It was an actual Blizzard here! (see photo) and I launched my podcast CORE with LIbby Andrew

Below I’m sharing the transcript from my second podcast episode with details on why girls and then women go undiagnosed with ADHD until later in life. One reason I don’t discuss is that the testing for ADHD was not as good in the 90’s and early 2000’s as it is now. Often parents had a very legitimate fear of mis-diagnosis, possible incorrect medication leading to even worse cognitive orientations. (we’ll discuss this in a later episode)

**Full disclosure, this podcast is the first thing I’ve done where I’m working quite differently then usual. The podcast is raw, its un-polished and it is a huge departure from my perfectionism. (The music carries on too long in the beginning amongst a few other things.) That said, I knew if I waited to hone and discover my perfect voice I would never put it out there. The first Episode is pretty bad, I’ll admit it. But the second one is pretty good. This might work out after all. You can read the transcript below and stay tuned for CORE – Episode 3 – The Wall – When High Functioning ADHD in Women Finally Shows itself and BONUS: Episode 4 – The Ocean Story Episode 5- No Body Cares As Much As You Think They Do and That’s the Best News You’ll Ever Hear Please enjoy. As always feel free to reach out to me, my contact information is below.

What does Dating Look Like when you are Masking? Here’s an Example:

I once sat across from a man I was dating — a smart man, actually — while he explained to me what a put option was. I knew what a put option was. I knew what a call option was. I probably understood the mechanics of options trading better than he did. And I said absolutely nothing. I let him finish. I smiled. I nodded.

Was I being polite? Maybe. But here’s what was actually happening: I didn’t trust myself to push back without it coming out like a sledgehammer. My ADHD brain doesn’t always have a dimmer switch. It’s either off or it’s everything, all at once. So I chose silence over the risk of saying the wrong thing too loudly.

That is masking. And I had been doing it my entire life without knowing it had a name.

Welcome back to the CORE podcast. I’m Libby Andrew. Today we are talking about why so many women — especially high-achieving women — spend decades living with ADHD without anyone ever noticing. Not their teachers, not their doctors, not their partners, and most heartbreakingly, not themselves.

THE NUMBERS — AND WHY THEY LIE

Let’s start with some numbers, because they’re staggering once you understand what they mean.

Boys are diagnosed with ADHD at roughly twice the rate of girls in childhood. Some studies put the ratio even higher — as much as three to one. For decades, researchers and clinicians assumed this meant ADHD was simply more common in males. What they were actually measuring was visibility. Boys with ADHD tend to be disruptive. They can’t sit still. They interrupt. They get sent to the principal’s office. They get noticed.

Girls with ADHD go to their rooms and stare at the ceiling. They daydream so vividly they can live entire parallel lives in their heads while appearing to pay attention. They get good enough grades to slide by. They learn, early and efficiently, how to become whoever the room needs them to be.

By adulthood, the diagnosis gap between men and women narrows — but only because women finally reach a breaking point. Perimenopause. A child’s diagnosis. A career collapse that makes no sense on paper. Something forces the question: why is this so hard for me when it looks so easy for everyone else?

The average woman with ADHD is diagnosed twelve to fifteen years later than her male counterpart. Twelve to fifteen years of wondering what is wrong with her.

THE GIRL IN THE CLASSROOM

Let me paint you a picture you might recognize.

There is a girl in a classroom. She’s bright — maybe exceptionally bright. She finishes the work quickly when she decides to engage with it. Her teachers sometimes say she’s not working to her potential, but she’s not failing, so nobody pushes very hard. She has friends. She’s likeable. She knows how to read a room.

But inside that classroom, she is somewhere else entirely. She has a rich, elaborate, almost cinematic inner world that she visits constantly. She’s choreographing a music video in her head, or replaying a conversation from three days ago, or mentally redecorating her bedroom, or living the plot of a book she finished last week as if she’s inside it.

She is not causing trouble. She is not drawing attention to herself. She is, from every visible angle, fine.

And so nobody looks closer. Nobody thinks: what is she doing to make this work? Nobody asks what it costs her.

What it costs her is enormous. She goes home and crashes. She cries without knowing why. She can spend three hours trying to start a homework assignment that should take twenty minutes, not because she can’t do it, but because she cannot make herself begin. She develops elaborate systems and rituals and workarounds that she tells no one about because she doesn’t understand why she needs them when nobody else seems to.

She learns to perform competence. And she gets very, very good at it.

MASKING — THE SKILL THAT HIDES THE DIAGNOSIS

Masking is the clinical term for what happens when someone with ADHD — or autism, which frequently co-occurs — suppresses, camouflages, or compensates for their neurological differences in order to appear neurotypical.

