So when something hits, when it really, genuinely hits, the brain doesn't say oh, how lovely, I'll enjoy this moderately. It says more of this, immediately, and also forever.

It's not a rhetorical question. It's the stunned gasp of someone staring back across the decades of their life and realizing that what they thought was a personal failing was actually a neurological difference. All those years of being told you're lazy, unmotivated, careless, too much, not enough - it hits like a crit when you're at 2% health and out of potions.

Most of the trauma didn’t come from being neurodivergent. It came from being misunderstood and mislabeled, again and again.