AuDHD at 40: How I Finally Understood My Own Brain (And Life)

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When I was about ten, I went to summer camp. And a couple of days in, I already knew – in that quiet, sinking way kids know things – that I didn’t fit.

Then came the day we had to pair up for a project. The counsellor said “find a partner,” and the whole room reorganized itself in seconds, like everyone else could hear a frequency I couldn’t. There was an uneven number of us. And when the dust settled, I was the one left over.

No one wanted to pair up with me. The counsellor had to step in and basically assign me to a group. And the looks on their faces when he did told my ten-year-old body something it would carry for decades: I don’t belong. I’m not wanted.

For most of my life after that, I thought I was just bad at being a person. Too much. Too sensitive. Always a half-second behind everyone who seemed to already know the steps.

It turns out I wasn’t missing a memo. I had a brain nobody had ever explained to me.

It was never that you were bad at being a person. You were just doing it with a brain nobody ever handed you the manual for.

About this episode

Episode 8 is the most personal one I’ve recorded. After seven episodes spent unpacking your brain and your relationships, I’m turning the microphone on myself.

I walk through my whole story: the painfully shy kid who felt like an outsider in almost every room, the years of feeling “too much” and “too sensitive” in relationships, and going back to school for my master’s in counselling psychology during Covid (including the practicum at a neurodivergent-affirming practice where I first started to wonder if the things I was learning about my clients were also true about me.)

And then the assessment, at 40, that named it: Level 2 autism and severe ADHD. I talk about what those labels actually mean, what AuDHD looks and feels like for me, the relief and the grief that arrived together, and the strengths I’ve learned to celebrate.

What you’ll learn

• Why a late diagnosis brings relief and grief at the same time – and why both belong
• What AuDHD actually is, and the “one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake” feeling of carrying both wirings at once
• How masking can hide your struggle so well that even you can’t see it (and why my CAT-Q score made the “severe” make sense)
• The everyday scaffolding I built since childhood to manage executive dysfunction (and why it was never laziness)
• The AuDHD strengths I lead with now: pattern recognition, deep empathy, justice sensitivity, and fierce loyalty
• Why “too much” and “too sensitive” were never flaws to fix. They’re features to understand and build a relationship around

Resources mentioned

• Free quiz: Is This My Brain or My Relationship?
• Instagram: @neurodivergentlovelab

Ready to go deeper?

If this one landed and you’re wondering what’s wiring versus what’s relationship dynamics in your own life:

• Take the free quiz — “Is This My Brain or My Relationship?” to start sorting out what’s actually going on (about five minutes, results straight to your inbox).
• Book a free 15-minute consultation if you’re in Alberta and want to talk through what working together could look like.

Loved this episode?

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Episode transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

When I was about ten, I went to summer camp.

And a couple of days in, I already knew – in that quiet, sinking way kids know things – that I wasn’t fitting in. I couldn’t have told you exactly why. I just felt it. That low hum of I’m on the outside, and I don’t know how to get in.

Then came the day we had to pair up for a project.

You know how this goes. The counsellor says “find a partner,” and the whole room just… reorganizes itself. Instantly. Like everyone else could hear a frequency I couldn’t. Pairs formed in seconds.

And I stood there.

There was an uneven number of us. So when the dust settled, I was the one left over. And no one wanted to go with me. I watched it happen on their faces – that little flicker of not her.

The counsellor had to step in and basically force a group to take me. And the looks on their faces when she did… I have never forgotten them. Because those looks told me something my ten-year-old body understood long before my brain had words for it:

I didn’t belong. I wasn’t wanted.

If you’ve ever been the one left over – the one someone had to be told to include – then I need you to stay with me today. Because this is the most personal episode I’ve ever recorded.

Intro

This is the Neurodivergent Love Lab. I’m Jenna Dalton, a psychologist who is AuDHD. I help ADHD, autistic, and AuDHD adults navigate love and relationships.

And this is Episode 8: AuDHD at 40: How I Finally Understood My Own Brain (And Life).

Today, I’m doing something I don’t usually do. I’m turning the microphone on myself. I’m going to tell you my own story: the summer camp where nobody wanted to be my partner, the relationships where I felt like too much, the moment in my forties when I finally got assessed and found out who I’d been the whole time.

