Who Am I, and What Am I Doing With My Life?
- Jul 16
- 7 min read
Alexandra Bennett, Founder and Director of Equanimity Psychological Services, leverages 28 years of experience in diverse psychological areas as a psychologist, teacher, writer, entrepreneur, and advocate to provide comprehensive care and mentor clinicians in complex assessments and interventions.
I hear this question more than almost anything else in my consulting room. It comes dressed up differently each time, a marriage, burnout, or a promotion that should have felt like triumph but felt like drowning instead. Underneath, though, it is the same sentence, spoken by women of every age and every level of visible “success.” Who am I, and what am I doing with my life? It should not be this hard.
Perhaps you are reading this at 11 p.m. with a cup of tea gone cold beside you, replaying a conversation from work and wondering why everyone else seems to move through the world without a manual while you are translating every exchange in real time. I want you to know something first.
That question is not a complaint. It is not weakness or drama. It is a diagnostic signal. I have spent 31 years learning how to hear it.
It should not be this hard and you are right
Here is what I know about AuDHD, the combination of ADHD and autism that shows up differently in women than the textbooks describe. It shows up differently again in women who are highly capable of hiding it, and in a growing number of men too.
You have a nervous system that registers more, sound, texture, social nuance, and everything happening in a room at once. At the same time, you are fighting a brain that struggles to sequence, filter, and land on “start.” That alone is a full time job. Add this, you learned, probably before you were ten, that the way you naturally thought and responded was not acceptable. So you built another self, a performance so good that my husband calls it my “avatar” for this world.
That is masking. It is not vanity. It is survival. You studied the room the way other children studied times tables, holding eye contact for the right number of seconds and laughing half a beat after everyone else. You rehearsed conversations in the shower and apologised for things you had not done yet. You became fluent in a language that was never your native tongue, so fluent that you started believing the performance was who you were.
For those of you leading teams or businesses, this pattern does not disappear at the office door. It usually gets worse. Composure under pressure is expected of every leader, but for an AuDHD leader, it means running two systems at once, making the actual decision and performing in a way that makes it look effortless. That is the cost nobody puts in a leadership plan.
This is why so many AuDHD women are not diagnosed until their thirties or later, often only after their own child’s assessment holds up a mirror. A 2024 CDC report found that 61% of women with ADHD were diagnosed in adulthood, compared with 40% of men. The diagnostic delay is not a personal failing. It is the pattern. You were too competent at hiding the traits, and the well socialised woman already knows the unspoken rule, you do not argue with professionals because they must know best. Clinicians look for struggle, but you presented as tired, anxious, or “intense.” Every label except the accurate one.
The cost is identity erosion. When you spend that much energy managing how you appear, there is little left to ask what you actually want or feel. You wake up at 45, having competently built an entire life, and you still do not know who you are underneath it because you were never given permission to find out.
A diagnosis is not a label, it is a map
It should not be this hard, and it is not once you understand what “this” actually is. The hardness was never proof that you are broken. It was the cost of navigating unfamiliar terrain without a map, in a language that was never yours, while being judged by rules that were never designed with your brain in mind.
A diagnosis, or even a clear, well assessed understanding of your own neurology, does not hand you a diminished version of yourself. It hands you a map of terrain you have been crossing blindly for decades. The hyperattunement that made you anxious in crowded rooms is what makes you extraordinary at reading people. The intensity that was called “too much” is the engine behind everything you have finished.
This is why I assess the way I do, considering multiple perspectives and refusing to accept the first plausible answer. I know exactly what it costs a woman, or a leader, to be assessed lazily or not at all.
What is identity erosion, and what do you actually do about it?
Identity erosion is not a dramatic event. It is the slow, cumulative effect of spending so much energy managing how you appear that you never develop a reliable sense of who you actually are. For AuDHD women, particularly those with trauma histories, it begins early and runs deep, until you have spent decades performing a version of yourself built around other people’s comfort.
Here is the part nobody tells you, getting the diagnosis, or finally having the conversation that makes everything click, matters. That moment of recognition is real. However, for most people with late diagnosed AuDHD and trauma histories, what follows is not liberation. It is a new kind of exhaustion.
