The question of work—or making a living—is at the heart of so many struggles for neurodivergent folks. We think differently and process differently, so we work differently. It’s a challenge to time our abilities with a clock when overwhelm or underwhelm, boredom or overexcitement are rotating realities. For myself, I get creative whims early in the morning and sometimes late in the evening, but I also need to get my family ready for school in the mornings and arrive at meetings when expected—all of which confuses my sensitive self. But at the same time, without that sense of being plugged in to the world, we are also at risk of isolating ourselves and becoming lonely. It’s a challenge to strike a balance, and many of us become therapists, writers, and entrepreneurs to help alleviate some of that struggle.
The subject of work is a tender one for me. In my midtwenties, I was fired from one of my first journalism jobs. The pace was so intense and demanding, I wasn’t the only one to leave, but it still hurt. Then I became a freelance journalist, which worked quite well for me, since I had the flexibility and freedom to pursue different topics. But when I attempted to move up the ladder in my early thirties and landed a job as a senior editor—albeit at a very dysfunctional early startup—things came crashing down. My sense of overwhelm and brain fog was like nothing I had ever experienced, and I was again fired after just six months. A year later I took a low-paying job in a more arts-oriented organization—thinking that was where I would find “my people”—but instead I was burdened with administrative tasks. Again, I was fired after a month. The hardest part throughout the trials of these various jobs was the overwhelming sense of loss, confusion, loneliness, and uselessness I felt. I had zero vocabulary about neurodiversity—and no one else around me had that vocabulary either. I felt judged, criticized, and undervalued by my coworkers and by society as a whole.
When I reached a state of delirious confusion and loneliness about what the hell was going on with me, I finally started opening up to others. Starting with my immediate family, I told them about the news reports of women—who sounded like me—who had sensory processing differences. Compelled by what I was reading, I created a Facebook event page inviting people to get together and talk about neurodiversity. I held the first Neurodiversity Project gathering in a small Berkeley studio filled with people craving honest discussion about how our minds seemed to work differently. Leaders from corporations and academia opened up alongside artists, singers, and activists. A buzz grew within me that I hadn’t felt in years, and it grew stronger with each gathering—and that was it: finally, at last, my neurodivergent working style as a writer and entrepreneur was flowing with something that people wanted and needed and where I could run a thriving venture.
Opening Up the Conversation
In my 2017 feature article in Fast Company “What Neurodiversity Is and Why Companies Should Embrace It,” I put forth suggestions for how to make the workplace more neurodiversity-friendly. That article led to dozens of inquiries, tweets, and emails, especially from women. At around the same time, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and other publications were starting to catch on to the dire need of addressing these topics. At the center of my article was a woman named Margaux Joffe, head of production for Yahoo’s Global Marketing Department at the time, who also launched the company’s first neurodiversity Employee Resource Group. Joffe has ADHD and previously founded the Kaleidoscope Society, a platform for women with ADHD to share and celebrate their successes in life—think artists, scientists, human resources folks, designers, and a whole range of career positions.
“My advice to neurodivergent employees is to learn as much as you can about how your mind works in order to design your daily life accordingly and be able to effectively communicate what you need at work and at home,” Joffe tells me. “I lived with undiagnosed ADHD for twenty-nine years, so the diagnosis alone has helped me tremendously in my career. Simply understanding how my mind works differently, I’ve been able to let go of how I thought I should do things and accept myself for who I am.”
Joffe explains that what often stands in companies’ way is a lack of knowledge for how to approach subjects such as neurodivergence. The growing “neurodiversity movement,” focusing on diversity of mind, just as activists in the 1960s and 1970s fought for racial equality and gay rights, is spurring an increasing awareness that is likely to put much more pressure on workplaces to understand neurodiversity, adhere to policies, and respect neurodivergent folks—especially women and people of color, Joffe points out, “who already feel like they have to work harder to overcome unconscious bias.”
It took Joffe a year to “come out” to her boss about having ADHD, because, she says, “I wanted to be able to prove myself free of any additional bias.” But once she did, and told him she wanted to launch an Employee Resource Group for neurodiversity, “he supported it 100 percent.” She continues, “Many times, the only thing holding us back is thinking we need to work like others. Build on your strengths and be fearless. This goes for everyone.”
For myself, as a sensitive neurodivergent woman, my primary concerns relate to social norms around extreme extroversion, expectations of high-speed productivity, overstimulation, and overemphasis on factory-style executive functioning. My ideal setting is a quiet, natural light–filled place surrounded by greenery, with easy access to colleagues when needed. I value mentorship and learn well one-on-one. Being myself often looks like lightning bolts of inspiration, needing to pause a conversation to write down an idea, emailing or calling someone spontaneously, or needing to take a quick rest when I’m overstimulated or work from home when I have a headache. Susan Cain has made some of this language much more accessible and acceptable through her Quiet Revolution website and Quiet Workplaces and Quiet Schools programs. Walmart’s most productive distribution center is staffed almost entirely by neurodivergent employees. SAP has an entire Autism at Work program, and Microsoft now holds annual Autism at Work events. Things are starting to shift, but more is needed.
