Everything’s Fine, Thanks for Asking
Imagine this:
Sarah wakes at 5am, fully refreshed. She jogs through the park, invents a new kind of biodegradable running shoe in her head, and drafts the patent before breakfast. Her kids emerge angelic from their bedrooms, already dressed, already eating kale. At work, she casually solves climate change before elevenses, then lands a keynote at Davos over lunch. The afternoon is a blur of Nobel prizes, spontaneous standing ovations, and writing a best-selling novel in one sitting.
On the way home, Sarah pauses. Something’s not quite right. Everything is too easy. Too joyful. Too… successful.
So she books a private assessment. A few weeks later, she emerges from the clinic with a smile: “Turns out I have ADHD.”
That story, of course, never happens.
In the real world, diagnosis doesn’t follow sunshine and roses. Nobody thinks: Everything is going brilliantly, let’s get myself checked out. It’s the opposite. It’s the crashing job, the unravelled relationship, the burnout, the sense of failing at things that seem easy for everyone else. Diagnosis comes when the wheels fall off, sometimes spectacularly.
And last week – bouncing from neurodiversity event to neurodiversity event, finishing with our own pitch night at MK Tech Week – I noticed that pattern everywhere.
The panels weren’t full of people saying, “I was so good at my job I wanted to understand my brilliance better.” They were stories of struggle. Of getting by until “getting by” stopped working.
Which makes sense. Nobody invests months, money, or emotional bandwidth into medicalised labels unless something’s gone wrong. A diagnosis is rarely the first chapter of someone’s story. It’s the plot twist that arrives after the crisis.
But here’s the catch: if we only ever view neurodivergence through the prism of disaster, we risk forgetting what it looks like outside the rubble. We make it pathology-shaped. We make it deficit-shaped.
Maybe what’s really needed is a shift in narrative. Imagine if Sarah’s impossible day wasn’t satire. Imagine if you could reach the point of “things are going well – and I’d like to know why.”
Because the truth is: diagnosis isn’t about brokenness. It’s a shortcut to understanding. A lens. A way of noticing why certain environments fit like a glove and others like an itchy jumper.
Last week reminded me how many people are still finding that out the hard way – through burnout, breakdown, or the grinding misery of unmet expectations. But it also reminded me why I’m here, why Protospace, RailPal, Neuromantics – all of it – exists: not to fix the broken, but to change the system so fewer people break in the first place.
Peace, love, and happiness
MP