Did Not Being Diagnosed Ruin a Friendship that Could Have Been Saved?
What happens when two neurodivergent people love each other deeply but don't know how to speak each other's language? A deeper look at what the lost generation really lost.
I recently heard a podcast episode about neurodivergent friendship breakups that hit me like a freight train. It talked about how friendship breakups can be “so much more devastating than any relationship breakup” and how we need to normalize that “it’s allowed to hurt.”
These words took me right back to the loss of one of the greatest friendships of my life with my friend Heidi and that October day in 2012 when I opened her email letting me know that after 19 years of friendship, weekly cribbage games, dozens of Crowded House and Wilco concerts around the world, dozens of trips together, even buying houses next door to each other twice!, she was gone. Just like that. We never spoke again and less than a year ago, Heidi died.
I have been grieving her death, but I have also been grieving the loss of the possibility that we would have a reunion. But here’s what I didn’t realize until listening to this podcast, if I understood better how my neurotype affected my relationships, I might have been able to fix things. After hearing this episode, I did something I hadn’t thought to do before, I looked up some dates.
October 5th, 2012: I took my first autism self-assessment
October 26th, 2012: Heidi sent her breakup email
October 29th, 2012: I received my autism diagnosis
Three weeks. The gap between my realization I was Autistic and her Irish exit. Not enough time to use the information to fix anything broken. This is the booby prize of late diagnosis: the continuous unraveling the things I lost as a part of being in the lost generation.
What We Lost by Not Knowing
It is so obvious now. Heidi and I had a classic neurodivergent friendship. We spin-bonded over Crowded House and cribbage. We spent hours in our shared obsessions without either of us getting bored or feeling like we were “too much.” We understood each other’s intensities because we both lived them.
For Heidi’s 40th Birthday, we formed a band and made a CD. It was called “Slowly Exploding Train.” We did a photoshoot. Taught ourselves Photoshop. Wrote all the song titles which were all inside jokes; but NEVER wrote or played a single song! We just got REALLY into the process of creating an album cover and liner notes!
For those of us who are neurodivergent, friendships like mine and Heidi’s aren’t just social connections, they’re lifelines. I think that’s why I have been grieving for over a decade. I never made friends easily and I struggled to tell who liked me for me and who was trying to get something out of me. I takes a lot of energy to find someone who truly gets us, someone who wants to, say, play cribbage every Tuesday at 7am for a decade and doesn’t find our info dumping “too much.” With Heidi, I found that.
I can now see that part of why our friendship was so easy is that Heidi and I were both neurodivergent. She understood my monotropic focus on concerts and card games. We shared the same obsession with Crowded House, could play cribbage for hours, and she never once made me feel like my interests (even ones we didn’t share like my love of Broadway and her love of Women’s Basketball) were something to apologize for. Finding her felt like finding a unicorn.
So what went wrong?
Communication Mismatch in Action
The morning of October 26th I walked out my front door to get in my car and go to work. Heidi lived next door and walked out at the same time as me. We had been missing each other for a couple months and I wasn’t sure what was up. I asked a couple times if anything was wrong in text messages, but was always reassured she was just busy. But when I ran over to give her a hug, I saw her flinch at me coming toward her, and then the weirdest thing happened. She literally RAN a way. At top speed! I was shouting after her but she kept running and shouted back that she was late. I was torn between thinking, maybe she didn’t want me to hold her up since she was late; and knowing something was terribly wrong. A few hours later I got this message.
------Original Message------
From: Heidi Scanlon
To: Angela Lauria
Subject: Definitely not smoothly done, but...
Sent: Oct 26, 2012 11:32 AM
Hey Angela,
There was a time some months back when I realized that our
relationship produced much more tension in me than it brought
happiness, and I did decide to let it go. I don’t regret that
decision, I am sure it was the right thing to do for me.
I did not talk with you about it, which I’m sure seems dreadful to
you. But you are someone who is very verbally powerful, and in my
experience, bringing up difficulties with you just puts you into
explanation/defensive mode, and it just hardens your stance, without
changing anything. It wasn’t something I wanted to do with you.
Do you need a list of reasons? I don’t think it matters -- I am happy
with my life and I’m sure you’re happy with yours. Would it provide
any benefit to you? It wouldn’t to me.
Heidi
Two neurodivergent people, both trying their best, both completely missing each other’s emotional frequencies. Heidi must have experienced my bottom-up, questioning communication style as aggressive and unchangeable. I experienced her withdrawal as inexplicable and cruel. Neither of us had the framework to understand that we were both just trying to survive in a world that hadn’t taught us how to navigate neurodivergent relationships.
For those of us with hyperconnected brains, rejection doesn’t just hurt, it can create looping thoughts that replay the same painful scenarios over and over. My brain spent years analyzing every interaction, desperately searching for the moment everything went wrong. But I was looking for the wrong thing. The problem wasn’t what I did or didn’t do. The problem was that we were both operating without the most crucial piece of information: who we actually were. We didn’t understand that what Heidi called my being “verbally powerful” was actually my autistic brain’s way of seeking clarity through detailed communication (bottom-up processing). We didn’t know that her need to avoid conflict wasn’t personal rejection but likely her own neurodivergent nervous system protecting itself from overwhelm.
