The Power and Complexity of Discovery

By Michelle Labine  May 6, 2025

Receiving a late diagnosis or coming into self-recognition can feel like a profound homecoming. Suddenly, so many pieces of your life rearrange themselves into a pattern that finally makes sense. The exhaustion from social effort, the need for structure, the deep empathy, the sensory experiences that were dismissed or pathologized—there’s finally language for it all.

With that understanding often comes a wave of relief. But it can also bring grief.

Grief for the years spent not knowing.
Grief for being misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or labeled as “too sensitive,” “too intense,” “too much.”
Grief for the support we didn’t know we could ask for, and for the parts of ourselves we buried just to get by.

I remember one moment in particular—about a month after my own diagnosis—when I was standing in the kitchen, overwhelmed by the noise of the kettle, the lights, the kids talking, the dishwasher humming. It felt like everything was crashing into me all at once. My body tensed, my thoughts blurred, and I felt that edge of dysregulation creeping in.

Before I had words for what was happening—before I knew this had a name—I would have spiraled inward. I would have started criticizing myself: Why am I like this? I should be able to handle this. Everyone else seems fine. I must not be trying hard enough. I’m just being dramatic. I’m failing—again.
I didn’t see sensory overload—I saw a personal flaw.

That day, though, I paused. And instead of falling into that familiar loop of self-blame, I named it: This is sensory overload.
That shift—naming it instead of shaming it—was a turning point.

It didn’t make the moment easier, exactly. But it gave it context. It gave me context. I wasn’t overreacting. I wasn’t fragile. I was experiencing a nervous system response that I had spent my entire life trying to suppress, rationalize, or ignore. I wasn’t broken. I was wired differently. And that difference had been there all along—unacknowledged and unsupported.

That’s what naming can do. It doesn’t erase the challenge, but it softens the shame. It allows space for compassion to enter where criticism once lived. It doesn’t change who we are, but it offers a new lens—a more accurate, human, and affirming one. It gives us a way to say: Of course I’m overwhelmed right now. This makes sense. I make sense.

And in those quiet moments of recognition, we begin—slowly, gently—to come home to ourselves.