Most of my friends have great jobs, live with their partners, and are doing the thing. I love them. But there's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being the one they check in on, the one who's still job hunting, the one who gets the soft voice and the head tilt. I'm tired of it. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

They tell you the diagnosis will feel like a light turning on. And parts of it do. But nobody warns you about what comes after the oh — the grief for the student who might have done better, the teenager who might have been kinder to herself, the years spent being told you just needed to try harder. This is the side of late diagnosis nobody writes about.