Why Neurodivergent Women Wait Decades for Diagnosis At sixty-one years old, I finally heard the words that reframed my entire life.
"You're autistic. There's absolutely no doubt." For one week, I experienced the most profound euphoria I have ever known. I don't have to try anymore. I don't have to fix myself. It's just me. Then came the grief - wave after wave of it. "If only I'd known before." I had already been diagnosed with ADHD at thirty-one, which had been a relief in itself. But the autism diagnosis thirty years later filled in the missing pieces in a way nothing else ever had. It explained everything. And it raised the question that so many late-diagnosed women ask themselves: why did it take so long? The answer, I've come to understand, has everything to do with being a woman.
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 Hello, I'm Jane Marin—and I exist at the intersection of art and advocacy, where creation and understanding are inseparable. For decades, I've lived with what I call a neurocomplex mind—AuDHD (autism and ADHD combined) along with layers of intuition, empathic sensitivity, and pattern recognition that shape how I experience everything. My ADHD diagnosis came in the early 1990s; my autism diagnosis arrived in 2025. But the truth of who I am has been here all along, weaving through every part of my life. Art has never been just a creative outlet for me—it's my sanctuary, my compass, and the way I make sense of a world that often feels overwhelming. As someone whose nervous system runs hot and who lives daily with fibromyalgia and ME/CFS, my creative practice is how I self-regulate, find calm, and reconnect with myself when everything feels like too much. You may know me for my Oracle card illustrations or my portrait paintings of strong, resilient women—figures who carry quiet messages of strength, love, and wisdom. Sometimes a gentle masculine energy steps forward too. These characters often feel like messengers from another time, whispering stories that want to be remembered. Bookbinding has become just as vital to my creative rhythm. There's something profoundly grounding about stitching pages into form, about turning discarded materials into something meaningful and beautiful. Each journal I make becomes a vessel for someone else's story—a safe place for reflection, mess, and magic. This repetitive, tactile work quiets the constant motion in my mind. But my work extends beyond my own creative practice. For years, I've been supporting ADHD and autistic people in my regional community of Bundaberg, Queensland. I've run support groups, brought specialists to our town, and walked alongside hundreds of neurodivergent individuals as they discover their own paths to understanding and self-acceptance. Currently, I'm writing a book about my neurodivergent journey—one that explores the complexity of living with a neurocomplex mind while teaching coping skills to others. I share regularly through my monthly newsletter and fortnightly blog, and create educational Instagram content about the lived reality of AuDHD experiences. Here's what I've learnt: my art and my advocacy aren't separate. They both flow from the same source—a mind that sees patterns others miss, feels deeply, and knows things intuitively before words can catch up. I experience what I call "the download problem"—thoughts arrive fully formed but scatter like startled birds when I try to express them. My creative work gives those thoughts form. My advocacy work gives them purpose.
Through my Gather and Create workshops, these worlds meet beautifully. These gatherings aren't just about making art—they're about reconnecting with creativity, with community, and with the parts of ourselves that need care and expression. They're neurodivergent-friendly spaces where regulation happens through creation, where there's no "right way" to be or make. In the months ahead, I'll continue to share more about what it looks like to live, create, and advocate from a neurocomplex mind. The behind-the-scenes reality of running a creative business when your brain works differently. The joy and challenge of supporting others while navigating your own journey. The ways art becomes medicine, and understanding becomes art. If this resonates with you—whether you're neurodivergent yourself, love someone who is, or simply recognise that creativity and self-understanding are deeply intertwined—I hope you'll join me. Here's to finding beauty, healing, and meaning in the everyday—and to honouring all the ways our minds make magic.  AuDHD and Auditory Overload
I'm in my sixties, and I can hear like a twenty-year-old. My children used to get annoyed because I could hear their whispered conversations from one end of the house to the other. Sounds like a useful thing to have. BUT My AuDHD wiring means I can't filter sensory input the way neurotypical brains do. Where others can tune out background noise and focus on a single conversation, my brain pays attention to everything at once - every conversation, every scraping fork, every footstep, every hum of fluorescent lights. All of it. Simultaneously. At full volume. Restaurant Overwhelm Imagine that you are sitting in a restaurant trying to have a conversation with someone across the table. A typical brain can focus on that person and let everything else fade into pleasant ambient noise. My brain doesn't work that way.  How My Neurocomplex Mind Accesses Hidden Channels
For most of my early life, I couldn't explain how I knew things. I just knew. And when I tried to explain my knowing to others, I was met with skepticism, dismissal, or worse—the suggestion that something was wrong with me. I didn't understand that what felt like a liability could actually be an extraordinary gift, and that my neurocomplex mind was wired to access information through channels most people never experience. It wasn't until my ADHD diagnosis in the early 1990s that I began to have an inkling as to what was actually happening. And even then it took decades to figure it all out. My autism diagnosis in 2025 was the final piece of the puzzle. But understanding my AuDHD is still only part of the story—I also had to recognise the additional neurological differences that came with it: intuition, empathic abilities, altered consciousness states, and more. I call this combination my "neurocomplex" mind—not just neurodivergent, but a complex layering of AuDHD plus these other abilities that are so often intertwined with it.  It may surprise you to know - as it does many people, that my seemingly free-flowing creative mind needs predictability and structure to function.
