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52 years. 30 jobs. Addiction. Suicide attempts. Narcissists. A parking garage. A YouTube video. A packed car.
And finally, a name for all of it.
The doctor was 30 minutes late calling me.
I was sitting in a private phone room in the middle of a business cohort—13 other people on the other side of the wall, living their lives—while a specialist I’d been waiting six months to speak to finally called to tell me what I already knew.
He asked me inappropriate questions. He was cold. Disconnected. Clinical in the way that makes you feel like a file number instead of a human being. And when it was over, he said someone would follow up.
Three weeks later, nobody had.
So I followed up myself. Because that’s what I’ve always done—figured it out myself. Found my own way through. Built the map when nobody would give me one.
At 52, I was diagnosed with ADHD. And what I felt wasn’t surprise. It wasn’t grief.
It was completion.
Because I had already spent almost 10 years healing the thing that finally had a name.
The Life that Looked liked Everything
Before 2017, I had the life.
Six figures. The house. The car. The boyfriend. The kind of external landscape that is supposed to mean you’ve made it. The kind that makes people say, from the outside: “she has everything.”
What they couldn’t see:
I was drinking. Heavily, especially on weekends. The kind of drinking that isn’t dramatic or visible—it’s a bottle of wine on Friday, another on Saturday, feeling like absolute garbage on Sunday and promising yourself this week will be different. It never was. The cycle just repeated, quietly, reliably, like clockwork.
The food was the same. Chips. Chocolate. Overeating to the point of shame and then starting again. Not because I was hungry. Because my nervous system was screaming for something—dopamine, comfort, stimulation, relief—and food was the fastest way to answer it.
The people were the same too. I wanted everyone to like me. I needed everyone to like me. I had no boundaries, not because I didn’t know what they were, but because somewhere deep in my wiring I had learned that my worth was in my usefulness. That love was conditional on performance. That if I stopped doing, doing, doing…I would become invisible. Unlovable. Disposable.
I was always pouring from a cup that was never filled. And I called it being an empath like it was a badge of honor.
The narcissists found me easily. Family members. Friends. Bosses. Coworkers. Partners. They could see, with the particular instinct predators have for prey, exactly how much I needed to be needed. How much I would give to keep the peace. How little I required in return.
I fawned. I accommodated. I shrunk and stretched and contorted myself into whatever shape the room required.
And I called it sensitivity. I called it empathy. I called it being spiritual.
What I know now: it was survival. A nervous system that had learned, very early, that the world was too much and the only way through was to make yourself indispensable to the people in it.
Living in the Dark
I don’t want to be vague about this part because vague doesn’t help anyone.
There were suicide attempts. More than one. Not dramatic gestures—a genuine, bone-deep desire to stop feeling. To be done. To go home to God because this world, this life, this body, this relentless noise in my head that never quieted, I didn’t want any of it anymore.
I want to say that clearly for the person reading this at 3 a.m. who recognizes that feeling. Who has had that thought and carried it alone because there is no language for it that doesn’t frighten people.
I didn’t want to die. I wanted to stop suffering. There is a difference. And it took me years to understand it.
What I now understand—with the ADHD and AuDHD lens I didn’t have then—is that every single thing I was doing to cope was my nervous system trying to regulate itself without the tools to do so.
The drinking: dopamine. The overeating: stimulation and comfort. The people pleasing: safety through appeasement. The toxic relationships: the familiar feeling of conditional love that my system had been trained to accept as normal.
Thirty jobs in my working life. Not because I was unreliable or uncommitted. Because an undiagnosed ADHD brain cannot sustain interest in work that doesn’t light it up, and once the novelty fades, it physically cannot stay. The boredom isn’t laziness. It’s neurological.
I was not broken. I was undiagnosed. And the world kept treating those two things as the same.
The Video that Changed Everything
I don’t remember exactly what I was searching for the day I found Carmel Joy Baird.
I remember what I was feeling: desperate. Exhausted. Done in that particular way that isn’t quite giving up but isn’t quite going on either. The grey place between. The waiting room of a life you don’t know how to leave.
And then this woman—this international medium, this stranger on a screen—said something that rearranged everything.
She said: your anxiety and your depression are because you are highly psychic. Most likely a medium. And I’m going to show you how to heal, how to become more, and how to drop all the baggage at the same time.
Something in me said: yes. Not cautiously. Not with qualifications. Just—yes.
Six months of the most intense psychic and mediumship work I have ever done. Cold cases. Missing persons. Learning to trust the knowing I had always had but never had a name for. Becoming a certified medium. Understanding for the first time that the thing I had been trying to manage and medicate and apologize for my entire life—the sensitivity, the intensity, the overwhelm—was not a malfunction.
