I’ve been putting off writing this one, which is very on-brand for me. It’s the post where the personal and the professional collide — the stretch of a couple of years where I got a name for how my brain works, lost a job I thought I wanted, and ended up somewhere that, of all the lovely ironies, makes a living helping people turn the volume down. Let me try to tell it honestly.
A note before I start: this is my story, from my chair. I’m not writing it as a complaint about anyone in particular, and it isn’t medical advice. It’s just what happened, and what I learned.
Getting the name for it
For most of my life I assumed everyone was running the same race I was, just complaining about it less. That everyone white-knuckled their way through open-plan offices, rehearsed small talk in the car, and crashed on the sofa at 6pm because being a person all day had used up the whole battery. That everyone’s feelings arrived at the volume mine did.
They don’t. I found that out properly as an adult — in 2023, in my late thirties — when I finally went looking for answers and came back with two words that suddenly explained a lot: autistic, and ADHD. Both. The combination even has a nickname, AuDHD, and once I had it, the puzzle pieces stopped fighting each other. The hyperfocus and the total inability to start a boring task. The way criticism doesn’t bruise so much as detonate. The sensory stuff I’d spent decades calling “being difficult.” The exhaustion that wasn’t laziness; it was the cost of pretending all day.
A diagnosis doesn’t fix anything overnight. What it gave me was a manual. I stopped reading my own behaviour as a series of character flaws and started reading it as a system with particular needs — predictable, once you know the wiring. That reframe alone was worth the whole process.
The job that didn’t work out
Here’s the part that still stings to type. Not long after I’d started understanding myself better, a job I’d been excited about came to an end — not on my terms. I was let go.
I’m not going to relitigate it here, and I’m deliberately not pointing fingers, because the truth is messier and more human than a villain story. But I’ll say the thing I most needed to hear at the time: a workplace not being the right fit for how you’re built is not the same as you being broken. I had spent so much energy masking — performing the calm, neurotypical-shaped version of competent — that by the time things went wrong, there was very little of me left in the room to advocate for. When you’re running on a mask, you don’t have the bandwidth to also explain why you need the mask.
RSD made the ending so much worse than the facts warranted. My brain took “this role isn’t working” and translated it, instantly and physically, into you are a failure and everyone always knew it. It took a long time, and a lot of help, to separate the real, survivable disappointment from the catastrophe my nervous system insisted on.
What I took from it, eventually, wasn’t bitterness. It was a quiet, stubborn decision: never again would I try to earn my place by hiding the thing that actually needed accommodating.
Finding the volume knob
And then — life’s sense of humour — I landed at a company that makes earplugs.
I work at Loop now, and I won’t pretend I didn’t laugh when the pieces lined up. A neurodivergent person who spent years overwhelmed by noise, who needs to manage her sensory world carefully to function, working somewhere whose entire reason for existing is giving people a way to turn the volume down without checking out of their own lives. It’s the most fitting metaphor I could have stumbled into. Some days the job is the metaphor.
More than the poetry of it, though, it’s the first place where I haven’t felt I had to choose between being honest about my brain and being taken seriously. Where “I work better like this” is a sentence that gets a “sure,” not a raised eyebrow. I don’t want to over-romanticise a workplace — they’re all imperfect, and I’m still learning where my edges are. But the difference between an environment that treats your needs as a negotiation and one that treats them as information is enormous. It’s the difference between surviving the week and actually having something left over at the end of it.
What I’d tell past-me
If I could send a note back to the version of me in the middle of all this — diagnosed but raw, freshly let go, convinced it was proof of something terrible — it would be short:
- The diagnosis is a map, not a verdict. Use it to route around the potholes, not to decide you’re a write-off.
- A bad fit is data, not a sentence. It tells you what you need, if you’re willing to listen instead of just bleed.
- Masking has a price, and you’ve been paying it in a currency you can’t afford. Spend less of yourself pretending.
- The right room exists. It might, hilariously, sell earplugs. Keep going until you find it.
I’m still a work in progress — gloriously, permanently so. But I’m doing it as myself now, at a volume I can actually live at. That turns out to be the whole thing.