Better to Drown in Depth, Than Die in the Shallows: My late-age Autism/ADHD Diagnosis and How it Changed My Relationship with Myself

I’ve always felt things "too deeply".

Cared too much.

Loved too hard.

Not in the soft, romantic way people glamorize it, either. I mean in the brutal, breath-stealing, stomach-hollowing kind of way. The kind of way that leaves you wrecked at 2 a.m. over something that wouldn’t make most people blink. The kind of way that makes others say “You’re too sensitive” or “You need to let things go.”

I used to believe them.

Used to think there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t just skim the surface of life. Because I couldn’t do casual. Couldn't fake small talk, or nod along to pleasantries when there was something real boiling under the skin. I tried, God knows I tried. I stayed in the shallows for a long time — because it was safer, because I was easier to love when I was smaller. More tolerable. Digestible. Quiet.

But it nearly killed me.

Not literally, but close enough. That kind of death of self — the slow erosion of who you are when you contort yourself just to fit in the tiny boxes other people hand you. It chips away at you until you barely recognize your own reflection. You become a watered-down version of yourself, always hovering on the edge of disappearing entirely.

All the ways I was called “too much” or “too different” weren’t character flaws or emotional defects — they were how I was wired.

But I didn’t learn that in some lightbulb moment that made everything better.

The diagnosis didn’t bring instant peace. It knocked the wind out of me.

Autism. ADHD. At 31.

I was blindsided.

Not because it didn’t make sense — honestly, it explained everything — but because suddenly, the weight of all the years I spent trying to be “normal” came crashing down on me. Every moment I’d been misunderstood. Every time I’d been told to “calm down,” to “get over it,” to “act right.” Every time I’d forced myself to smile through sensory overload, to mimic connection, to keep up with systems I was never built to navigate. I had to grieve all of it — my childhood, my early adulthood, the identity I had spent decades crafting in survival mode.

And then came the work.

Because having a name for it didn’t solve anything — it just gave me a starting point. A rough, jagged map of where I’d been and where I might be able to go now. But only if I was willing to get honest. To peel back the layers of shame I had learned to wear like armor. To stop performing “normal” and begin the painstaking process of figuring out what my normal even looked like.

What my capacity was.

What my needs actually were.

What environments allowed me to function — or crush me.

It wasn’t healing wrapped in a bow.

It was deconstruction.

And somehow, in the middle of that unraveling, I began to see myself not as broken, but as wired differently. I started to understand that my depth, my intensity, my patterns, my sensory sensitivities, and my executive dysfunction weren’t failures. They were facts. And more importantly — they were valid.

Not because the world suddenly made room for me, but because I stopped trying to rip myself out of my own skin to fit into places I was never meant to belong.

Now I’m slowly learning how to exist without apology.

To stop masking.

To let myself be exactly who I am — even if it’s too much for some.

Especially if it’s too much for some.

And it changed everything.

Not because the world became easier, but because I stopped trying to rip myself out of my own skin to belong in places never meant for me. I stopped apologizing for how I process, feel, love, and exist. I started unlearning the shame, one layer at a time, and gave myself permission to stop performing “normal.”

That’s when I realized something: I’d rather be too much than nothing at all.

I’d rather scare people with the weight of my truth than let them love a lie.

I'd rather drown in depth than die in the shallows.

Because depth is where the real stuff lives.

It’s where connection is born. Where healing happens. Where truth cuts through the noise and makes room for growth. It’s where I find me — the messy, wild, aching, neurodivergent version of myself I’ve spent too long apologizing for.

And yeah, sometimes I go under.

Sometimes the heaviness of it all threatens to pull me beneath the surface — heartbreak, loss, trauma, grief — but I’ve learned how to breathe down there. How to hold space for my pain without letting it swallow me. How to stop running from the parts of myself that feel too much.

I wasn’t built for shallow waters.

I was built for the deep end — for conversations that crack open the soul, for love that doesn’t flinch at scars, for truth that doesn’t care if it makes others uncomfortable. I’ve come to terms with that now. I prefer it. Crave it. No more performing, no more shrinking, no more sanding down the edges of who I am to make others more comfortable.

If you’re like me — if you’ve ever been told you feel too deeply, think too much, care too hard — let me say this plainly:

You’re not broken.

You’re just swimming in a different ocean.

And maybe it’s time you stopped treading water in the shallows and let yourself sink into the depth you were born to hold.

You’ll find me there — not floating, not flailing — but fully alive.

Finally, unapologetically, me.

Closing Notes:

This post ties in with my post, "Flat Tires and Frazzled Transitions: Navigating Autism, ADHD, Trauma, & Task Shifts". Getting a late diagnosis of Autism and ADHD — even after years of quietly suspecting it, especially once three of my children were formally diagnosed — still hit me harder than I expected.

Not because I’m ashamed.

Not because I wish I were someone else.

But because it changed everything.

It reframed my entire life.

Every struggle I thought was a personal failing. Every meltdown I chalked up to being “too emotional.” Every time I pushed myself to fit into spaces that left me overstimulated, anxious, or shut down. It wasn’t just that I’d been misunderstood — I’d been trying to heal using a map that wasn’t made for me.

My brain and nervous system aren’t wired like a neurotypical’s.

Which means all the self-work I had been doing before — the therapy, the mindfulness, the personal development — it wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t written in a language I could fully understand. It was like trying to follow step-by-step instructions in a dialect I never learned to speak. The pieces didn’t fit, and I kept blaming myself for not “getting better” fast enough.

This diagnosis didn’t just give me clarity — it forced me to start over.

To throw out the old script and begin building something that actually honors the way I work.

And that’s both liberating and grief-laced.

Because while it gave me permission to finally stop pretending, it also made me reckon with how long I had been pretending just to survive.