Just Ten of The Things I Am Grateful For About My Neurocomplexity

I have spent most of my life navigating a world that wasn’t built for a brain like mine. The confusion, the exhaustion, the years of masking and second-guessing and pushing through — those stories are real, and I’ve told them honestly here before. But today I want to focus on gratitude.
​
The deep, hard-won, this-is-genuinely-mine kind of gratitude that only comes after you’ve done the work of truly understanding yourself.

Because here is what I know now that I didn’t always know: my neurocomplexity — the whole glorious, exhausting, extraordinary package of being AuDHD 2e Gifted — has not just shaped my life. In the most important ways, it has been my greatest gift.

Here are just ten of the different, contradictory and confusing reasons why.

1. The Download — Thoughts That Arrive Whole
​
The best way I can describe it is this: it’s like having access to a library. Not just the library in my own mind — though that is vast and well-stocked — but a library somewhere out in the universe itself. Information, wisdom, knowing — just arrives.
​
My mind thinks in words first, then concepts. When I was younger, images were harder to summon deliberately, though they would arrive unbidden. These days I can think in pictures too. But always, before the words and before the images, there is feeling. The feeling comes first. Everything else follows.
I have experienced this my whole life. At five years old, in a playground in England, I watched children taunting a dark-skinned girl and walked over to tell them why her ancestors had dark skin — about protection from the sun, about where people came from. I stood there afterward thinking: where did that come from? I hadn’t yet been taught any of it.

​When I worked with clients, I learned to trust this completely. A particular flower would appear in my mind — sometimes one I didn’t even recognise. A pet. A person. I would describe what I was receiving, even when it made no sense to me, because a quiet inner voice would simply say: say it. And it always meant something to the person I was with. Always.

Sometimes the information arrives in metaphors, which I then need to sit with and unpack — a process I love. I am grateful for how much information is now available at your fingertips to research and explore, but I have learned that personal, intuitive investigation is absolutely necessary. The research confirms what the knowing already sensed.

As a young adult, when I first began to understand what was happening, it frightened me. I had lost my connection during an illness at eighteen, and had to find my way back slowly — through nature, through learning to relax, through self-healing. When the downloads returned, I had to learn to trust them again.
Now I understand that what I have been doing all along — with clients, with community, with people I love — is something I would perhaps call mediumship. Messages from ancestors, guides, beloved animals. A form of knowing that sits beyond intellect entirely.

I am grateful for every single download. Even the ones that scared me. Especially those.

2. Hyperempathy — Feeling the World Deeply
​
Hyperempathy feels like no boundaries. That is the most honest way I can describe it. The feelings I receive are not mine — they belong to the person or creature or space in front of me — and yet I feel them as if they are.

For much of my life, before I understood what empathy really was, I experienced other people’s emotions as my own without realising it. I couldn’t understand why I felt things I had no context for. Now I understand something that is both clarifying and quietly humbling: I feel and understand other people’s emotions more quickly and more accurately than I feel and understand my own. The empathy points outward, almost by default.

This is what made me effective as a therapist and healer for decades. I didn’t just intellectually understand what someone was going through. I literally felt it. It triggered downloads of wisdom. It allowed me to help people move through trauma — past, present, sometimes what felt like future — and to sit with them in the places language couldn’t reach.

My relationship with nature operates differently. I am tuned to it, yes, but nature does not overwhelm me the way human emotion can. Instead, nature works as an empath for me. It hears me, and it helps me heal.

Hyperempathy is inextricably tied to intuition and knowing. I cannot separate them, and I no longer want to. They are part of the same gift.

3. Pattern Recognition & Big-Picture Thinking

Pattern recognition arrives differently depending on the situation. Sometimes it is instant — a click, a sudden clarity. Sometimes it builds, layer by layer, until the shape of something becomes undeniable.
With neurodivergent children, I didn’t just observe their patterns. I almost felt them. Which, as I now understand, ties directly into both the empathy and the alexithymia — the way I can read what is happening in someone else long before I can name what is happening in myself.

I recognised the patterns in the children I worked with because I related them to myself. And yet, for most of my life, I never noticed those same patterns in me. I was looking outward so fluently that I missed the mirror entirely. I am only now, late in life, learning my own patterns. And the extraordinary thing is this: getting the words — the diagnosis, the language, the framework — didn’t just describe what was already there. The words opened my vision. I am now noticing things that were always happening but had no hook to hang on. I can see what comes before the patterns I used to ignore.

It is both discovering something new and finally having words for something that was always there.
Puzzles, word games, dingbats, murder mysteries — the patterns usually appear quickly to me. But only, I have learned, when I am not overloaded. This is the reality of living with a finely tuned instrument. When it is clear, it is extraordinary. When it is overwhelmed, everything goes quiet.

