Becoming My Own Best Friend

It started with a simple question.

I was sitting in a room with a group of women at our local business network when a therapist asked us to think about what a best friend actually does. How they speak to you. How they show up for you. How they treat you when things are hard.

Then she asked us whether we were being that kind of friend to ourselves.

I could only honestly answer: no.

There was something almost desperate in that realisation. Not a gentle nudge of “I should be kinder to myself.” It was a knowing that landed in my body — a recognition that I had to do something about this. That I couldn’t keep going the way I had been.
​
This was just before my autism diagnosis. I was about to receive the piece of information that would finally make my whole life make sense. But first, I had to reckon with what I’d been doing to myself in the meantime.

The Advocate Who Never Advocated for Herself

Here is the part I still find quietly astonishing: for decades, I had been a fierce advocate for children and adults with ADHD and autism. I ran support groups. I brought specialists to our regional community. I helped families find language for what their children were experiencing, and I fought for them in the way you only fight when something truly matters to you.
I fought for those children because somewhere inside me, I remembered what it felt like to be one of them. To grow up feeling different, without understanding why the world seemed so much harder than it did for everyone else.

What I didn’t fully understand then is that you don’t grow out of ADHD or autism. It is not a childhood phase. It is who you are. And while I was turning up so completely for others, I had never once turned that same advocacy inward. I had never been in my own corner the way I was in theirs.
If I could speak to that little girl now — the one who felt so different and couldn’t understand why — I know exactly what I would say to her.
“I’ve got you. You can rely on me.”

It took me most of a lifetime to be able to say that and mean it.

The Voice That Wasn’t a Friend

I berated myself. I judged myself constantly. I put myself down for the things that didn’t come naturally — for losing things, for needing more time, for being overwhelmed by situations others seemed to sail through.

I tried to change the need for structure and routine — to be more spontaneous, more flexible, more like someone who didn’t fall apart when plans shifted without warning. I tried to push through the social awkwardness, to perform ease in situations that cost me enormous energy. I tried to manage the hypersensitivity — the noise, the light, the overwhelm that could build without warning and tip into a meltdown I was ashamed of long after it had passed.

I spent enormous energy trying to fix the parts of me that felt broken, to smooth off my edges and become someone who functioned the way the world seemed to expect.

What I didn’t understand then is that there was nothing to fix. My brain and body genuinely work differently. I had known it deep down, always — I always felt a little like an alien, if I’m honest. But knowing something deep down and truly believing it are two very different things.
The research tells us that ADHD children receive around 20,000 more negative messages before adulthood than their neurotypical peers. Twenty thousand. Those messages don’t just sting and fade. They carve neural pathways. They become the voice in your head — the way you speak to yourself in quiet moments when no one else is listening.

For a long time, that voice was not my friend.

The Week Everything Shifted

It's almost one year since my autism diagnosis. Thirty-two years since my ADHD diagnosis. I still remember the week after that assessment — after all of the thorough questionnaires, the three-hour evaluation, my psychologist looking at me and saying there was absolutely no doubt.
I walked around on top of the world for seven days.

Not because I’d been given a label — labels aren’t something I wholeheartedly embrace. But because for the first time I could say to myself: I don’t have to fix myself anymore. I can stop. It’s just me. I think differently. I always knew I thought differently. Now I finally knew why.

Then grief came. As it does with late diagnosis. Grief for the years spent in battle with myself. Grief for the version of me who had worked so hard, so exhaustingly hard, trying to be someone she was never meant to be. But sitting with that grief was also the beginning of something else. The beginning of compassion. For myself.

Over the years I have been fortunate to work with some wonderful therapists who have helped me in more ways than I can name. The inner work they supported me through — finding language for things I’d long felt, releasing old roots, learning that I am allowed to have boundaries, and arriving at the understanding that it is safe to be me — has been part of this journey. But the realisation at the centre of it all was mine. And it started in that room with a question I couldn’t honestly answer.

The Gifts Were Always There

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know for most of my life: the very things that made me feel broken were also the things that made me extraordinary.

The intensity that felt like ‘too much’ is the same intensity that gives me deep empathy, fierce determination, and the drive to advocate for people who need a voice. The pattern recognition that made me feel like an outsider is the same gift that lets me hold complexity and see connections others miss. The creativity that couldn’t be contained in conventional formats found its way into art, into writing, into dance, into decades of healing work with others.

My neurodivergence is not something I need to overcome. It is what makes me who I am — the source of the strength, creativity, wisdom, empathy, and knowledge I carry. It always was. I just needed to stop fighting it long enough to see that.

One Year On

If you are reading this and you recognise yourself in the version of me who spent years trying to fix what was never broken — I want you to know that this shift is possible. It doesn’t happen all at once. It isn’t linear. Some days the old voice is louder than others. But slowly, with the right support and the grace to start telling yourself a different story, you can become the friend you have always needed.

When rejection sensitivity flares and that flood of pain comes, I’ve learned to pause and ask: was that fact, or am I just perceiving criticism? That small question is me stepping in as my own advocate. Offering myself the same second opinion I would offer anyone I cared about.

One year on from my autism diagnosis, thirty-two years on from learning about my ADHD, I am still learning. Still unmasking. Still sometimes sitting with grief for what might have been. Still recovering from years of constant burnout.  But I am also encouraging myself now. Being gentle with myself.

The need for structure and routine, the social awkwardness, the hypersensitivity, the meltdowns — these are never going to change. They are part of me. And I can accept that now. I can allow it. I don’t have to hide my special interests or my collections, my carefully tended routines or my schedules. They are all me, and it’s okay.

The most important people in my life could already see all of it. They saw me — truly saw me — and they stayed.

It was really only me who wasn’t there.
I’m here now.
--
* With heartfelt acknowledgement to the therapist whose simple question started everything.