October 5, 2025

I write today after a recent, profound career disappointment. In simple terms, I was nominated for an honor and ultimately not chosen. This experience forced me to face some truths of my AuDHD:

1. I feel deeply, and it is a physical, mental, and sensory experience.
2. I perseverate on the feeling. What did I do wrong? Recounting interactions, steps, and so on. Then I swivel to perseverating about why I’m feeling so deeply. All leading back to…it must be something wrong with me.
3. Disappointments build upon one another. When I am struck by sadness or grief, I am flooded with images going all the way back to childhood.

It is disabling. I can’t function properly. I can’t sleep. I don’t know how to show up for work on Monday and pretend like everything is okay. And I don’t know how long this feeling will last.

I’ve actually had very few career disappointments. Realistically speaking, many people wouldn’t consider this even appropriate for grief. But to me, it’s a loss.

I’ve poured myself into my work for 20 years. 15 years for this department. Many of the things that exist today are because I’ve built them. Yet, no one even knows this because our department has completely turned over in the time I’ve been there. I’m in a leadership role. I’m faced daily with the paradox of our leaders having incredibly inequitable oversight, resources, and reporting structures. I’m on the under-resourced end. When I try to bring up the past in an effort to not repeat mistakes, I’m told that we need to move on from the past.

It’s easy to say we need to move on when you weren’t here for the trauma.

When I learned I was nominated for the honor, I was honestly confident. I felt like my time to shine was coming–I was finally going to be seen, my impact was finally noticed. The idea of being selected is what got me through what was otherwise an extremely difficult week. As I navigated challenges, I rehearsed my reaction to when my name would be called.

I was extra pretty on the day the announcement would be made. I was confident up until the last minute. As the obligatory background of accomplishment was read for the winner, the first few sentences were about leadership and innovation. My confidence was boosted.

And then it dissipated when it became clear from the bio that I was not selected. It felt like five minutes of enduring the bio being read. All I wanted to do was escape, but there I was, forced into smiling and giving a standing ovation for the winner.

That honor was going to change everything (temporarily of course). It was going to make these 15 years worthwhile. My struggles, my life would have meaning, even if just for a short while.

And now, it is worse than if I had never been nominated at all. On top of the deep feelings I am experiencing, I also have the luxury of feeling guilty over being a “sore loser.”

But I’m not a sore loser. I’m just sore. Downtrodden. Beaten down by giving 250% in a neurotypical world. By making my needs known and still having them unaccommodated. Every interaction I take, every decision I make, every action–it all requires significantly more effort than a neurotypical.

And this constant need for external affirmation? Let’s talk about that. For decades, therapists, family, friends, supervisors have all shamed me for needing external validation. I’ve been labeled unconfident. You know what the real shame is? I’m confident. I actually KNOW I am better than any of those people who have shamed me. The real shame is that I’ve had to spend my entire life believing this bullshit until I realized at 41 that my needs for affirmation are because I can’t read the room. I’m second guessing every single facial expression, vocal inflection, word, body movement to figure out if I’m doing anything remotely correct. I’m doing this every second of every single day. It happens with my own husband, who I know better than he knows himself. I will see a facial expression and have to ask, “What’s wrong?” My paranoia builds, only for him to reassure me there is nothing flipping wrong–his face is just being his face.

I don’t know how long it will take for me to get over this. I don’t know if I will ever fully recover. That is not me being dramatic, but this is actually a traumatic experience for me, and it becomes a part of who I am. I also do not know if I can safely share any of this with the people in my world, outside of my husband and best friend. I fear others are ready to truly embrace neurodiversity, they won’t be ready to understand this disappointment from my lens. It will be more of the same shame cycle, guised as reassurance.

This is one of those black letter days. I can’t really see anything positive to pull from this experience at this point in time. I’m so lonely and isolated in this moment where only I can truly understand the devastation of this one moment in life.

If you are in that space of loneliness and feeling unseen in a world where you are giving your physical, mental, and emotional all–just know, I accept how you feel. Your experience is valid.