BY SHIVANI KULKARNI*
After years of mistaking her struggles for personal shortcomings, Shivani Kulkarni shares how she is using those experiences to help her son better understand himself.
Have you ever lived 30 years of your life in about three seconds? I did. A few years ago, over dinner with two Indian mothers, the conversation turned to advanced classes and gifted programs. I said I thought my son probably needed to be evaluated for neurodivergence.
They were shocked. Really? Him? Why?
They knew the version of him everyone knew: confident, funny, kind, articulate. Then came some version of, Shivani, maybe you’re overthinking it. Kids do that. They meant no harm, but I picked up from what they were not clearly saying; our kids ( south Asian) are ok!
In those three seconds, I lived about 30 years of my own life. I became a kid again, and I knew exactly how this story could unfold.
Until about fifth grade, I was a school topper. Somewhere around sixth or seventh grade, everything changed. My grades plummeted. I struggled through high school and eventually finished a four-year college degree in about seven years.
I now understand what happened around sixth grade. The way the world measured me became more rigid, and it no longer fit the way I knew how to show up. My intelligence had not disappeared, but I was falling short by the measures around me and had no language for why. So, I made up my own explanation: maybe I was never that smart. Maybe the early years were simply easy. Maybe when things got hard, I could not keep up.
So, I masked. I overcompensated by becoming what I understood the world would like: outgoing, helpful, kind, bubbly, funny and, above all, confident.
Except it was very fake confidence, because underneath it I was anxious, worried, nervous, and absolutely not confident.
That belief shaped far more than my grades. It shaped what permission I gave myself to become.
That is what ADHD, unknown to me at the time, did to me. It did not simply make it difficult to focus. It took away part of my confidence and encouraged me to create narratives about myself that were often wrong.
If little Shivani could have explained what was happening, I think she would have said: I am trying. I can understand difficult things. I just do not yet know how I need to learn, or how to show you what I know in the way you expect to see it.
Most people hear ADHD and think: cannot sit still, cannot focus. That is hardly all of it.
For me, it has also looked like knowing exactly what needs to be done and still struggling to begin. Sometimes procrastination is only the surface. Underneath it, the first thought is often incompetence.
For years I tried to become more disciplined, organized and focused. Eventually I learned something different: sometimes my own power is not enough, and when it is not enough, I need a system.
My systems are ordinary. I brain-dump. If I am hosting a party, I make a list of dishes, ingredients, what I actually need to buy, then organize that list by section of the store. For me, that is how one giant task becomes something I can move through.
The bigger shift was recognizing that my brain works differently, and that I needed to learn me first, then learn how the world works.
Even today, my lack of confidence still enters the room with me. The difference is that now I recognize the game it is playing, and I have my systems.
I eventually built a 20-year career in technology and payments. Today I am building a behavioral health technology company. There is irony in realizing I spent years building systems for businesses before understanding how badly my younger self needed awareness, language, and support.
Growing up in India in the 1980s, this was simply not a conversation that was happening. I do not tell this story to assign fault. I tell it because now we know more.
That night with those mothers, I was not thinking about protecting my son from difficulty. I was thinking: How do I equip him so he does not automatically use difficulty in learning or regulating as evidence against himself?
Why is this hard for me? Why is everyone smarter than me? Who will want to be friends with me if I am not smart? Those questions only get harder as children grow.
Maybe that is why I chose to write this for South Asian readers. I am not making a case for lowering ambition or goals. I am asking us to pause long enough to understand the root of some difficulty before deciding what it means about the child.
When my son was five, I told him, in an excited tone, that we were meeting a doctor who understood how brains work and might help us understand something interesting about his. Did he understand every nuance? Probably not. Was he excited? Absolutely!
That was not the point.
I needed to understand it. And I needed to give him language so he could build his own narrative.
A narrative that will walk with him through life: that his brain was not in deficit, only different. That he might learn differently. That difficulty did not automatically mean inability.
He is 11 now. He has spoken at the Georgia State Capitol as a community keynote speaker around neurofeedback and regularly wins public speaking and debate medals.
We did not arrive here in one moment.
There was a lot of acceptance, even for me, despite understanding some of my own challenges. It is not always easy to accept that your child’s everyday experience may be different from what you imagined.
There was advocacy too, but much of it started inside our own home. Even the most intentional people around a child may need language if neurodivergence is unfamiliar to them.
And there has been a tremendous amount of action—unlearning, relearning, getting things wrong, and trying to repair after those moments.
I have made plenty of mistakes. I also know I have kept trying to understand.
And when something feels ridiculously hard for him, I hope he knows what I did not know:
Difficulty is information. It does not have to become identity.
Fun fact: this essay was proofread by my 11-year-old son.
*Shivani Kulkarni is a first-generation immigrant, a twenty-year fintech executive, and the founder of sayWELL, a pediatric behavioral health technology company. She left her corporate career to build something personal — because she had lived the story she now helps families navigate. She speaks on neurodivergence, personal narrative, and what it takes to build a life — and a company — around understanding how you actually work.
