This email is 60 seconds: Four years ago, I got my ADHD diagnosis. It was validating, overwhelming, and not at all what I expected. I went through grief, anger, a phase of trying to fix everything, and eventually arrived somewhere much more useful: acceptance. This week I'm sharing the story I don't usually tell in full - because next week in Neurodiversity Celebration Week, because four years feels significant, and because someone reading this probably needs to hear it. Dear Reader, Next week is Neurodiversity Celebration Week. And as part of the week, the ACCA will be releasing a piece of research on "Navigating you career in Accountancy" which I co-wrote. It is all about other people's stories and therefore it felt right I should share mine. And this week also marks four years since I received my ADHD diagnosis - so it felt timely. I don't often sit still long enough to reflect. But four years feels like a moment worth marking. This newsletter is going to be a bit different. I'm not going to give you a framework or a list of actions. I'm going to tell you a story. My story. Because I think the honest version of a diagnosis journey - not the neat, tidy, "and now everything is better" version - is something the world needs more of. So here it is.

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Before I Knew

I had never considered I had ADHD. That seems almost laughable now.

For the ten years I was at EY, I had to take time off for mental health reasons three times - each stretch lasting six to eight weeks. I was in therapy. I was doing everything I was supposed to do. I was unpacking things, processing things, working through things. And yet, the same cycle kept recurring. Overwhelm. Burnout. Anxiety. Depression. Back to the start.

I remember the frustration of that vividly. I was doing all the right things. And I couldn't get to the bottom of it. I genuinely thought: what is wrong with me? Why can I not navigate life the way other people seem to?

There were some really dark moments in there. Times where I left my phone behind and walked out of the house. Times when people had to come and find me because I was that low. I've never hurt myself, but I want to be honest about how overwhelming it got - because I think pretending it wasn't that serious does a disservice to anyone reading this who is in a similar place right now.

The physical symptoms I largely dismissed. I got headaches constantly when I was in the office. Multiple times a week. I went to the doctors. I had MRIs. Nobody connected it to anything. What I know now is that I was likely experiencing sensory processing challenges: the lights, the noise, the relentlessness of open-plan office life. I work from home now. I almost never get headaches.

At work, I was described as someone who struggled to prioritise. I had a colleague who used to sit with me and work through my to-do list to help me structure it. I found it helpful - and mortifying in equal measure. I'd been sent on a time management course early in my career. Time management courses, it turns out, don't fix time blindness. But I sat in it desperately thinking: why can everyone else do this and I can't?

I changed jobs roughly every 18 months. I loved new projects, got stuck in, figured out the direction - and then the moment we hit implementation, I lost interest completely. I was a generalist who thrived on the new and shiny. I led things; I didn't manage them. I set direction; I didn't live in the detail. I knew this about myself, but I didn't know why.

And through all of it, I delivered. I had a genuinely good career in organisations that valued me and gave me extraordinary opportunities. I worked with brilliant people. I was promoted young. I thrived - but I was exhausted in a way I couldn't explain, and the gap between what I could do and what everyone else seemed to find effortless was something I carried quietly for years.

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The Moment it Clicked

The pivot point came when I was asked to set up EY's Neuro-Diverse Centre of Excellence as the people lead. To do that role properly, I needed to actually understand neurodivergent conditions - which I didn't. So I completed a specific learning difficulties course in my own time. (Back when I started there were very few resources on Neurodiversity in the Workplace!)

I got to the ADHD module. Some of it resonated immediately. Some of it didn't seem like me at all. (I'm not untidy, for instance - quite the opposite. I need my environment to be ordered to function. On Monday mornings, the first thing I do after everyone leaves the house is tidy it, because I need to start the week from that baseline. I now understand that's a coping strategy, likely linked to autistic traits that the psychiatrist later identified alongside my primary ADHD diagnosis.)

But there was enough there to make me stop and think. So I started reading. I went down every rabbit hole I could find. And the more I read, the more I thought: that's me. That is absolutely me.

I tested it carefully. I spoke to my husband. I went and dug out my old school reports. I'd done fine at GCSEs - high level, not much depth required, which suits my brain perfectly. A-levels were a different story. The depth, the revision planning, the breaking content into component parts - I struggled. I still tell my children, who are now 15 and 18, that I'm genuinely not the person to help them with exam revision timetables. It's my nemesis.

But the moment that clinched it? I sent a list of ADHD traits - without any label - to my ex-husband. I asked him to read them and tell me if they sounded familiar. He came back immediately. "That's you on a piece of paper. 100%."

He doesn't know it, but that was the moment I decided to seek a diagnosis.

