Short reads, real stories and news on neurodivergent life.
The Understanding Zoe blog shares short, plain-language articles for families raising neurodivergent children, neurodivergent adults, and the people who support them. You will find recent stories, practical tips and Australian neurodivergence news. For step-by-step guides, see our Guides. Understanding Zoe is a neurodivergent app made in Australia.
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Autism tests were built around boys, girls needed more visible difficulty to be assessed, and masking worked. Australia's own evidence on late identification.
An adult ADHD assessment in Australia costs about $1,387 and takes about 10 weeks. Learn what a diagnosis gives you, what it does not, and when to wait.
In this solo episode of the Neurodivergent Pulse podcast, Laetitia Andrac shares her lived experience as an autistic, ADHD, PDA and twice-exceptional adult. She names the invisible parts of neurodivergent life: burnout from sustained masking, hygiene struggles driven by demand avoidance, and rejection sensitivity that shows up in boardrooms and on award stages. The episode explores what changes when you replace shame with self-understanding and discover that your challenges reflect a world built for neuronormative expectations, not personal failures.
Living well with AuDHD and chronic illness isn't about pushing through until you crash. Saffron Canny-Smith shares how accepting the word 'disabled' unlocked her self-advocacy, why proactive rest is how you keep going, and what genuine belonging looks like when your body has changed. This conversation explores practical strategies for managing overlapping conditions, naming access needs without waiting to be asked, and building relationships with people who actually accommodate you.
For many women, motherhood is when AuDHD finally becomes visible. Samantha Johnson, a late-identified AuDHD mother and lived experience educator, explores why the combination of executive function demands, sensory load, and postpartum hormone shifts makes masking unsustainable. Learn how each developmental stage compounds the load, why parenting gets harder (not easier) for neurodivergent mothers, and practical strategies for managing overwhelm without pushing harder.
Most of what's written about PDA is about children. This piece is for adults. Written by two people who live it, Laetitia (parent, PDAer, and founder of Understanding Zoe) and Caitlin (neuroaffirming mental health social worker and PDAer), it covers what demand avoidance actually feels like from the inside, why wanting to do something and being able to start it aren't the same thing, and why the usual advice to just break it into steps or build a routine often backfires. There are honest accounts of the invisible labour of being a PDA adult and parenting a PDA child, plus the shifts that genuinely help: choice over instruction, invitation over expectation, and lowering the demand without lowering the goal. If you recognise yourself here, you're not broken. You may simply be carrying more demands than the people around you can see.
Neurodivergent students often perform well academically while experiencing severe burnout and exhaustion that parents rarely see. Jocelyn Green, an AuDHD student and advocate, explains why neurodivergent brains work twice as hard just to keep pace, why success stories can be harmful when they hide the cost, and what accommodations genuinely help. This episode challenges the myth that good grades equal wellbeing and invites parents to recognise the invisible toll of masking, the reality of autistic burnout, and the grace their child needs most.
