By Bee Austin
GRANN Inc. | BEE – Neurodivergent Buzz 🐝
For most of my life, I felt like I was standing slightly to the side of every room I entered.
Not outside. Not fully inside either.
Just… offset. Or everywhere but centre.
I could pass. I could perform. I could meet expectations well enough that people assumed I was fine. Capable. Resilient. Maybe “a bit much” or “a bit sensitive,” and more often than not I was "the quiet one," but ultimately functioning.
Inside, though, it felt like my nervous system, my brain and my body, was running two different operating systems at once. One craved order, predictability, depth, and meaning. The other pulsed with restlessness, intensity, novelty, and an unruly scatter of ideas. When one finally found its footing, the other would shift the ground.
For a long time, I didn’t have language for this.
I just knew I was tired. Bone tired. Soul tired.
I’m a late-identified, non-diagnosed AuDHDer. I say identified deliberately. Because for many of us, especially women and gender-diverse folks, recognition doesn’t arrive neatly through diagnostic pathways. It arrives through lived experience, community mirrors, research that finally listens, and that quiet, grounding click of "this explains things without pathologising me".
A new 2024 qualitative study recently shared on social media by Emma Craddock did exactly that for me.
Reading it felt like someone had been gently observing my internal life for decades and finally wrote it down.
Between identities, not split in two
The women in Craddock’s research spoke about living between ADHD and autism identities. Not feeling fully at home in either space. Resonating deeply with parts of both, but never the whole picture.
That in-between is familiar terrain.
I’ve sat in ADHD conversations where the pace felt too fast, too chaotic, where my need for sensory regulation and depth felt invisible. I’ve also been in autistic spaces where my intensity, impulsivity, and novelty-seeking felt out of sync.
For years, this mismatch fed a quiet narrative of personal failure.
Why can’t I just stick to the routine I need so badly and be consistent?
Why do I crave structure and then unravel it myself?
Why does my brain feel brilliant one day and completely inaccessible the next?
The research names this tension clearly. The autistic need for structure and predictability existing alongside ADHD’s difficulty creating and sustaining it. Not as a flaw. Not as laziness. But as a neurological interaction.
That reframe matters.
Because shame grows fastest in the absence of understanding.
The invisible labour of “looking fine”
One of the strongest themes in the study is the gap between how AuDHD women appear and what they are carrying internally.
This, too, feels achingly familiar.
I’ve been described as articulate, capable, organised, passionate. What people don’t see is the internal calculus running constantly. The sensory filtering. The emotional regulation. The executive functioning scaffolding held together with reminders, rituals, lists, alarms, and sheer force of will.
Looking “together” often costs me tomorrow.
There have been seasons where I was functioning publicly while privately dissolving. Where exhaustion wasn’t just tiredness, but a full-body shutdown. Where emotions came in tidal waves and my nervous system never quite returned to shore.
Like many women in the research, I was offered mental health explanations that never fully fit. Anxiety. Mood issues. Burnout framed as personal fragility rather than neurological overload.
Only later did I recognise the pattern for what it was. ADHD hyperactivity colliding with autistic burnout. A system pushed far past capacity while still appearing composed.
Masking doesn’t always look like pretending to be someone else.
Sometimes it looks like surviving quietly.
A blended neurology, not a broken one
What I appreciate most about this research is that it resists splitting AuDHD into two separate conditions battling for dominance. Instead, it honours a blended neurology. One that shifts across time, context, and life stage.
Some days my ADHD traits lead. Ideas buzzing, connections sparking, energy spilling outward. Other days my autistic traits hold the reins. Needing sameness. Silence. Precision. Safety.
Neither is wrong. Neither is more “real.”
The problem has never been my brain.
The problem has been environments, systems, and expectations that demand consistency from a nervous system designed for oscillation.
This is where the neurodiversity paradigm becomes not just theory, but relief.
I am not disordered.
I am divergent.
My needs are not excessive.
They are specific.
Support should not require me to fracture myself into diagnostic silos or perform distress loudly enough to be believed.
Making this matter beyond myself, and what comes next
Craddock’s study matters because it listens. Because it centres women’s voices. Because it names an experience many of us have lived without language.
But it is also only a beginning.
Understanding AuDHD is not enough if support systems remain rigid, deficit-focused, and compliance-driven. We need approaches that reduce masking, respect fluctuating capacity, and honour both the need for structure and flexibility.
At GRANN and BEE – Neurodivergent Buzz, this is personal for me. It shapes how I think about community, employment, advocacy, and care. It’s why I push for low-demand (as is any space truly "no-demand") spaces. For choice. For pacing that honours nervous systems instead of overriding them.
Late identification doesn’t mean late becoming.
It means finally meeting yourself with compassion.
If you’re reading this and feeling that familiar sense of living between currents, know this. You are not alone. You are not imagining it. And you do not need to be neatly categorised to be valid.
Sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is name ourselves, gently, on our own terms.
🐝