Since my AuDHD diagnosis, I seem to have been continually discovering new words and labels for things I have experienced all my life.

Before diagnosis, I didn't think I needed more labels. I sometimes hear people say the same thing — that they don't want to be labelled, or that having a label won't change anything.

And perhaps that is the point. The label doesn't change who we are. The experiences were already there.

What a label can change is our understanding of them.

For me, having the right words has been incredibly important. A label gives me something to explore and understand. It helps me recognise patterns and discover that an experience I thought was uniquely mine is shared by other people. Sometimes it has even allowed me to reconsider something I had spent years thinking was a personal failing.

Rather than putting me into boxes, these labels have opened doors.

Every now and then I come across another term and think, Oh! There is actually a reason I do that.

Sometimes it explains something that has frustrated me for years. Sometimes it helps me look differently at something I once considered a failing. And sometimes it explains one of the many contradictions in myself that never made sense before.

The experiences were already there. Having a name for them gave me a pathway to understanding them.

These are some of the labels that have helped me understand how my brain works.

AuDHD

This was probably the most important term of all.

AuDHD isn't currently a formal diagnosis. It is a term commonly used to describe the co-occurrence of autism and ADHD.

I had known I was ADHD for many years, but discovering that I was also autistic — and, more importantly, beginning to understand how the two interact — changed the way I understood myself.

Suddenly, so many of my apparent contradictions made sense.

For most of my life, I really thought I understood boundaries.

To me, having good boundaries meant not allowing people to take advantage of my good nature. But I'm beginning to realise that even my understanding of being "helpful" was more complicated than I thought.

Growing up, I had this need to be seen as helpful, and that clearly continued into adulthood.

Being useful - doing things for people, solving problems, stepping in, physically helping, rearranging my life to accommodate someone else's needs - had somehow become tangled up with my sense of self-worth. Being capable and helpful made me feel valuable.

I understood boundaries as something that protected me from people who might take advantage of that willingness to help, but I didn't apply those same boundaries to my family in fact I don’t think I applied them to anyone at all really.

And I certainly didn't think to apply them to myself.

Since my AuDHD diagnosis and, particularly, during this latest period of autistic burnout, I have been thinking and learning a lot about capacity. I'm starting to understand that boundaries and capacity are far more intertwined than I ever realised.