I have a neurodivergent brain. But I am a little hesitant to slap a label on it for a few reasons.
The first is that I am very conscious of how a former version of me got wrapped up in a victim story and allowed a label to define me, wielding near-complete power over my life.
Before we go much further, I am sharing my story with a personal perspective about that experience, only.
I don’t have an opinion about anyone else’s story or how they should relate to it because I am not them.
This is where I am at today and its different from where I was ten years ago which is different from where I was twenty years ago as much as from where I will be in ten or twenty years forward from now. All are true, valid, and real with neither better or worse, right or wrong, just different. I invite you to read my story with that in mind as I’m sure it will be different from yours.
In my twenties, my whole identity was tangled up in, shaped by, some may even say completely warped by mental illness.
I began this story by writing: I have a neurodivergent brain, not: I am neurodivergent. For who I am today, that subtle difference is the defining mental shift between living with something and living for or by it.
I am many, many things - most far beyond definition - and none of those things fit neatly into a checklist of symptoms, behaviors, or expectations that define who I actually am.
But this was not always so. The moment I got my diagnosis, I rather easily placebo-effected myself into an entire character performing the rituals of various criteria until I quite nearly managed to check off the whole damn DSM-5 list.
I was in university studying as a biochemistry major who quickly switched to neuroscience and eventually made another leap to psychology, where I eventually graduated.
The fascinating part of succumbing to a mental illness while studying it in tandem was how quickly it transformed a relatively insecure freshman into a marginally arrogant senior. All while using mere words and statistical probabilities as ‘reliable’ data measures.
My budding expertise was rewarded by sleepy professors, flattered to finally have such an engaged student, and all but egged on by a zealous psychiatrist who eagerly piled on the prescriptions.
I will never forget the first, of many, diagnosis that were to come throughout my stint in institutionalized higher education.
It felt like relief. It felt like validation. It felt like proof.
My whole life I knew I was ‘different’ but I could never understand why. I never quite meshed properly. I never fit in fully, but also never stood out enough to be a proper misfit. I was accepted, but not embraced. Tolerated, but not chosen.
And no matter what group I found my way into, it wasn’t long before I became problematic to that ecosystem.
I was called dramatic, overly-sensitive, attention-seeking, and I am sure many other things that never made their way to my ears. But the sense that I was the problem was clear and felt.
I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in a sort of hysterical melancholy about ‘what was wrong with me,’ so the diagnosis landed with a particular weight of authority that it wasn’t my fault. That something was actually wrong with me.
The corrosive effect of this belief was profound and extensive. The intoxicating grips of victimhood dug their trenches fast and deep.
I started medication and was quickly swept into the world of outsourcing ownership and responsibility. Suddenly everything was filtered through the lens of ‘the illness’ as I began to excuse myself increasingly more from my own life.
It was not until I was seven medications deep with two more for emergencies that I had a horrible awakening.
My mind cast a vision into my future if I carried on in this little circus. And I did not recognize the woman I saw there.
All her light, her glimmer, her essence, her vitality had been drained out and syphoned away leaving but a shell, a frame really, of an impression for what a ‘good woman should be’, but not a thread of truth of who she really was.
I started tapering my medications against my psychiatrists advice and despite her heavy warnings the very next day. It took me a considerably determined six-months to endure the worst of it—electric shocks, insomnia, skin crawls, panic and dissociation withstanding—but a year after I started, I was fully med-free.
There is more to this story, of course.
There are years of destructive behaviors and harrowing trauma that crumbled relationships, dissolved opportunities, and smashed dreams; leaving a wake of damage still being sifted.
There are the mental, physical, and spiritual scars of adverse reactions to a litany of various powerful and in some cases dangerous medications.
There are the confusing and destabilizing realities of repeated misdiagnosis and the eroding self-trust that took decades to reestablish.
And there are the fragments of who I thought I was, who I used to be, and the difficult work of not only accepting, but also integrating these fallen, broken, shadow selves into the truth of who I am.
