You Were Never Broken, You Were Misinformed

There’s a story that gets told quietly, persistently, over years… sometimes decades.

It doesn’t get said out loud. It lives underneath things. Underneath the to-do lists that never quite got finished, the systems that worked for everyone else but not for you, the endless cycle of trying harder and still feeling like you were somehow missing the point.

The story goes something like this: if things aren’t working, it must be something I’m doing wrong.

It’s not a dramatic belief. It doesn’t announce itself. It just… shapes everything.

Here’s what’s actually happening when self-blame takes hold so completely…

When someone grows up with undiagnosed ADHD, or enters perimenopause without anyone naming what’s shifting neurologically, they’re handed a set of tools that simply don’t match how their brain is working. And then they’re assessed against outcomes, again and again, using systems built for a different operating system entirely.

So when things fall apart, the most logical conclusion available is: I’m the problem.

Not the tools. Not the systems. Not the complete absence of accurate information. Me.

That conclusion gets reinforced every time a strategy fails… every time someone else seems to manage what feels impossible… every time the gap between effort and result doesn’t make sense.

Over time, it stops feeling like a conclusion and starts feeling like a fact.

Something that often gets missed in conversations about ADHD and self-blame is the role perfectionism plays… not as a character flaw, but as an incredibly resourceful response to an impossible situation.

If the fear is that you’ll be seen as careless, scattered, unreliable, then the logical counter-move is to try to be flawless. To over-prepare, over-deliver, over-explain. To work three times as hard to produce what looks like an average result.

It’s exhausting. And it works… until it doesn’t.

Because perfectionism fuelled by shame isn’t sustainable. It’s not a strength being expressed, it’s a threat being managed. And the nervous system eventually signals that loudly and clearly, whether that looks like burnout, shutdown, or something that gets quietly labelled as ‘just anxiety.’

The shift that starts to change things isn’t working harder. It’s understanding what was actually happening all along.

This is something that tends to land differently depending on where someone is in their understanding…

For people who’ve spent years in self-blame mode, curiosity can feel almost suspicious. Like it’s too soft. Like it lets something off the hook.

But here’s what curiosity actually does: it asks better questions.

Instead of why can’t I just do this like everyone else… it asks what’s actually going on here?

Instead of what’s wrong with me… it asks what do I need to understand about how I work?

That shift from judgment to curiosity isn’t about making excuses. It’s about getting accurate. Because judgment tends to generate shame, and shame tends to generate paralysis. Curiosity, on the other hand, tends to generate information… and information is where things actually start to change.

Trying harder is a perfectly reasonable strategy when the problem is effort. When the problem is neurological, or hormonal, or a fundamental mismatch between someone’s wiring and the systems they’re trying to use… trying harder just accelerates exhaustion.

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with understanding this clearly for the first time. Because it reframes so much. Not just the recent struggles, but years of them. Moments that felt like failure that were actually just… the wrong tool for the job.

That grief is real and it’s worth sitting with. But underneath it, there’s usually something else too…

Relief.

The relief of finally having a frame that makes sense. Of not having to carry the weight of a story that was never actually true.

It doesn’t mean everything becomes easy. It doesn’t mean the practical challenges disappear overnight.

But something changes when the internal narrative moves from broken to misinformed. People stop spending energy on self-correction and start spending it on self-understanding. They stop trying to force themselves through systems that were never designed for them, and start asking what systems might actually work.

And gradually… not all at once, not in a straight line… something that looks a lot like self-trust starts to rebuild.

Not because anything was fixed. Because something was finally understood.

What might shift for you if the story moved from ‘I’m broken’ to ‘I was working with the wrong information’? 🌿