06/01/2026
Raise your hand if someone spent actual years of your life making you feel like too much.
Too loud. Too sexual. Too sensitive. Too weird. Too intense. Too opinionated. Too big for whatever small room they put you in. Too everything except too quiet and too small which is apparently the only two things that were acceptable.
And you believed them. Because you were young or tired or they were someone who was supposed to love you and so you started editing yourself like a rough draft. Cutting. Shrinking. Filing down every interesting part of yourself until you were finally the right size for their comfort.
I know because I did it too.
I am auDHD. I am weird in ways I couldn't explain or control or turn off no matter how hard I tried and trust me I tried everything. Every strategy. Every mask. Every version of myself I could construct that might finally make me fit somewhere. And every single time I tried to shrink into normal I just stood out more. Like the universe kept turning the volume up every time I tried to turn it down. Absolutely humiliating. Would not recommend.
It wasn't until college that something cracked open. I stopped trying to fit and started just being and something insane happened.
People were drawn to it. Like actually magnetically pulled toward the exact thing I had spent years being ashamed of. The weirdness wasn't the problem. The weirdness was the whole thing. It was the most powerful thing about me and I had been treating it like a liability.
Standing in who I actually was changed everything. My relationships. My work. The way I walked into rooms. The way people responded to me. And I became so obsessed with that feeling that I built my entire life around helping other people find it because nobody should have to spend years apologizing for the most interesting thing about them.
So here's what I know for a fact.
The weird kid is still in there. Still loud. Still filthy. Still too much. Still absolutely feral in the best possible way. She didn't go anywhere she's just been waiting for you to stop apologizing for her existence like she's a problem you're managing.
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