This is the second in a series of reflections on AuDHD, identity, and lived experience through service and beyond. The first piece is What I Finally Have Words For.
There's a particular cruelty in being harmed by the thing that first made you feel safe.
It doesn't cancel the safety. That's what I've had to learn to hold. The years that worked, worked. The structure that regulated me, regulated me. That's real, and I'm not going to flatten it for the sake of a neater story.
But the harm is also real. And for a long time, I couldn't find the language to talk about both at once without one swallowing the other.
The AuDHD lens gave me that language. Not to excuse anything. Not to explain it away. Just to see it whole.
When I wrote about joining the RAAF in the first piece, I described what the structure gave me: predictability, written rules, defined roles, a world where knowing exactly what was expected was a feature rather than a limitation.
What I didn't say — because I was still circling it — was how profound that was. Not convenient. Not useful. Profound.
I had spent the first twenty years of my life in environments that ran on unwritten social code I couldn't reliably read. Classrooms where everyone seemed to instinctively know what was expected. Social groups where the rules shifted without announcement. Workplaces where the real hierarchy was invisible and unofficial, communicated through tone and exclusion and in-jokes I was always slightly outside of.
In all of those environments, I was working harder than anyone around me could see. Monitoring. Calibrating. Watching faces for information my own nervous system wasn't supplying automatically.
The RAAF was the first place where the code was written down.
Not just suggested. Not implied. Written. Posted. Enforced consistently. The rank structure was visible. The expectations were explicit. The rhythm of the work — busy, then quiet, then busy again — matched something in my nervous system I hadn't known was there to be matched.
For the first time in my life, I didn't have to guess what the room expected of me.
I want to be careful not to romanticise this. The military has its own particular flavours of dysfunction, and I encountered plenty of them. But in those early years, the structure held. And for an undiagnosed AuDHD brain that had been white-knuckling its way through social environments for two decades, being held was not a small thing.
Here is what I understand now that I didn't then: an AuDHD brain in a high-trust, transparent mode is not naive. It is functioning exactly as it's wired to function. The absence of a natural firewall — the open-API quality I described in the first piece — is not a character flaw. It's a feature of a nervous system that wasn't built to assume bad faith.
In the right environment, that quality is an asset. You get someone who brings full engagement, radical honesty, and a genuine absence of political manoeuvring. What you see is what you get. What I said, I meant. What I gave, I gave without calculation.
In a closed hierarchical environment with its own power dynamics and, at times, its own impunity — that same quality becomes a liability.
Not because I was wrong to be the way I was. But because there were people who recognised what I was offering and used it in ways I hadn't anticipated, because it genuinely hadn't occurred to me that they would.
I wasn't naive. I was wired differently. And I was also, in the way that matters most, let down by the institution I had trusted with that wiring.
Moral injury is a term that's gained more visibility in veteran communities over the last decade, and I've sat with it long enough now to know it fits what I'm describing.
It's not the same as PTSD, though they can coexist. Moral injury is what happens when something occurs that violates your understanding of what is right — and the institution that should have addressed it either couldn't, or wouldn't, or actively chose not to.
What happened to me during a specific period of my service I am still finding the words for. I'll write about it more directly when I can. What I can say here is that it involved a failure of duty of care at an institutional level, in a context where I had been transparent in the ways that my neurology makes natural — and that transparency was not protected.
The RAAF did not cause my AuDHD. But it created conditions in which being undiagnosed and transparent and trusting in a hierarchical power structure had consequences that I am still, decades later, working through.
That's the thing about moral injury. It doesn't resolve on a timeline. It doesn't respond to willpower or positive thinking or being told to move on. It sits in the body and in the nervous system — which, for an AuDHD brain already running complex regulation software in the background, adds a particular kind of weight.
For a long time, I held the two versions of my service in separate rooms in my mind. The version that worked — the rhythm, the structure, the belonging I found in the work itself. And the version that didn't — the harm, the institutional failure, the things that were done and the things that were left undone.
I couldn't find a way to be in both rooms at once without feeling like I was being dishonest about one of them.
What coming to understand myself as AuDHD gave me — and I use gave deliberately, even though it arrived late and came with its own grief — was a framework for understanding why I responded to both versions the way I did.
The structure worked because of my neurology, not despite it. My brain was not broken; it was finally in an environment shaped for it.
The harm landed as hard as it did because of my neurology, not despite it. The absence of a firewall, the depth of the trust I'd extended, the inability to fully process what was happening through the social-cue-reading channels that neurotypical people rely on — all of that is relevant context.
This is not a diminishment of what happened. If anything, it makes the institutional failure clearer. The duty of care that was owed was owed to someone who was, by nature, more exposed than most people around her. That doesn't make what happened more excusable. It makes it less so.
What it also produced — and this is the part that took longest to name — was a deep, structural distrust of the system itself. Not just the institution, but the people within it. The colleagues, the supervisors, the ones who presented as support.
Because what I learned, slowly and at some cost, was that even those people had their own frameworks for who I was. Their own ideas about my choices, my life, who I had married — ideas that shaped what they were willing to offer and what they were quietly withholding. Support that looked unconditional had conditions I couldn't see. Solidarity that felt genuine was filtered through judgements that were never made explicit.
For an AuDHD brain with no natural firewall, this is a particular kind of damage. I had already extended full trust. I had already shown my hand — not strategically, but because that is simply how I operate. To then discover that the people receiving that trust were working from a version of me they'd constructed from their own assumptions — about who I should be, who I should love, what my life should look like — was not just a betrayal. It was a lesson in the cost of being legible to people who will use that legibility against you.
I stopped knowing who to trust with what. And in a closed system, in a hierarchical environment where the wrong disclosure could have professional consequences, that uncertainty was not a small thing to carry.
I'm writing this because I think there are other veterans — particularly women, and particularly those who were late-identified as neurodivergent — who are sitting with a version of this same story.
The institution that regulated you. The institution that failed you. The impossibility, for a long time, of holding both.
I don't have a resolution to offer. I'm not on the other side of this; I'm in the middle of it, writing as a way of working through it, which is the only way I know how.
But I do have this: the two things can be true at the same time. The structure held you and it let you down. The years that worked were real and the harm was real. You were not wrong to trust and the trust was violated.
You don't have to choose which version of the story is the true one.
They both are.
The next piece in this series moves forward rather than back — into what the decade after service looked like, and what happens to an AuDHD nervous system when the structure that regulated it disappears and the civilian world offers nothing to replace it. There are parts of the period I've referenced here that I can't write about publicly, and that constraint is itself part of the story. If this resonates, or if you're carrying something similar, I'd like to know. Not because I have answers, but because the not-being-alone part matters.