Ep 2. The Invisible Struggle: Labels, Neurodivergence and Coming Home to Myself

Liz Buggy: Welcome to Spicy Brain Phoenix Heart, the podcast where we honor the beautiful complexity of neurodivergent minds and the resilience of the human spirit. I'm Liz Buggy, a NeuroSpicy certified transformation and neurodivergent coach who's also a breathwork practitioner. And I'm here to walk along beside you through the messy, the overwhelming and the deeply human parts of healing. If you've ever felt burnt out, disconnected, stuck in survival mode, or like you've somehow lost yourself. You're not alone on that journey and you're in the right place. This space is for the sensitive, the overthinkers, the feelers, the survivors, navigating trauma, dissociation and the weight of a world that doesn't understand how your brain thinks or your heart feels everything. Here we don't rush healing. We don't bypass the hard stuff. We feel everything and we rise anyway. Together we'll explore nervous system healing, self-trust, identity, and what it really means to come home to yourself. So you can remember who you are. beneath the noise, the patterns and the pain. So take a breath before you go on the journey. And let's begin. Today's episode of the podcast is called The Invisible Struggle, labels, neurodivergence and coming home to myself. This is a story about what you don't always see on the surface. the quiet battles, the labels, the exhaustion of trying to function in a world that never quite felt that it was right for you. If you've ever felt misunderstood, mislabeled, or like you've spent your life trying to figure out what's wrong with me. This episode is for you. From the outside, I looked like I was coping, but internally, it was a different story. It was absolute chaos. There was constant noise in my mind, overthinking, overanalyzing, feeling everything so deeply, intensely. At the same time, there was moments where I felt nothing at all. Disconnected, numb. That's the part people don't always get to see. The invisible struggle of trying to keep up. Whilst quietly falling apart inside. Feeling alone. Having no one to understand. Throughout my life I was given labels, some spoken out loud like you're too sensitive, you're too emotional, too much. Others came in more clinical forms such as a diagnosis of bipolar. Often people's actions would tell a different story of how they related to me. And while that explains some things, it never fully explained me. Because labels can do two things. They can create understanding or they can create limitation. And for a long time, I felt those labels had defined me and I let them. I saw myself as broken, hard to love. But what I didn't understand at that point was... that there was so much more beneath the surface. As I started learning more about myself, things began to click. Traces that had always been there. Hidden beneath the bipolar label, the sensory overwhelm. Struggling with change, hyper-focus, followed by a complete shutdown. Emotional intensity, rejection sensitivity. I began to recognise traits of ADHD and autism. things that had never been acknowledged before. Suddenly, my life started to make more sense. And it was different. It wasn't that I was too much. It was that my brain worked differently. I was wired differently. When you live in a world that doesn't understand how you operate, you adapt, you mask, you show up differently, you keep pushing through, trying to please others, and you override your needs. Eventually your system crashes, you lose yourself in all the noise. Burnout for me wasn't just exhaustion, it was full shutdown, not being able to think clearly, struggling to fit in and to function, feeling like even the smallest tasks were too much. I felt it. I knew there was more. And then came the dissociation, the feeling of disconnectedness from my body, my emotions, my surroundings. I didn't care. Like, it was like I wasn't fully there and layered on top of that was the rejection sensitivity dysphoria where even the smallest perceived rejection felt unbearable. It was like physical pain. It was like every confirmation of every belief that I had ever carried about not being enough was in play. It wasn't until I started looking at the patterns when things began to shift. Instead of asking what's wrong with me, I started asking what's happening to me and how am I? That question changed everything. It moved me out of the shame and into a level of understanding. I started to reframe my experiences. My sensitivity wasn't weakness, it was depth. My emotional intensity wasn't a flaw, it was awareness. My need for space was an avoidance. It was regulation. I stopped trying to force things and trying to force myself to be this version of normal that was never designed for me. I started doing the work, real intentional work, understanding my triggers, recognizing my patterns, learning how my nervous system functioned and responded to stress. I explored tools like breath work, meditation, even somatic acupoint tapping. I looked into more regulation practices. I started setting boundaries and I learned how to sit with my emotions instead of fighting them. Slowly, I started to build trust within myself. Today I still carry those labels. The diagnosis, the traits. But they don't define me. They inform me. I've learned to listen to my body, the signs, and they help me understand how to support myself instead of moving towards that feeling of I have to judge myself. I became a coach, a breathwork practitioner, but more importantly, I'm someone who understands myself better. someone who honours their sensitivity, who respects their limits, who no longer sees their differences as something to hide or to be afraid of. If you've spent your life feeling like you don't quite fit in, like you've been labelled, misunderstood, or overlooked or judged, I want you to know this. You are not broken. You may just be misunderstood. or wired differently in a world that hasn't learned yet how to hold your differences, your sensitivity, your intensity, your way of experiencing life. It's not something to fix. It's something to understand. And when you do, everything begins to make sense and change. If this has resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. always remember you are allowed to take up space, to show up for yourself, to be different, to be that person you are and that you are worthy exactly as you are. Thank you for being here.