for the sake of power. I am regulating my own sensory experience of it.

The Perfectionism Behind the Control

There is something else underneath the “control freak” label that rarely gets named: perfectionism.

AuDHD perfectionism is well documented, and it is not the healthy, motivating kind that drives people to do their best work. It is the exhausting, relentless kind that is never quite satisfied, that moves the goalposts the moment they are reached, that finds the one flaw in an otherwise flawless result and cannot look away from it.

Research consistently shows significantly elevated rates of perfectionism in both autistic and ADHD populations, and in AuDHD, the two mechanisms combine and amplify each other.

The autism side experiences imperfection as genuinely wrong. Not “could be better” – wrong. A crooked picture, an uneven arrangement, a task completed at 90%, these register as disruptions, not as acceptable outcomes. The standard is not something I chose. It is simply how my brain processes the world.

The ADHD side adds a different and darker layer: imposter syndrome. The constant, exhausting suspicion that I am not as capable as I appear. That at any moment someone will notice. That if I am not perfect, at everything, all the time, the fragile scaffolding of my credibility will collapse.

For me, imposter syndrome has been a constant companion. Despite over 20 years of expertise. Despite the presentations, the consulting work, the peer recognition. Despite every piece of evidence to the contrary. The voice that says you’re not really that good does not respond to evidence. It responds to the next perfect outcome,  briefly, before moving on to the next thing that needs to be better.

And then there is the third layer: decades of being told I was too much, not enough, lazy, difficult, crazy, too loud, too high maintenance. When the world spends years finding fault with who you are, perfectionism becomes armor. If everything I produce is flawless, maybe people will stop looking for flaws in me.

So when someone calls me a control freak for needing the mirror at the right height, they are seeing the surface behavior without any of the architecture underneath it. The perfectionism is not vanity. It is not power. It is a brain trying to create order in a world that has never quite made sense, driven by standards it cannot lower, protected by armor it built out of necessity.

That is not control freakery. That is survival, dressed up in a very well-organized room.

There is an interesting pattern I have observed in the people who call me a control freak. They tend to have a very confident self-assessment of their own abilities,  particularly in the areas where they are, quietly, not as capable as they believe.

The person who tells me they have always been great with numbers, then calculates 20% of 150 as 40.

The person who insists they have a good eye, then hangs a mirror under the ceiling.

The person who says they are very organized, then cannot find anything because their system exists only in their head and nowhere else.

When the error is pointed out, there is always an explanation. They are tired. They were rushing. They didn’t have time. It is never simply that they got it wrong, because getting it wrong would conflict with the identity they have built around being good at this thing.

Meanwhile, I spent years being told I was stupid. Being called lazy. Assuming the fault was mine when I couldn’t follow the same rules as everyone else. I underestimated myself so comprehensively and for so long that even now, knowing what I know, the old voice still surfaces occasionally.

The person who hung the mirror under the ceiling has never once doubted his spatial awareness.

I have doubted mine despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary.

What “Control Freak” Actually Means

When someone calls you a control freak, what they are usually saying is one of the following:

Your standard makes mine look inadequate and I would rather label your precision than examine my own comfort with mediocrity.

Or: I cannot see what you see, and rather than consider that you might be seeing something real, I will decide that you are being unreasonable.

Or simply: You are making me feel uncomfortable by being better at this than I am.

None of these are your problem to solve.

A control freak needs to control other people. I do not need you to arrange your books by height or keep your surfaces spotless or hang your pictures at precisely the right level. I need MY books, MY surfaces, MY pictures to be right, because my brain uses that order to function, to regulate, to feel at peace in my own space.

That is not control. That is self-knowledge.

The mirror is now hung at the correct height. You are welcome.