My day started like any other with too many tabs open, a half-finished coffee cooling beside my laptop, and the low hum of an ordinary day. Then, somewhere between emails and calendar reminders, my phone began to light up.

First, a name I hadn’t seen in over a decade. Then another. And another. By the fourth message, I had to stop and ask myself if Mercury was in retrograde, if some shared nostalgia portal had opened, or if the universe had simply hit “reply all” on my unresolved past.

It felt… uncanny. Like the ghosts of earlier versions of me had suddenly found Wi-Fi.

I spent the rest of the day trying to make sense of it because that’s what my brain does. I doesn’t see randomness like many others, I see constellations. I stitche coincidences into meaning, map chaos into geometry, and ask what is this moment trying to teach me?

The Neurodivergent Algorithm
For many of us with neurodivergent wiring, whether the be dyslexia, dypraxia, ADHD, autism, or another flavor of brain difference, our memory doesn’t play by the same rules as most people assume. It’s not a straight line of “then to now.” It’s more like a neural web, humming with dormant connections that spark to life when the right cue appears.

When I say that people from my past “resurfaced,” I don’t just mean in my inbox. I mean in my mind.
With each message, my brain unearthed an entire chapter of sights, smells, and emotional weather. One text and suddenly I’m back in that old clinic, in that old version of me, feeling the same curiosity, awkwardness, or hope that once filled the air.

For a neurodivergent person, this can feel both like a gift and a flood. The brain’s associative memory system is vivid and relentless and often it connects everything to everything. That’s why a single sensory detail can reopen an archive that’s been sealed for years. It’s also why “coincidences” rarely feel coincidental.

There’s a unique pattern-seeking instinct built into neurodivergent cognition. It’s what makes us visionary problem solvers and sometimes relentless overthinkers. We see threads others miss and the trick is learning not to assume every thread is fate’s embroidery. Sometimes it’s just the mind’s way of tidying up loose ends.

The Myth of Randomness
In coaching, I talk a lot about the myth of randomness. Humans, especially neurodivergent ones, are meaning-making machines. We rarely accept that something “just happened.” Instead, we look for why and we dissect context, tone, and timing.

Here’s what I’ve learned through both neuroscience and coaching practice, meaning and randomness aren’t opposites. They’re more like dance partners.

The brain’s reticular activating system, which is the filter that decides what information gets through your awareness, tunes itself to what you care about most. When you start reflecting on identity, old identities start to reappear. When you begin questioning belonging, people connected to past belonging re-emerge.

So maybe these reconnections weren’t the universe whispering. Maybe they were mirrors reflecting back my own readiness to reconnect.

That’s what makes coaching powerful, is that it helps separate pattern awareness from pattern obsession. We don’t always need to decode the “why.” Sometimes. and I mean only sometimes, noticing that we’re noticing is enough.

When a client tells me, “It’s weird, all these old things are coming back,” I ask, “What’s reawakening in you that might be calling them forth?” Because that’s usually where the real stories live.

When the Past Knocks, the Present Answers
As I replied to those messages (cautiously at first, and then with curiosity) realized I wasn’t talking to those people as I once was. They were speaking to an entirely new version of me. The conversations were familiar, but the person holding the phone was not.

This is one of the great paradoxes of coaching and neurodivergence…we crave continuity, but we live in flux. The same wiring that gives us deep loyalty and memory can also make change feel like betrayal. When someone reappears from the past, it tests that balance.

Am I obligated to be who I was when they knew me? Or, do I let them meet who I am now even if that feels like a stranger to them?

The answer depends on what the reconnection invites. Some people return as reminders, while others as reflections. Some represent healing still unfinished and others are simple proof that time can soften what once hurt.

In neuroinclusive coaching, this is where I often work with clients on energy discernment, which is identifying what interactions feed or drain them. Because neurodivergent people often default to over-connection because we replay, re-explain, and reopen over and over again. The work is learning when revisiting becomes reopening wounds instead of rewriting stories.

The Time-Fold Mind
Time is not linear for neurodivergent thinkers. It folds like origami. The past sits right beside the present, waiting for the right sensory trigger to invite it back into view.

