Oh my gosh, Lauren. This is our story. My daughter's story. All of it. The daily meltdowns after masking at school all day, asking for help and being told to just be more firm and it's because she's an only child and used to getting what she wants. Gaslighting from teachers, doctors, everyone. I will never forget sitting in the principal's office one day, crying, and her telling me that I should add MORE to my daughter's schedule to fill up the free hours. She suggested martial arts and other adult-led activities. She told me to make home less pleasant so she would be willing to go to school. She blamed my parenting.
I was so involved at school. I volunteered in her class every single week. One day I just watched my kid shut down right in front of me. She asked how to spell something correctly and her teacher said to just do her best to sound it out and circle the word if she thought it was not spelled correctly (true story). She put down her pencil and just refused to write anything else. She stared at the wall. She used to hug me and beg me not to make her stay. She used to cry in the car on the way to school. She would refuse to go to bed and be constantly exhausted.
We pulled her from public school halfway through first grade and never looked back. She's a teen now, and if you ask her, she will tell you point blank she thinks schools are prisons. She still believes negative things about herself and her ability to learn (especially around expressive writing and math) because of 1.5 years of school 8 years ago.
But it's never school, right? Can't be.
Thank goodness for our astute family therapist who recognized autism in my sweet girl.
thank you so much for sharing you and your daughter's story - I know others will read this and have also been in a similar place. How school doesn't get it at all, how children (girls) are expected to be when everyone else doing well, and how the parents seem to be the ones who have to make their children go to school when it's just not possible! I hear every word you have said here. How wonderful you decided to pull her out and do what was best for her, and the other adults who recognised her needs too. She is so right - there are often not many differences between school and prisons - isn't that absolutely bizarre!
wow! you could be describing my daughter, she is exactly the same! she's 11, I finally persuaded my husband to take her out of school last year, she's doing a lot better now, and this week we are actually doing the ASD assessment but i have a feeling it's going to be "well she can do eye contact so she's fine", and ignore all the rest.
The pattern I’m seeing is they think that everything they learnt at University is all they need to know. Shocking when its s’posed to be their speciality! I still have a week till I find out their diagnosis so I’ll try to give them the benefit of the doubt! For now!
I was nodding along to so much of this. As a teacher and a parent. Thank you for expressing it so eloquently and clearly. But I wouldn’t want people to assume that neurodivergent children will always show themselves by acting out. Like my lovely friend who was so compliant and high achieving all the way through school and university. A late diagnosis explaining to her all the ways she had struggled in life. My own daughter. We kept being told she was ‘very quiet’ ‘well-behaved’ ‘a day dreamer’. At home she was lively and chatty & full of opinions and information, so we were always a bit puzzled. Not until she began to really struggle, leading to an ASD diagnosis, did we realise that what school were seeing was overwhelm, shutdowns and anxiety-related reactive mutism. We are still dealing with the fallout of her being left to manage that without support. I wish now that we had videoed her at home and they had videoed her at school. Both sides would have been shocked at the difference.
you are so right, I would love to talk about this side of ASD in some more depth. I would also resonate with this in my own experience - very good at school and very quiet - more shutdowns at home than outbursts. I so hear this experience for you and your daughter. It can be so challenging for the outside to understand it because of how we expect little girls to be - pleasant and well-behaved is such a good marker of a good girl!
This!!! I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, so the idea of 'falling apart' at home was absolutely NOT an option either. That's what "bad" kids and I desperately did not want to be bad. Consequently, I disassociated everywhere--at home, at school, at church. I had nowhere I could really express my big feelings, because if my parents/adult authority figures weren't watching me, I firmly believed that god was. That could be a comfort--especially when my OCD kicked in--but it also meant I could only relax when I was completely alone--and when I could forget about the whole 'god sees everything you do/think/feel' narrative I'd been taught since birth. This is a somewhat niche experience, but its definitely why I don't resonate with the, 'well behaved angel at school/wild uncontrollable terror at home' narrative that's so common to most autistic girls.
This is my story, pretty much to the letter. My coping strategy in school was always reading any chance I got. I read through recess, I read when I finished my work early, I read for hours when I got home. When covid hit I was finishing 5th grade (yes, I am that young lol). I switched to online school and suddenly realized the learning wasn’t the problem, the people were. I’ve been homeschooled since then and it’s been absolutely amazing
As a teacher and parent of autistic girls I found this an immensely powerful read. How filled with regret am I now for those years when I could have done better for children like mine. This is such an important post so thanks for writing it. X
Thanks so much for taking the time to read. I think there are so many educators like us reflecting on the past now we have our own children with similar needs. It can be so hard to digest can't it? And we could have always done more for those children that fell through the gaps. I hope we can at least now highlight this more in some way for future educators and parents.
