Anna Thought Everyone Was Finding It This Hard
Anna knew life took effort. She just assumed everyone else was using roughly the same amount.
Anna had spent a lot of her life watching other people do things.
Go somewhere unfamiliar. Change plans. Make a phone call. Spend a day around people. Come home and make dinner.
Anna could often do those things too.
So she assumed the experience must be roughly the same.
She didn’t realise that two people could complete the same task while paying very different prices for it.
She had paid much less attention to what doing it cost her.
Anna thought some things were just hard for everyone
Perhaps they were. Just not always to the same degree.
Anna had explanations for most of this.
She was anxious.
She was tired.
She was too sensitive.
She overthought things.
She needed to be more flexible.
She needed to stop making such a big deal out of things.
None of those explanations made Anna’s life particularly easier.
What if some ordinary things genuinely required more processing from Anna’s nervous system and brain?
When Anna began learning about neurodivergence, she recognised pieces of herself.
Sensory differences.
Executive-function difficulties.
A strong preference for clarity and predictability.
The amount of conscious thinking she sometimes used to navigate things that seemed automatic for other people.
The way overload could build quietly and then appear suddenly.
Anna’s first thought was:
“Oh.”
Her second was:
“That explains rather a lot.”
Her third was:
“Does it explain everything?”
It did not.
Anna still had a whole body and a whole history
Neurodivergence became an important part of Anna’s understanding of herself.
It wasn’t the only part.
Anna also lived with health problems, fatigue, pain, disrupted sleep, stress, difficult experiences and periods of very limited capacity.
These could overlap with neurodivergent traits, amplify them, hide them or make it difficult to tell which piece was doing what.
Anna did not need to force every experience into one explanation.
A useful framework could be useful without becoming the only framework.
Some old explanations began to change
This did not mean Anna stopped taking responsibility for herself.
In some ways, it gave her more useful responsibility.
Instead of repeatedly demanding that she become a person who was unaffected by noise, uncertainty, transitions or overload, Anna could look for places where the load could actually change.
Anna started working with her brain
Anna’s good-enough line
Understanding herself was not about finding an excuse.It was about finding more accurate starting information.
Anna could still learn skills.
She could still repair mistakes.
She could still stretch herself when stretching was useful.
She just didn’t have to assume that making life harder was the same thing as growing.
Anna sometimes wondered how she had missed all of this for so long.
Then she remembered that she had only ever lived inside her own brain.
She had no control group.
What felt difficult to Anna had always simply felt like what life was.
The useful discovery was not that everybody else had been finding life easy.
They hadn’t.
It was that people could find different things difficult, in different ways, at different costs.
And once Anna understood some of her own costs better, she had more choices about what to do with them.