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.