For women with ADHD, masking is often not a conscious choice. It’s a survival adaptation that begins in childhood and becomes so automatic that even the woman doing it doesn’t know she’s doing it anymore. It becomes the self.

There are layers to it. There is social masking — learning to mirror the emotional tone of a room, giving people what they want to see, becoming fluent in performing whatever version of yourself produces the least friction. There is competence masking — developing elaborate compensatory strategies that look like giftedness or discipline from the outside. And there is diagnostic masking — being so skilled at presenting as functional that when you finally sit across from a clinician, you can pass a checklist that should flag you.

This last one is particularly insidious. By the time many women seek a diagnosis — if they seek one at all — they have spent decades studying what “normal” looks like. They have learned to perform it on demand. They can answer a diagnostic questionnaire the way they know it’s supposed to be answered. And they walk out without a diagnosis, more confused and defeated than when they went in.

THE COST OF A LIFETIME OF MASKING

Here is what nobody tells you about masking: it works. And that is exactly the problem.

Because masking works, the woman with undiagnosed ADHD often achieves. She gets the job. She gets the promotion. She gets the relationship. She looks, from the outside, like someone who has it together. And so when she falls apart — and she does fall apart, quietly, repeatedly, behind closed doors — there is no framework for understanding why.

Worse than that: masking doesn’t just hide ADHD from other people. It hides it from the woman herself.

When you have spent forty or fifty years becoming whoever the room needs you to be, you lose track of who you actually are underneath it. Your sense of self is assembled from external feedback — from what other people reflect back to you. You are good at your job, so you are that. You are a good mother, so you are that. You are the capable one, the dependable one, the one who figures it out. But these are performances, not identities. And performances are exhausting.

The tragedy of late diagnosis isn’t just the years lost to struggle. It’s that the very skill that helped you survive — the ability to become whoever was needed — also prevented you from knowing yourself.

HUMPTY DUMPTY — A NURSERY RHYME WORTH REVISITING

My grandfather recited Humpty Dumpty at nearly every dinner we ever shared. I was a child. I thought it was just a thing he did — a grandfather’s eccentricity, a bit of performed whimsy.

It wasn’t until decades later, sitting with my own diagnosis and my own fragmented sense of self, that I started to wonder: was he offering kindness, or a warning?

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Most people hear that as a tragedy. The thing that breaks cannot be repaired. But I’ve started to read it differently.

The king’s horses and the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. The king’s resources, the king’s institutions, the king’s systems — the same systems, by the way, that were never designed to see girls like us — could not do the repair. Of course they couldn’t. They couldn’t see the problem clearly enough to fix it.

But the rhyme doesn’t say Humpty couldn’t be put together again. It says the king’s men couldn’t do it. Maybe the question isn’t whether repair is possible. Maybe the question is who gets to do it, and whether we finally stop waiting for the systems that failed us to be the ones that save us.

SO HOW DO WE GET THE PIECES BACK?

This is the work I want to do with you on this podcast, and in the coaching work I’m building. Not pretending the years of masking didn’t happen. Not grieving them indefinitely, either — because I’ve found that for an ADHD brain with our capacity for emotional time travel, grief without a container is a black hole.

The work is this: learning to distinguish between the mask and the self underneath it. Noticing when you are performing competence versus actually inhabiting it. Recognizing that the real you — the one who slips out in certain conversations, in creative moments, in the rare environment where you feel completely safe — she has been there the whole time. She just hasn’t had permission.

This diagnosis, however late it arrives, is permission.

It doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t excuse everything. But it reframes everything. And for a brain wired for pattern recognition, having the right frame changes everything you see.

Next week we’re going to go deeper into what the unmasking process actually looks like — and why it can feel terrifying before it feels like freedom. Because taking off a mask you’ve worn for fifty years isn’t a relief at first. It’s disorienting. It can feel like losing yourself. But that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is you’re finally starting to find yourself.

I’m Libby Andrew. This is the Second Episode of CORE-The podcast for late Diagnosed Women with ADHD. Create CLARITY – with scaffolding. OWNERSHIP with core value systems. REGULATION for Consistency in your life. EDGE – your ADHD brain strategically for an optimal healthy life.

I’m introducing a group coaching program for Late Diagnosis, High – IQ, High- Capacity Women. The group will launch April 1st. This will be a monthly membership and meetings will take place twice weekly. If you are interested I’ve created a link here to get on the wait list.

I’m available for Private Coaching, please check out the Work With Me Page, if you are interested.