I completely understand your feeling of regret–and Lauren's, which is very obvious in this post–but I disagree that you could have done better. You can only do what you can with the knowledge, experience, and information you have at the moment. You didn't know then what you know now, so you truly couldn't have done better for children like yours. You've gained knowledge and experience since then which has allowed for that growth (and unfortunately regret). But now that you know better, you are doing better. And that's what counts. So please don't beat your past self up too much over what you did not know.
See also: any Dr Phil show about wild children, and through today's lens you see overwhelmed autistic kids being punished and restrained for meltdowns. Overstimulation punished with extra stimulation. Bids for coregulation punished with the parent's withdrawal or own dysregulation. It's heartbreaking. So many caring parents getting terrible advice and trying to help their kids but doing the opposite of what their kids need.
Oh, this is so heartbreaking. And parents going against their instinctual nature also which leads to even more overwhelm. It feels very like ABA… another hot topic.
What a powerful post. The prevailing view at my son’s school is definitely it’s a ‘problem’ with parenting and they are completely blinkered as to how damaging school really is for some children. Thank you for writing this.
you are so right, they are utterly blind to the school institution. It's a real awakening when you can finally see outside it. thanks so much for reading.
Where are all those little girls with the fast brains and the dislike of being in groups and noisy classrooms?
We are still here, with our babies... navigating a world that appreciates us one day and despises us the next. I'm AuDHD, and so is my son who just turned the most brilliant 13 yet. He was that kid questioning 'ancient aliens' in kindergarten. He's the teen now pondering if it's the world that's neurodivergent and we're neurotypical. I don't just love this guy, I like him- he makes me do mental gymnastics daily for fitness and health.
oh wow - ‘the world that’s neurodivergent’ - that’s just opened up a whole new day of thinking for me now too. I just love their way of expressing themselves - they really are our greatest teachers. And yes, I have a daughter who in Kindergarten was also exploring topics that were just way to wild for anyone else to relate too. They are wonderful!
This needs more and more exposure, thank you!! My highly masking neurodivergent (PDA) six year old has recently stopped attending school, leaving her teacher, principal, and SE team baffled. As a clinical counsellor who used to work in the public sector with Child and Youth Mental Health, I’m now haunted by all the cases of kids where I was a voice of thinly veiled judgement towards caregivers instead of seeing what truly might be going on. Now I’m a thoroughly humbled parent. I recently blogged about our first school based meeting where I sat on the “other side of the table” and felt all the things I could not (or would not) understand before. https://pdaparadox.com/2025/04/04/the-other-side-of-the-table/
Thanks so much for sharing you and your child's experience. It is really difficult for us to look at back at those times when we didn't know any better and pointing the finger at the parents. It is humbling, you are so right. I look forward to reading your blog about this meeting, I love to hear these stories as we can support each other by sharing them. Great to meet you here.
It’s so hard for the world to see beyond this ‘spoiled’ child mindset isn’t it? I guess from behaviourist parenting norms for so many years. And yes, the masking leading to physical symptoms is so real. We do need to keep talking about this more and more. Thank you so much for highlighting this and sharing your experience.
This is spot on! The gaslighting, the judging - it MUST be the parents’ fault! Sadly not just from teachers - the NHS, the whole system needs educating!
Thank you for this post Lauren, and thank you to everyone who has commented with their own stories. This is what really helps, what gets me through, realising I'm not the only one just now recognizing how I and my family have been / are being gaslit by schools and health care providers as my daughter, neurodivergent, talented, bright and brilliant, sits her exams after two years of school refusal and teaching herself. I read your recent post about forest school and home schooling and wept for what could have been. I read this post and realised (again) we are not alone in fighting this battle, even though it's hard not to blame myself, how could I not have known?
you are so right Ling, we are not alone in this, even though it can seem so awfully like this when deep in the trenches of schools, healthcare etc. not recognising our children's needs. It's wonderful that your daughter is teaching herself, she absolutely can do it her way and is bright and talented in her own unique style that unfortunately our schools cannot see. I think we will always feel that sense of blame, you are right. We do our best with what we know at the time. I wish you both lots of success for the future.