I gotta warn you, there’s a whole lotta inner child healing in this episode, so buckle up, my friend.

The Memo I Never Got

So here’s something you might resonate with:

For most of my life, I thought I was just bad at being a human.

Not in a dramatic, woe-is-me way. More like a quiet, background hum of something’s off with me and I can’t figure out what the heck is going on kind of way. Other people made it look so easy. Friendships, conversations, relationships, ordering food without needing to rehearse what you’re going to say 52 times…. they slipped into it like it was the most natural thing in the world. And I was over here studying them. Consciously and unconsciously watching how they did it. Taking mental notes. Trying to copy the choreography a half-second behind everyone else.

When I was young, I was painfully shy. The kind of shy that makes you feel like you’re taking up the wrong amount of space at all times. I had a hard time making friends. I felt like an outsider in almost every room. And the social stuff that other kids just knew to do? I had to think about all of it. Where do I put my hands. What is my face doing right now. Am I standing too close. Did I laugh at the wrong time.

It’s exhausting to run that program in the background of every single interaction. And I ran it for decades.

Then I got older, and the playing field changed but the feeling didn’t. In my teens and twenties, I felt so deeply insecure. Like I just wasn’t good enough. I’d watch other girls and women move through friendships and relationships with what looked like total ease, and I’d think: they know something I don’t. There’s a thing everybody else understands and nobody ever explained it to me.

And in relationships specifically? I felt like I was always too much. Too sensitive. Too emotional. Always wearing my heart on my sleeve. I got the message – loud and clear, over and over – that I should bottle it up. Be cool. Be chill. Act like nothing was a big deal and everything was fine.

When the truth was: so many things felt like a big deal. Everything had volume. Everything had weight. And I spent years believing that I was the problem, instead of understanding that I was simply built to feel things at a different frequency.

If any of that is resonating for you right now – that ache of why is this so much harder for me than it seems to be for everyone else – I want you to know something before we go any further:

It was never that you were bad at being a person. It’s that you were doing it with a brain nobody had ever explained to you.

Part One: How I Found Out

So here’s how I found out.

In my thirties, I decided to go back to school to get my master’s in counselling psychology. It was during Covid. I was stuck at home anyway, so I figured, why not. Why not do an online master’s while the whole world was on pause.

To finish the degree, I had to complete an eight-month practicum. And I landed at a practice that specialized in supporting neurodivergent people.

Now, I’ll be honest. At the time, I didn’t know a lot about neurodivergence. I knew the textbook stuff. But I hadn’t really lived inside it as a clinician yet.

And then I started working with neurodivergent clients. I started learning all of it. Really learning it, the lived-experience version, not the diagnostic-criteria version. And the more I learned… the more something started tapping me on the shoulder.

Wait.

That’s me.

That’s… also me.

That’s me, too.

It kept happening. Client after client, concept after concept. I’d be reading about autistic social fatigue, or ADHD rejection sensitivity, or what masking actually costs a person…. and I’d feel this jolt of recognition.

So one day, in a supervision call with my boss, I decided I was going to say it out loud. I told him I’d been wondering if I might be neurodivergent too.

And he looked at me – with this big, knowing smile – and said, “Oh yeah? You think so, hey?”

He already knew. Of course he knew. He – being an expert in this area – told me he knew in my interview for the practicum placement. He was just waiting for me to find my own way there.

I sat with that knowledge for a couple of years. Knowing I was neurodivergent. Having a sense of what that meant for me, slowly putting the pieces together, re-watching my entire life through this new lens.

And then, when I turned forty this past fall, I decided to get officially assessed by a colleague I trusted.

The results: Level 2 autism. And severe ADHD.

Now, I want to slow down on those words for a second, because the clinical labels can sound different than the lived reality.

“Level 2 autism” is just the diagnostic language for the amount of support an autistic person needs day to day. It’s a snapshot of how much energy the world takes from you.

And “severe ADHD”? That one surprised me a little. I knew I had ADHD – that part I’d basically called in advance. But severe? I remember sitting with that word thinking, really? Me? I have a master’s degree. I run a business. I have two kids and a to-do list I tackle every single day. I show up on time…. Sometimes. I can handle my big emotions… most of the time. How could it be severe?

And then I thought about it for a minute longer.

