NOTE: The full-length version of this Layla’s Letter was originally published to my Patreon page on June 13, 2023. While I will be publishing posts here on Substack, I am reserving future full-length posts for Patreon.
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I have been trying to find the right way to write this letter for weeks.
I pictured myself telling an easy to follow story, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. One that clearly charts the course chronologically from my childhood to adulthood. And that explains, with detective-like precision, how my autistic and ADHD self-discovery at 39 years old was a journey I had knowingly been on all this time.
I wish I could tell that story.
But I can’t, because that’s not how it happened. And not only that, but after a lifetime of masking I now find myself in neurodivergent burnout. Which means, among other things, that I’m experiencing a lack of skills. Including the skill to write and speak as clearly as I know I can. So if this letter (or my future letters) don’t sound like me, please know it’s because I’m burned out, unmasking, and going through a massive transformation that will forever change my life.
When I look back through my life retrospectively now, it is obvious. But it’s only obvious because I:
Had reached a breaking point
Had already done a lot of work on identifying and healing other internalised forms of oppression
Actually began to learn what autism and ADHD were, including how they often show up differently for girls, women, and those assigned female at birth than classically portrayed in white males
Had the support of family and friends to validate me, hold safe space for me, model to me through their own experiences, and love me no matter what
Yes, I often do wish I’d known earlier.
The most painful parts of this journey have been crying for my younger self because she tried so hard to fit into neurotypical culture, and had no understanding of the toll it was taking on her to go against her very nature. But I am here now, and I am grateful.
So how did I get here?
The long story is that, even though I didn’t know it, I have always been autistic and ADHD. And that I can tell you a story from every point in my life that demonstrates the presence of my traits - from the painful challenges of sensory meltdowns while at neurotypical jobs, to the triumphant wins of my special interests and hyperfocus as a writer, to the everyday mundane signs of how I walk or how I covertly stim (self-stimuatory behaviour).
But even though the signs were always there, I never knew that this amounted to neurodevelopmental disabilities. The most that I knew when it came to naming myself was that I was an introvert and a highly sensitive person, thanks to the seminal books Quiet by Susan Cain and The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron. I first read these books when I was in my late 20s, and they helped me to accept parts of myself that, up until that point, society had made me believe were ‘weak’. And I learned to make some accommodations for myself accordingly.
Years later, through the work that I have done as an antiracism student, writer and educator, I began to understand the intergenerational trauma I was carrying of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and other Systems Of Supremacy. And I was (and continue to be) engaged in a journey of self-love and self-liberation, as well as community care to practice healing and justice.
But I still never suspected that there was anything else I should be aware of. Not because the signs weren’t there but because I was so heavily masked to myself and to the world that I had taken these traits that I learned to consider ‘weaknesses’ and buried them deep, deep underground.
So what changed?
This is what I call the short story. Three specific but distinct things happened that coalesced in me finally seeing what I needed to see.
The first thing was the journey of a best friend, Sharona Lautoe, who was late-diagnosed as autistic.
Sharona and I have been close friends for years. We are both Black, both mothers, and both passionate about justice and healing. We are very different - but very similar in many ways too.
They were the first friend I’d ever had who was late diagnosed as autistic. And because of the way she clearly communicated her journey and needs with close friends and family, I had the opportunity to learn, for the first time, what autism actually was - beyond the way it is described in white males, or the way it is often stereotypically portrayed in the media.
Sharona generously created a little document for their inner circle called ‘Autistic Me’, which helped those of us who weren’t autistic to better understand what autism was, and specifically how it was for them. I will forever be thankful for this gift!
That being said however, there were some times when I found myself thinking ‘hmmm, I do this too’ and other times when I found myself thinking ‘oh wow, I can’t imagine what that must be like’. That second reaction makes me laugh now because I understand that my masked self couldn’t understand, but my now unmasking self does. But also, it’s an important reminder that no two autistic people are autistic in the exact same way. That’s why it’s called a spectrum.
