At 60, I’ve spent decades navigating a world that consistently told me I was ‘too much’ - too intense, too deep, too different. As a neurodivergent woman with a PhD in Leadership, I’ve experienced firsthand the exhaustion of masking, the pain of hypervigilance, and the loneliness of being consistently misunderstood despite having valuable insights to offer.

After years of forcing myself into systems designed for minds that work differently than mine, I’ve learned something revolutionary: the problem isn’t us. The problem is a culture that demands we sacrifice our natural rhythms for unsustainable speed, trade our authentic selves for performance, and exhaust ourselves trying to fit into spaces that were never designed for how we think and process the world.