The dopamine hit of finally having an answer is intoxicating, creating the sense that everything is about to change. Then, almost without realising it, you do exactly what you have always done, learn everything about AuDHD, research every strategy, and optimise every system, not to understand yourself, but to perform a better version of yourself for other people again. The map becomes another tool in service of the mask. You end up back in the same exhaustion, now carrying the added weight of, “But I know what is wrong with me, so why is this still so hard?”
This is the gap nobody talks about. Diagnosis is not the destination. It is the beginning of a very different kind of work.
Stop learning more about yourself to be better for others
For most late diagnosed AuDHDers with trauma histories, the first response to a diagnosis is to weaponise the new information in service of the old wound. You learn about executive dysfunction so you can apologise more effectively for missed deadlines. You learn about rejection sensitive dysphoria, intense emotional pain triggered by perceived criticism, so you can explain why you overreacted.
This is not recovery. This is the same performance with better footnotes.
The diagnosis was supposed to answer, “Who am I?” But if you are using it to optimise yourself for everyone else’s benefit, you are still not asking what matters, "What do I want? What do I need? What would my life look like without organising it around other people’s comfort?"
Identity erosion is healed not by learning more about your neurology, but by practising, slowly and imperfectly, how to choose yourself. Not performing wellness. Actually, quietly, and deliberately choosing what is true for you.
Here are five things I ask my clients, and the executives I coach, to focus on for the next three months. This is not a programme. It is a practice in rediscovering who you are when no one is watching.
Stop masking in at least one relationship. Choose one person, a partner, friend, or sibling, and practise being honest about what you find difficult, without explaining or apologising. Simply name it, “I find this exhausting.” Choose someone safe who will not use it against you, remembering that everyone masks. The skill is knowing who it is safe to stop masking around.
Let something remain unfinished. Perfectionism in AuDHD is almost always anxiety in disguise about what someone else will think. Choose one task this week, weigh it against your own values, and deliberately leave it at good enough. That discomfort is the edge of your identity.
Spend time alone without a purpose. Do not meditate, journal, or consume self improvement content. Simply exist without producing or performing. This is difficult for AuDHD women because stillness without output feels indulgent. It is not. It is the only way to hear your own preferences.
Notice what you enjoy, not what you are good at. AuDHD women are often extraordinarily competent at things that cost them enormously. Separate the two. Ask yourself, "If nobody ever knew I did this, would I still want to do it?"
Grieve the version of yourself you performed. There is no timeline for this. There will be anger, loss, and mourning for the years spent being someone else in order to survive. That grief is not self pity. It is necessary. Allow yourself to feel the weight of what it cost, then gently begin choosing what comes next.
You are not behind, you were unmapped
If you have made it this far at 2 a.m., here is what I want you to take from this. You are not too much. You are not late to your own life. You are not broken, difficult, or a disappointment for finding ordinary things exhausting when your nervous system was never built to do them in the ordinary way.
You are, quite possibly, an extraordinarily capable woman who has been navigating without a map, finally close enough to stillness to ask what matters, "Who am I underneath the performance?"
I cannot answer that for you. But I can tell you this, the woman underneath the performance is not a lesser version of the one you have shown the world. She is usually the more interesting one, and she has been waiting patiently for you to finally go looking.
Start there. Become as curious about yourself as you have spent your whole life being curious about everyone else’s comfort. You have earned the map. Go and enjoy the journey.
Start your journey today
If you lead a team, a business, or a life that no longer fits the way your brain actually works, you do not have to redesign it alone. Reserve your seat at our two day workshop for neurodivergent leaders and executives, taking place in Canada in January 2027.
Read more from Alexandra Bennett
Alexandra Bennett, Equanimity Psychological Services
Alexandra Bennett, Founder and Director of Equanimity Psychological Services, brings 28 years of expertise in trauma, ASD, ADHD, personality and mood disorders, fertility, women’s health, sexual health and wellness, relationships, and sexual dysfunction. Renowned for her skill in complex assessments and diagnostics, she employs diverse interventions to address her clients' needs. As a teacher, writer, entrepreneur, and advocate, Alexandra mentors group clinicians, fostering their development in comprehensive psychological care.
