Written by Alyssa Ostroff
For most of my life, the story I told myself was that I was too much and not enough at the same time — too sensitive, too tired, too strange, and simultaneously not trying hard enough to be normal. It took me thirty-some years, a diagnosis nobody gave me until I demanded it, a layoff I didn’t see coming, and a lot of crying on a lot of floors to understand that the story was never true. It was just the only one I’d been handed.
I want to tell you how it changed, in case you’re standing somewhere in the hard part right now.
The years of being disbelieved
I grew up neurodivergent in a house and a world that had no framework for it — and, harder than that, in a family where the difficult things I went through were more often denied than helped. I have Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism. As a kid, I knew none of those words. I only knew that my body did things I couldn’t control, that I was exhausted in a way sleep didn’t fix, that I was bullied for being different, and that when I tried to tell the adults around me that something was wrong, I was told I was fine. Imagining it. Too much.
So I learned to doubt myself. That’s what disbelief does to a child — it doesn’t just deny the event, it teaches you not to trust your own mind. I spent years unable to tell whether my own experiences were real, because the people who were supposed to be my witnesses kept telling me they weren’t.
I didn’t get diagnosed with Tourette’s until I was eighteen, and I booked that appointment myself. I wasn’t treated properly for narcolepsy until years after that. For a long stretch, I self-medicated the exhaustion with caffeine and sugar, gained a hundred pounds, developed a panic disorder, and moved through the world dissociated from most of it. From the outside, I looked like someone who couldn’t get it together. From the inside, I was a person carrying a full-time medical and emotional load that no one had ever helped me name, let alone lift.
The ending I didn’t choose
In the spring of 2025, I was laid off from my job as a senior graphic designer at the CDC. It was frightening in all the ordinary ways — the income, the health insurance, the sudden blank where a structure used to be. But it also cracked something open. When the institution I’d oriented my life around let me go, I was left holding a strange question: with the scaffolding gone, what did I actually want to build?
I didn’t have an inspiring answer ready. I didn’t have a passion waiting in the wings. What I had was a skill — design — and a lifetime of surviving my own mind. So I looked at the only raw material I truly owned: the notes I’d written to myself over the years to get through hard days. You’re not in trouble, and no one is mad at you. Rest is productive. You don’t have to be okay right now. Small, unglamorous sentences that had kept me alive.
One month after the layoff, I started drawing them.
Turning the wound into the work
I didn’t set out to build a company. I set out to make the reminders I’d needed and never found, in case anyone else needed them too. I put them on shirts and stickers, drawn by hand, because I’m a designer and it was the thing I could make. And something happened that I still don’t fully have words for: people wrote back.
They told me the exact phrase I’d written to myself at 2am was the thing they’d needed at 2am. That they’d bought a shirt for their anxious best friend, or their kid, or themselves, because it said the thing out loud that they’d been too afraid to. The little sentences that had saved me turned out to save other people, too. The specific, private hell I’d survived turned out not to be private at all.
That’s the moment my story flipped. For decades, my struggles had felt like liabilities — proof I was broken. Building this showed me they were the opposite. They were the whole foundation. I could speak to the people I was reaching as one of them, not down to them, because I had lived every word. The wound became the work. The thing that nearly broke me became the thing I had to give.
What “triumph” actually looks like
I want to be honest about the triumph, because I’m allergic to the tidy kind. I did not get rich. I run a small business on thin margins, I still manage three chronic conditions every single day, and I have weeks where a hard day and a good day happen to the same person a few hours apart. I’m not “cured.” I’m not a before-and-after photo.
Here’s what I am instead: a person who spent her whole childhood not being believed, who now runs a brand whose entire purpose is to make other people feel seen. A person who couldn’t get anyone to help her, who now helps strangers feel less alone for a living, and funnels part of every sale to crisis lines so someone else’s 2am has a number to call. A person who finally, after all those years, learned to believe herself — which turned out to be the only verdict that was ever mine to give.
That’s the triumph. Not that the hardship disappeared, but that I stopped letting it have the last word about who I am, and started using it to build something that helps.
If you’re in the hard part
If you’re reading this from inside your own difficult chapter, here’s the only thing I really know: your hardship is not wasted. I spent decades believing mine was pure damage — years of suffering with nothing to show for it. It wasn’t. It was raw material I couldn’t see yet. The very thing you’re surviving right now may turn out to be the thing you’re uniquely built to make, or say, or give to someone else who’s drowning in the same water.
You don’t have to be healed to begin. You don’t have to have found your passion. You just have to look at what you’ve survived and ask what you could build from it. I built the thing I needed at six, when I finally had the tools to make it at thirty-four. It was late. It was worth it. And it started the moment I stopped waiting to be okay first.
Whatever you’re carrying — it can become something. Start where you are. That’s not the consolation prize. In my experience, it’s the whole miracle.
Author Bio:
Alyssa Ostroff is the founder of Self-Care Shirts ( https://selfcareshirts.com/ ). She lives in South Florida with her husband and her beagle, and writes about mental health from lived experience.
