I Want My Twenties Back

A messy soup of anger, grief and acceptance.

When I was twelve, maybe thirteen, my mother took me to see the doctor. I vividly remember the bored and disinterested look on his face as she explained my recent high anxiety, the strange things I’d been saying and the little rules and rituals my brain had been conjuring up.

‘Let’s just nip this in the bud now,’ he said without looking at either of us and referring me to children’s mental health services.

I remember his large frame, the glasses that regularly slid down his nose and the messy, grey hair on his head. When I next went to see him again at eighteen he looked relatively the same; a similarly bored and disinterested look on his face, except this time he sighed in disappointment when he glanced at my notes and then wrote out my first prescription for anti-depressants.

My life has been filled with similar appointments with medical professionals who look at me with different expressions of disappointment, some kinder than others, but they’ve been nonetheless at a loss as to why I was back with the same complaints and concerns; why I hadn’t been magically fixed by different prescriptions and sprinklings of six-week, coincidently inappropriate, therapy offerings.

Now that I am a thirty-five year old triple-threat (C-PTSD, ASD, ADHD), it feels maddening to look back at all the missed opportunities for the truth, for suitable support and for a different experience.

As we grow older, I think that it’s entirely normal to look back at our younger years with a variety of emotions and to imagine what it might be like to go back in time to change a thing or two.

While some find comfort and stability in a ‘no regrets’ attitude towards their past, I’m afraid I have reached a point where I want an entire decade back. Give me back my twenties because I am fuuuucking fuming about them.

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I am quickly realising that there are a plethora of women like me who are navigating late neurodivergent diagnoses and I can imagine that for anyone on the outside looking in, it potentially looks as if we’re overreacting, having one existential crisis after another and that we’re being pretty dramatic about a diagnosis that doesn’t actually change anything.

Look — I get it, kind of.

There’s a lot of noise around how ‘everyone has adhd these days’ and ‘we’re all a little bit autistic’, and I’m not denying that there are plenty of examples where people who are neurotypical also have similar symptoms traditionally associated with neurodiversity, but late diagnosis is a genuine mindfuck, I don’t think I can explain it with better articulation.

The thing is, whether anything in your present life changes or not, it’s impossible not to look back at your life up until diagnosis and recognise all the (now glaringly obvious) red flags, as well as all the ways you’ve been let the fuck down.

It’s so painful and frustrating but, yes, ultimately fruitless because of course you can’t go back in time and force people to treat you different with knowledge they didn’t have yet. I can’t go back and body slam every disinterested doctor who thought I was just a bit shy or dropkick every teacher who said I was lazy or clothesline every boyfriend who thought I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

Alas, this reality hasn’t stop me from thinking about it all. From knowing I’d already lost most of my childhood to fear and anxiety, and that my twenties were spent in total survival mode; trying to make just enough money to live and not let anyone see how utterly batshit crazy I was.

24 years old, wildly unsymmetrical face, side parting and dead behind the eyes.

I wanted the whole decade back!

At least I thought I did but the more I’ve been playing out scenarios in my mind of what my twenties would look like if I could do it all again with the knowledge of my AuDHD, the more I realise I’ve just been imagining what it would be like not to have AuDHD at all.

Even in my fantasies I’ve been trying to escape the truth. I don’t think I can actually imagine what it would have been like to live in my twenties as somebody diagnosed because I’m only just trying to figure out how to do that now. Yes, I’d have had more time, perhaps more support, but I am forced to wonder whether I’d have let myself have any of it anyway.

Because, in truth, I am struggling to allow myself any of that now. I’ve made positive changes in the months since my diagnosis, sure. I work less hours, I’m waiting for further support in actually understanding what my AuDHD looks like but I’m not sure I’ve entirely accepted it yet. Not really. Not with any sense of security or compassion.

While I am relieved to now know the cause of my plethora of struggles, whether they fall into trauma or neurodivergence or the horrible mixture of both, it is good to know, but I think I am still rather heartbroken about it.

The more I write, in the raw thoughts of my journal or even as I type these words, the less convinced I am that it is my twenties I want returned to me, a second chance with the knowledge I have now, and more so that I simply want the chance to live without this kind of brain at all.

I think part of the problem is, when you live your whole life feeling completely misunderstood, even by yourself, low self-esteem is hard to avoid and, while I can always work towards a better handle of my C-PTSD, to be told that, actually, there is nothing you can do about the rest of you, that you were born that way, well, that’s a difficult pill to swallow.

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It occurs to me that I have little choice but to work towards some kind of acceptance and empathy towards oneself. When I think back to myself in my twenties, that’s exactly what I’d have liked to encourage her to do.

I wish I could sit her down and explain everything, encourage her to prioritise understanding herself, beg her to take better care of herself and steer her firmly away from anyone who’ll make her feel like too much hard work.

How can I want that for her and yet struggle to believe myself worthy of the same?

Nip this in the bud, that’s what the doctor said.

I am afraid it is too late for that, for I have grown into something wild and unruly, and often frightening. I am all thorns and blossom, and instead of poisoning my own roots I must learn to tend to all that madness. It is frightening to admit that you’re afraid you’ve become someone unlovable but in confessing such a truth allows for the hope of change.

I can’t get my twenties back and I can’t hate myself into not having the brain that I do but I hope there is a version of myself in the future that forgives me this period of fearful grieving, of uncertainty and anger, and that I’ll find myself becoming her far sooner than later.