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The Diagnosis

I went privately - I was fortunate enough to be in a position to be able to do that, and I recognise not everyone is. From the first moment of "hang on, this might be me" to having an official diagnosis in my hand took about three months. I also told my line manager early. She was incredibly supportive. And honestly, I felt I couldn't be a people lead for a Neuro-Diverse Centre of Excellence without knowing whether I was neurodivergent myself.

When the diagnosis came, the overwhelming feeling was validation.

All of those years of thinking I wasn't good enough. Of thinking I couldn't fit the mould. Of wondering why everything that seemed easy for others was so hard for me. It all had a reason now. I wasn't making it up. I wasn't weak. I wasn't broken. I was wired differently.

And then - I want to be really honest about this - I went to quite an unhelpful place.

My first instinct was: right, now you need to accommodate me. I have ADHD. You need to be more accepting of me. That's your job now. I used the diagnosis as a reason rather than a lens. I leaned into it in a way that, looking back, wasn't particularly constructive for me or for the people around me. Both at work and at home.

My second instinct was: great, now I can fix this. I know what it is. I can find solutions. I can make myself better.

I tried medication multiple times. It didn't work for me - I know it does for many people, but for me, it didn't. I even sought a second diagnosis to access a different psychiatrist and try different medication. That didn't work either.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, a coach said something that stopped me in my tracks.

"You do realise you're not going to be able to fix that."

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What Acceptance Actually Looks Like

This is where the conversation got really eye-opening. There are two strands of change happening simultaneously.

There was grief. I want to name that clearly, because nobody warned me about it. Grief for the version of myself that might have existed had I known sooner. Anger that nobody spotted it. Frustration at the decades of struggling to do things that, it turned out, my brain was simply not built for in the way I'd been trying to do them.

But there's no power in staying in that space. You can't change what's already happened. You can only go forwards.

The real shift came when I stopped trying to fix what wasn't fixable, and started paying attention to what was actually there.

One of the most important things I've learned is this: when something is easy, we don't register it as a strength. We focus on what's hard. The easy things - the things we just do - don't seem worth noting. But those are often where our greatest strengths live. I had to learn to look at the things I'd always taken for granted and ask: is this actually something not everyone can do?

For me, it's pattern recognition. It's seeing the whole picture when others are still reading the brief. It's building something from nothing. It's being parachuted into chaos and knowing instinctively where to start. These aren't small things. I just hadn't counted them.

The self-compassion took longer. Probably longer than I'd like to admit. It didn't come from therapy, though I'd done plenty of it. It came from diagnosis, and then from the slow work of actually accepting - not just intellectually understanding - that I am not going to be able to do some things. And that's okay. Because the things I can do are worth celebrating.

I opened up about my ADHD publicly, just as I had previously opened up about my mental health. Partly to help others. But I'll be honest - partly for myself too. Because if you understand a little more about how I'm wired, maybe you'll extend me some grace. And maybe the mask slips a little, and I can breathe.

The person I really needed to extend grace to, though, was myself. That took multiple years to figure out. And I am still trying some days!

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Why This Matters Beyond My Story

I'm now the founder of PegSquared. I've trained 100's of professionals. The Research I've done has been read globally. And my voice heard on stages, podcasts and in interviews. I work with organisations to build systems that actually work for neurodivergent people - not just awareness sessions, but structural change, practical tips that each and everyone of us can implement to make the working world just that little bit easier for others.

And I do this work because I wish it had existed when I needed it.

My daughter is now 15. She is on the waiting list for an autism and ADHD assessment. I am making sure she has every piece of information, every frame of reference, every tool that I didn't have. Not so she can fix herself. So she can understand herself, and own it, from the start.

If you're reading this and you're in the early stages of diagnosis, or questioning whether something applies to you, or somewhere deep in that grief and anger phase - I want you to know this: the label is not the destination. It's just the beginning of understanding.

And that understanding, when it finally lands? For me, it's absolutely worth the wait.

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Over to You

So for this Neurodiversity Celebration Week if you're running sessions in your organisation right now, I'd love to know how they're going. If you're trying to move beyond a single awareness session into something with more substance and staying power, that's exactly the conversation I have with people every day.

I'm also launching a new coaching and mentoring programme - something I've been building for a while, and something I'm genuinely excited about. If you're a neurodivergent professional who wants support from someone who gets it from the inside, or if you're a leader who wants to think differently about how you show up for your team, I'd love to talk. I will be sharing more on this in the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading.

See you next week,

Tania

P.S. If this resonated, please forward it to someone who needs to hear it. There are people in your network right now who are in the cycle I described - and they don't yet know why.

P.P.S. If you read all the way to the end of a newsletter this long - your brain is probably quite good at deep focus when something actually matters to it. Mine too. Funny, that.

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