It would be easy to look back at this period of my life and believe that this is something that happened to me. That mental illness and psychiatric medication ruined my life because it nearly took my life, which it almost did, several times. It would be easy to say this chapter shaped my life and who I am today, but while that’s not un-true, it’s also not fully true.
And for where I am right now, that distinction matters. Because although that time was hard and painful, and while those events were real and not okay, defining myself by them is as misplaced as dismissing them entirely.
It is an often said, but much less so felt, quality of personal agency that things do not happen to us, but for us.
The inevitable passing of time separates us all from the raw wounds of former experiences; but where we expected rigid callouses, we instead are found with softer hearts and deepened minds. And through this opening, we become more capable of claiming personal autonomy by structuring our experiences to create a new personal reality.
After I got off all my psychiatric medications, there was a brief time that I was really passionate about sharing how I did it with the same evangelical authority and conviction that harms so many by invoking shame in those who are not on the same path or with the same experience.
Naturally, I followed this with a cycle of intense denial. The problem with brushing off what was true for us then is that it denies the very reality that the person who actually had to live that experience felt.
It is easy to look back with regret, disdain, or contempt at a version of ourselves who didn’t have the capacity that we have now. But we forget that the only reason we have this strength, wisdom, perspective, and agency is because that ‘ignorant and weaker’ version of us is the one who built it.
I have nothing but admiration and respect for the brazen young woman who led me here. And I fully acknowledge that while I carry much of her with today, I am not her.
Living with mental illness, or as I relate more closely now, with a neurodivergent brain is not easy, but it also does not have to not be easy.
What I mean is that so much of what I see in this space still measures for a gap in capacity inside a system that makes it feel hard.
When I do things that way, I don’t do them well. When I do things my own way, I often still don’t do them well, but I do them with far less friction and more importantly, without the running narrative that I’m failing, falling behind, or doing it wrong.
I don’t do many things in the traditional way, on the traditional timeline, or in the traditional system. Sometimes, I feel ‘bad’ about that, particularly if I’ve been spending time with people in those traditional lives that are not as open or receptive to my different approach. But these days, that is less and less so.
Part of the reason is that I have cultivated some boundaries around who I spend time with and more strongly, whose energy I allow to penetrate and mesh with my own.
The other part is an ongoing dedication to building self-trust.
One of the fallouts that came from years on psych meds was a terrifying distrust of my own mind. I was wholeheartedly convinced that my mind was set to destroy me and I fully believed that one day, it would succeed.
For years, I woke up and entered the same egregious battle that marched me toward the same ominous and inevitable ending as my soul tore from self more and more with each successive day.
A chance DMT ceremony in the Nevada desert shattered my poisonous beliefs and restored my brain to my body to my mind to my soul.
There is no separation and there never has been. Yet this one pervasive myth— that we are separate from one another, from nature, from God, from the living world that sustains us —drives the human engine faster and faster toward its own extinction, all in the name of ‘progress’.
The belief has become the limitation, much as my own beliefs eventually limited me to but a fragment of my existence.
And while limitations are often measured as weaknesses, that is not all they are. Though they often present as deficits or restrictions that prevent us from touching life a certain way, they are also something else.
Limitations are invitations to explore your genius.
They are opportunities to push your creative boundaries and develop new ways of seeing, moving, and experiencing reality. Limitations become gifts that teach you how to think differently by remembering how to think for yourself.
Yes, I live with a neurodivergent brain and that’s a different experience than most people. But so is all of life.
I am often just more aware of that than everyone else, and I really like that for me. In many ways, I consider myself lucky that I have to take the long route, and I am even more delighted when I often get rerouted as I discover a new way, a new thing, a new part of life that lights up with recognition of who I came here to be.
I don’t know the way, and I certainly don’t have a plan, but I have me. And not only am I really starting to trust her, I am really starting to like her, too.
Rooting for us all — SJT
Thank you for sharing this slice of time with me. I would love to hear your experiences and invite you to please share in the comments. If this struck something within you, I will be sharing more of my story and the strategies and skills I am developing to experience this one precious life as fully as I can.
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