Everything I Was, Everything I Am, and Everything I’m Rewriting

Learning, unlearning, oversharing, and surviving American politics… all while in perimenopause raising teens.

Dec 15, 2025

Everything I Was, Everything I Am, and Everything I’m Rewriting

My first Substack post. After decades of masking, surviving, reinventing, and unlearning, I am finally writing in my own voice. This is me, starting where I am, telling the truth out loud.

Hi. I’m Breanne. I am a late-diagnosed AuDHD woman, a genetic mutant and chronic illness ninja, and a mom of three. I passed my AuDHD and mutant superpowers to two out of three of my offspring. I just started my first year of college at 45, two years after walking away from a decade-long career as a top leader and top earner in the MLM industry; a decade I am still deconstructing and recovering from.

I am medically complicated and spent most of my life being dismissed, misdiagnosed, medically mismanaged, and forced to become my own medical detective and advocate. In an ironic twist of fate, this made me the perfect mom for children with the same genetic disorders. I’ve lived with EDS, Chiari Malformation (decompressed in 2014), and Dysautonomia my whole life, long before research, science, advocacy, and awareness caught up. In the past eight years, Hashimoto’s and early peri/menopause joined the party and have taken center stage.

I am a former 2000s hipster (my kids remind me I am no longer “hip”), a war-time Army wife who spent six years on a military base raising kids alone while their father (ex-husband for a decade now) was deployed in Afghanistan, a “crunchy mom” back when it meant evidence-based home birth, breastfeeding, cloth diapering, and babywearing before the far right co-opted the culture, and a former “Boss Babe”—literally. My success story was featured in The Four Year Career Boss Babe Edition.

I consider myself open-minded and non-judgmental, but I will absolutely judge you on your musical taste and your politics. I am a progressive atheist feminist—the type of woman the far right hates. Women like me raised daughters who are the reason there are more single men under 30 now than ever before; they have been taught not to tolerate what we were forced to. My feminism is intersectional, disability-centered, and unapologetically anti-authoritarian.

For most of my life, I believed I was not “book smart” and that academic spaces weren’t for me. School was traumatic and difficult without support for undiagnosed disabilities. I spent decades masking, misdiagnosed, dismissed, and adapting to systems that were never built with people like me in mind. Yet I just finished my first term back in school in 27 years with a 4.0.

Here I am. Rewriting the narrative in real time.

What This Substack Is

This is where I document the journey of:

• starting menopause before I started college
• being back in a classroom for the first time in 27 years
• raising neurodivergent and physically disabled teens as a neurodivergent and physically disabled parent
• unmasking, unpacking, and healing from 40 years of trauma and CPTSD
• navigating my own medical and neurological reality
• pulling apart political narratives, propaganda, and systems of power
• analyzing communication, relationships, and identity
• writing the things I wish someone had told me years ago

It is part personal archive, part social commentary, and part anti-gaslighting project.

What I Write About

I am interested in how our inner lives meet the outer world and how personal experience is shaped, distorted, or validated by the systems we live inside.

Expect essays on:

• neurodivergence and chronic illness
• parenting ND kids
• the reality of going back to college later in life
• pulling back the curtain on my decade in the MLM industry and recovering from it
• philosophy
• communication, relationships, and identity
• trauma, healing, and unmasking
• political analysis of the rising authoritarian movement
• the psychology of propaganda and scapegoating
• my own academic writing, including essays, reflections, and class projects

Some posts will be polished essays. Some will be informal reflections. Some will be spicy political commentary when the world becomes too absurd to stay quiet.

Who This Space Is For

Honestly, this space is for me. It is the first authentic corner I am carving out online after a decade of trading authenticity for an income on social media.

But if you are:

• a late learner
• a woman, mother, or person looking to feel seen and empowered
• neurodivergent
• chronically ill
• raising kids with similar challenges
• deconstructing old identities
• navigating trauma
• trying to make sense of the current political chaos

…then this space is for you too.

If you have ever felt like your intelligence was overlooked, your pain dismissed, or your story minimized, you will feel at home here.

What You Can Expect

• Honesty
• Clarity
• Nuance
• The occasional f-bomb
• Zero tolerance for fascism, bigotry, pseudoscience, or terrible taste in music
• A warm place to land in a world that often feels cold

I am glad you are here. Truly. I hope this helps you feel seen, validated, understood, and more understanding of yourself.

Let us learn, heal, question, unmask, and grow together.