I thought about how good I’d gotten at masking. How many tools and frameworks and little workarounds I’d been quietly running since I was very, very little. Every one of them built, without me even realizing it, to counteract executive dysfunction I didn’t know I had. How hard I had to work at emotional regulation and how often I found myself in an anxious space with the hamster wheel of my brain spinning and spinning while I looked cool as a cucumber on the outside.

The “severe” wasn’t surprising because it was wrong. It was surprising because I’d spent my whole life building scaffolding so elaborate that even I couldn’t see the thing it was holding up.

That’s masking. And masking is so effective that it hides the very struggle it exists to manage – including from the person doing it.

My CAT-Q score, by the way – the measure of how good I am at masking – was exceptionally high. That part made utter and complete sense! 

The Part Nobody Warns You About: Grief and Relief

Here’s the thing nobody really prepares you for about getting your answers later in life.

I knew finding out would feel like a relief. And it did. It absolutely did. There’s this exhale that comes with finally having a name for it. This oh… it makes so much more sense now feeling. All those years of what is wrong with me? finally answered. Nothing. Nothing was wrong with me. I was just trying to run neurotypical software on a neurodivergent system.

I also knew there would likely be some grief, too. I had read about it and seen it in some of my clients.

What I didn’t realize was how specific the grief would get.

Because once you understand your brain, you don’t just understand it going forward. You go backward. You re-watch your whole life with this new clarity – and you start to see, in scene after scene, all the places where knowing would have changed everything.

I grieve for the ten-year-old at that summer camp, standing there while everyone paired up, who decided in that moment that she wasn’t wanted – when really, her brain just worked differently and nobody in that room had the language for it. Not even her. She made it personal when it didn’t need to be. She was just misunderstood.

I grieve for the teenager who felt everything so loudly and got told, again and again, that she was too much – and believed it.

I grieve for the young woman in her twenties who blamed herself for every connection that didn’t fit, who was so sure she was the broken one in the room.

I even grieve for the version of me just a few years ago – working so hard, masking so well, exhausted in ways she couldn’t explain or justify to anyone, because she still didn’t have the words.

That’s the part of a late diagnosis. It isn’t relief or grief. It’s both. You finally get the answers. And you also mourn how long you went without it. How different it all might have felt if someone had handed you this map at ten, instead of at forty.

But the tricky thing about regrets is that you assume if you’d done something different, it would all be different in a more positive way. But maybe if I knew earlier things would have been harder in a different way. Maybe I wouldn’t have had the life experience I had that made me who I am. Maybe I wouldn’t have the career I have, family I have, life I have.

Maybe this was what was supposed to happen.

And I’m okay with that.

What AuDHD Actually Is

Okay. Let me zoom out, because some of you are AuDHD too – or wondering if you might be – and I want to talk about what this combination actually is.

AuDHD is exactly what it sounds like: being both autistic and ADHD at the same time. For a long time, you literally couldn’t be diagnosed with both. The systems treated them as mutually exclusive. We now know that’s not true at all. They co-occur constantly. And when they show up together, they don’t just sit side by side as separate entities. They interact.

Here’s the way I describe it: it’s like having one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. At the same time. All the time.

Right?! Like how does one get anywhere with that combination?!

The ADHD part of me craves novelty, stimulation, movement, newness, go-go-go. The autistic part of me craves routine, sameness, predictability, deep focus, please-do-not-change-anything. And those two things are running at the same time, in the same body, pulling in opposite directions.

So let me tell you what that actually feels like, day to day, for me specifically.

Socially? I want to be social. And I need alone time. And I often feel lonely. All three. Often in the same afternoon. I’ll genuinely want connection, and then the moment I’m in it, my battery starts draining at a rate that doesn’t match how much I love being with these people. And then I’ll get home, finally alone, exhale… and feel lonely anyway. It’s a tug-of-war that never fully resolves, and for years I thought it meant I was broken or fickle or impossible to please. It doesn’t. It just means I have two nervous systems’ worth of needs in one body.

The same tug-of-war shows up everywhere. Routine and novelty. Stillness and stimulation. I need my structures, and I’ll get restless inside them. That’s not indecision. That’s AuDHD.

Then there’s the sensory piece. Sound and light are big ones for me. Certain sounds, certain lighting, they don’t just bother me, they can be physically painful. The radio? Especially first thing in the morning? Like someone is taking a jackhammer to my skull. 