Wow. I have chills because my daughter is 9.5 and she’s the one her teachers thought was “fine.” We were repeatedly told that “she’s fine once she’s in the class.” Little did we know she was masking all day long and then would come home and have the big meltdowns you’ve described. Your story is poweful and vulnerable- thank you for sharing!
This is such a hard one, and I hear it so often just like your daughter. The masking is really for survival of school and when in the safety of home it all comes out. So great that you have been aware of this now and how that will benefit her so much going forward. Thank you so much for taking the time to read.
This spoke volumes to me. This could have been my story, but I got lucky. My ADHD “presented like a little boy,” (which is what the school psychologist said to my parents) so I was diagnosed at 8 (as a girl). Practically unheard of in the early-2000s! My mother was in healthcare, and knew my meltdowns at home after school weren’t normal. And at school, I couldn’t stop making noise—talking, whistling, clicking, tapping, you name it. So, I was flagged.
Beautifully written. Powerful message. Just subscribed, and can’t wait for more.
That is so interesting to hear and almost quite rare to hear today being diagnosed as a girl back then. Do you feel this helped your experiences going forward as you knew early on?
I think it helped in many ways, but it definitely had its own challenges. They may have been a bit more nuanced because there was a (vague) understanding of how I navigated the world differently. In school specifically, I was still bombarded with a lot of conformity and not a lot of connection. That said, I did have access to support from an early age, which certainly gave me some tools that I still have in my toolkit to this day.
oh wow - ‘conformity and not a lot of connection’ that’s very interesting. Great it did help you with the tools for today. I hope that I can bring that to our family too.
I was this girl and from reading the comments here and elsewhere on similar topics, I feel less alone now. I taught high school here in the States for a few years but it was a miserable experience and a huge mistake. I thought I could help by being a different kind of teacher, but like you, I just saw sets of problem parents because that’s what I was taught and it was the general attitude among my colleagues.
But I knew it wasn’t the parents or the home life, not always, not even most of the time. School was the problem, for my students and for my own children. Covid reduced to rubble all my faith in institutions: education, medicine, government, everything. I’m not even sure my local dog catcher is reliable. I left education in 2023. It’s a rotten institution whose bloated corpse needs to be burned up and scattered to the four winds.
I am not formally diagnosed and do t know if I ought to be. I’m not seeking exceptions or understanding from other people—that’s never going to happen anyway, and until recently only met one other person who bothers to understand me (my amazing never-medicated ADHD husband). I have a team of ND coworkers now who are simply wonderful people and I feel so much like myself around them it’s refreshing after so many decades of having to hide my spontaneous joyful dances and weird ideas or hard days. My colleagues just get me, they get IT, they don’t judge or complain, they just do their thing and give me permission to do mine. We’re quirky and harmless and just trying to be cool with others. I can relax around my husband and my work friends in a way I haven’t been relaxed in a long time.
The connection to ND and addiction is one I need to explore. Alcohol was my drug of choice, as it turned me (temporarily) into the kind of dynamic and interesting person I thought I was supposed to be. How many addicted people are just trying to cope with other people’s lack of understanding and vision, the inability to communicate the intensity of this beautiful world and its mechanics, in ways they will understand. Ultimately I’ve just decided all of that perception of beauty is for me, no one else really cares about my perspective or ideas, and that’s painful, but I’m used to keeping it all tucked away.
I really love to hear all of your experiences here. You are right it is so hard to be a different kind of teacher. I love that you are now able to work with people who get it - that is very unique. And you are right, being true to yourself is the best way to get by. I hope we can encourage this for our children too.
I was that little girl, holding it in all day at school but then still holding it in at home because it wasn't safe to be myself there either. It's a lot to hold in and eventually it all has to come out, which for many neurodivergent women has been the shitshow of perimenopause, burnout and countless stressors of mid life. I only hope that more girls and women identifying their neurodivergence earlier means they can get the support they need to be themselves.
Oh my gosh, Lauren. This is our story. My daughter's story. All of it. The daily meltdowns after masking at school all day, asking for help and being told to just be more firm and it's because she's an only child and used to getting what she wants. Gaslighting from teachers, doctors, everyone. I will never forget sitting in the principal's office one day, crying, and her telling me that I should add MORE to my daughter's schedule to fill up the free hours. She suggested martial arts and other adult-led activities. She told me to make home less pleasant so she would be willing to go to school. She blamed my parenting.
