A strengths-led exploration by 🟠 the neurovision group

Introduction

This article is Part 8 of a 12-part series exploring neurodivergent lived experience, not as a list of challenges, but as a complex interplay of brain, body, nervous system and environment. Here, we uncover the real, lived experience of neurodivergence, the stuff that shapes your days long before you ever learn the words for it.

If someone had told me 20, 30, 40 years ago that my “mystery symptoms” were actually neurodivergence living in the body… I would’ve cried on the spot.

Here’s the thing nobody told us:

Neurodivergence doesn’t just sit quietly in the brain.
It expresses itself through the entire body.

And if you’ve spent years thinking you were weak, dramatic, failing, unfit, unreliable, or “just anxious”…

My beautiful friend, you were simply undiagnosed.

Our bodies have been telling the truth long before anyone understood the language.

The health puzzle — and the moment everything clicks

For years, I genuinely thought I’d been assembled in the wrong factory.

I could run on adrenaline for days… then wake up unable to stand up without the room spinning.

Heart racing when lying flat.
Dizzy the moment I stood.
Digestion doing interpretive dance.
Chronic pain moving around like it had a travel itinerary.

I was a walking plot twist.

Doctors offered the classics:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• IBS
• “Stress”
• Hormones
• All in your head (my fave!)
• Have you tried yoga?

And after every appointment, I’d go home, push harder, crash harder and blame myself. After one such appointment I actually signed up for boot camp, feeling like I just wasn't healthy or strong enough and this would work!? .....it didn't and my god the pain my body shouted at me after every 5am session.

Then the autism + ADHD + dysautonomia trifecta arrived (after many years of fighting for assessments), and suddenly…

Oh.
Every symptom has context.
Every crash has a reason.
Every “weakness” was actually physiology.

From the inside, it feels like:

• your body running 47 tabs with 3% battery
• being totally fine until you’re suddenly underwater
• a heart that keeps starting drum solos unannounced
• temperature regulation controlled by a toddler
• nausea that appears like an unwanted surprise guest
• fatigue so deep that conversation itself feels like heavy lifting
• the guilt of “but you don’t look ill”

It’s not unreliability.

It’s the nervous system spending its entire daily budget before lunch.

What’s actually going on

Our autonomic nervous system (the bit that runs heart rate, digestion, blood pressure, temperature) didn’t download the neurotypical update.

Add in:

• sensory overload
• years of masking
• hypermobility
• connective tissue quirks
• an attention system that forgets to eat or drink
• stress hormones running a circus

…and the body flips between full throttle and 404 error without warning.

This is not imagined.
This is not weakness.
This is your wiring.

The gifts nobody sees (but you live every day)

This same sensitive, high-resolution wiring is why:

• you can feel emotional shifts before anyone else notices
• you spot danger, friction or tension before there’s language for it
• you read a room like an instrument
• you sense what’s off long before it becomes a problem
• you’ve built a quiet mastery of pacing, recovery, and energy economy
• your intuition is razor sharp because you live through your whole body, not just your mind

Your body isn’t fragile.
It’s finely tuned, and finally understood.

Solution — What actually helps now

Not perfection. Not pushing harder.
Just responding to your wiring with accuracy.

• Rest becomes oxygen, not a reward.

• Energy, not time, dictates the plan.
  Big thinking when the tank is full.
  Admin when the tank is half.
  Grace when it’s empty.

• Crash kits everywhere.
  Salt sachets, water, headphones, soft clothes, snacks.
  (People with dysautonomia carry salt like Victorian women carried smelling salts.)

• Name your wiring out loud.
  “I work differently.”
  The right people nod.
  The wrong ones..... were always the wrong ones.

• Treat symptoms as data, not failure.
  Dizzy → drink water + salt.
  Heart racing → lie down.
  Overloaded → remove one sense at a time.

• Stop pretending you run on the same power supply as neurotypicals.
  Your operating system is different.
  Honouring it is self-leadership.

If you’ve ever had to cancel plans because standing up felt impossible…
if you’ve been told you “just need to push through”…
if your body has ever crashed the second you finally felt okay…

This isn’t weakness.

This is the story of a system that has worked overtime for decades without support.

Your body isn’t broken. It’s brilliant.

It has been communicating with you for years.
No one taught you the language.
You’re learning it now.

And when you partner with your body instead of battling it?

Your health shifts from survival to clarity, from exhaustion to wisdom, from chaos to coherence.

Most people live in low-resolution.
You live in technicolour. And that is a beautiful thing.

That’s not a flaw.
That’s an advantage, once understood.

Reflections ✨

• Which symptoms make more sense now through the ND lens?
• Where does your energy naturally rise and fall?
• What parts of your body wisdom have you ignored?
• How might life feel if your body was an ally, not an opponent?

Come sit with the rest of us who’ve finally stopped apologising for our biology

Our community is full of:

• people who’ve fainted in supermarkets and blamed themselves
• women misdiagnosed for decades before anyone said “this is neurodivergence in the body”
• folks who can run a company but can’t stand up too fast
• legends who finally feel validated, seen and grounded

We don’t do health shame.
We do honesty, pacing, salt packets and humour.

👉 Join All Kinds of Minds community — free, gentle, no pressure, full of people who get it.

Part 9 next — The relief of knowing.

When the puzzle pieces finally lock into place.
When the story reorganises itself.
When the self-blame dissolves into clarity.
When everything that never made sense… finally does.

This is the moment many neurodivergent people describe as

“the calm after a lifetime of confusion.”