The second thing was the journey of my son, who is my youngest and the one most like me in ‘high sensitivity’.
I won’t write too much about him here because he is only 9 years old and I want to respect his consent and his agency to tell his own story when he is older. However, what I will briefly share is that for many years he struggled with ‘picky eating’ until I realised this year (thanks to Sharona’s journey and the recommendation of a special ed center from another friend), that this was deeper than that. We discovered he has sensory processing challenges, as well as needing other kinds of support.
This was helpful for me as I have always seen him as the more ‘unmasked’ version of my younger self. From the day he was born, he has been highly responsive to all kinds of sensory stimulation, as well as easily getting overwhelmed and needing lots of downtime like me.
As I began to see his neurodivergency, I became more aware of my own.
The third thing, and this was really the straw that really broke the camel’s back, was my entrepreneurial journey.
This is the one that is hardest to share about.
A year and a half ago I shared a post on Instagram about my ‘big visions’ that I was speaking into existence. These visions included building a 7-figure change-making business, leading a publishing imprint for authors of colour, publishing bestselling books every two years, and building a successful media platform centering and celebrating Black and Brown voices.
In the few years before that I had written and published the adult and young reader’s editions of Me and White Supremacy, had become a well-known and respected bestselling author, hosted a much loved podcast and book club, and was an in-demand speaker.
I was also not feeling right.
The ‘success’ that I’d had felt like a double-edged sword because of the trauma that came with doing antiracist social justice work as a Black woman. I also felt very beholden to the publishing industry - and to the white gaze - in a way that didn’t make me feel comfortable. I wanted to do work that didn’t require me to sacrifice my well-being (I had developed chronic reflux and gluten and dairy sensitivity in 2020), and that made me feel like I was working ‘for’ liberation, and not just ‘against’ oppression.
I was also two years away from my 40th birthday, and I wanted to use the wisdom and resources I’d gathered up by 38 years old to intentionally build something helpful, beautiful, loving, world-changing, aligned, and mine.
From that place, Become A Good Ancestor - the company - was born in 2022.
For the next 15 months I worked tirelessly as a CEO to build a business that I loved.
I hired a team of incredible people who were experts at what they do and also passionate about our mission - to create services that helped people to do the intergenerational work of healing and justice.
I worked with women, predominantly women of colour, who helped me to build a business I was so proud of from the ground up. From systems and SOPs, to company branding guidelines, to courses and masterminds, a new website, a revamped podcast, customer service, social media, you name it. I was building a “perfect” business full of love and joy, and I was so, so proud.
The only problem was, it wasn’t working.
Maybe it was the economy. Maybe it was the way I pivoted from antiracism education to supporting changemakers. Maybe it was just that these things take time. Maybe it was that I couldn’t figure out how to show up in the business without having to be the face of it - but also having to be the face of it. Maybe it was that the services I was creating weren’t what people actually wanted or needed.
I just couldn’t figure it out. But I kept pouring my heart, soul, time, energy, and all my money into this business that I loved so much… waiting for the time when it would take off.
And then a few months ago, I ran out of track. A CEO’s main role is to make sure that there is enough gas in the tank to keep going. But the truth was, more was being spent - from my own personal savings - than was being made in sales.
And so I had to make the hard, but necessary decision to pause what we were doing, so I could figure things out. I had already started to shrink our team size for some months beforehand. Some because our contracts were over, others because I had to prioritise where to spend money.
But eventually, I had to let go of my core team and that was a hard, hard decision. It also ended up being the thing that finally led me to seeing the light.
During my 15 months of business-building I found myself feeling like I was ‘finally doing the thing that I was here to do’. But I also felt an incredible amount of stress. Entrepreneurial stress, yes. But I also understand I was now overtaxing myself as someone who has ADHD and is autistic.
But I pushed through this stress because building the business felt so GOOD. It was nourishing the parts of me that had been so burned out by strictly antiracism work.
