I'm Not Doing It Anymore: Neurodivergence, Identity and Mental Health Beyond Labels

For a long time, I thought the answer was clarity — that if I looked hard enough, organized carefully enough, and named myself precisely enough, I would eventually arrive at a version of me that felt stable, legible, and complete. Instead, I kept meeting the same uncomfortable but liberating truth: identity is rarely that tidy, and neither am I.

One Box Too Small

I can’t fit myself into one neat, well-structured box, no matter how many times I try to reduce everything into something clear, manageable, and easy to explain. I’ve tried so many versions of it while attempting to define who I am — photographer, jewelry designer, feminist, neurodivergent fighter, mental health survivor, and the list keeps going.

The Seduction of Structure

A part of me genuinely loves structure, strict guidance, clear rules, and the idea that chaos can be organized into smaller and smaller clusters until everything finally makes sense.

So I make a plan, and for one or two days I follow it like my life depends on it, and then, almost inevitably, I find myself right back in the spiral. Annoyed at myself for not being able to stay inside the shape I created, as if the failure was in the plan and not in the fact that I was never supposed to be reduced that way in the first place.

What I Got Wrong

What I keep getting wrong is not the methodology, and not even the ideas themselves, but the much more basic truth that I simply cannot define myself through one main characteristic, one dominant title, one polished identity that explains the rest. I am everything I have ever tried, liked, loved, hated, failed at, survived, avoided, returned to, or succeeded in. I am all the things I am doing and all the things I am still too scared, too tired, or too fractured to do.

I am a woman, a friend, a daughter, a dog mom, a photographer, a jewelry designer, a writer, a feminist, a Silesian, a neurodivergent peacock, a shy mental health and home violence survivor, and many more things depending on the day, the hour, the season, the wound, the hope.

No matter the order, no matter which title comes to the front, no matter which version of me is the easiest to understand from the outside, all of it is still me.

My Identity, Uncontained

So here’s the ultimate Wero plan: no plan.

Just me, and the chaos, and whatever kind of sense can be made from finally stopping the attempt to make myself smaller, simpler, and easier to label.

Join me on this ride.

Let’s see where it takes us.

xoxo, wero