I was born into a troubled family. My father struggled with addictions and possibly a personality disorder, while my mother has always lived on the edge of depression, overwhelmed with her fate, absent and unpredictable. As the eldest of five kids, I’ve always felt like the one fighting most just stay afloat, yet most driven to change my fate.

Childhood wasn’t a merry time. I never had a safe space to be myself and was actually rejected for being myself—and as a neglected child, I had no place to learn essential social or life skills. School certainly wasn’t making anything better, as it never does for troubled kids. In school I was mostly invisible. I felt lost and out of place everywhere, from nursery onwards, while I was changing homes, schools and classes all the time.

Looking back now, it’s hard to tell what went wrong. Or was it that nothing went right for me? I was an odd girl, hardly connecting to others. I could just never figure out what to do to belong. And home was a difficult place to be. I was mostly raised… by me. Figuring out life on my own. At 20, I left home, relieved to close that chapter, though life didn’t get easier.

Rediscovering My Potential

After leaving school at 20 without a proper degree, I felt like a failure. But with my first jobs and later as I pursued a proper school degree again and then studied psychology, something clicked. For the first time, I realised I wasn’t as incapable as I’d been led to believe. I started to get good feedback about my work and skills—an experience that was entirely new to me. This was a revelation. It showed me how much potential had been overlooked in my earlier years, shaped by a system that didn’t support or understand me. I was fairly smart—but nobody had noticed, probably because I was quiet, shy and distant.

Despite my abilities, to this day, people meet me with skepticism, probably due to my “weird” personality and how I don’t fit into the picture of a person with potential. Still, that regained confidence in myself laid the foundation for how I now approach life and coaching: most of us need to look at who we really are and how we became who we did due to our circumstances. We all have untapped potential that is just waiting to be identified, acknowledged and used.

The Invisible Forces

For all my adult years, I felt trapped by what I eventually coined the 'invisible forces.' No matter how hard I tried, I found myself repeatedly pulled back into unemployment, poverty, loneliness, and severe weight struggles, unable to break free. It was like a rubber band, constantly pulling me back, ensuring that I couldn’t reach my goals and dreams despite all my efforts. Then, motherhood really sent me tumbling. The overwhelming demands of daily life, the constant chores, as well as feeling like an alien in the world of mothers left me feeling drained. Keeping everything running at home, engaging with my children, and being present didn’t come natural to me like it does for most mothers.

I spent years studying trauma, trying various therapy and healing modalities, soaking up everything about toxic relationships, even getting into spirituality. I also experimented with nutritional and supplement interventions, many of them. Yet nothing explained why I felt so overwhelmed, why I couldn’t live like others, or why I struggled to stay active and stick to my todo lists, often choosing idleness—not out of laziness, but because my internal motor simply wouldn’t switch on.

My Brain’s Peculiarities

I’ve known I was different all along. At different points in my life, I had already wondered if I was autistic, or hyper-sensitive, even considered some sort of giftedness. And there are many traits of these that I can definitely find in myself. Then, almost by chance, I began exploring ADHD. Researching its symptoms and lived experiences, my whole life started to make sense. The difficulties with planning and execution, the exhaustion, the constant sense of paddling upstream—it all made sense. For years, I resisted diagnoses, but now I tentatively self-diagnose with ADHD because it ticks most of the boxes. I still haven’t pursued an official diagnosis due to low trust in the system at this point and because I wouldn’t identify with it anway.

Dealing with issues caused in or by the brain led to a deeper understanding of my brain’s peculiarities, and my life’s struggles. These also include:

• Binge Eating Disorder (BED), tied to emotional regulation as well as a number of foods that literally trigger addictive eating patterns (and it’s not sugar).

• Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM), and some other memory related issues. SDAM means that I have no vivid past memories, only rough recollections. Making any trauma therapy (almost) redundant.

• Aphantasia, the inability to visualise images, even in dreams or hypnosis.

• Lack of smell, taste, and feelings like joy or pleasure (anhedonia), but also sadness, anger and other feelings. I can’t cry, or only little.

For the longest time, I wasn’t even aware that others had a natural sense of appetite and any of the cognitive abilities I lacked. But I have all of these shortcomings, and I hadn’t even suffered head trauma that could explain why my brain is so broken. Except for the eating disorder, I uncovered all of these at over 40 years with the first being aphantasia, and then the dominoes started falling.

But rather than dwelling on my challenges, I use them as opportunities in my ongoing journey to find my place. Years of struggle have revealed not only who I am but also who I am not—neither defined by others' expectations nor bound by societal norms. I am always delighted to offer my talents, but not at the expense of my health or sense of safety.

I am in the process of re-creating my life, aligning it with my true capacities—whether it’s through embracing mindfulness or adopting an approach to eating that supports my well-being. I firmly believe that it’s possible to find our true place in this world, even when circumstances aren’t ideal. This is the message I want to share with my fellow “divergents”—that it’s possible to find your own way, even when it feels like the world isn’t designed for you.