The Marsupial at the Mammal Convention
It is a common occurrence for people who get a late-life diagnosis of neurodivergence to have had a feeling of not belonging or not fitting in. In the absence of obvious reasons, the mind can turn to more fanciful explanations. A close friend shared that she always thought she was an alien that had gotten left behind, like E.T. Another person related that she had always felt like she was a changeling child, and that the Fae would come back for her eventually. The phrase that floated to the top of my mind unbidden one day: "I am the marsupial at the mammal convention."
Yes, yes, I am a mammal. But not like all the other mammals. I do things a bit differently.
Marsupials don't do pregnancy wrong. They do it differently, out loud, in public, with the whole process visible instead of hidden away until the finished product shows up. A kangaroo joey is the size of a jellybean at birth, blind, hairless, and about as developed as a bean sprout. It has to climb, with its own tiny arms, from the birth canal to the pouch to keep developing. No help. No shortcuts. It just does the thing its body is built to do, the hard way, because that's the way its body knows how.
I think about that joey a lot.
Same game, different build
If you squint, evolution is basically the longest, slowest game design process ever run. Placental mammals picked one build: gestate fully inside, get born mostly finished, run around on the same default settings as everyone else at the convention. It works. It's the meta. Most of the room is running that build.
Marsupials picked a different build. Same game, still mammals, still nursing their young, still warm-blooded and furry, but a different stat allocation. Less time in one loading screen, more time in another, out where everyone can watch the process happen.
Neither build is broken. They're just two different ways of playing the same game.
The build you didn't know you were running
Here's where it stops being cute biology trivia and starts being personal.
If you got a late diagnosis of neurodivergence, there's a good chance you spent years, decades maybe, assuming you were running the default build and just doing it badly. Losing to people who weren't even trying that hard. Burning through resources on things that seemed to cost everyone else nothing. Wondering why the tutorial that worked for everyone else never quite worked for you.
I didn't get my own memo until my fifties. Three decades of assuming I was bad at the default game, when I'd actually been playing a different one the whole time, with no manual and no idea I needed one.
We don't usually find out we're running a different build. We just notice we're low on energy a lot, and we assume that means we're bad at the game.
It doesn't mean that. It means you've been playing a modified build this whole time, without the patch notes, without the character sheet, without anyone telling you your stats were different. Of course it took more energy. Of course the standard strategies underperformed. You weren't failing at the default build. You were succeeding at a completely different one, blind.
So what do you do with that
You stop grading your build against a build you were never running.
That's the whole strategy shift, and it is simpler than it sounds and harder than it looks. You stop comparing your marsupial stats to placental mammal stats and start actually reading your own character sheet: what costs you more, what costs you less, what recovery looks like for your specific build, what a sustainable pace is when you finally stop trying to match somebody else's.
A late diagnosis doesn't hand you a new build. It hands you the character sheet for the one you've been running the whole time. That's the gift. Not a fix. Information.
I am the marsupial at the mammal convention. I climb instead of coast. I develop out loud instead of behind closed doors. And once I understood that was the build, not a malfunction, I stopped trying to win the game like a placental mammal.
What's the metaphor you landed on, before you had the words for what was actually going on? I'd love to hear it in the comments! And if you're ready to start reading your own character sheet with some help, that's exactly the kind of work we do together in coaching.