I was so involved at school. I volunteered in her class every single week. One day I just watched my kid shut down right in front of me. She asked how to spell something correctly and her teacher said to just do her best to sound it out and circle the word if she thought it was not spelled correctly (true story). She put down her pencil and just refused to write anything else. She stared at the wall. She used to hug me and beg me not to make her stay. She used to cry in the car on the way to school. She would refuse to go to bed and be constantly exhausted.
We pulled her from public school halfway through first grade and never looked back. She's a teen now, and if you ask her, she will tell you point blank she thinks schools are prisons. She still believes negative things about herself and her ability to learn (especially around expressive writing and math) because of 1.5 years of school 8 years ago.
But it's never school, right? Can't be.
Thank goodness for our astute family therapist who recognized autism in my sweet girl.
thank you so much for sharing you and your daughter's story - I know others will read this and have also been in a similar place. How school doesn't get it at all, how children (girls) are expected to be when everyone else doing well, and how the parents seem to be the ones who have to make their children go to school when it's just not possible! I hear every word you have said here. How wonderful you decided to pull her out and do what was best for her, and the other adults who recognised her needs too. She is so right - there are often not many differences between school and prisons - isn't that absolutely bizarre!
wow! you could be describing my daughter, she is exactly the same! she's 11, I finally persuaded my husband to take her out of school last year, she's doing a lot better now, and this week we are actually doing the ASD assessment but i have a feeling it's going to be "well she can do eye contact so she's fine", and ignore all the rest.
It's such bs that we get written off like we haven't spent every minute studying our own children and their needs
The pattern I’m seeing is they think that everything they learnt at University is all they need to know. Shocking when its s’posed to be their speciality! I still have a week till I find out their diagnosis so I’ll try to give them the benefit of the doubt! For now!
I was nodding along to so much of this. As a teacher and a parent. Thank you for expressing it so eloquently and clearly. But I wouldn’t want people to assume that neurodivergent children will always show themselves by acting out. Like my lovely friend who was so compliant and high achieving all the way through school and university. A late diagnosis explaining to her all the ways she had struggled in life. My own daughter. We kept being told she was ‘very quiet’ ‘well-behaved’ ‘a day dreamer’. At home she was lively and chatty & full of opinions and information, so we were always a bit puzzled. Not until she began to really struggle, leading to an ASD diagnosis, did we realise that what school were seeing was overwhelm, shutdowns and anxiety-related reactive mutism. We are still dealing with the fallout of her being left to manage that without support. I wish now that we had videoed her at home and they had videoed her at school. Both sides would have been shocked at the difference.
you are so right, I would love to talk about this side of ASD in some more depth. I would also resonate with this in my own experience - very good at school and very quiet - more shutdowns at home than outbursts. I so hear this experience for you and your daughter. It can be so challenging for the outside to understand it because of how we expect little girls to be - pleasant and well-behaved is such a good marker of a good girl!
This!!! I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home, so the idea of 'falling apart' at home was absolutely NOT an option either. That's what "bad" kids and I desperately did not want to be bad. Consequently, I disassociated everywhere--at home, at school, at church. I had nowhere I could really express my big feelings, because if my parents/adult authority figures weren't watching me, I firmly believed that god was. That could be a comfort--especially when my OCD kicked in--but it also meant I could only relax when I was completely alone--and when I could forget about the whole 'god sees everything you do/think/feel' narrative I'd been taught since birth. This is a somewhat niche experience, but its definitely why I don't resonate with the, 'well behaved angel at school/wild uncontrollable terror at home' narrative that's so common to most autistic girls.
This is my story, pretty much to the letter. My coping strategy in school was always reading any chance I got. I read through recess, I read when I finished my work early, I read for hours when I got home. When covid hit I was finishing 5th grade (yes, I am that young lol). I switched to online school and suddenly realized the learning wasn’t the problem, the people were. I’ve been homeschooled since then and it’s been absolutely amazing
As a teacher and parent of autistic girls I found this an immensely powerful read. How filled with regret am I now for those years when I could have done better for children like mine. This is such an important post so thanks for writing it. X
Thanks so much for taking the time to read. I think there are so many educators like us reflecting on the past now we have our own children with similar needs. It can be so hard to digest can't it? And we could have always done more for those children that fell through the gaps. I hope we can at least now highlight this more in some way for future educators and parents.