This can make old memories feel as fresh as yesterday and sometimes, that’s overwhelming. But it can also be profound. It means the neurodivergent brain has a unique relationship to legacy and learning. We don’t move on from experiences because we loop back to integrate them more deeply each time.

Coaching through this lens means teaching clients to honor those loops rather than shame them. You’re not “stuck.” You’re revisiting with new tools. You’re the adult version of the child who still needs acknowledgment. You’re the current self returning to the moment an earlier self didn’t have support.

When those messages arrived, I didn’t just see the names per se…I saw unfinished chapters in me. The me who didn’t know his neurodivergence yet. The me who masked and who over-functioned and who thought exhaustion was a prerequisite for belonging.

Each ping was a time fold, like a tiny portal. And when I opened them, I could finally offer those versions of myself something new, which was understanding instead of judgment.

Reconnection as Reflection
From a coaching standpoint, reconnection moments like this are data points. They reveal readiness. They mark the edges of growth.

In my R.I.S.E. leadership model (Reflect, Implement, Sustain, Empower) this kind of moment lives in the Reflect and Empower zones.

Reflect: What patterns or emotions resurfaced when the past reached out?
Empower: How can awareness of those patterns guide new boundaries or invitations?
Maybe the old coworker who texted reminded you of a part of yourself that once thrived in chaos. Maybe the friend who resurfaced brought back a softness you’d tucked away. In either case, the past becomes a mirror, not a map.

Neurodivergent coaching is about helping people learn to read those mirrors clearly and to see reflection without distortion. Our brains can turn curiosity into overanalysis in seconds. When held with compassion, reflection becomes integration, “Ah, I see where I’ve been and I see who I’ve become.”

When Meaning Finds You
Late that night, I sat scrolling through old messages I never answered, photos I never deleted, chapters I thought I’d closed. Instead of the usual cringe or guilt, I felt something quieter…gratitude.

This was gratitude not for the sake of the people themselves, necessarily, but for the reminder that no version of me is truly lost. They just live in different rooms of the same house, and sometimes, they knock to remind me they’re still there.

Neurodiversity, at its heart, is an invitation to see difference as design. Our minds aren’t broken, they’re just wired for a different kind of storytelling. Sometimes, that story isn’t chronological, it’s recursive and it spirals inward before it expands outward again.

When I work with clients, I often say “The past doesn’t return to punish you. It returns to be rewritten by the person you’ve become.”

That’s what this day felt like, the universe handing me a stack of old drafts and asking, “Still want to say it this way?”

The Coaching Perspective: Holding Both Truths
Coaching in the neurodiversity space requires a delicate balance of honoring the meaning we see in patterns without letting those patterns rule us. We hold both the mystery and the mechanics.

The mystery says: “Maybe this means something.”
The mechanics remind us: “It means something because your brain is wired to find meaning.”

Both can coexist. One gives life poetry while the other gives it context.

So when the universe redials, whether through an old friend, a memory, or a perfectly timed coincidence…you don’t have to choose between wonder and logic. You can hold both. You can say, “I don’t know if this is fate or feedback, but I’ll listen either way.”

That’s what coaching teaches! Coaching is not to assign instant meaning, but to pause in awareness. To notice what’s being stirred, what’s being reopened, and potentially what’s being healed. To let the experience teach you what it came to teach and then to release it.

Epilogue: The New Network
By the end of that strange day, my phone had gone quiet again. The pings stopped and the past retreated back into its archives, perhaps satisfied. But I was left with something new and interesting. It wasn’t closure, exactly, but coherence.

I realized that reconnection doesn’t always mean rekindling relationships. Sometimes it means reconnecting neural pathways between who you were and who you are now.

In the neurodiversity space, we talk about inclusion as creating systems that meet us where we are. But personal inclusion starts internally, inviting all your former selves to have a seat at the table, even the ones who used to hide or mask or ache to belong.

The people who reached out were just messengers. The real reunion was between my current self and every version of me that had been waiting for acknowledgment.

So yes, maybe it was coincidence. Or, maybe it was cosmic, or just the universe updating its contacts list.

Whatever it was, it reminded me of this truth…we don’t outgrow our stories, we grow through them. And sometimes, the universe just wants to check that you’re still listening.

​