Welcome to AuDHD Reframe

A new space for exploring complex minds, sensitive bodies, and the art of living differently.

OmAr Taha on Unsplash

I’ve been writing for many years, but this space emerged at a different point — the point where everything, quietly and insistently, asked to be seen anew.

The seed of AuDHD Reframe was planted when I finally realised that all the years of chronic health issues and complexity I’d written about before were not separate strands at all, but expressions of my slowly emerging neurodivergence. That being AuDHD is, in fact, the pivot point around which everything else rotates. The realisation that I was very likely AuDHD first hit me around the age of fifty, and it’s taken the past seven years to unpack, digest and (begin to) reconcile — culminating in my recent diagnosis and a whole new layer of coming to terms with it all, which remains very much an ongoing process.

It was at this point that I knew I needed a new vehicle for my writing.

I now understand, more clearly than ever, how deeply I embody the meeting point between a highly sensitive, hypermobile body and the paradoxical push-and-pull mind of AuDHD — and how this adds yet another layer of complexity for those of us living within it. It’s impossible to prise one part away from the other because my divergence runs through everything that makes me who I am. Exploring this has become a kind of lifelong fascination, and I often need to process my thoughts out loud, in writing, simply to make sense of them — or to feel that there might be resonance, recognition or community with others whose experiences echo my own.

So what follows in this space is the slow, often vulnerable work of reframing everything after late-life diagnosis in my fifties.

I write from lived experience, exploring regulation, pacing, and the kind of necessary yet endlessly challenging self-advocacy that makes everyday existence a little more manageable. This space is about living differently after recognising how profoundly a complex mind and body shape experience. I write from within many overlaps: AuDHD, hEDS, POTS / dysautonomia, MCAS, hypersensitivity, burnout, post-viral illnesses and their painfully slow recoveries, alongside the constant need to re-examine what we thought we knew about ourselves and our place in the world. It’s a shifting-sands reality and the challenges never cease, but there are hard-won positives and I write about those too.

The topics may vary, but the thread is constant: learning to build a life that fits, instead of constantly reshaping ourselves to fit into a world that wasn’t designed for us, with all the compromises that entails. As I strive towards a future that lets go of heavy masking and apologising (all the many sacrifices and contortions once endured to seem “normal”) I share what feels lighter, what sustains, and what gives some hope of finding some version or other of personal ok-ness.

Nothing here is prescriptive or inauthentically upbeat. It’s all about sharing reflective, exploratory fragments of thought without over-editing them and, hopefully, offering a foundation for meaningful connection with those who recognise similar patterns in themselves.

Three months after formal diagnosis felt like the right time to begin again: to gather what’s been learned and share it in a calmer, more conversational space. Substack feels like the right home for this next chapter, being a slower, more connected place to exchange insight and perspective.

There won’t be constant posts, just occasional essays written when inspiration strikes and there’s something genuine to say.

Thank you for being here.

— Helen J

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Writing on AuDHD, chronic health, and the ongoing work of making life more liveable.

🌿 Read more at audhdreframe.substack.com

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About the author

Helen J is a late-diagnosed AuDHD writer living with overlapping chronic health conditions including hEDS, POTS, and MCAS.

Her work explores the intersection of neurodivergence and complex physiology — the wired mind meeting the sensitive body — and the ongoing process of finding ways to live that are sustainable and authentic.

She writes AuDHD Reframe to document the realities of regulation, pacing, and the challenges of safely unmasking neurodivergence — while connecting with others on the same path of reframing life on their own terms.