About Claire Wong
A journey turning scattered into a strength.
I’m Claire - observer, deep thinker, creative and practical in equal measure and a quiet shell collector, building Scattered Mind Society from the parts that once felt like too much.
I was diagnosed with combined ADHD and Autism at 39 after spending most of my life trying to be more.
More confident, more disciplined, more successful, more like everyone else. From the outside, I was keeping it together. Inside, I was overthinking everything, burning out, and measuring myself against where I should be, doom-scrolling past other people’s perfect lives.
No matter how much insight I gained, how much work I did on myself, I was stuck in cylces of burnout.
In the thick of raising three boys (with different brains in the mix) and trying to finish a university degree I had dropped out of at 18 life appeared to be moving forward. Only, I still felt far behind.
I started learning about ADHD, especially how it presents in women and something clicked.
Not in a casual, joking way but in a quiet, confronting way.
I knew.
But I didn't always know.
Growing up I just thought I couldn't do anything right.
I did what I could to cope. I adapted.
Sometimes I tried harder.
Sometimes I stopped trying at all.
I crashed. Then the cycle would start again,
while the underlying thread stayed hidden in plain sight.
Looking back, the signs were there:
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A very noisy inner world but very little sense of self
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Bullying, binge drinking, and the beginning
of an eating disorder in my teens - years shaped more by survival than self-understanding and set the path for years to come -
Learning to read the room and adapt to feel safe, while never really feeling that safe
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Little confidence in myself or my abilities
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A sense of being on the outside, even in rooms where I belonged
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Emotions that ran deep and fast
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Big ideas stretched into impossible standards
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Perfectionism that often led to avoidance
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Periods of burnout after intense effort
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Impulsive and addictive behaviours
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Anxiety that felt like a personality and was often treated as the root problem rather than part of a wider pattern
I could have never truly
known myself without
knowing this part of me.
My diagnosis brought both relief and grief.
Relief, because things finally made sense.
Grief, for the years I had spent blaming myself for not being able to “get it together.”
It didn’t change who I was, but it gave me a framework for who I had always been. Language for the intensity, the burnout, the sensitivity. The way I could be capable and completely overwhelmed at the same time.
For years, I thought those patterns meant something was wrong with me.
In reality, they were part of how my brain works, I just didn’t have the understanding to make sense of them.
When that changed, so did the way I approached everything. I stopped trying to fix myself or spend all my spare time “healing,” and instead began building support around how I actually function. Paying attention to patterns rather than judging them, and creating a ways of living that felt sustainable.
This is the work I do now.
Helping you understand how your brain works, so you can work with it instead of against it, and let go of the idea that you were ever the problem, not something to fix, something to understand.
This is where things start to make sense.
If any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone. If you've spent years wondering why the awareness was there but nothing actually shifted - this might be where that starts to change.