"Too Much, Never Enough": Plum Ruffles on Neurodivergent Motherhood and Finally Finding the Words

Diagnosed with ADHD at 41, after two children and a lifetime of masking, Plum Ruffles is now the founder of Not Too Much - a community for women who've spent their lives feeling too much, and somehow not enough.

Plum grew up moving countries, surviving a war as a child, being bullied out of who she was as a teenager, and masking her way through two decades of adult life before anyone, including her, had the right word for why things always felt harder than they should. This is her story, in her own words.

Growing Up Under Sniper Fire and Swimming Pools

Plum moved to Kuwait at two and a half. By the time she was eight, the Gulf War had reached her streets. Her family hiding in a safe house, climbing a garden wall as bullets passed overhead.

"We could see bullets going over our heads. It was terrifying, but we didn't think it was, at the time."

What she didn't know then was how much that unsettled, constantly-moving childhood - the international school, the structure, the swimming pool she still credits with regulating her nervous system - was holding an undiagnosed ADHD brain together.

Bullied for Three Years, Then a Breaking Point

When her family moved back to the UK when Plum was 13, that structure disappeared overnight. She started at an all-girls grammar school with a hybrid accent and a childhood nobody around her could relate to, and the bullying started almost immediately. It lasted three years.

"I felt like I was getting everything wrong. I didn't understand these rules that everyone else seemed to instinctively know."

Just before her 16th birthday, it reached a breaking point. One serious enough that Plum was taken out of mainstream school entirely.

Glastonbury Was Where She Finally Belonged

Homeschooled from then on, Plum sat her GCSEs and came out with outstanding results. At 16, a trip to Glastonbury Festival gave her something she hadn't felt in years: the sense that she didn't have to shrink herself to fit in anywhere.

"That made me realise there was a whole other world out there. I didn't have to be localised to where I lived."

One of the Best Things That Ever Happened to Her

In her mid-twenties, deep into a career in magazine publishing and still masking hard, Plum was hit by a car crossing a London street. She broke her leg in two places, needed a skin graft, lost four teeth, and suffered a collapsed lung. It was brutal. And, she says now, exactly the forced stop she didn't know how to give herself.

"It was definitely the change in direction that I needed."

Diagnosed at 41. And Finally, Answers.

It took until her forties - after marriage, a demanding career, and two children - for anyone to say the word out loud. Her husband was the first to suggest it. The ADHD diagnosis that followed didn't erase the years before it, but it gave Plum a framework for understanding them.

"I think the ADHD diagnosis has helped me find who I am."

When ADHD, PMDD and Perimenopause Collided

The diagnosis arrived in the middle of its own storm. Both of Plum's pregnancies had brought postnatal depression, and by her late thirties she was navigating undiagnosed perimenopause on top of ADHD and PMDD. Three things compounding each other, while raising two young, neurodivergent children of her own.

"It was the biggest unravelling I've ever experienced - all whilst looking after very young children."

Out of that unravelling came Not Too Much: a community and series of women's sharing circles for neurodivergent women, built after one honest Christmas Day post about a Christmas dinner that fell apart went further than Plum ever expected. From 3,500 followers to nearly 30,000 in a matter of months.

What Plum Ruffles's Story Teaches Us

• Masking protects you as a child, but it costs you as an adult.
• A diagnosis doesn't erase the grief for who you could have been. It gives you a manual, not a magic fix.
• Self-compassion has to come before compassion for anyone else.
• Community with other neurodivergent women isn't a luxury. Plum calls it the medicine.
• The right environment changes everything; you were never the problem.

"We're actually all unified in our humanness."

A Final Thought

Plum's story isn't really about a diagnosis. It's about what happens in the years before one. The masking, the misreading of yourself, the conviction that you're the problem. And what becomes possible once you finally have the right words. She's taken the thing she didn't have as a teenager, and built it, deliberately, for other women.

Listen to Plum's full story

Find Plum Ruffles

Instagram: @plum.ruffles
LinkedIn: Plum Ruffles
Not Too Much: @wearenottoomuch

Not lost, not arrived, just not there yet.