There was a time when I thought resilience meant speed. The faster I got up after every fall, the stronger I believed I was. I wore exhaustion like armor and it was proof that I was trying hard enough. I could function in chaos, outwork fatigue, outthink emotion. That was my pattern for decades!! I mistook hypervigilance for discipline, over functioning for leadership, and burnout for passion. I didn’t understand that what I called “resilience” was really “overadaptation” where my body and brain constantly recalibrating to stay safe in a world that didn’t understand how I was wired.

The crash didn’t happen all at once. It came quietly, like water seeping into cracks. Missed deadlines that once would have stung became normal. Words slipped out of reach mid-sentence. I’d stare at my screen, unable to remember what I was supposed to do next. The smallest decision felt like climbing Everest barefoot. My nervous system which was once so good at running on fumes was now filing for divorce. I had confused capacity with capability for too long. And the truth was brutal, that I wasn’t losing my edge. I was losing access to myself.

Post-traumatic growth doesn’t start in triumph. It starts in collapse. It begins when you’ve run out of compensatory strategies like when masking, performing, and overachieving no longer keep the shame away. It begins when silence feels safer than pretending. Growth doesn’t arrive dressed as motivation. It creeps in through the cracks left behind when all your old survival strategies stop working. For me, it started the day I said, out loud, “I can’t do this anymore,” and meant it. Not as a plea for pity, but as an act of truth.

When I told my story on the ADHD-ish podcast, I wasn’t trying to inspire anyone. I was trying to make sense of my own map of how the landscape of trauma and neurodivergence had shaped the way I experienced the world. I grew up believing productivity was the only proof of worth. When I got my ADHD diagnosis, it reframed so much, but it didn’t automatically fix the scripts running in my head. I still fought the same war, only now I knew its name. I still chased the illusion of “catching up,” still shamed myself for executive dysfunction, still called rest “lazy.” The diagnosis gave me language, but healing required surrender.

That surrender came through coaching and first as a client, then as a coach. Coaching became the bridge between understanding and integration. It taught me that post-traumatic growth isn’t about transcending pain because it’s about learning to metabolize it. It’s the process of turning survival responses into self-awareness, and self-awareness into agency. It’s recognizing that the same intensity that once drove burnout can also drive breakthroughs…if you stop directing it against yourself.

For neurodivergent people, stress isn’t just an emotional reaction, it can be sensory and cognitive overload. Our brains don’t just feel stress they also store it. Every missed cue, every social misunderstanding, every moment of masking to survive, our bodies record it. Over time, that accumulation becomes an invisible weight. The answer isn’t to toughen up! It’s to listen. Stress can be transmuted, but only if we stop moralizing it. Only if we allow it to speak before it screams.

That’s what post-traumatic growth really is…alchemy. Turning the raw material of pain into the architecture of wisdom. It’s not linear, and it’s not gentle. It’s the work of learning to recognize your stress responses as stories your body tells about what it has survived and then rewriting the ending. It’s learning to say, “I’m safe now,” even when the echoes of danger still hum in your nervous system.

As a coach, I watch this transformation happen every day. I see people come in carrying invisible backpacks full of “shoulds,” packed with the debris of overfunctioning. They sit across from me and say, “I just want to feel normal again.” But normal is a myth built on someone else’s wiring. What they really want is to feel at home in themselves. That’s the work! Expanding the space between stress and shutdown, between reaction and reflection. That’s how we build resilience, not by erasing the stress, but by widening our capacity to hold it without losing ourselves.

I tell my clients that resilience isn’t about how quickly you recover, it’s about how deeply you rebuild. Stress can be a signal. It can reveal what systems need redesigning, what environments need adjusting, what boundaries need defending. It can become a compass for growth if we stop viewing it as the enemy. The key is integration and letting your nervous system catch up to your ambition.

As neurodivergent individuals, our growth comes from reclaiming our own rhythm. Post-traumatic growth asks us to stop rehearsing resilience as performance and start practicing it as embodiment. It’s learning that your worth isn’t measured by output, but by alignment. It’s remembering that you can be both brilliant and broken, capable and tired, still healing and still powerful.

If you’re standing in that liminal space, the one between who you were before the crash and who you’re becoming after it. Please know that you’re not behind, you’re unfolding. Growth is not the erasure of trauma because it’s the expansion of meaning beyond it. And when you learn to move that stress through your system, when you learn to stretch instead of snap, you discover something sacred. You discover that you were never meant to bounce back and that you were meant to evolve forward.

If this resonates and if you’ve been carrying the quiet exhaustion of always managing your own overwhelm then this is where our work together begins. In coaching, we don’t rush the healing. We build the scaffolding for it. We take your dreams, your drains, your doubts, and we turn them into data. We find patterns in the chaos. We learn what safety feels like in your body. And from that safety, we build systems that honor who you are, not who you’ve been taught to be.

​Because the truth is that post-traumatic growth isn’t a finish line. It’s a practice. One that allows you to live as your full self and not the version that survived. If that’s the version of you you’re ready to meet, my door’s open. Let’s turn your stress into growth and build your next chapter, one that finally fits your nervous system.