4. Hyperfocus & Special Interests

When I am in autistic hyperfocus, time slows down or disappears entirely. For someone who has spent much of her life afraid of time — rushing, exhausting herself, convinced there is never enough — this is an extraordinary relief. The noise just stops.

My ADHD side can get frantic within it — reaching for more information, more connection, more — and I have learned to notice when that is happening and gently redirect. But the autistic hyperfocus itself? It is one of the most peaceful states I know.

People sometimes speak of special interests as though they are separate, scattered, unrelated obsessions. Mine have never felt that way. Dance, healing, art, writing, ancient history, archaeology, DNA, ancient customs and beliefs — there is a single thread running through all of it. I have always been trying to understand the same thing. The meaning of life. Where we come from. How to heal. Every interest I have ever had is an expression of that one vast inquiry, approached through a different door.

Even my collections follow the same thread. Always history or nature — things that speak to the growth of human knowledge and awareness, to the story of life on this earth. Each one a small piece of the same enormous question I have been sitting with my whole life.

I masked my hyperfocus quite well, I think. I am not very social, so there were not many opportunities to overshare. But if someone mentions something I am genuinely interested in, I can feel the floodgates. I have learned to notice that too.

When hyperfocus meets something I truly love, there is only one word for what that feels like: wonder. Or perhaps awe. Both, really. They are the same.

5. The Synergies — My Brain’s Dream Team

I don’t think I could have done any of the things I have done if I only had one.
The dance school, the fundraising concerts, the illustration work, the writing, the healing business, the advocacy, the behavioural programs, the support groups — all of it required both. The organisation and pattern recognition of autism. The dopamine-seeking, momentum-generating drive of ADHD. I have focus and I have drive. I have courage and determination, but I also have restraint. I am creative, but not flamboyant. I think big and I follow through.

Everything I have done in my life has been fulfilling. Even though none of it has been what could be termed successful in a traditional, material way — in fact, quite the opposite. And this too is partly because of my two brains: the impulsive, outgoing ADHD and the quiet, self-contained autism pulling in different directions, sometimes at the cost of the practical.

I have won business awards for my innovation and my community work. People in my town still thank me for programs I created decades ago. And yet I have never made real money from what I am good at. That remains unresolved. I say it honestly because it is honest. But I am also learning that the measure of a life’s work was never really the bank account.

The synergy of these two ways of being is the reason I existed at all in the spaces I occupied. Neither brain alone would have been enough. Together, they were extraordinary.

6. Nature Connection

My favourite photograph of myself is from when I was four years old. I am sitting by a river in Wales. Even looking at it now, I can feel the connection and the energy in that image. It was always there.

I have always loved trees and large rocks. There is something about ancient, rooted, solid things that speaks directly to the part of me that so often feels unmoored. When I am in nature, I feel my energy change. It lifts me. It slows me down. It relaxes me in a way that very little else can.

I am lucky to live on a farm. I only have to step outside to hear birds, to feel wind move through trees, to feel the energy shift. There are particular places on our land where something is stronger — near water especially, though the energy remains even when the waterway is dry. Places where the veil feels thinner. I spend intentional time in those places. Under particular trees. Near the water. I choose them deliberately.
The ocean is too much for me — that scale of sensory input overwhelms rather than soothes. But fresh water, moving gently, and the earth beneath me: those are where I come back to myself. When things are hectic or hard, I sometimes feel that I leave my body slightly. Sitting on the grass, or on a rock, helps me stay attached to the earth.

Nature works as an empath for me. It hears me, and it helps me heal. I have never found a better way to say it than that.

7. Authentic Voice & Truth-Telling

My need to be authentic has never felt entirely like a choice. It is simply what I am. And yet, for most of my life, very few people have truly seen the real me — not until a genuine connection is made. From that point on, I am exactly what I am. No performance, no filter. The right people seem to see through the mask, almost instinctively. Perhaps in the same way that I am drawn to people like me — recognising something in each other that doesn’t need explaining.

It has cost me at times. Being seen too clearly, telling a truth too plainly, refusing to perform a version of myself that made others more comfortable. My mother was particularly uncomfortable with my truth. She told me for years that she knew me better than I knew myself. Underneath, I always knew that wasn’t true — but it took me until my thirties to begin dismantling the version of myself I had built from her voice rather than my own. I had surrounded myself with her preferences, her perceptions, her map of who I was. Unpacking that and finding what was actually mine took a long time.

Speaking my truth now feels both vulnerable and cathartic. I have spent a long time hiding my authenticity. Writing from inside the experience — which is how I write all of this — is a choice to stop hiding. Every time I do it, something releases.

The line I use to close this blog — “Your voice doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be yours” — is not just a nice sentiment. It is the distillation of a lifetime. No one else has the exact same truth as you. Just because someone holds a different belief doesn’t make it yours to carry. You cannot be happy if your voice isn’t your own.