It was a gift I didn’t yet know how to hold. And then one thing led to the next.
Reiki. Usui Rhoyo Reiki master teacher. Working with the energy of people and animals. Learning where my intuitive hits came from. Learning to trust my gut—not as a metaphor but as literal, embodied knowing.
A YouTube channel. A book. A podcast. A speaking career. Coaching. Retreats. Holding space for women who were, I would come to understand, essentially me—walking through the same darkness with the same undiagnosed wiring and the same desperate need for someone to say: you are not broken.
Yoga. I am halfway through my 200-hour certification. Qigong. Breath work. Somatic practice. Nature. Animals. Grounding.
Because the biggest thing I have learned—the thing that sits underneath all of it—is that I was out of my body. Completely, chronically, understandably out of my body. Because being in your body when the world is too loud and too much and too overwhelming is almost unbearable. Dissociation isn’t a disorder. It’s a protection.
Coming back into my body wasn’t a practice. It was a homecoming. And it took almost a decade.
December 1st, 2020
I packed my car on December 1st, 2020.
In the middle of a pandemic. Six years into a relationship with someone who was emotionally unavailable in the particular way that is almost harder than cruelty—because at least cruelty is clear. Emotional unavailability is a slow fog. You keep reaching and finding nothing and wondering if the nothing is your fault.
It wasn’t my fault.
My son and I drove to Vancouver Island. And I want to tell you what that felt like—not the fear, though there was fear, but the other thing. The thing underneath the fear.
It felt like the first honest thing I had done in years. Like my body finally agreed with my soul.
That move was not the end of something. It was the proof that everything I had been building—the mediumship, the Reiki, the somatic work, the yoga, the breath work, the grounding, the slow painful rebuilding of a nervous system that had been in crisis for decades—had actually worked.
Because the woman who got in that car was not the woman who had been sitting in the parking garage in 2017.
She was someone who finally knew her own edges. Who had learned, slowly and imperfectly, that her worth was not in her usefulness. Who had started to understand that the right people don’t require you to be less.
The Phone Call at 52
The doctor called me late. Asked inappropriate questions. Said someone would follow up.
Nobody did.
And when he told me—yes, ADHD, likely AuDHD—I didn’t fall apart. I didn’t rage at the lost years. I didn’t grieve the diagnosis I should have had at eight or 18 or 30.
I sat in that phone room in the middle of a business cohort and I thought: there it is. Another piece of the puzzle. What’s next?
The diagnosis didn’t heal me. It translated me. It gave language to a journey I had already walked.
Because here’s what I want you to understand, the thing this whole story has been building to: I didn’t wait for the diagnosis to heal. I healed my way to the diagnosis.
For almost 10 years, guided by nothing more than a YouTube video and my own psychic knowing and the stubborn refusal to keep suffering, I built a healing practice that addressed my ADHD and AuDHD before I had words for either of them.
>> The grounding—because I was chronically dysregulated.
>> The somatic work—because I was out of my body.
>> The breath work—because my nervous system was in permanent overdrive.
>> The energy work—because I needed to learn what was mine and what I had absorbed from everyone around me.
>> The boundaries—because a boundary-less empath is not a gift to the world. She is a resource being extracted until there is nothing left.
>> The plant-based food, no alcohol, no caffeine, no sugar—because I finally understood that my brain chemistry is sensitive and what I put in my body is not separate from how my mind works.
All these labels—medium, Reiki master, empath, coach, speaker, author, ADHD, AuDHD. And what I know now is just who I am.
Why am I telling you this?
Because somewhere there is a woman reading this who has the life that looks like everything—and feels like nothing.
Because somewhere there is a man in his 50s who just got a diagnosis and has no idea where to go next.
Because somewhere there is a person sitting in the grey place—the waiting room—who needs to know that you do not have to wait for the system to catch up to you.
The system failed me. The doctor was late. The questions were wrong. The follow-up never came. The perimenopause battle lasted two years and ended in a surgery I didn’t want. The ADHD diagnosis came 40 years after it should have.
And I healed anyway.
Not because I was exceptional. Because I was desperate enough to say yes to a video. And brave enough to keep saying yes to the next thing. And stubborn enough to keep going even when the world kept telling me I was too much.
You are not too much. You are not broken. You are undiagnosed, unsupported, and exhausted from a lifetime of trying to fit into a world that was never designed for your brain.
But there is a way through.
I know because I walked it. And I’m still walking it. And now I’m building the sanctuary so you don’t have to walk it alone.
~
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