Welcome to my whimsical world

Our beautiful tabby cat Babou, basking in the sunlight. 2025. a13x©

Welcome to The Whimsical Divergent: a space for sharing neurodivergent (ND) experiences, stories, strategies, and hopefully over time, community connection.

I’ve created this space to provide a safe haven for unmasking, self-discovery, and self-compassion. It’s mostly a place for me to quietly research and reflect, to systematically arrange my disorganised mental collection of hyperfixation data so I can navigate it more effectively.

My rather ambitious (and temporarily dopamine-fueled) ADHD brain thought it would also be a wonderful idea to build a treasure trove of tools and resources to support the wider ND community. This will be one of my paced tasks, while I remind myself not to bite off more than I can chew among the thrill of shiny-new-project excitement.

So who am I, and why am I here?

I’m one of the many late-diagnosed AuDHD adults (diagnosed with both ADHD and Autism) scrambling to make sense of my existence, albeit finally having some words to describe my 38 years of repeated mental chaos.

There’s a lot of us older-diagnosees floating around lately, slowly unfolding from the fabric of neurotypical societal demands. We’re all just a little over-processed from years of stamping out the divergence of our true selves, and now we’re mustering up the courage to extract the layers of our compressed self-identity.

There’s also a lot of us speaking up about it, and it’s one of my favourite passtimes – learning about neurodivergence, from books, scientific journal articles, social media, and generally listening to the voices of others with lived experience.

I love listening to podcasts and videos (while doing monotonous chores) to deepen my understanding of how neurodivergence can present itself, especially in women. Some of the brilliant neurodiverse content creators I’ve stumbled across helped me through particularly low moments, making me feel far less isolated and unusual in my plight. It’s been a huge relief knowing many of things I experience are common amongst my neurotype.

It strikes me how many people out there probably feel just as “seen” and validated like I have with this increasing momentum of neurodiverse educational content. My over-enthusiastic mind became exhilarated by the idea that I could somehow “do a thing” in an expressive and potentially educational format too.

But first and foremost, I’d just like to get all these busy bees in my head down on e-paper so I can see what they actually look like. Because in my head, they’re just noise.

So again, welcome, and thanks for reading (skimming, right? I forgive you) up to this point. I’m looking forward to sharing a variety of neurodivergent thought-pieces, self-reflections and potentially relatable experiences for readers. Please be kind, as I’m not a seasoned writer and I’ll be learning a lot as I go, but I hope you’ll join me again soon as I begin to share my journey.

Dani