I didn't pursue an ADHD diagnosis. My body did it for me.

As part of Mental Health Awareness week, I'd like to share how I came to my diagnosis. The honest version of it, anyway – because the tidy version doesn't exist.

You might assume it went something like this: I read an article, I recognised myself, I sought assessment, I was diagnosed. Tidy. Linear. A small revelation followed by the appropriate next step.

Mine was nothing like that. It was a slow accumulation, over a period of years, in which my body knew something I had no language for. By the time I finally walked into the assessment, I wasn't there because I'd had a sudden insight. I was there because I was at breaking point.

I do believe the unravelling started when my mother became unwell. I spent several months travelling between the England and Germany to be with her in hospital, while also continuing to work in a demanding role. Looking back, that was probably when my reserves started running down – though I didn't notice that at the time. People with ADHD are often unusually good at functioning while quietly drawing on energy they don't have, and I was no exception. The mask held.

When my mother passed away, my response surprised people. I wasn't visibly grief-stricken in the way they expected. I told people I was doing okay, and I believed it.

I didn't know yet that grief in ADHD brains often has a different timeline. Loss is sometimes processed on a slight delay, which might look like coping. The grief itself sits underneath, unmetabolised, until something gives.

What gave first was my sleep.

A few weeks later, my sleep started fracturing. And when sleep is bad, everything else falls apart: emotional regulation drops, focus drops, energy drops, rejection sensitivity spikes, and the daily cost of looking competent triples.

I now understand what was happening biologically. ADHD brains depend on sleep for dopamine regulation and executive function. And almost certainly – given my age – perimenopause was beginning to destabilise the same systems underneath everything as well.

I didn't know any of that at the time. I just knew I was tired in a way I couldn't sleep off, and that the version of me I was used to relying on wasn't quite reachable anymore.

I held it all together for almost a year. And then I couldn’t any more.

The collapse, when it came, was burnout. Decades of high-functioning ADHD masking, quietly straining for years, had finally outrun what my reserves could sustain. Grief, broken sleep, hormonal shift, and the cumulative cost of working twice as hard as everyone else to look composed had all converged at once.

It was in that period of collapse that I started coming across material on how ADHD presents in girls, and I read it the way you read something that's describing your own childhood back to you. The daydreaming. The forgetfulness. The over-preparation. The chronic anxiety underneath the competence. The masking. The way the symptoms had been there my entire life, hidden by the fact that nobody was looking for them in someone like me.

I sought an assessment and was diagnosed with combined type ADHD.

Every woman's diagnosis story is different in the specifics. But almost every woman I talk to has at least one of these three things in common.

A destabilising life event. A bereavement, a divorce, a job loss, a serious illness in the family – something that depletes the reserves the masking has been quietly drawing on.

A hormonal shift. Postpartum, perimenopause, the years when oestrogen begins to fluctuate or crash. The neurochemistry that has been just about holding the executive function together starts losing its support.

A burnout. A long, slow erosion of capacity, often invisible until the moment it breaks.

If you recognise yourself in any of this, please know: what is happening to you is biological and circumstantial. It is not a reflection of who you are.

The diagnosis itself didn't miraculously get me out of burnout. But it changed the story I had been telling myself – about myself – all these years.

The first thing I felt was relief. The kind that comes from finally having a name for something that has shaped every year of your life. It is hard to overstate how much that matters.

But the relief was followed by something I wasn't expecting: grief. Not for the diagnosis, but for the life I could have had if I'd known sooner. The friendships I lost because I thought I was bad at staying in touch. The jobs I left because I thought I wasn't cut out for them. The hours of self-criticism I spent after a difficult day at work. Almost every late-diagnosed woman I have talked to describes some version of this grief. If you are currently in it: it is not self-pity. It is mourning the cost of not knowing.

And then – once the relief and the grief had begun to settle – I encountered something else. There was almost nothing.

By which I mean: very little support, very few women specific resources, very few people who could help me design a way of working with my newly-named brain. I was offered medication, which is the standard first-line intervention. For some women it is genuinely life-changing. For me, it didn't work – not unusual, but not what I had been hoping for. And beyond medication, the system thinned out fast.

I trained because as a late-diagnosed woman trying to make sense of what had just happened to me, I really needed someone who understood both the science and the lived reality. So I became that person. Not for myself, but for the women who are currently somewhere in that moment I described, or just emerging from it, or holding the diagnosis paperwork and wondering what on earth happens now.

That last question is one of the most common things I hear, and it is the reason I am hosting a webinar called Diagnosis: ADHD — Now What!? . It is built for the moment after the diagnosis lands and before the rebuilding begins. The moment most of us are left in alone, with very little guidance and a lot of feelings.

If you are in that moment now, know someone who is or are simply curious, then I would love to see you there.