There is something nobody tells you about neurodivergence in women: it rarely comes alone.

Research increasingly shows that women and girls almost never present with just one neurotype. The most common combination is AuDHD, autism and ADHD together, but layered on top of that, in many cases, is a third element that currently has no reliable clinical test: hypersensitivity, also known as HSP, or Highly Sensitive Person.

And here is the cruel irony. The very trait that makes you feel everything more deeply, the one that makes you the most empathetic person in the room, the one who can read a face with extraordinary precision, the one who holds eye contact without difficulty and radiates warmth, is also the trait that can cause you to fail your autism assessment.

That is exactly what happened to me.

The Test That Couldn’t See Me

I scored 37 out of 50 points on the Autism Spectrum Test. The clinical cutoff is 26. By any reasonable measure, the result was unambiguous. And yet the formal diagnosis was initially out of reach, because I scored 100% on reading emotions from facial expressions, held eye contact with ease, and presented as highly empathic. In clinical settings, these traits are not yet recognized as compatible with autism, even though, for hypersensitive women, they are not contradictions. They are compensations. Skills developed over a lifetime of having to read rooms to stay safe.

The same complexity shows up on the ADHD side. Hypersensitive women with ADHD tend to be deeply emotionally reactive, where the more stereotypical male presentation often skews toward emotional detachment. Two people, same diagnosis, completely different emotional profile, and the tests were largely built around one of them.

If you are a woman who has been tested and told “you don’t quite fit,” hypersensitivity may be exactly why.

The Giant Antenna

The simplest way I can describe what it is like to be hypersensitive is this: imagine having a giant antenna on your head that is permanently switched on, tuned to every emotional frequency around you, whether you want it to be or not.

I do not just empathize with people. I absorb them. I feel what they are feeling, their anxiety, their sadness, their anger, their joy, and I am not always aware that I am doing it. This means I can find myself inexplicably sad or furious for an entire day, and only realize in the evening, when I finally have space to decompress, that the emotion was never mine to begin with. I had picked it up from someone nearby and carried it home without knowing.

This is not a metaphor. This is a Tuesday.

The implications are significant. I cannot afford to spend extended time around toxic, negative, or chronically angry people, not as a preference, but as a matter of physical and mental health. Their emotional state becomes mine. I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that certain environments and certain people will make me genuinely ill.

The Landmine World

Sensory overload is common in AuDHD. But for me, hypersensitivity takes it further; it is not just about sound and light and texture, it is about the emotional atmosphere of a place.

Clubs, sports events, large crowds driven by herd mentality, these are not just overwhelming, they are destabilizing. The combination of noise, alcohol, collective emotion, and the sheer volume of signals coming at me from every direction is too much for the antenna to process. Social media, with its constant stream of outrage and performance and manufactured emotion, had to go entirely, with the exception of LinkedIn, which I need professionally.

Even everyday environments have their landmines. The driver blasting music from an open window. The person in the supermarket who rams their cart into me and then gives ME the dirty look. A commute full of strangers’ bad moods seeping through the air. These things do not just annoy me. They tank my day in a way that is disproportionate and difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t experience it.

I used to think this meant I was antisocial. I am not. I genuinely love being with people I care about, a good company party, a meaningful conversation. What I cannot do is be in spaces where the emotional climate is outside my control and the signals are coming from every direction at once.

The world is often a landmine. I have learned to navigate it carefully, not to avoid living, but to protect my ability to keep living well.

The Vulnerability Nobody Talks About

Here is the part that is hardest to write, because it is the part that has hurt the most.

Feeling more than most people does not just mean more joy, more connection, more empathy. It also means more vulnerability. And there are people, not many, but they exist, who recognize that vulnerability and use it deliberately.

I have had people in professional settings identify exactly which button to press to provoke a strong reaction from me, then twist that reaction and present it as evidence of my instability. I have had people take things I confided in them and not only share them with others, but add their own interpretation, or tell only part of the story, in a way designed to cause damage. These experiences have been deeply devastating, not just because they were unfair, but because betrayal, for someone who feels as deeply as I do, is not something that passes quickly. In some cases it has taken years of work and therapy to fully process.

This is the price of the antenna. You pick up the good and the warmth and the love with extraordinary clarity, and you pick up the cruelty just as clearly.

It has made me careful around people. Not closed off, careful. There is a difference.

The Other Side

And yet.

I would not trade this. Not entirely.

Being hypersensitive in a leadership role is something close to a superpower. I can sense when something is wrong before anyone has said a word. I know when a team member is struggling, when a conversation has an undercurrent nobody is naming, when the room has shifted. I can make people feel genuinely seen and safe in a way that is rare, rare enough that a colleague recently summed up her experience of working with me in one sentence: “You are a real safe space and that is wonderful.”

I have raised significant funds for causes I believed in, not because I am a skilled salesperson, but because I can make other people feel what I feel about something, and feeling it is what moves people to act. I have volunteered for things that matter and learned over time which causes are worth my energy, and which ones would deplete me without return.

What Actually Helps

Getting here took work. Real, sustained, sometimes grueling work.

Cognitive behavioral therapy gave me tools to interrupt the emotional absorption cycle before it took over. Daily meditation, now well over a year in, has given me the ability to observe an emotion rather than automatically become it. Noise cancelling headphones on trains are non-negotiable. Medication helped me dismantle the social anxiety and panic attacks that hypersensitivity had built up over decades. And honest, clear-eyed choices about which environments and which people are actually worth being in, rather than ones I feel obligated to tolerate, have changed my quality of life more than almost anything else.

I now know that not every event is worth attending. Not every person is worth my energy. Not every trigger needs to be pushed through. My wellbeing is not a luxury. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

Hypersensitivity is not a flaw in my wiring. It is a feature that came without a manual, in a world that wasn’t designed for it. Learning to work with it instead of against it, that has been one of the most important things I have ever done.

The antenna is still on. It always will be. But I have learned, finally, to choose what I tune into.