Work and Temperament Rights
Our internal makeups matter. A lot. How I spend my days thinking, reflecting, and responding to the world correlates to my mental health, the mental health of my family, and the overall health of my workplace. Each of us creates our own reality, largely dictated by our internal perceptions and how those perceptions are shaped by people in power. As Elaine Aron frequently likes to bring up, if we as sensitive people are raised in supportive environments, our unique gifts are often fostered and allowed to thrive; but if we grow up in negative environments, we often develop depression and anxiety. And so the interplay between inner and outer is significant and largely holds the key to the overall health and well-being of us as individuals and of our wider communities.
The idea of “temperament rights” brings into the equation a consideration of our inner constitutions in every sphere of life—work, family, school, education, sports, religion, and more. The unique individual makeup of each person deserves its own articulation, respect, and corresponding accommodation. Note that this is not the same as every person getting exactly what they want all the time. But it does mean, for example, that when a person starts a new job, it is carefully noted in their personnel file whether they identify as neurodivergent, and if so, which neurodivergence, as well as their workplace preferences and needs. That person’s particular sensitivities need to be acknowledged. They will then know that their internal reality is acknowledged at work and they can thus resort to the language of temperament rights and neurodiversity to sort out any issues as they arise, as well as advocate for themselves.
When I got back in touch with Joffe a few months after our initial interview, Yahoo was in the midst of its merger with AOL after both companies had been acquired by Verizon. It was a tough time—and in many ways traumatic. People were being laid off, and change was everywhere—from management structure to the redesign of office space. It was a significant time to talk about neurodiversity at the company, as unexpected shifts often allow for new ways of leading and operating, and Joffe’s team advocates for neurodivergent employees in a number of ways. “We’ve been bubbling up some questions and concerns to leadership—everything from office moves and layouts to accommodations,” she told me. Her team was making recommendations to the team in charge of real estate and workplace, such as designating quiet spaces, working with individuals who need accommodations, and making noise-canceling headphones available.
“I feel like we’re just beginning to see the start of a new wave of how mental health and neurodiversity are going to be looked at in the workplace,” Joffe says, “because traditionally the workplace hasn’t always been best-suited for anyone who doesn’t fit the mold, so to speak, but I do think things are beginning to change. Once we launched the ERG [Employee Resource Group] it opened up a Pandora’s box and people came out of the woodwork, sharing their stories. It was definitely the case that people were dealing with things on their own and keeping to themselves.” Launching the neurodiversity ERG was a big, brave, and vulnerable move for Joffe. It took courage to put herself out there, and ultimately that courage led to her being on stage in front of eighty-five hundred people to share her story.
Indeed, sharing stories is often the first step for helping changes take hold in a workplace. After Joffe formed her ERG and started speaking openly about the gifts and challenges of her neurodivergence, dozens of others started speaking up as well. “In our department alone, through launching this group,” she says, “I found out a few of my colleagues are also neurodivergent—and I would have never guessed! I would’ve never known what they were going through. It’s been so powerful because people from senior leadership are also coming forward as having ADHD. I don’t know if there are any other companies out there specifically with neurodiversity ERGs. I know there are autism working groups, but I’m not sure about neurodiversity more broadly. I’ve seen disability and health and wellness, but not neurodiversity. It’s an open frontier—a lot to learn and a lot to do.”
Embracing neurodiversity at work also allows for a narrative shift to happen, because colleagues find themselves surprised by the mismatch between what they think a neurodivergence might look like and how it actually shows up in a person. It is essential that all workplaces—companies, organizations, nonprofits, government offices—open up this “Pandora’s box” so that the buried treasures and gifts that neurodivergent folks possess can emerge and help entire teams. Senior executives, managers, bosses, board members, and others have a significant role to play in creating work cultures and spaces that allow for the language of neurodiversity. This can have a profound ripple effect throughout companies and society at large. The opportunity to transform social norms is real—and tangible.
Adobe: A Lesson in Sensory Design
Silka Miesnieks is another bright star in the neurodivergent underworld of tech and design in Silicon Valley. I saw her speak at a design conference in the Japanese innovation space Digital Garage in San Francisco. The conference was about artificial intelligence and the intersection with design, empathy, emotions, and human impact—and to my delighted shock, some of the first words she delivered were about her being dyslexic and about the senses of proprioception and interoception as they relate to design. I felt so lucky that I had decided to attend the conference that day, walked into that downtown San Francisco tech space, and happened upon someone so aligned with my research interests.
Miesnieks is now head of Emerging Design at Adobe. “I actually got diagnosed a couple years ago with ADHD, and my son has been diagnosed with that, too,” she tells me over the phone a few days after the conference. “At first, we thought he was dyslexic, but then it turned out it was ADHD. And often those two go together. So it’s been quite a journey having spent most of my life not knowing I’ve got ADHD and then not getting help with dyslexia because I wasn’t quite ‘bad enough.’”
