My intersection of Virtual Admin and AuDHD diagnosis

TL;DR Image can be found at the bottom

Come with me now on a journey through time and space... 

Just kidding. But honestly, this post might be a bit of a chronological mess. 

If you're reading this, you probably already know that in 2023, around my 30th birthday, I was diagnosed with both ADHD (combined) and Autism. It's been a year now, and so many things have changed for me over the last 12 months. 

What does this have to do with being a VA you might ask? Theoretically nothing. But in reality, the two really came hand in hand for me. 

I started this business in mid 2022, and at that stage, I had an inkling. I think for a lot of us late-diagnosed folk, we have an inkling. For me, for as long as I could remember, I had felt like I didn't quite fit in anywhere. But the thing is, it wasn't obvious from the outside. For the most part I had friends throughout my childhood and teenage years, I made friends as an adult. I actually can be quite sociable at times. But what no one else knew or could see is that on the inside I was hyperfocused on doing the ‘right’ thing to maintain those friendships, or mimicking the behaviours of my friends so that they wouldn't notice that I was different to them. 

I did well enough at school. There were no red flags. No one knew that on the inside I was in a near constant state of panic, because I was so scared of doing the wrong thing. So scared of messing up and having people notice that I wasn't quite like them. As you can probably imagine, this led to some pretty intense mental health issues. 

Let's skip forward again. After I finished school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I found an admin job. Data entry all day?! AMAZING. I loved the work, but I really struggled with office politics and my need to do things right rather than fast. These were common themes across all of my admin roles.

When I was around 22 I remember flagging with my psychologist at the time that I was concerned about my overwhelming anxiety levels along with a few other (what I now know are) ADHD and Autism traits. ADHD wasn’t mentioned as a possibility.

When I was 26 I took a list to my GP of why I thought I had ADHD. I’d been trying to work part-time, solo parent, and attend university full-time, and I was drowning.

As most women and AFAB people are, I was brushed off. I was told that I was ‘coping’ with university, so I couldn't have ADHD. Let's not talk about the fact that I was there begging for letters to get extensions for every assessment piece. 

I took a leave of absence from uni and started a new admin job that ended in everyone working from home. It was amazing. At this stage, despite being brushed off, I knew I had ADHD. Being able to work from home meant - my comfortable chair, no awful overhead lights, listening to music to concentrate, being able to move away from my desk without being questioned, and not ending up emotionally exhausted from having to mask in an office all day.

I was on a 12 month contract, and around 9 months in I started working on Beam, and picked up my first clients whose tasks I would work on at night. 

I knew more Autistic/ADHD people by now, and I started paying more attention when they hinted that I might share some of the same traits and characteristics as them. Of course, my husband had been out right telling me for years at this point that I was Autistic (I was clearly very peer reviewed), but I didn't really believe him. 

I tried to work with some neurotypical clients, and tried to run Beam the way I thought it was "meant to be" run, but something wasn't quite working. 

When I booked in my ADHD assessment I said to her "I'm not really sure, but can you assess for Autism as well? Autistic people keep telling me I'm like them. I don't think I believe them though." 

(Apparently the 8 page document I sent to her with my results from every online Autism test I could find, including annotations and notes, wasn't enough for me to start believing it.) It still took her telling me that I absolutely had been diagnosed with both to believe it. 

I'd already been playing around with the concept of moving Beam towards working with ADHDers, and this really cemented it with me. I started researching and understanding myself more, and for the first time in my 30 years, I felt like myself. After years of therapy talking about self-compassion, I was finally actually able to show myself some. 

I decided to stop masking in my business. I wanted to work with people that I understood, that understood me. The clients that I have had either long-term or since my diagnosis and pivot, have changed my life in a way I could never find words to explain. 

I know that people say to not mix work with pleasure, and that becoming friends with clients is a mistake. But I don't regret it. Some of my clients have become my closest friends. We support each other in so many ways, and I am blessed to be able to support them both as a friend and in their businesses. 

Would I have been diagnosed without becoming a VA? I truly don’t know. Probably eventually, but I can’t help but wonder how burnt out I would have become before that happened. For me, being a VA and learning my neurotype go hand-in-hand, and I can’t imagine going back.