I completely understand your feeling of regret–and Lauren's, which is very obvious in this post–but I disagree that you could have done better. You can only do what you can with the knowledge, experience, and information you have at the moment. You didn't know then what you know now, so you truly couldn't have done better for children like yours. You've gained knowledge and experience since then which has allowed for that growth (and unfortunately regret). But now that you know better, you are doing better. And that's what counts. So please don't beat your past self up too much over what you did not know.
thank you Abbie, that comment really means a lot. You are so right learning from the past to move forward with hope!
See also: any Dr Phil show about wild children, and through today's lens you see overwhelmed autistic kids being punished and restrained for meltdowns. Overstimulation punished with extra stimulation. Bids for coregulation punished with the parent's withdrawal or own dysregulation. It's heartbreaking. So many caring parents getting terrible advice and trying to help their kids but doing the opposite of what their kids need.
Oh, this is so heartbreaking. And parents going against their instinctual nature also which leads to even more overwhelm. It feels very like ABA… another hot topic.
What a powerful post. The prevailing view at my son’s school is definitely it’s a ‘problem’ with parenting and they are completely blinkered as to how damaging school really is for some children. Thank you for writing this.
you are so right, they are utterly blind to the school institution. It's a real awakening when you can finally see outside it. thanks so much for reading.
Where are all those little girls with the fast brains and the dislike of being in groups and noisy classrooms?
We are still here, with our babies... navigating a world that appreciates us one day and despises us the next. I'm AuDHD, and so is my son who just turned the most brilliant 13 yet. He was that kid questioning 'ancient aliens' in kindergarten. He's the teen now pondering if it's the world that's neurodivergent and we're neurotypical. I don't just love this guy, I like him- he makes me do mental gymnastics daily for fitness and health.
oh wow - ‘the world that’s neurodivergent’ - that’s just opened up a whole new day of thinking for me now too. I just love their way of expressing themselves - they really are our greatest teachers. And yes, I have a daughter who in Kindergarten was also exploring topics that were just way to wild for anyone else to relate too. They are wonderful!
He's like a Star Trek brain worm on one hand and a raccoon bucket fart the rest of the time. It's the best :D
This needs more and more exposure, thank you!! My highly masking neurodivergent (PDA) six year old has recently stopped attending school, leaving her teacher, principal, and SE team baffled. As a clinical counsellor who used to work in the public sector with Child and Youth Mental Health, I’m now haunted by all the cases of kids where I was a voice of thinly veiled judgement towards caregivers instead of seeing what truly might be going on. Now I’m a thoroughly humbled parent. I recently blogged about our first school based meeting where I sat on the “other side of the table” and felt all the things I could not (or would not) understand before. https://pdaparadox.com/2025/04/04/the-other-side-of-the-table/
Thanks so much for sharing you and your child's experience. It is really difficult for us to look at back at those times when we didn't know any better and pointing the finger at the parents. It is humbling, you are so right. I look forward to reading your blog about this meeting, I love to hear these stories as we can support each other by sharing them. Great to meet you here.
Thanks for this. I was absolutely that "spoiled" only child who masked hard then fell ill all the time. I'm so tired of the parent blame!
It’s so hard for the world to see beyond this ‘spoiled’ child mindset isn’t it? I guess from behaviourist parenting norms for so many years. And yes, the masking leading to physical symptoms is so real. We do need to keep talking about this more and more. Thank you so much for highlighting this and sharing your experience.
YES. As a teacher, mother, and recently diagnosed AuDHDer…it all resonates…
so glad to hear this resonates. I find neurodivergent educators and mothers all have had such similar experiences!
This is spot on! The gaslighting, the judging - it MUST be the parents’ fault! Sadly not just from teachers - the NHS, the whole system needs educating!
Thank you for this post Lauren, and thank you to everyone who has commented with their own stories. This is what really helps, what gets me through, realising I'm not the only one just now recognizing how I and my family have been / are being gaslit by schools and health care providers as my daughter, neurodivergent, talented, bright and brilliant, sits her exams after two years of school refusal and teaching herself. I read your recent post about forest school and home schooling and wept for what could have been. I read this post and realised (again) we are not alone in fighting this battle, even though it's hard not to blame myself, how could I not have known?
you are so right Ling, we are not alone in this, even though it can seem so awfully like this when deep in the trenches of schools, healthcare etc. not recognising our children's needs. It's wonderful that your daughter is teaching herself, she absolutely can do it her way and is bright and talented in her own unique style that unfortunately our schools cannot see. I think we will always feel that sense of blame, you are right. We do our best with what we know at the time. I wish you both lots of success for the future.
