The Invisible Reality

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?
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The answer, I've come to understand, has everything to do with being a woman.

The Different Rules for Girls
From the very beginning, neurodivergent girls face a fundamentally different experience to neurodivergent boys. When I was labelled "hyperactive/gifted" at six years old in 1969, I wasn't sent for support or accommodation - I was sent to be fixed. To be quieter. To be less.

I was precocious, hyperactive, always on the go, never sleeping. A tomboy from the start. I was constantly told I was too loud, laughing too much, crying too much. I asked too many questions. I wasn't allowed jeans until age twelve, yet constantly getting into trouble for not being "ladylike" when I climbed, played soccer, or sat upside down on chairs.

The message wasn't clear, and it was impossibly contradictory: be less active, but also not lazy. Be feminine, but not too feminine. Fit in, but change everything about who you are.
I loved machinery, tractors, engineering. Those toys went to my brother who happily played with dolls and dress ups. I felt totally misunderstood.  

Learning to Disappear
At age seven, when my family moved from England to Australia, something shifted in me. I left behind everyone who knew me - and I made a conscious decision to start fitting in. I began practising conversations in my head. Practising smiling. Forcing myself to try to connect with girls when I naturally got on so much better with boys.
This was the beginning of masking - though I had no word for it then. It was simply survival.

By puberty, the masking had intensified enormously. Developing a very feminine figure early when I was fundamentally still a tomboy created a painful disconnect. Suddenly I couldn't join in the activities I loved. I had to be ladylike. I practiced making myself feel more girly, even though it felt completely foreign.

I'd been brought up being told it was dangerous to be a woman, that men were only after one thing. I took that literally. So when I was accused of flirting at fifteen and sixteen - when I genuinely didn't understand romantic interest and was just trying to be friends - it created a confusing and frightening landscape. Get on better with boys, but boys are dangerous. Be feminine, but femininity attracts danger.

At fifteen, I began colouring my light eyelashes and eyebrows because people said I looked "pale and unwell," which drew unwanted attention. That same year I started dyeing my blonde hair light brown - beginning thirty-five years of avoiding the "dumb blonde" stereotype and the "blonde bombshell" sexualisation I despised. Standing in front of mirrors, copying facial expressions. Changing my English accent. Taking up ballet - not for the femininity, but for the discipline it gave me.

There was a brief window of relief in grade ten, when I found a kindred spirit - a girl I could completely unmask with. We went hiking, made art, op-shopped, danced, talked about everything. My family said I became "a different person" when I was with her. I tried to explain that it was the only time I could be the real me. They preferred the masked version.
She left after less than a year. And I continued hiding and waiting to fit in.

The Body Keeps the Score
What nobody talks about enough is how hormones compound everything for neurodivergent women.

My menstrual cycle was traumatic. Painful periods lasting ten days, followed by two weeks of exhaustion and incapacitation. During those two weeks, touch would become physically painful - adding another layer of sensory difficulty to an already irregular cycle that refused to fit into my routines. I was constantly in tears, constantly exhausted. I was highly intelligent but couldn't pass exams. I knew something was wrong, but I had no framework to understand what.

My sensory needs also shifted dramatically with puberty. Before, I preferred loose clothing and avoided touch. Afterwards, I needed tight clothing and firm hugs - because my sensitivity to light touch never changed. A tight hug I can handle. Light touch is unbearable. The tight clothing provides constant deep pressure that prevents the kind of incidental contact that feels like pain.

These hormonal intersections with neurodivergence are still poorly understood by most medical professionals, which is one of the many reasons women go undiagnosed for so long.

The Cycle of Collapse
At eighteen, following an illness with Ross River fever, I collapsed. I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Looking back now, I am certain that was autistic burnout - the pattern is unmistakeable. I was also diagnosed with depression. I didn't know much about it then, so I accepted it and took the medication. After six months, I realised: I wasn't depressed. I was anxious and stressed. So I weaned myself off.

Instead of recovering properly, I got out of bed and went back to work - eventually holding down three jobs simultaneously. An engineering firm. A clothing store. My family's business. Working from six in the morning until six at night, only charging for nine to five. Just trying to prove my worth.

At twenty-three, I lost my engineering job due to a restructuring and collapsed again. When they replaced me, it took three women to do what I had been doing alone. Depression was diagnosed again. This time I fought it and refused the medication.