I also hated brushing my teeth as a kid. I was always getting in trouble for not doing it. Which was definitely a sensory thing – to this day brushing too far back or having mouthwash in my mouth for too long, sets me off.

But it goes the other way too. I have things that regulate me, profoundly. A firm, long hug. My partner resting his hands on my back or around me – that’s enormously reassuring to my nervous system. And movement is huge: weight training, yoga, long walks with my puppy. Movement is one of the most reliable ways I have to come back into my body when I’m dysregulated.

I also have special interests: psychology, neurodivergence, health and fitness. These aren’t just hobbies. They’re the things my brain wants to dive all the way into. (You can probably tell. I built an entire career and a podcast out of two of them. And before I went back to school for my master’s, I was a personal trainer and nutrition coach.)

And I have my stims and self-soothing behaviors, which I can name now that I have the language. I hum. I push my nails into my fingertips. I use breathwork – I deeply exhale a lot without even realizing I’m doing it when I’m overwhelmed. I love being in or near water and the forest even just being outdoors in nature grounds me. I dance. And I’m a pretty stereotypical ADHD-er in that I love EDM, although I’m picky about it. Nothing too jarring. The right kind of repetitive, building, electronic music does something really specific and good to my brain. (There’s a reason the intro music for this podcast is what it is.)

And here’s the part I want my fellow late-identified folks to hear: none of these things looked like “symptoms” to me for most of my life. They just looked like me. My quirks. My preferences. My weird little habits. I was just passionate about fitness, it wasn’t a special interest. And doesn’t everyone dance their nails on their fingertips when they’re nervous? It was only after I understood my wiring that I could look back and go, oh. Oh. That was my brain taking care of me the whole time.

The Tool & Reframe: The Scaffolding I Built and the Strengths I Started Celebrating

So I told you I’d built tools since I was little. Let me actually give them to you, because if you’re AuDHD, some of these might be quietly running in your life too. And naming them turns them from “things I do because I’m a mess” into “accommodations I designed for my own brain.”

• Everything goes in the calendar or the to-do list. If it’s not written down somewhere external, it does not exist. My brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
• The floor by the door. If I need to take something with me the next day, it goes on the floor right in front of the door the night before. I physically cannot leave without stepping over it. Object permanence is not my brain’s strong suit, so I make the object impossible to forget.
• The recitation loop. When I think of something I need to remember and I can’t write it down yet, I repeat it in my head, over and over, like a chant, until I can get to a piece of paper or my phone. (If you’ve ever done this, you know exactly the low-grade panic of don’t lose it, don’t lose it, don’t lose it….)
• Sticky notes, written the night before. The morning version of me does not have the executive function to plan the day. So the night-before version of me does it for her and leaves notes.
• Checklists and visuals, everywhere. I need to see it. A task I can see is a task that might happen. A task that lives only in my head is gone.
• Setting my clock ahead by 15 minutes so I’m less likely to be late. Yes. I said less likely, not for sure not.
• Can’t stop, don’t stop. Once I get going on something, anything, stacking task after task after task so I don’t “lose momentum.” It’s like I know once I get the engine started I need to go, go, go – sometimes until I’m utterly exhausted, because I don’t know when I’ll get that burst of motivation again. I’ve worked hard to not bring myself to that space of exhaustion anymore, but if I’m doing something I love – like building my business – it’s hard. I just want to keep going forever.

None of this is because I’m lazy or disorganized. It’s the opposite. It’s a lifetime of engineering. This is the misunderstanding around ADHD: that ADHDers are lazy and unmotivated. It’s actually not true. People who are ADHD can actually be incredibly productive and motivated – when it’s something they’re interested in or have a passion for.

And here’s the reframe I want to leave you with:

The tools were never proof that something was wrong with me. They were proof of how hard I was working – invisibly – just to keep up. And the world only ever saw the result, never the effort.

I looked so organized. So on top of things. So put together. And I was. Thanks to the scaffolding I built for myself.

It was unconsciously intentional.

Now, I’ve talked a lot about the hard parts. So I want to spend a minute on the other side. Because AuDHD is not just a list of challenges. It comes with real strengths, and I want to name mine in the hopes you see yourself in some of them as well. Not in a toxic positivity kind of way, but in a – you’re not all hard things, there are good things, too – way.