Every morning I have the same routine - get up at around sunrise, get dressed, take the Hector the Studio Dog for a walk. Then feed him. I'll have my breakfast, which is always the same: a cup of tea, three grapes sliced, one or two of each type of berry that's in season, and four spoons of Greek yogurt. And it will stay the same for years, until I decide to change it. Oh - with the occasional fast morning when I have a cup of green tea instead but that is still built in to my routine. My husband has usually left for work by this time - around 4:30am during harvest. While I eat breakfast with Hector, I watch a lifestyle or renovation programme on TV. Then I brush my teeth and wash my face. Make the bed. Put on makeup (which I've done since high school). Then I do emails and I clean the kitchen. Sunday is the exception. I have to skip the bed-making because my husband gets up after me and then we head out to breakfast at 6am. Once I've completed my morning sequence, then it depends on the day. But the order of days has its own pattern too.  Why my six page CV feels emotionally hollowI stand in my home, looking at twenty certificates mounted on my wall. Qualifications, awards, distinctions. A 99% average in child psychology. Creative artist of the year. Business awards. My CV runs over six pages.
I feel nothing. They're pieces of paper now. I didn't put them up to celebrate myself - I put them up to remind me what I've achieved in life and so that other people could see what I'd done without me having to tell them. Another form of hiding in plain sight. I've seen others on social media celebrating their wins, their achievements. When I try, it feels performative, presumptuous - like I'm showing off. So I post occasionally, brief and humble: "So proud and grateful to have won this award." And I'll even agree to newspaper articles and interviews. It's a compromise. Public enough to be seen, but modest enough not to trigger the danger signals that have lived in my nervous system for decades. I used to think this was just me. That I was ungrateful, or broken somehow. But then I realised - my son does exactly the same thing - so I researched.  Aged 13 with my cat Snippy Of all the traits that come with being neurodivergent, Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) is one of the hardest for me to deal with. It's taken me years to understand what it is, and even longer to learn how to manage it. I only discovered that RSD was "an actual thing" recently - and suddenly, so much more of my life made sense.
What is RSD? RSD isn't something you're born with - it develops over time, particularly in children with ADHD. Here's a statistic that stopped me in my tracks: ADHD/AuDHD children receive an estimated 20,000 more criticisms than neurotypical children by the time they reach high school age. Twenty. Thousand. More!!  Aged 7 at Pompeii in 1970 The Weight of Hours: My Lifelong Battle with Time
I was six years old when my grandmother died, and someone told me that people usually live to about 70. I remember lying in bed that night, doing the math—64 years left—and feeling an overwhelming sense of panic. It wasn't enough. How could 64 years possibly be enough time to figure out why I was here? What my purpose was. Most children that age are worried about losing teeth or learning to ride bikes. I was lying awake at night, gripped by existential dread, convinced I would run out of time before I'd even started.  Have you ever had the experience of knowing exactly what you want to say, but the moment you pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard, pick up a paint brush, or even open your mouth to speak, your thoughts scatter like startled birds and disappear? You're not alone, and it's not incompetence or lack of intelligence. For many of us with dysgraphia and or AuDHD, this "download problem" is a daily reality that goes far beyond messy handwriting and failure at school.
What Is the Download Problem? I call it the download problem because it feels to me, like trying to transfer files with a broken connection. The information is all there in the mind—complete, detailed, vivid—but when I attempt to write it down, the transfer fails. It's as if the act of writing, speaking, or otherwise expressing creatively, causes interference that scrambles the signal between my thoughts and my ability to 'download' them. This isn't like writer's or artists block in the traditional sense. That type of block suggests you don't know what to write or paint or say. With the download problem, I know exactly what I want to say, or paint, or dance, but the pathway from brain to hand, mouth or body, seems to short-circuit the moment I try to access it.  In a world that often focuses on deficits and challenges, I want to share some of the strengths that come with my neurocomplex mind. My neurodivergence includes AuDHD (Autism and ADHD),
2e giftedness, mirror touch synesthaesia and heightened existential awareness (plus a few more I could add)—a combination that shapes how I experience and interact with the world in ways that I've come to deeply value. |
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