The Compass You Were Never Given

A Gentle Guide to Discovering Your Values with an AuDHD Brain

Why Values Matter (Especially for AuDHD Brains)

This isn’t a personality quiz.

This isn’t about who you should be.

This is about remembering what matters to you, especially when no one’s watching.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

“Values” sounds like something you’d find on a dusty HR poster next to “Teamwork” and “Excellence.”

But if you’ve got ADHD, autism, or both, values aren’t fluff.

They’re fuel.

And without them, most of us end up sprinting in circles, exhausted, but no closer to who we want to be.

For a lot of neurodivergent folks, life has been a long game of adaptation.

You learned to mask. To accommodate. To anticipate what other people needed, and put it ahead of what you needed.

And somewhere along the way, your own compass got buried under a pile of shoulds.

And here’s the part people rarely say out loud:

If you struggle with executive function, emotional regulation, or even knowing what you want in the first place, identifying your values can feel like trying to read a road map underwater.

The lines are there. But they’re blurry.

And you were probably taught to prioritize being likable, helpful, or “not too much” over being real.

You might second-guess yourself before you even write something down.

You might confuse what you were praised for with what you actually care about.

You might notice that the moment someone else has an opinion, yours evaporates.

That’s not a failure of character.

It’s a side effect of years spent adapting to survive.

This guide is here to help you return to yourself.

Values aren’t rules or goals.

They’re direction.

They’re the deep, steady truths that whisper,

This is who I am.

This is what matters.

Even when the world is loud.

When you know your values, you stop crowdsourcing your decisions.

You stop trying to impress people who aren’t even watching.

You begin making choices that feel quietly right in your bones, in your gut, in your nervous system.

This guide is built for your kind of brain.

Story-based. Pattern-hungry. Honest.

No vague fluff. No pressure to get it right. Just real prompts, practical tools, and a few surprising ways to find your compass again.

You don’t have to be perfect.

You don’t need to figure it all out today.

You just need to notice what already matters, and give yourself permission to trust it.