The Good Girl Script: Why so many Canberra women are only now discovering they’re Autistic or ADHD
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You learned small talk the way other people learn a second language: memorised phrases, practised facial expressions, and a mental note to hold eye contact for three seconds, then look away.
Under the desk, you press your nails into your palm instead of letting people see your leg bounce. You keep a hidden system of alarms, sticky notes, colour-coded lists and a whiteboard so nobody finds out how easily things slip. You arrive half an hour early to everything because being late feels unbearable. You laugh at the right moments in the meeting, then sit in your car for twenty minutes afterwards dissecting every word, and because you can’t face another voice or another light. People describe you as calm, capable, and easy to work with. Nobody sees what it costs you.
I see this in my practice. This kind of high-performing, highly polished masking is one of the reasons so many Autistic and ADHD women go unrecognised for decades. And in a city like Canberra, it can be especially easy to hide.
A city that rewards the mask
Canberra is Australia’s most highly educated city. Nearly half of ACT residents aged 15–74 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, the highest share of any state or territory,¹ and more than 70,000 Australian Public Service employees work here.² This is a city that runs on careful wording, reading the room and never walking into a briefing unprepared.
For a high-masking neurodivergent woman, that is close to perfect camouflage. The constant rehearsal looks like diligence. The diplomatic phrasing looks like polish. Smoothing over conflict instead of naming it looks like good judgement. Canberra doesn’t just tolerate masking; it promotes it. So it’s no surprise that many women here don’t realise they’re neurodivergent until well into adulthood.
What the good girl script is
I call it the “good girl script”: the unwritten rulebook many girls absorb early. Be agreeable. Put everyone else’s needs first. Keep the peace, whatever it takes.
When a neurodivergent brain follows that script, masking can go into overdrive.
At work, it looks like saying “no worries” while quietly rebuilding your whole afternoon in your head. It’s spending twenty minutes on a two-line email so nobody could possibly take offence. It’s sitting through a meeting holding back the one thing you actually think, because saying it feels like starting a war.
Plenty of Canberra women build entire careers on this. It reads as unflappable and diplomatic. Underneath, it’s often a nervous system running hot: constant self-monitoring, a prepared script for every interaction, and a quiet rule that being “too much” is the worst thing you could be.
When the script comes home
For mums, the script gets heavier.
It’s the family calendar full of everyone’s appointments except yours. It’s holding it together at school pickup, at the gate, at the birthday party, and then falling apart the moment the front door closes, often with no one there to see it.
For mums of neurodivergent or high-needs kids, there’s another layer again. Every ounce of patience and regulation goes to a child who needs it, and nothing is left to notice your own needs, let alone name them.
This is often where the penny drops. Many women never recognise themselves in the textbook picture of autism or ADHD until they see it in their own child. Then comes the quiet realisation that the “good girl” habits they’ve carried since childhood were never just personality.
The numbers tell the same story
Autism has historically been diagnosed in boys at around four times the rate of girls.³,⁴ But a Swedish study following more than 2.7 million people found that the gap shrinks with age and almost disappears by adulthood.⁵
Girls aren’t less autistic. They’ve just been better trained to hide it. And a high-achieving city gives that training a very receptive audience.
The hidden cost
None of this shows up in a performance review or the Christmas card photo, but it is exhausting. Research links long-term masking with burnout, anxiety and depression, and in its most extreme form with suicidal ideation.⁶⁷⁸
This absolutely isn’t about willpower or personality. Masking is often genuinely protective, especially in workplaces where professional polish decides who gets promoted, believed or heard. The goal isn’t to shame anyone out of it. It’s to make masking a choice you can put on and take off, rather than the only option you have.
Differently wired, not deficient
Destigmatising neurodivergence starts with seeing it as a difference, not a deficit. Cancelling plans at the last minute, a special interest that takes over your weekend, the endless internal script-check before a work function or the school run: these are a nervous system doing its best in a city built on precision, deadlines and looking like you have it all together.
Neuroaffirming care begins with curiosity about how your brain actually works, rather than trying to smooth it into looking more typical.
If you recognised more of yourself here than you expected, that recognition is the first real step. You don’t have to work through it alone. I explore these themes on my podcast, AuDHD IRL, and in the “good girl” resources on my website.
If this article has raised concerns for you, support is available 24/7 through Lifeline on 13 11 14.
References
- Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025). Education and Work, Australia, May 2025. ABS.
- Australian Public Service Commission. (2025). APS Employment Data, 30 June 2025. APSC.
- American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., text rev.).
- Loomes, R., Hull, L., & Mandy, W. P. L. (2017). What is the male-to-female ratio in autism spectrum disorder? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 56(6), 466–474.
- Fyfe, C., et al. (2026). Time trends in the male to female ratio for autism incidence: Population based, prospectively collected, birth cohort study. BMJ.
- Hull, L., Levy, L., Lai, M.-C., Petrides, K. V., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., Smith, P., & Mandy, W. (2021). Is social camouflaging associated with anxiety and depression in autistic adults? Molecular Autism, 12, 13.
- Raymaker, D. M., et al. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143.
- Cassidy, S., Bradley, L., Shaw, R., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2018). Risk markers for suicidality in autistic adults. Molecular Autism, 9, 42.