When I had to make the decision to let go of my team, I was devastated. A big part of me felt like I was giving up. I was also so used to working with these incredible people, we had become a community working towards a shared vision with shared values.
As we got closer to the date when they would finally be out of the business, I found my level of stress increasing.
To the point where it no longer felt like stress, it felt like terror. I was terrified of the idea of doing everything all by myself. Even though my workload was decreasing, my overwhelm was increasing. Though we already had great systems and SOPs in place, and my team were preparing even more for me before they departed, I just felt like I couldn’t do it.
And I don’t mean the hard parts. I mean the easy parts. Like making sure I stayed on top of emails. Responding to customer service queries in a timely manner. Making sure to keep writing and publishing my weekly newsletter. And just… not disappearing from overwhelm.
After all this time building this business and trying to birth this vision, when left to myself I feared that I would be the one who would cause its downfall. And not because of self-sabotage or having limited beliefs. But because I find routine tasks HARD. And because the business structure that I had built was more than I had the capacity to hold all by myself.
Ask me to speak on stage, or write something vulnerable, or run an instagram challenge on white supremacy and I’m fine. Risk-taking is easy for me.
Ask me to stay on top of routine, mundane, necessary tasks, and I fall apart.
The more I sat with this terror and observed it, the more I realised it applied to other parts of my life too. I have an incredible amount of support in my life - from my husband, to my housekeeper/nanny, and my parents. Without this support, I would quite simply fall apart. I hadn’t really thought about it in that way until then, but I realised it was true.
If any of these supports get pulled away, even for a short time, I’m severely impacted. Not because I’m lazy or spoiled, but because I genuinely find it challenging to handle everything - life! - by myself.
For a long time I was ashamed of this. Again, I saw it as a weakness. But as I began to look at things through new eyes, I thought - what if something else is going on here?
I then remembered then a term my friend Sharona had shared with me - Executive Dysfunction.
I decided to Google it, and that is where I finally fell down the rabbit hole.
Executive Dysfunction… ADHD Inattentive Type… High Masking Autism In Women…
For weeks I Googled, watched videos on TikTok and Youtube, listened to audiobooks, listened to podcasts, took online tests, read articles, and consumed everything I could find on ADHD and autism.
I barely slept. Instead I spent every hour I could learning about these neurodevelopmental disabilities and reflecting on my own life.
(I now understand this is the combination of my autism being focused on a ‘special interest’ and my ADHD being able to ‘hyperfocus’ on something it finds interesting – I have done this all my life, but now I have the words).
At first some of the terms didn’t sound like me, or I couldn’t relate. But the more I read and learned and listened to other people’s testimonies of their own experiences, the more obvious my own traits became to me. And the more my past challenges could finally be explained to me in a way that made sense.
It wasn’t just depression and anxiety, it was autistic and ADHD burnout.
They weren’t just panic attacks, they were sensory meltdowns.
I wasn’t rigid or controlling, I was autistic.
I wasn’t flaky or a’ jack of all trades, master of none’, I had ADHD implusivity and dopamine issues.
I wasn’t gifted when I was young but then fell apart when I got older, I was 2E.
I wasn’t just a highly sensitive introvert, I was an autistic person who gets easily overstimulated.
I wasn’t just socially awkward and naive, I was autistic.
I wasn’t ‘bad’ at getting things done in day to day life, I had executive dysfunction from ADHD.
The more I learned and reflected, the more it all made sense. With every new behaviour, habit, or quirk I learned about, I saw myself. The way I am actually started to make sense to me - in a way I never had before.
And as I began to share with family and friends, many of whom themselves are neurodivergent, the more sense it made.
As I began to reflect on my business, I also came to a jaw-dropping but important realization - one that I will never forget.