We expressed empathy differently, but neither of us understood why. I processed our friendship challenges out loud, which felt threatening to her. She processed by withdrawing, which felt like abandonment to me. We were speaking different neurological languages but had no translation guide.
If we had known—if we had both understood ourselves as neurodivergent people with different nervous systems, different communication styles, different ways of showing care—could we have found a bridge instead of a chasm?
The Lost Generation’s Invisible Grief
We call ourselves the “lost generation.” We are adults who discovered our neurodivergent identity too late to change how we moved through our formative years. We lost more than just understanding; we lost relationships that might have thrived if we’d had the language to name our needs.
How many friendships ended because we couldn’t explain our sensory overwhelm? How many partnerships fractured because we didn’t understand our different ways of processing conflict? How many family relationships remain strained because we spent decades masking, only to have our authentic selves feel foreign and threatening to those who knew our performed versions?
Heidi’s death closed the door on our reconciliation forever. But her timing, ending our friendship just weeks before I finally had words for who I was, illuminates something profound about what we lost as the lost generation. We lost the chance to rebuild relationships with knowledge instead of guessing. We lost years of authentic connection while we performed versions of ourselves that felt safe but weren’t sustainable.
What I Wish I Could Tell Heidi Now
If I could have that conversation with Heidi now, I think I’d start with this: “I’m sorry I caused you more tension than happiness, and I’m sorry I didn’t know I was doing it.”
I’d want her to know that her assessment of me as “verbally powerful” wasn’t wrong, but it came from my Autistic tendency to seek clarity through communication, not from a desire to be defensive or unchanging. When you can’t read social cues, sometimes words are the only tool you have.
I’d want her to know that I understood why she chose to leave the way she did, even though it devastated me. Sometimes self-preservation has to come first, and I don’t blame her for protecting her peace.
Most of all, I’d want her to know that despite everything, those 19 years were some of the best of my life. The weekly cribbage games, the concerts in cities around the world, the shared obsessions and inside jokes shaped me in ways that outlast the pain of losing her.
What We’re Reclaiming Now
When I think about Heidi now, I feel grief for the conversation we never got to have. Not just the goodbye conversation, but the “now I understand” conversation. The conversation where I could have said, “I’m autistic, and when I talk through problems, it’s not because I’m being defensive, it’s because my brain needs to process out loud to feel secure.” The conversation where she might have said, “I’m overwhelmed by intense emotional discussions, not because I don’t care, but because my nervous system needs gentler approaches.”
We were both neurodivergent people trying to maintain a friendship without the tools to understand our own operating systems, let alone each other’s. To protect her mental wellness, she chose to leave. And she was probably right to do so. But oh, what we might have built together if we’d known.
The Hope for What Comes Next
This is why I started the Late Diagnosis Club. Not as therapy, not to fix anyone, but as a space where the lost generation can finally claim our neurodivergent identities and learn to articulate our needs. Where we can understand that our spin bonds—those intense shared obsessions—are not quirks to be ashamed of but connections to be celebrated.
Where we can practice saying things like: “I need to process conflicts verbally to feel secure” or “I need gentler approaches to difficult conversations” or “My way of showing care might look different from yours, but it’s just as real.”
In our weekly calls, we work through scenarios exactly like the one that cost me Heidi. We practice scripts for difficult conversations, explore our sensory and emotional needs, and learn to build relationships that can hold all of who we are—not just the masked versions we learned to perform for survival.
We can’t change what the lost generation lost. We can’t go back and save the friendships that ended before we had words for what we needed. But we can make sure that moving forward, we have the tools to build relationships that honor both our intensities and our vulnerabilities, our need for deep connection and our need for nervous system safety.
A Love Letter to the Lost
If you’re reading this and recognizing that you’ve lost relationships that might have been saved if you’d known who you were, if you’re grieving connections that ended in confusion rather than understanding, your feelings are valid. The loss is real, even if others can’t see it.
But your story doesn’t end with diagnosis. It begins again with the words to name what you need, the community to practice those words with, and the hope that the relationships you build from here can hold the fullness of who you’ve always been.
We were lost, but now we’re finding each other. And that, perhaps, is its own kind of healing. Do you want to share your story with the Late Diagnosis Club? Here’s a link to schedule the interview. The appointment time is 90 minutes but the interview will only be 45 minutes but the extra time will allow us to deal with tech and set up. Once you schedule, you will receive sample questions in advance so you can prepare, as well as technical instructions.
Rest in peace, Heidi. I hope you know that wherever you are, you were loved by someone who finally understands herself enough to love better.
The Late Diagnosis Club meets weekly online for adults discovering their neurodivergent identity later in life. Whether you have a formal diagnosis or self-identify, you belong here. Learn more at autisticculture.substack.com/subscribe
