A father came up to me after my talk on Saturday and said: “For the first time, I think I understand my son.”

A father came up to me after my talk on Saturday and said: “For the first time, I think I understand my son.”

He was twenty two.

And what he was trying to understand was what it feels like to live inside a nervous system like mine.

On Saturday 24th May, I stood on the Midlife Stage at the Mind Body Spirit Festival at Olympia to give a talk called Unmask at Midlife: AuDHD, Ancestral Intelligence and Authenticity.

I thought I was there to speak about the gap between what people see and what is happening on the inside.

Instead, the talk became it.

Olympia is vast. Bright. Loud. Thousands of nervous systems moving through one shared space.

For someone with AuDHD and fibromyalgia, my body had already been receiving signals long before I reached the stage.

I had prepared slides. A structure. A careful arc.

And then, mid talk, I could no longer follow it.

So I stopped trying.

I spoke instead from inside the experience itself. About the electricity I hear humming through appliances at home. The way my body feels fizzy. What it means to inhabit a nervous system that notices more than the room knows what to do with.

Several people nodded while I spoke.

Not agreement.

Recognition.

I have thought about that father often this weekend.

Because the original talk was about masking.

About the distance between external competence and internal reality. About the cost of carrying an inner world that few people are equipped to see.

As I have rested this weekend, I have found myself thinking about how often this same pattern appears in leadership.

The founder praised for resilience while quietly overriding what their body already knows.

The senior leader carrying grief privately while certainty is expected publicly.

The executive navigating change faster than identity can keep pace.

People functioning.

Performing.

Delivering.

And carrying realities that remain largely invisible.

Perhaps this is why so many thresholds arrive disguised as exhaustion, disorientation, or a quiet sense that the old performance no longer fits.

I had not planned to demonstrate any of this.

But perhaps this is what unmasking sometimes is.

Not performance.

Presence.

My body has needed rest since. The sensory intensity of the weekend led to a fibromyalgia flare and I have spent much time in bed recovering.

People often see the stage and not what follows after. The visible moment and not the nervous system that carried it.

When you unmask, you free more than yourself.

And sometimes, what becomes visible in one room creates language for someone else to recognise themselves in another.

If something in this feels quietly familiar, perhaps the question is not what you need to push through.

But what part of you is asking to finally be heard.

#AuDHD #NeurodivergentLeadership #EmbodiedLeadership #Unmasking #Leadership #AccessibilityMatters #KeynoteSpeake

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