Wow. I have chills because my daughter is 9.5 and she’s the one her teachers thought was “fine.” We were repeatedly told that “she’s fine once she’s in the class.” Little did we know she was masking all day long and then would come home and have the big meltdowns you’ve described. Your story is poweful and vulnerable- thank you for sharing!
This is such a hard one, and I hear it so often just like your daughter. The masking is really for survival of school and when in the safety of home it all comes out. So great that you have been aware of this now and how that will benefit her so much going forward. Thank you so much for taking the time to read.
This spoke volumes to me. This could have been my story, but I got lucky. My ADHD “presented like a little boy,” (which is what the school psychologist said to my parents) so I was diagnosed at 8 (as a girl). Practically unheard of in the early-2000s! My mother was in healthcare, and knew my meltdowns at home after school weren’t normal. And at school, I couldn’t stop making noise—talking, whistling, clicking, tapping, you name it. So, I was flagged.
Beautifully written. Powerful message. Just subscribed, and can’t wait for more.
Cheers to us neurodivergent educators!
That is so interesting to hear and almost quite rare to hear today being diagnosed as a girl back then. Do you feel this helped your experiences going forward as you knew early on?
Thank you for joining here :)
I think it helped in many ways, but it definitely had its own challenges. They may have been a bit more nuanced because there was a (vague) understanding of how I navigated the world differently. In school specifically, I was still bombarded with a lot of conformity and not a lot of connection. That said, I did have access to support from an early age, which certainly gave me some tools that I still have in my toolkit to this day.
oh wow - ‘conformity and not a lot of connection’ that’s very interesting. Great it did help you with the tools for today. I hope that I can bring that to our family too.
Excellent.
I was this girl and from reading the comments here and elsewhere on similar topics, I feel less alone now. I taught high school here in the States for a few years but it was a miserable experience and a huge mistake. I thought I could help by being a different kind of teacher, but like you, I just saw sets of problem parents because that’s what I was taught and it was the general attitude among my colleagues.
But I knew it wasn’t the parents or the home life, not always, not even most of the time. School was the problem, for my students and for my own children. Covid reduced to rubble all my faith in institutions: education, medicine, government, everything. I’m not even sure my local dog catcher is reliable. I left education in 2023. It’s a rotten institution whose bloated corpse needs to be burned up and scattered to the four winds.
I am not formally diagnosed and do t know if I ought to be. I’m not seeking exceptions or understanding from other people—that’s never going to happen anyway, and until recently only met one other person who bothers to understand me (my amazing never-medicated ADHD husband). I have a team of ND coworkers now who are simply wonderful people and I feel so much like myself around them it’s refreshing after so many decades of having to hide my spontaneous joyful dances and weird ideas or hard days. My colleagues just get me, they get IT, they don’t judge or complain, they just do their thing and give me permission to do mine. We’re quirky and harmless and just trying to be cool with others. I can relax around my husband and my work friends in a way I haven’t been relaxed in a long time.
The connection to ND and addiction is one I need to explore. Alcohol was my drug of choice, as it turned me (temporarily) into the kind of dynamic and interesting person I thought I was supposed to be. How many addicted people are just trying to cope with other people’s lack of understanding and vision, the inability to communicate the intensity of this beautiful world and its mechanics, in ways they will understand. Ultimately I’ve just decided all of that perception of beauty is for me, no one else really cares about my perspective or ideas, and that’s painful, but I’m used to keeping it all tucked away.
I really love to hear all of your experiences here. You are right it is so hard to be a different kind of teacher. I love that you are now able to work with people who get it - that is very unique. And you are right, being true to yourself is the best way to get by. I hope we can encourage this for our children too.
I was that little girl, holding it in all day at school but then still holding it in at home because it wasn't safe to be myself there either. It's a lot to hold in and eventually it all has to come out, which for many neurodivergent women has been the shitshow of perimenopause, burnout and countless stressors of mid life. I only hope that more girls and women identifying their neurodivergence earlier means they can get the support they need to be themselves.