I have strong pattern recognition and a lot of empathy – and honestly, I think both of those make me a better psychologist. I can feel what’s happening in a room and connect dots across someone’s story in a way that comes very naturally to my brain. I try not to mind read too much in session – simply allow my client to share their experience without my bias – but I often find myself asking questions like “Tell me how that shows up for you” and knowing what they’re going to say before they say it.

I have deep justice sensitivity. I have strong feelings about what’s fair – especially when I see someone else being treated unfairly. That sensitivity used to feel like “being too intense.” Now I understand it as a moral compass that points toward my values and my vision for the world I want to live in.

And I am fiercely, almost inconveniently loyal. If you need me, I will drop everything for you. That’s not new relationship energy, that’s simply how I’m wired.

But I’ll be honest about the flip side, because it’s part of the story. That loyalty isn’t always reciprocated. I’ve had a hard time, more than once, realizing that a relationship or friendship meant more to me than it did to the other person. I thought we were close, deep, in it together, and they experienced us as more surface-level. That was painful.

Because here’s how I’m built: I go deep, or I don’t go at all. I am very typically neurodivergent. I cannot do small talk. Put me at a dinner party and within about four minutes I’m asking, “Okay, what’s the best vacation memory you have?” because talking about how it’s been raining for a couple days and whether the sun will come out soon is killing me. I need something real.

For a long time I thought my intensity in relationships was a liability. That I loved too hard, gave too much, felt too deeply. Now I understand it differently. I’m not too much. I’m a lot… for the right people. And the work isn’t to give less. It’s to aim it at people who can actually hold it.

A Note on the Hard Parts in Love

I want to say one honest thing before I close, because this is a relationship podcast and I’m not going to pretend my own wiring doesn’t show up in my relationship.

I experience pretty significant RSD: rejection sensitive dysphoria. I can shut down during conflict and go non-verbal, where the words just… aren’t available, even when I desperately want them to be. And I still – even now, even with all this understanding – wrestle with the feeling that I’m too much, or too sensitive, or not enough.

Yes, my friend. I’m human. A neurodivergent human to be precise.

I’m also very blunt and direct. Which can be a gift – I won’t sugarcoat my thoughts if you ask for them (and sometimes when you don’t) – but it can also land hard, especially if I don’t give context. So I’ve had to learn to add the context. To say not just the blunt thing, but why I’m saying it and what I mean by it.

I’m fortunate. I have a partner who’s genuinely supportive of my neurodivergent needs. And I want to be clear that having a supportive partner doesn’t erase the struggle – it just means I’m not facing it alone. The shutdowns still happen. The “am I too much?!” spiral still happens. But understanding why it happens changes how I move through it, and it changes how we move through it together. Because we’ve built tools together to support me through it, rather than seeing it as something wrong with me that needs to be fixed.

If you’re nodding right now. If you’ve been called too sensitive, too intense, too blunt, too much…. I need you to hear me: those aren’t defects to fix. They’re features to understand, contextualize, and build a relationship around.

The Close

So here’s where I’ll leave you today.

For most of my life, I thought I’d missed the memo. That everyone else got the playbook and I was just faking my way through, badly, hoping nobody would notice.

It turns out there was no memo. There was just a brain, my brain, that the world had never bothered to explain to me. And the day I finally understood it, everything I’d carried as shame got quietly reclassified as information.

That’s the moment things shifted. The moment it stopped being “what’s wrong with me?” and became “oh! It makes so much more sense now.”

And indulging in that moment – for myself, for my clients – is exactly why I’m building this business.

Because I looked at common relationship advice and saw an enormous gap. The therapy world wasn’t built for our brains. So I’m building something different.

If this one resonated, send it to someone who needs to hear it. Someone who’s been calling themselves bad at relationships when really, they just haven’t been handed the right tools yet.

And come find me on Instagram – @neurodivergentlovelab – and tell me what’s coming up for you after listening to this episode. I read every message and I want to hear from you. Because this is not where you’re the kid nobody picks. You belong here. I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m Jenna Dalton. Your brain isn’t broken. It’s beautiful. I’ll talk to you soon.

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Neurodivergent Love Lab is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for therapy or mental health care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a local crisis line or emergency service.