The pattern repeated after having a baby at twenty-seven - diagnosed with postnatal depression, fighting it again: "I'm not depressed. I'm just not coping." Nobody listened.

They saw chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety. They treated symptoms, never once connecting them to the underlying neurodivergence that was causing autistic burnout over and over again. This is the experience of so many neurodivergent women: decades of treating the symptoms whilst the cause remains invisible.

Why Women Wait So Long
The diagnostic criteria for both ADHD and autism were developed primarily by studying boys and men. The presentation in women is different - not less significant, just different. We are better at masking. We internalise rather than externalise. Our hyperactivity is often mental rather than physical. Our social difficulties are hidden beneath years of learned scripts and practised facial expressions.

If I'd been born a male, perhaps my intelligence and interests would have been nurtured more. The ADHD might have been caught sooner, maybe not. But I probably wouldn't have faced the impossible expectations: be naturally organised, socially fluent, emotionally regulated, manage everyone's needs whilst hiding your own struggles.

The weight of carrying the emotional burdens of the entire family is guaranteed to exhaust any woman, but add to that executive dysfunction, RSD, and neurodivergent-associated emotional dysregulation, and total burnout hits much harder. It creates a fatigue most people just can't understand.

So much of my energy went into managing other people's needs and emotions. When I couldn't do it anymore, I'd have a meltdown. I blamed myself because women are "supposed to be" naturally good at relationships and emotionally intelligent. I AM emotionally intelligent - but I'm also an empath.  I felt like I was failing at being a woman.

At forty, I took up belly dancing, still trying to learn femininity. Still trying to fix something that was never broken.

The Moment Everything Changed
My autism diagnosis at sixty-one changed everything. It makes me feel PROUD now of everything I've achieved - especially all the ADHD and autism advocacy work I've done over the decades. I look back and wonder how I managed it all.

I grieve the years lost through not recognising my own autism and not having the courage to ask for help earlier, but the diagnosis gave me the framework to see that I never needed fixing, that I am perfect the way I am, and that my brain really does work differently to most. It showed me that relationship issues were never all my fault - that there were systemic expectations affecting everyone around me.

Understanding my neurodivergence lifted the shame entirely, revealing it for what it always was: society's failure to accept me, not my failure to be acceptable.

Now It's My Time
Being myself now looks like doing things when I have the energy to do them. Learning to ask for help. Setting boundaries I never could before: "I don't have the capacity for that right now."
Learning to prioritise my own needs. For decades, I put everyone else first. Now I understand that I need my help too.

My relationship with productivity and worth is gradually changing. I'm learning that I don't have to be productive to be worthy. I can create art just because it brings me joy. I can rest without guilt. I can exist without constantly justifying that existence through output.

I'm rewriting my story - from one of failure and trying to fix myself to one of strength, resilience, and authentic self-acceptance. I wasn't broken. I was neurodivergent in a world that didn't accommodate me. That's a fundamentally different story.
Now I'm just me. And honestly? Who cares if I'm too much or not enough?

To Other Late-Diagnosed Women
If you're reading this and seeing yourself in these words - if you've spent decades trying to fix something, trying to be normal, trying to understand why everything feels so impossibly hard - please know this:
You are not broken. You never were.

Your exhaustion is real. Your struggles are valid. The years of masking and performing and pushing through took an enormous toll, and you are allowed to grieve that.

But you are also allowed to stop now. To unmask. To accommodate yourself. To work with your brain rather than against it. It's never too late - even at sixty-one, I'm still learning who I really am beneath the mask I wore for so long.

You deserve to know yourself. You deserve to be yourself. You deserve support, understanding, rest, and kindness - especially from yourself.

And you deserve to know: you are not alone. There are so many of us finding ourselves in later life, rewriting our stories, supporting each other through this journey.
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Welcome. You've found your people. And we understand.

This post represents my lived experience as a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman - ADHD at thirty-one, autism at sixty-one. Your experience may be different, and that is valid too. What matters is that we are finally being seen, heard, and understood - and that the next generation of neurodivergent girls and women won't have to wait sixty-one years to know themselves.
If this resonates with you, please share it. Our stories matter, and sometimes seeing yourself in someone else's journey changes everything.

​This is just a small extract from  a chapter in my upcoming book.  Stay tuned.