We don’t outgrow the past ~ we carry it. In stories, in silence, in how we rest. Or how we can’t.

In therapy this week, I was unpacking the restlessness ~ the way my mind starts spinning whenever I step away from work or felt productivity. I run through quiet rituals to convince myself it’s okay to rest. That it’s okay not to do. I tally what I’ve already accomplished. I make little mental contracts ~ I’ll sleep an hour less tonight, I’ll put in extra time over the weekend ~ just so I can let myself pause and play a family game. My panicked brain loops through all the ways I’ll make up for the loss of productivity. As if rest needs a receipt. My brain scrambles to frame presence as productive. If rest helps me be more productive later, then it counts. Then I can allow it.

That question ~ why rest feels unsafe ~ is actually what brought me back to therapy earlier this year.

This past fall, a combination of long COVID flare-up and sheer exhaustion hit me hard. My body collapsed, and for the first time, I began seriously looking into CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). I learned it’s not uncommon in people with type-A personalities. And if I wanted to be honest about my energy, I needed to be honest about my psychology.

About 18 months ago, I started naming something I’d long avoided: I might be a workaholic. I hoped that naming it would help me do something about it. But for many of us who are AuDHD, work is complex. It’s not just a pathological escape ~ it’s often the container where our passions live. The place we escape the overwhelm and dive into monotropic pleasure. The place we play. And yes… it can also become a place where we avoid, overcompensate, or spiral into burnout.

For a while, I chalked it up to “ADHD restlessness.” Like, of course I can’t sit through a board game without nudging everyone along ~ “Your turn. Your turn. Your turn.” Of course my brain always needs to be chewing on something. That’s just ADHD, right?

But over the past year and a half, I’ve been stretching myself to go deeper than those surface-level explanations. I’ve been asking: What’s under the restlessness? What happens when I stop producing? And what does that say about how I see myself?

Like most things in my life, it leads me back to identity, core woundings, and the stories we carry.

So in therapy, I’m describing what happens when I don’t work. The hollowness. The agitation. The boredom. The near-inability to be present with my own life. My therapist ~ who knows I can overanalyze anything into oblivion ~ smiled and said, “I imagine you have some theories.

“Well… yeah. But they’re mostly in my head,” I said, already bracing for how over-conceptual my attempt to explain my theories would be.

Still, I started talking.

“I’m working on this article about Erikson’s stages of development… and how they might impact neurodivergent people…”

And just as I started to explain what I meant ~ with a story ~ something shifted. A surprising swell of emotion caught in my throat.

“I really struggled to learn how to read.”

It’s something I’ve said before. Many times. But saying it in therapy, saying it while feeling it, was different.

I told him how they pulled me out of class to test me (which came back inconclusive). How I used to memorize books word-for-word so I could trick my mom into thinking I was reading ~ unless I accidentally got off by a page and the words didn’t match.

The adults in my life found creative ways to help. They taught me to look at the shapes of words ~ like how house kind of looks like a house. Even then, I was finding visual workarounds before I had language for why I needed them.

Later in school, I remember the dread of public reading. How I’d count ahead in class, figure out which paragraph would be mine, and rehearse it in my head ~ over and over ~ trying not to mess it up.

This has always been part of my story. I’ve always known school was hard for me. I used to beg my parents to homeschool me. I’d fake sick to stay home ~ and in more desperate moments, even tried to make myself sick.

But somehow, I made it through. And later, I finally blossomed in college, where I could follow my passions and learn on my own terms. (Cue all the visual workarounds.)

But sitting there in therapy, I finally touched the feelings that live inside that story ~ the shame of watching my sisters breeze through advanced classes while I struggled. Growing up with two professors as parents and gifted siblings, I felt like the “dumb one.” I scratched and clawed my way toward worth.

If I wasn’t going to find it through academics, I had to find it somewhere else. So I became the designated “Jesus Freak” of the family ~ hoping that if I couldn’t be the smart one, I could at least be the good one. The giving one. The passionate one.

This week, I joked with my therapist: “Basically, when you get down to it, my identity is 10% special interest and 90% shame.”

It was a joke… but also not. That wrapping of shame around core identity ~ it’s not unique to me. It’s a pattern I see over and over in Autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD humans. And it makes sense. It makes so much sense. From unresolved developmental tasks, to chronic invalidation, to the ways we were misunderstood in our most formative years ~ the shame doesn’t come from nowhere. It is often the residue of invisible disability.

Much of late-in-life identity discovery is about unpicking those layers. Re-storying them with more understanding. More context. More compassion. Letting a bit of the shame melt.

That’s what led me back to Erikson. The stages of psychosocial development offer a useful map for understanding how these shame narratives form. Each stage asks something of us ~ trust, autonomy, identity, intimacy. And when our developmental task gets thwarted, the tension doesn’t disappear. It lingers.