Too successful. Too educated. Too old. Published April 1st.

April 08, 2026•5 min read

Hiya,

4pm hits and I'm done.

Not tired. Done. Like a wind-up toy that's run out of power with no chance of being wound up again until tomorrow.

So I sit on the couch. Rewatching Giuliana & Bill — we can't do new. No bandwidth for new shows, new experiences, new anything.

My gorgeous husband Simon works from home and carries the load. He does the majority of the cooking. The household chores. And it's taken time — real time — for him to understand why I used to be able to do so much more.

That it can look a lot like lazy.

It isn't lazy.

We've worked out our own system. He washes the dishes, I unpack the dishwasher. He washes the clothes, I fold and put away. If I'm cooking, our son Jack just... hangs out in the kitchen with me. Not doing anything. Just there.

Body doubling. It's a real thing for ADHD brains and it works.

I feel shame writing that paragraph.

The fear of judgment about how much Simon carries. About what that says about me. About what you might think reading it.

But if I'm not transparent about my own life — how can I ask my clients to be transparent about theirs?

So there it is.

And the whole time, my brain won't stop.

1,335 unread emails. The dining table that has somehow become a permanent laundry holder. The load that's been in the dryer since Tuesday. Walking past all of it to let Louie outside and thinking — I'll do it when I get back.

I don't do it when I get back.

Someone should do a study on why ADHD brains cannot put away laundry. I'm completely serious. I would fund that research.

We have so many I shoulds.

As women. As mums. As wives. As business owners who are supposed to have it together.

My lovely dad is gone. Mum is still here and she needs me — really needs me. And I carry guilt about that. Guilt that I can't spend as much time with her as I want to. Guilt that some daysI simply don't have the spoons to show up for the hard moments that come with a medically unwell parent.

That guilt is just another 'I should' in disguise.

I should be more available. I should be able to handle this. I should be better at all of it.

We are sandwiched — between our kids and our parents and our businesses and our partners — carrying every end, running on empty in the middle.

And we just do it.

Because what other option is there.

Until the voices get too loud to ignore.

The I shoulds stack up. The mess stops being background noise and starts feeling like evidence. Evidence of everything you haven't done.Everything you should have done. Every item on the list that's been there since last week.

And if I'm doing really well at ignoring all of that — I invite someone over.

Deliberately. Strategically. To break the procrastination monkey and force myself into deadline mode.

Because sometimes the only thing that moves me off the couch is knowing someone is going to walk through that door in an hour.

Then something switches.

The whirling dervish arrives. Four hours of deep cleaning, sorting, restoring order.

Clean house.

Exhausted human.

Reset. Repeat.

I needed to build an entire support system around the tasks and things I used to be able to manage myself.

But did I really manage?

I suffered with chronic anxiety. All the time. I still get it — I understand now it's more social and sensory based, another layer of the autism onion I'm still peeling back. But I just... did it. We just did. Because what other option was there.

I'm 56. Diagnosed with ADHD for five years.I work in this space.I know exactly what dropping oestrogen does to an ADHD brain.

And I went to the doctor today — today — to finalise starting on HRT.

15 years later than I should have.

Because obviously I'm a failure if I can't manage my own hormone system.

Right?

On April 1st — sit with that date, — a University of Queensland study confirmed that women with ADHD are still being turned away from diagnosis because they're too successful. Too educated. Too old.

The joke writes itself.

And this: 94% of women say their ADHD symptoms got significantly worse during perimenopause and menopause. More than half said it's the period when ADHD had the greatest overall impact on their lives.

Not their twenties. Not their thirties.

Now.

We are high-achieving, self-critical women who have spent decades proving we can hold it together.

The more capable we look, the longer it takes to ask for help.

Because we keep passing a test nobody should have to take.

I passed it for five years.

I'm done passing it.

I'm not telling you I have this figured out.

I never will. None of us will.

That's not what this is.

With ADHD there is no sorted. There is no finish line where you finally become the person who manages it all.That version of you doesn't exist and she was never the goal.

What exists is this.

Understanding yourself more than you did last year.Finding the people and the situations that hold you as you actually are — not the version you perform for everyone else. Building the scaffolding that works foryourbrain, not the brain you were told you should have.

Stopping the fight to fit.

That's lifelong work. Slow, imperfect, ongoing.

We can run successful businesses. We can have the couch days. We can build a life that actually fits us.

But not while the I shoulds are taking up space.

Pack them up. Buy them a one way ticket to the moon.

Because underneath all of it — underneath the laundry and the emails and the 4pm wall — there is a sparkly genius inside you who has been there the whole time.

She just needed the I shoulds out of the room to finally be seen.

—Mel x

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