My Brain’s Been Roasting Me Since 1983
If you’re neurospicy, you already know the script. You walk into a room and your brain immediately drafts a press release about everything you’ve done wrong in the last thirty seconds. Your laugh was too loud. Your top’s doing something weird. You said “you too” when the waiter said enjoy your meal, and now you’ve got to move countries. The internal commentary’s relentless, and it’s rude, and it’s been doing this on loop since primary school.
I’ve always made jokes about myself before anyone else can. It felt safer that way. If I beat you to it, you can’t hurt me, because we’re laughing together at the same target. I’ve called myself a disaster, a goblin, a feral little gremlin, a woman held together by matcha and spite. Some of that’s genuine personality. Some of it’s armour. The line between the two used to be so blurred I sometimes forgot which was which.
The thing is, self-deprecating humour’s the unofficial native tongue of neurodivergent people. We grew up being told we were too much, too loud, too sensitive, too messy, too distracted, too intense, too weird. So we learned to say it first, to soften the blow, to make it palatable. By the time we hit our forties, the joke’s stopped being a joke. It’s just a worldview wearing a clown nose, and honestly, babe, it’s got to go.
Imposter Syndrome Is Just Childhood in a Blazer
Imposter syndrome gets wheeled out as a cute little career buzzword, like it’s something high-functioning women say at networking events to seem relatable. But for neurospicy people, it isn’t a quirk. It’s a full-body conviction that you’ve somehow tricked everyone, and any moment now they’ll work it out and revoke your access. To the job. To the friendship. To the relationship. To the life you’ve built.
I’ve had moments where I’ve genuinely thought, who let me do this. Who let me write things people read. Who let me speak into a microphone. Who let me have opinions in public. There’s a part of my brain permanently convinced I’m one bad day away from being exposed as a fraud who got lucky. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. The feeling doesn’t consult the facts.
Here’s what I’ve worked out. Imposter syndrome isn’t about your competence. It’s about your nervous system remembering every time you were corrected, mocked, misunderstood, or made to feel like the odd one out. Your brain learned early that being seen was dangerous, so now, every time you succeed, it sounds the alarm. The fix isn’t more credentials. The fix is teaching your nervous system that being visible’s no longer a threat.
The Voice in Your Head Sounds Suspiciously Like Someone Else
When I actually sit with the negative self-talk and listen to it properly, the script isn’t mine. It’s a remix. It’s a teacher who told me I’d never amount to anything if I didn’t stop daydreaming. It’s an ex who said I was too intense. It’s a relative who laughed at the wrong moment. It’s every offhand comment from people who aren’t in my life anymore but whose voices apparently signed a long-term lease in my skull.
That’s the wild part. Most of us are walking around being bullied by ghosts. By people who, if you ran into them at the shops tomorrow, you wouldn’t even recognise. Their opinions of us were formed in passing, on a Tuesday, when they were probably hungry or tired or unhappy. And we built an entire identity around what they said. We’re letting people who haven’t thought about us in decades dictate how we speak to ourselves at 3am.
Once you notice this, you can’t unnotice it. The next time the inner voice starts up, ask whose voice it actually is. Nine times out of ten, it isn’t you. It’s a recording. And recordings can be deleted, written over, and replaced. You don’t have to keep playing the same cruel little track just because it’s familiar. Familiarity isn’t the same as truth.
Stop Workshopping Yourself for Other People’s Comfort
There’s a specific flavour of self-deprecation that women, and especially neurodivergent women, do almost reflexively. We shrink. We pre-apologise. We say things like “sorry, this is probably a stupid question” before asking something perfectly intelligent. We laugh at ourselves on the way into a room so no one else has to. We make ourselves smaller so other people don’t feel intimidated, threatened, or inconvenienced by our existence.
And you know what? I’m done with this. I’m elder millennial tired. I’ve spent decades softening myself into a shape that fits other people’s comfort, and the return on investment’s been, frankly, pathetic. No one ever clapped. No one ever said thank you for shrinking, here’s your reward. They just took the smaller version and asked for less. The performance never ends if you keep agreeing to perform.
The shift, for me, was been catching the words before they leave my mouth. Not in a wellness girlie way. Not with affirmations whispered into a mirror at dawn. Just a small, blunt question: would I let someone else say this about me? If a friend introduced me as a hot mess who barely has her life together, I’d be furious. So why am I allowed to say it about myself, in front of people, as a personality? It’s not humility. It’s a slow self-betrayal dressed up as a punchline.
Becoming the Queen You Already Were
The thing nobody tells you about overcoming negative self-talk is it isn’t a single dramatic moment. There’s no spa retreat, no journal prompt, no meditation app that’ll fix it overnight. It’s a thousand tiny corrections. Catching the thought. Naming it. Asking whose voice that is. Choosing a different sentence. Doing it again tomorrow. And the next day. Forever, basically, because brains are stubborn little creatures who like a familiar groove.
The goal isn’t to become some serene, self-loving woman who glides through life believing she’s divine. That woman’s fictional, and frankly, she sounds exhausting. The goal’s to be on your own team. To stop being the first person to throw yourself under the bus. To speak about yourself the way you’d speak about your best friend, which is to say, with affection, with honesty, and with absolutely zero tolerance for anyone who tries to make her feel small. Including you.
You’re not a fraud. You’re not too much. You’re not a disaster. You’re a clever, complicated, neurospicy woman who’s spent a long time being told she was the problem, and you’re starting to suspect, finally, that you might actually be the prize. Lean into that suspicion. Let it grow. The queen’s been there the whole time. She’s just been waiting for you to stop talking over her.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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