I grew up believing things about myself that turned out to be someone else’s truth. Finding my own has been the work of a lifetime. I am grateful for the compulsion that kept pointing me back toward it, even when it was easier to look away.

8. Teaching, Sharing & Wisdom

I have been teaching, in a way, since I was old enough to notice that someone near me didn’t know something I could show them. In nursery school, I was teaching other children how to fall safely off the rocking horse. I have never stopped.

When something lands for someone else — when I can see the moment of recognition in their eyes, when something I have shared reaches the place it needed to reach — I light up. There is no other way to describe it. I feel blissful. Excited. It is one of the purest experiences I know.

I have worked with neurodivergent people across generations. My approach has shifted slightly over the decades, but not fundamentally, because I always worked intuitively anyway. I did not agree with much of the educational and clinical material about ADHD and autism. I followed my instincts instead. Much of what I believed, and taught, forty years ago is now being confirmed by research. The connection between autism and hyperempathy, the overlaps between ADHD and autism, the understanding that these are not disorders, but different ways of thinking and being. And now the links between neurodivergence and hypermobility, fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. I was noticing these patterns before most of the science caught up.

Lived wisdom and learned wisdom share equal space for me. Both matter. But lived wisdom — the kind that comes from having been inside the experience — has a texture and a certainty that no textbook can replicate.

If you ask me who I am writing my book for, I will tell you: anyone who needs it. Anyone who has felt alone and hasn’t quite understood why. People like me. I spent decades finding those people, helping those people, being seen as someone who understood them — while not yet fully claiming that I was one of them. I am claiming it now. And I am writing the map I wish I had been given.

9. Lateral & Non-Linear Thinking

This one is hard to explain. It is not always the same, and it is difficult to describe the air that you've always breathed.

My mind makes connections and jumps. Suddenly I am thinking about something completely different, and I have no idea how I got there — until I backtrack and find the trail. It is like following a map I didn’t know I had drawn.

This can lead to impulsiveness, but not very often. My autistic side analyses everything before an idea settles or a decision is made. The ADHD leaps; the autism checks the landing. Together they form something that is neither reckless nor rigid.

Non-linear thinking is also why I question everything. If I don’t agree with something, I analyse it, research it, sit with it until I understand it on my own terms. This is what led me to create a behavioural management program that people in my community are still thanking me for. It is what led me to understand the connections between environment, food, sensory input and behaviour decades before these links became mainstream. I refused to accept the standard answers. I followed the patterns instead.

And it is what allows me to see things in my children and grandchildren that others are not seeing. I notice. I stay quiet mostly, and I drop hints, and I remind myself that I am here if they need me. But the seeing — the non-linear, pattern-following, map-I-didn’t-know-I-drew seeing — is always happening.

It also shows up in how I teach art. I teach techniques, we have a subject, but everyone creates something completely their own. At the end of a workshop, when we look at each other’s work, we are always amazed at how different each piece is. That is not an accident. I built the space to work that way because I genuinely believe that anyone can create something given the right environment of support — and I do not believe that anyone has the right to judge another person’s art. It is one of the reasons I did not pursue art college. I could not accept a framework in which someone else’s criteria determined the value of what I made.

10. Late Diagnosis as a Homecoming
​
When the diagnosis came, the first thing I felt was relief.

Not surprise. I had been noticing my autistic patterns for years before the DSM caught up. But for a long time, you couldn’t be both ADHD and autistic — the categories were considered mutually exclusive. I wanted to be right, but I second-guessed myself because I couldn’t see all the patterns. They contradict each other so much. Each one masks the other. So I held my knowing loosely, and waited.

When the confirmation came, it felt like being told: you were right about yourself all along. You don’t have to try to fix it anymore.

I could allow myself to continue to think differently. To struggle with the things that don’t work for me without shame. And — perhaps most importantly — to give myself credit for all of the absolutely amazing things I have done with the challenges I have carried. I have found my way around things that others wouldn’t have attempted. I have worked through pain and confusion and frustration that would have stopped most people in their tracks. Whether I should have pushed myself so hard is another matter entirely. I am living through the consequences of that now, in burnout. But I did it. I did all of it.

The diagnosis didn’t give me a new identity. It gave me permission to inhabit the one I always had.
If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: don’t hide who you are. Just ask for help. They are really the same instruction, because if you hadn’t hidden who you were, asking for help would have been possible.


Ten things. Ten gifts. A whole life’s worth of evidence that the brain I was given — the one I spent so long wishing was different, the one I exhausted myself trying to manage and hide and reshape — was never the problem.

It was always the answer.

If you are reading this and you recognise yourself somewhere in these pages — in the downloads, the empathy, the patterns you spotted in others before you spotted them in yourself, the deep connection to the earth, the truth you couldn’t stop telling even when it cost you — then this is for you.

Your voice doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be yours.