There was another secret reason why I had built the business I was building. A reason so secret that even I didn’t realise it until I hit this ‘rock bottom’:
I hadn’t just become neurodivergent. I had been neurodivergent all my life. A big part of me had known this but hadn’t known it as something that was a real thing - I only understood it as something about me that was ‘weird’ at best, and ‘broken’ at worst.
I had always felt like my success through Me and White Supremacy had been by some sort of divine chance or serendipity, or even accident. And so as hard as I worked on it, and as much it cost me sweat, blood, and tears, I could never truly ‘own’ it, because the way I had created it had been so unconventional. I believed that the ‘weird’ way that I birthed MAWS meant that it wasn’t a ‘real’ success.
And so even though I’d created this life-changing body of work, and even though I did the work, a secret part of me felt shame that I hadn’t done it ‘the right way’.
And so deciding to build a ‘real business’ and become a ‘real CEO’ was my way of trying to become a ‘real person’. Now just substitute ‘real’ for ‘neurotypical’ and you can see why this realisation shook me to my core.
I rejected the success that my neurodivergent self had ALREADY created and then promptly tried to UNDO it, by trying to build a business that an imaginary, NEUROTYPICAL version of me would feel more proud of.
I was a neurodivergent person, camouflaged as a neurotypical CEO, trying to build a neurotypical business that I hoped would finally make me feel like I could be fully proud of myself.
Yes —- this is imposter syndrome and internalised ableism.
I now understand that MAWS would not exist if I did not have this beautiful neurodivergent brain. And that the only way for me to actually build a life and a body of work that I am proud of is to build it the neurodivergent way.
But it took “failing” at my neurotypical dreams, spending a lot of time and money, and bringing myself to burnout to realise this :(
It was then that I decided to get myself assessed for ADHD by a psychologist, and received my formal diagnosis.
I have yet to pursue a formal diagnosis for autism - I will write a whole other letter on why I’m still sitting on the fence with pursuing this. But for now I am self-diagnosed as autistic, and I am of the view that self-diagnosis is valid, and for many people, the only form of diagnosis that is accessible.
Listening to the testimonies of actually autistic people, especially those who are women, assigned female at birth, non-binary, mothers, late-diagnosed, BIPOC, and others whose experiences have not historically been medically studied and accounted for in a meaningful way helped me to finally see myself.
Discovering myself as an AuDHD person has been life-changing. I am still very much in the early months of processing it and as I mentioned at the start of this letter, I am in burnout.
But what I have learned about myself in just these past few months has already helped me to radically understand my past experiences with more clarity and compassion, and has given me permission to love (and accommodate) who I actually am - not who I thought I needed to be.
To healing + justice,
Layla
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I was late diagnosed two years ago at the age of 55 and also in a similar state of burnout and unmasking after building a new platform as part of my vision for my own business as an artist, but it was costly and has become untenable for my own wiring and needs as a single woman AuDHD person dependent on my own income.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, other than to say thank you for all the work you do.
I’ve followed you long before I was diagnosed and have learned so much about my own internalized racism and the systems that enabled me to be blind to it from you, but this post today resonates so deeply with my own awakening to my neurodivergent wiring and look back at my life through that lens, I found myself nodding my head reading the entire way through. Thank you, thank you, a thousand times over, thank you.
I'm a 73 yr old therapist, mediator and writer. My son is a musician, keen intellect, and the most decent man I've ever met, always inclusive, especially of his autistic sister. He is now living in our basement with his trans partner, and i am trying to understand his journey. Your vulnerable disclosure is freaky-spot-on and timely.
I used your book in my novel, When We Lost Touch, as characters struggle to rebuild a friendship post-George Floyd, during Covid, after years in which they never talked about race. I did a deep dive into imposter syndrome-- how dare an old white lady attempt to write from the perspective .... --etcetcetc. I'm in the middle of the marketing phase, and i feel that my heart is walking away, letting go. I cannot sustain the weight of worrying.
If you ever want to come to Kansas, give some workshops or talks at the university here in Lawrence, I'll set it up. One connection at a time. One hand reaching...