6 - Maybe You Didn’t Fail the Framework, Maybe the Framework Was Never Built for You

I didn’t start my career thinking anything about me or the way I worked was unusual. I had energy. Drive. Ideas. Leadership instincts. I could hold a lot at once. I built an entire life on that capacity.

Then came ADHD.

The diagnosis gave me vocabulary, but no map.
No support.
No one who actually understood adult neurodivergence in women.
No one who could explain how hormones, trauma, and leadership intersect.
No community of women navigating the same thing.

Just a label — and a sense that now I was supposed to manage myself differently without knowing how.

And right at that moment, perimenopause arrived.

Quietly.
Steadily.
Relentlessly.

It amplified everything I didn’t know ADHD was already doing: the destabilized sleep, the inconsistent focus, the emotional volatility, the sensory overwhelm, the shifting capacity. Nothing felt dramatic — just persistently “off.”

From the outside, I still looked like a high-capacity woman.

On the inside, I was losing traction in ways I didn’t yet have language for.

So I did what sny responsible, high-performing women do:es

I went looking for help.

I brought in coaches.
I purchased frameworks.
I used assessments, 360s, communication tools, and leadership models.
I tried to build a shared language with my team.

I believed I was doing the right thing.

It took me years to unearth the truth:

Most coaching models, leadership tools, and self-help frameworks were never designed for someone wired like me.

And not just me.

They were never designed for:

• neurodivergent minds

• people navigating hormonal shifts

• racialized communities

• queer and gender-expansive leaders

• Anyone outside the white, male, neurotypical blueprint, these systems were initially built to serve.

This isn’t a critique.
It’s an origin story.

The tools weren’t universal.
They were cultural.

Which meant that when they didn’t work for me…

I blamed myself.

I thought I wasn’t disciplined enough.
Or regulated enough.
Or “emotionally intelligent” enough.
Or whatever the model insisted I should be.

But the truth was more straightforward — and far more liberating:

I didn’t fail the frameworks.
The frameworks failed to imagine someone like me.

And the most challenging part?

I had already seen this happen to women before me.

Brilliant women.
Women keeping whole departments afloat.

Women who were intuitive, intense, perceptive, fast, relentlessly committed — and thoroughly misunderstood.

I watched them get mislabeled.
Coached into exhaustion.
Measured against templates that were never built for their wiring.

I didn’t have the language to explain what I was witnessing.
I only had the pattern:

The more capable they were,
the more the system relied on them —
and the more it misread them.

Now, with the language of ADHD, autism, masking, sensory load, hormones, and trauma, I can finally name what I used only to observe:

It wasn’t them.
It was the framework — failing them, too.

Years later, at 48, autism gave me clarity.

Not a verdict.
Not a collapse.
Just clarity — and grief.

Grief for the version of me who masked for decades, thinking she was fitting in.
Grief for the brilliance I spent years translating into a system that never understood the original language.
Grief for all the rooms that loved the performance and never actually met me.

Autism didn’t break me.
It broke the illusion that the frameworks were neutral.

This is the heart of the reframe:

It’s not about getting better at fitting the model.

It’s about questioning the model itself.

Most leadership and coaching tools assume:

• linear processing

• steady regulation

• indirect communication

• stable capacity

• predictable emotional bandwidth

• culturally dominant norms

• and a nervous system that behaves like the “default”

If you match that template, the tools feel insightful.

If you don’t, the tools quietly turn you into a “problem to manage.”

And that isn’t a “you” problem.
That’s a design problem.

The moment you understand that, everything shifts.

You stop contorting yourself to fit.
You stop giving frameworks more authority than your lived experience.
You stop internalizing friction as personal failure.
You stop accepting misalignment as your responsibility.

And you start asking better questions:

• Who was this methodology designed for?

• Whose comfort does it protect?

• Who gets to belong here effortlessly?

• What parts of myself did I have to erase to succeed inside it?

• What happens if I stop performing and start leading from my wiring?

This isn’t self-help.
This is self-honoring.

This isn’t about becoming more palatable.
This is about becoming aligned.

This isn’t about improving your performance.
This is about reclaiming your design.

Those truths don’t just apply to individuals.
They apply to systems, frameworks, leadership models, and cultural expectations.

You didn’t fail the framework.

The framework wasn’t built for you.

And the moment you understand that, you no longer contort yourself to fit.
You begin designing a life, leadership style, and future grounded in your real wiring — not someone else’s template.

And that is where everything finally starts making sense.