Late-diagnosed neurodivergent women over 50 often find themselves feeling lost. Here’s how to discover fulfillment again, this time on your terms.
The story.
Satisfaction and joy played a symphony together as I stood up from the chair. With care, I gripped my guitar to avoid moving the tuning knobs, then walked over to put it on its stand.
Was it just yesterday I was lamenting that I’d never done anything professionally with my love of music? But why, just because you’re good at something and love to engage in it, did you have to make a career out of it?
Who made that idiotic rule?
Because I’d recently discovered that playing and singing to my heart’s content with only myself as the audience was as fulfilling as being on stage.
And with none of the stress.
The neurodivergent midlife crisis is a scary thing.
In my post about neurodivergent women creating a fulfilling life after age forty-five, I shared an abbreviated story of my struggles to sense even a slight direction or purpose for my life. The story represents a series of midlife crises that I experienced between my late forties to around age fifty-five.
Or maybe it was one midlife crisis broken up by brief spurts of feeling balanced?
It’s easy to blame these feelings of turmoil on hormones or brain chemistry. But a big part of my problem was that life as I knew it had changed dramatically, and was continuing to change as my son grew up and I felt (wrongly) that my husband and I were growing farther apart.
Many women experience something similar as they hit midlife. Late-diagnosed neurodivergent women feel it harder, because suddenly their world is upended. Much of what they’d believed about the world and themselves turns out to be… off. Sometimes, by more than a smidgen.
Knocked off kilter, they lose the sense of purpose and meaning that had buoyed them up until the diagnosis.
If that’s where you are right now, take heart. You’re entering a new stage of life. That means, it’s time to redefine what fulfillment looks like for you. I want to look at seven ways that you can do that.
Way #1: Recognize you’re a different person now.
You are not the same person now that you were at age twenty. That seems obvious, but many women hit fifty and start crying over the dreams they never fulfilled.
Then they realize: they don’t care about it anymore, and haven’t cared about it for years.
And/or: if they had walked into that dream, it probably would have slowly taken a toll on their psyche or physical health.
But if the dreams you had as a young adult no longer fit, and you don’t have any new dreams, what then?
Keep reading…
Way #2: Create a low-demand life.
Mainstream society claims that the way to a fulfilling life is to go-go-go and do-do-do.
But for neurodivergent women, who are usually taking care of the house and children on top of everything else, this can be a literal death sentence. Since learning how to take care of my needs, I’ve discovered that I can feel fulfilled simply sitting down with a coloring book and helping a picture come to life as I listen to relaxing music.
Who knew? Especially for this late-diagnosed, AuDHD woman over 50?
Way #3: Leverage your hyperfocus.
For much of our lives, we’ve been forced to shove aside the urge to hyperfocus on research or creative endeavors. But if we neurodivergent women are going to feel fulfilled, we needs to make time for this part of us.
When we get deeply interested in a topic, or get involved with a creative project, we need to milk the hyperfocus for all its worth whenever we have a chance.
Way #4: Choose alignment over ambition.
Again, since we were very young, we’ve been taught that ambition rules the day. As older neurodivergent women embracing authenticity, however, we need to seek alignment above all.
Does a request to volunteer jive with our values? Does an opportunity to earn a side income align with our skills, talents, or goals?
Perhaps most importantly, will XYZ activity or decision align with our need to live quietly and simply?
Speaking of living more quietly and simply…
Way #5: Consider micro-fulfillment.
Neurodivergence and aging in women equal a lot less energy than we want to have. This is part of what leads postmenopausal autistic and ADHD-labeled women into depression. Low energy leads to low engagement leads to our brain’s “Happy Chemical Center” shutting down.
Just as you can leverage your times of hyperfocus, you can also leverage the dips in energy to produce a sense of fulfillment. How? Regularly engage in small, relaxing activities. Here is a smattering of examples:
- Crochet or knit for a few minutes every evening.
- Write and publish one blog post a week.
- Bake a batch of something yummy for your family, friends, or neighbors a couple of times per month.
- Sing one song with all your heart every day.
- Read or watch a video on your latest special interest fifteen minutes per day.
Small bursts of fulfillment accumulate over time, making the entirety of life more joyful and satisfactory.
Way #6: Navigate the diagnosis grief.
I don’t think a single one of us late-diagnosed neurodivergent women doesn’t go through some level of grief. We mourn for the career path we didn’t take. We mourn for causing ourselves health problems due to all the stress we didn’t realize we were carrying.
Some mourn taking on the responsibility of a family, others mourn the loss of friends.
Walking through this inevitable period of grief is critical. Just as critical?
To walk out of it.
You need to learn to focus on the here and now. Say to yourself, “Okay, I didn’t live my ideal life, yet here I am. What does my brain need right now?”
Acknowledging past mistakes while living in the present moment in and of itself brings a sense of fulfillment.
Way #7: Take off the mask.
I know from personal experience that for autistic women over 50, unmasking is an interesting journey. And that may be putting it mildly. We’ve spent decades suppressing stims, suppressing our thoughts and ideas, and shoving our special interests to the side.
We’ve forced ourselves to be in overstimulating environments for the sake of having friends. Perhaps we’ve even pretended to like people for fear of losing something – or someone – we held dear.
While we don’t want to be unkind, we do need to begin standing up for our emotional, psychological, and physical health. Our sensory, social, and executive function issues are real. It’s not only okay to let the world know that you’ve finally decided to take care of yourself, it’s vital to your well-being.
And, by proxy, to your sense of fulfillment.
Neurodivergent women embracing authenticity = abundance.
Fulfillment is a sense of overflowing joy and of self-worth. What brings on this blissful state doesn’t always stay the same. Shouldn’t stay the same, because you don’t.
Read over the seven suggestions above, choose a couple of them, and see if you don’t have a new definition of what fulfills you within the next few weeks.
Then come back and tell us how it went!
