Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
Part 19 of the Things I Wished I Knew Sooner Series
Belief: A diagnosis should bring relief — not regret and anger.
Reality: A late diagnosis is a loss, and grieving it is valid.
Action: Name the feelings, drop the self-blame, and practice acceptance daily.
Welcome back to Things I Wished I Knew Sooner, a series about being diagnosed with ADHD late in life.
Sorry, I missed last week. I had some unplanned life events and couldn’t pull everything together in time.
When you’re diagnosed late — ADHD, autism, OCD, any of it — there’s a first wave of relief. Oh. It wasn’t that I was broken — there was a reason all along. And then, at some point, a second wave arrives that nobody warns you about: had I known sooner, I could have done so much more. Maybe I’d have made it through school differently. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent years believing the worst about myself.
Maybe life would have been easier.
That second wave is grief, even if it doesn’t announce itself by that name. To understand it, I sat down again with Dr. Megan Shen — a social psychologist and Associate Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center who studies grief, loss, and resilience. She taught me how grief fits into a diagnosis: the feelings that show up after a late diagnosis aren’t a sign you’re handling it wrong. They’re a sign there’s something real to grieve.
When my diagnosis came, I believed relief was the only feeling I was entitled to. I finally had an explanation, so what right did I have to be angry or full of regret? Feeling anything else seemed like ingratitude, or proof that I was still doing it wrong.
So when the regret came anyway, I treated it as one more personal failing. The same went for the shame — the self-loathing that’s been one of my core ADHD challenges — and the anger underneath it. I thought a “healthy” person would take the diagnosis, nod, and move on. I couldn’t, and that became evidence against me.
The trap is believing there’s a correct feeling to have, and that everything else is a malfunction. When relief is the only emotion you’ll allow yourself, every other one becomes something to hide — which is exactly how you stay stuck in it.
What Megan helped me see is that a late diagnosis is a loss, and grief is the loss of an imagined future. Not only death gets to be grieved. Any future you assumed you’d have and suddenly won’t is a real loss: the school you might have finished, the career timeline you might have kept, actually starting the big dream you had, the version of yourself who wasn’t carrying all that shame.
There’s a second layer, too. Megan calls it a secondary loss — the diagnosis can pile shame on top of the missed opportunities, making you feel even more restricted in what you’re allowed to want now. So the regret, the sadness, the anger, the shame are not signs you’re broken. They’re the many valid doors into the same grief. The anger especially is rightful: a lot of us grew up in a generation with no screening, no language, and no support, where the treatment for a struggling mind was “walk it off” or “work harder and it’ll go away”
Megan told me about Kate Bowler, an author diagnosed with a rare stage-four cancer in her thirties, who spent a long time raging at herself for not catching it sooner — until a doctor told her there was genuinely nothing she could have done. It both crushed her and set her free, because she finally saw she’d simply been dealt a bad hand of cards. Late diagnosis is like that. You didn’t fail by not knowing. You were handed a bad hand in a time that gave you nothing to read it with.
That reframe is what moved me from anger to acceptance with my own mother. After watching Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie about an Asian American family dealing with generational trauma, with a main character who has ADHD. I realized she had done the best she could with even less than I’d been given. Once I let go of the relationship I thought I was owed, I ended up closer to the one I have.
You don’t reason your way out of this in an afternoon. But there’s a path, and it’s walkable.
Let the feelings be valid.
When the regret or anger or shame shows up, don’t grade it. There’s no wrong feeling to have about a real loss, and naming it is the first honest step.
You can feel relief and grief at the same time. Both are true, and neither cancels the other.
Release the self-blame.
You were dealt a hand you couldn’t read yet, in a generation without the tools. That’s not a verdict on your character — it’s the hand.
Letting yourself off the hook isn’t giving up. As Megan put it through Kate Bowler’s story, it’s the freedom of realizing some things were never yours to prevent.
Treat acceptance as a daily practice.
Acceptance isn’t a steady state you reach once and keep. Like grief, it ebbs and flows — some days you’re at peace with it, some days far less so, and that’s normal.
I’ve stopped seeing my self-loathing as a permanent identity to fix. It still visits, but a visit isn’t who I am. I notice the feeling, remind myself it’s temporary, and let it pass through instead of moving in.
If you’ve been diagnosed late and you’re sitting in a mess of relief and regret and anger all at once, I want to tell you what I wish someone had told me: that’s not you failing at acceptance — that’s you beginning it.
Grief over the life you imagined is allowed. You live with it, it softens, and slowly you make room for what’s still ahead. And for me, what’s ahead is a different question entirely — not what did this cost me, but what has it given me. After years of looking at my ADHD through regret, I’m ready to look at it through acceptance, and to go looking for the gifts.
That’s what I wish I’d known sooner — the wave of feelings after a late diagnosis was never proof I was broken. It was grief, and grief is what love and a real life look like when something is lost.
Dr. Megan Shen studies grief, loss, and resilience at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. You can find more of her work at her Substack, Light in the Wound, her website, and her TEDx talk on grief and resilience.
Closing up this series on late diagnosis.
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