Barbara (Blaze) Lazarony, MA, LMFT

Twenty years at Macy’s — and the high-functioning mask underneath.

Twenty years at Macy’s. Responsible for $2.5 billion in sales across 42 stores. I led big teams, solved hard problems, and loved the work — until a cancer diagnosis at 38 stopped everything cold.

I came to that office from a farm in rural Ohio. The young girl I’d been thought making it to a corner office overlooking Market Street in San Francisco meant she’d arrived. What I didn’t understand yet was the cost of getting there. Corporate life rewarded the exact things my brain did naturally — pattern recognition, anticipating other people’s needs before they could name them, holding twelve threads at once. It also rewarded the things my brain did unnaturally — the small talk before meetings, the right facial expression at the right moment, the never letting on when fluorescent lights and open offices had ground me down to nothing by 3 PM.

I don’t regret those years. They taught me how organizations break, how leaders fail their teams without meaning to, how systems either hold people or grind them down. I still use all of it — when I work with executive coaching clients, when I help a couple see the structural patterns inside their conflict, when I sit with someone who’s burning out at work and can’t yet name what’s broken. The work I do now is built on that foundation, not in spite of it.

I didn’t know it then, but I was masking through every meeting. The exhaustion underneath the success was real. The body was already trying to tell me something.

Three cancer diagnoses, complex trauma, and an undiagnosed neurodivergent brain.

Three cancer diagnoses. PTSD. OCD. Anxiety. Depression. The labels piled up, but none of them quite explained the whole picture.

Looking back, I can see what I was doing. Scripting conversations in the car before walking into a meeting. Choosing my facial expression in advance. Memorizing what people had told me about their lives so I’d have something to ask about — not because I didn’t care, but because the spontaneous version of caring didn’t always come out the way other people expected. By the end of most days, my body felt like a wrung-out cloth. I called it stress. I called it being driven. It was masking, every single hour.

When I finally understood that some of what I’d been carrying wasn’t only trauma — that my brain had always been wired this way, that there had been a name for it the whole time — there was relief. There was also grief. A specific, quiet grief that I think a lot of late-diagnosed adults know: the soft mourning for the version of yourself who could have been met, much earlier, by someone who saw the whole picture. I sit with that grief in my own work, and I sit with it alongside the people I work with now. Late discovery isn’t a tidy gift. It’s a real loss, and a real homecoming, and both of those things at once.

What I’d been calling trauma was also neurodivergence — autism and ADHD traits, sensory sensitivity, the wiring of a Highly Sensitive Person. It just took me almost twenty years to put the right name on it.

Two years apart, then back together just before the pandemic — quieter, more honest, finally ready.

My partner and I have been together for over 40 years. We’ve also nearly lost each other — more than once — in the gap between two nervous systems that were wired completely differently and didn’t yet have the language for it.

Eventually the gap got too wide to keep stepping over. We separated for two years. They weren’t loud years. There was no big rupture, no third party, no scene. Just the slow, undeniable recognition that we couldn’t keep doing what we’d been doing — and neither of us yet knew what else there was to do. We talked, sometimes. We didn’t, sometimes. Mostly we each had to go back to ourselves and figure out who we were when we weren’t bracing against each other. That work was lonely. It was also necessary. I don’t think the marriage we have now would exist without those two years.

We came back together just before the pandemic — quieter, more honest, and finally ready to do the work we’d been avoiding.

What the return required of us wasn’t romantic. It was practical, slow, and unglamorous. We had to learn to name what was actually happening between us instead of arguing about the surface of it. We had to accept that we would never be wired the same way, and that “wired the same way” had never been the goal. We had to give each other much more time and much more silence than either of us had been taught to expect from a marriage. And we had to forgive — not in one big moment, but in a hundred small ones, over and over, including for things we hadn’t even known we were holding.

The therapists we’d seen along the way weren’t wrong. They just didn’t see neurodivergence. We had to find the map ourselves. That map is what I now bring to every couple I work with.