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.

Let me paint you a picture.

I am sitting in a meeting. Someone is talking. To all external appearances, I am present – eye contact, appropriate nodding, the occasional thoughtful expression. And then someone notices my eyes have gone glassy, that I am looking directly through them rather than at them, and they say, with increasing alarm: “STOP STARING AT ME!”

I am not staring at them. I am not even there. I left about two minutes ago and forgot to take my body with me.

Welcome to Part 2 of my relationship with time, which is less about efficiency and more about the fact that I have never been entirely sure which universe I actually live in.

The Parallel Universe

Long before I had any diagnosis, long before anyone had words for what was happening in my brain, I built myself another world.

It had different parents. In this world, I was loved without condition, I had friends, I was popular, I had everything I had wanted and I was happy. It was vivid and detailed and completely real to me, not a daydream exactly, but a place I could go. And I went there often. During school especially. Teachers would call on me and get no response, not because I was being difficult, but because I was genuinely elsewhere.

This got particularly noticeable around 4th grade and into the first half of 5th grade. Teachers scolded me for not paying attention. What they didn’t know, what I couldn’t have explained, was that I was managing two parallel lives simultaneously, and the other one was considerably more pleasant than this one.

Then, somewhere in the second half of 4th grade, I made a decision. I chose to stop going there.

Three different therapists, across different periods of my life, have independently landed on the same response when I told them this story: that I had made a conscious choice between sanity and insanity. That given everything I had experienced, I could have ended up completely lost in that other world, catatonic, unreachable, and that people had arrived at that place with far less reason than I had. They were also unanimous in their bewilderment at how I had done it, given that the cognitive ability to make that kind of decision shouldn’t have existed in a child that age.

What I told them was simple: I knew that if I kept going back, there would come a point where I couldn’t return. And as much as I loved that other world, I chose this one.

I never fully understood why I was able to make that choice. What I know now is that I was never really a child in the way the world expects children to be. I was an adult trapped in a child’s body, giving my mother relationship advice before I had even started school, sorting my toys by height on a shelf rather than playing with them, navigating adult emotional landscapes before I had the vocabulary for any of it. The cognitive ability the therapists said shouldn’t have been there, it was there, because it had to be.

The Camera

Here is something I have never talked about before.

For as long as I can remember, I have had the persistent feeling of being watched. Not in a paranoid way. I know, intellectually, that there is no camera. But I move through life with a background awareness of being observed, as if I am a character in a film and somewhere, in some other universe, an audience is watching.

I think of it as the Truman Show feeling. And like Truman, I sometimes find myself wondering: what if none of this is real? What if I actually live in that other universe, and this one is the constructed one?

This feeling has not always been unwelcome. In many ways, it kept me safe. When I was on the verge of a decision that could have gone badly, something would pull me back – the awareness of the camera, the sense that I was accountable to something larger than the moment. It kept me out of a lot of trouble. It made me follow rules even when I disagreed with them, because some part of me felt that how I behaved mattered beyond the immediate situation.

What I have since learned is that this experience has names. What I was describing, observing my own life from the outside, the feeling of existing in a kind of waking dream, the blurring of boundaries between states, is known as depersonalization and derealization. And it is significantly more common in neurodivergent people than most realize. The parallel universe I built as a child, the camera feeling, the vivid dreams that feel more real than waking life and sometimes recur across years, these are not signs of psychosis. They are signs of a brain that experiences the boundaries between inner and outer reality differently than most.

I was always too ashamed to speak about this. It felt too strange, too close to something I was afraid of being labeled as. But it is not hearing voices. It is not hallucinating. It is a brain that built extraordinary coping mechanisms in extraordinary circumstances, and then never quite dismantled them, because they were useful.

The Disappearing Act

Which brings me to dissociation — or as I prefer to call it, my emergency exit.

I can step away entirely and most people will never notice. Not in a dramatic way, not with any visible sign. I am simply there, and then I am not, while my body stays behind and does a passable impression of paying attention. I learned in a clinic that this is common in people with AuDHD, that the brain, when overwhelmed by sensory overload beyond a certain threshold, simply… steps out for a moment. Hits pause. Goes somewhere quieter.

The only time it becomes visible is what I now know to call a freeze response. My eyes go unfocused, I look through whoever is in front of me rather than at them, and I am simply gone. It’s the situation I’ve described in the beginning of this post. It tends to make people uncomfortable. It also, on more than one occasion, made people angry, particularly men who interpreted my vacant stare as aggression or a challenge and responded accordingly. Being shouted at for staring when you are not even present is a special kind of surreal experience.

What nobody ever stopped to consider was that I was not staring. I was coping.

300 Years Old and 30 at the Same Time

There is one more way that time works differently for me, and it is harder to explain than all the others.

I feel ancient and young simultaneously. When I turned 40 and caught my reflection and suddenly noticed I was aging, it was not the aging itself that unsettled me; I have always looked considerably younger than I am, and that has not changed. What unsettled me was the awareness of limitation. Of a world that looks at a woman who is, on paper, in her 40s or 50s, and makes decisions accordingly – about what she is capable of, what she should be offered, what chapter of life she must be in. From the inside, I have always been able to reinvent myself entirely, to start over, to become something new regardless of how many years had technically passed. Age never felt real to me in a linear way. It still doesn’t.

And yet. I am also acutely, painfully aware of time passing. When it is June, the year already feels almost over. Entire periods of my past feel genuinely inaccessible, not forgotten exactly, but sealed off, as if they happened to someone else in another timeline. Which, in a way, they did.

The Lightbulb

The last piece of this is perhaps the most AuDHD thing about me.

I do not evolve gradually. I do not inch forward through slow, incremental change. I try and try and try to shift a pattern, to understand something, to break through a wall I can feel but cannot see, and nothing happens. And then one day, without warning, a lightbulb turns on. The puzzle unfolds in my mind’s eye, complete and fully formed. I see it. All of it. And I cannot understand how I didn’t see it before.

Once something clicks, I do not forget it. I do not slip back. I simply become different, immediately and permanently, in a way that apparently unnerves people who were not expecting it. It is one of the reasons a clinic once declared me ready to leave ahead of schedule. Not because the work was easy, but because when it landed, it landed completely.

This is not patience or discipline. It is just how my brain processes things – in the dark, and then all at once, in the light.

What It All Means

I have spent a lot of time in this post describing things I have rarely or never said out loud. The parallel universe. The camera. The disappearing. The strange relationship with age and years and the passage of time.

What I want you to take from this, if you recognize any of it, is that none of it makes you broken. It makes you someone whose brain found extraordinary ways to survive an ordinary world that wasn’t built for it. The parallel universe was not madness. It was creativity in the service of survival. The camera was not delusion. It was accountability without external structure. The dissociation was not weakness. It was your nervous system doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

You built what you needed, with what you had, before anyone gave you a name for any of it.

That is not a disorder. That is resilience.