Miesnieks learned early on that she had a gift for spatial ability, and from a young age she began making 3D creations. “I ended up being an artist because that was the best way I could communicate—through visual imagery.” She studied art, which led her to technology and animation and then graduate school in industrial design. “It’s all around these connections between how we feel and the spaces that we live in. And I feel very attuned to that.” In the past she led startups as well as teams in large companies. She’s always been more of a leader than a follower, she tells me, attributing that to the ADHD.
I ask Miesnieks about how she went from identifying her own neurodivergent inclinations—seeing things differently, thinking about design differently—to action. How does one go from identification to input and effect? First off, she says, “I think having been an entrepreneur and having to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and always being insatiably curious helped me overcome fears of failure—having an inkling and just going with it.” Then, to arrive at what she and many others in the field are calling “sensory design,” she went from discussing some ideas with a designer friend of hers to asking experts in various fields some questions about this new direction in her work. “I constantly test my assumptions,” Miesnieks says. “I don’t feel like I have all the knowledge and expertise that is needed.” So she reached out to leaders in the industry, and “everyone said this is something that we need to be doing.”
Psychology has focused on the mind, but there are newer insights now around the body, movement, and kinesthetic styles of learning, so she is seeing a shift. “This is a nice time, where the technology can reflect society’s mood. Our cultural shift has also been to think about the whole person. And the way my kid and I like to learn—and the more research I did—I saw how we are not edge cases. So even things like voice-to-text applies to so many more than just dyslexics.”
Miesnieks was able to follow her gifts and inclinations, become an entrepreneur, and now also channel her knowledge and style into a large company environment. “It’s been a really big thing for me,” she says. “My first reaction when I found out about the ADHD was anger. ‘Why wasn’t I diagnosed in college? That would’ve helped me. I could be so much farther ahead in my career. I could have had an easier time.’ And then I got over that and I started to see the benefits. I was never able to recognize them before, because I didn’t know I was different. I thought I just had to try to be normal. The ability to connect lots of different abstract ideas together and come up with concrete solutions and combining many different thoughts and concepts and seeing them through all different angles all at once and then connecting them together—I didn’t realize that was unique.”
Miesnieks also points out the importance of who you are surrounded by. Her first boss at Adobe, for example, was very encouraging. “He recognized that I got things that no one else got,” she tells me. Rei Inamoto, a New York–based advertising and innovation executive who hosted the design intelligence conference that day, also told me as much when we spoke a few days later. Recognizing the high proportion of entrepreneurs with ADHD in Silicon Valley, he prompted me to think about the ecosystem surrounding the people who succeed in that environment.
Miesnieks’s second boss is the head of all of Adobe Design. “All she does is encourage me to be me, which is all I needed. Just trust,” Miesnieks says. “And she has to have enough security in herself to be able to do that, and thank goodness she does, to be able to say, ‘I’m just trusting you.’ And I’ve grown because of that, and I’m pretty much given my own freedom. It’s unusual, really unusual.”
I ask Miesnieks whether she’s starting to see more conversations about embracing mental differences at work, especially in Silicon Valley or the global design and tech startup ecosystem. “I still think ADHD has a bad name,” she says. “I hesitate saying it. I can now say I’m dyslexic and not feel bad; I feel that stigma is gone. But the stigma with ADHD is still there. It’s not well known, and it’s only because I have it myself that I realize how different it is for different people.” She reiterates how there’s a prevailing outdated stereotype that ADHD means being hyperactive and always bouncing around. “That needs to change,” she tells me. “What I’d like is that ADHD become associated with good things and with abilities that are valued in the company and in the community as a whole.” She’s found colleagues at Adobe who are also ADHD, and they compare notes and talk openly with each other. “I think when it’s an open conversation and when there’s a support group, you realize an amazing amount of people have it.”
When I ask her about women in particular, Miesnieks says she sees immense value in women with ADHD being able to talk about it with each other and connect. She’s part of several women’s groups and says ADHD stigma is one of many issues women face in the workplace. She notes that “women are very good at supporting each other.” When she brings up ADHD in her women circles, she feels immense relief and finds that everyone has a story related to some kind of mental difference.
In the end, she says, “I’m just really grateful for being ADHD. It’s given me such creative abilities. I want to put that out there for other women as well.”
Masking at Work: It All Starts with the Job Interview
The friction between our modern-day neurotypical expectations in the workplace and the reality of human neurodiversity shows up early—the job interview process. Previously, when I went into a formal setting such as a job interview, I would unconsciously go into masking mode—speaking and gesturing in ways that, in hindsight, didn’t feel good or natural to me. Like many who try to make a good first impression, I would present in a way that I knew was expected of me, but I would feel exhausted and wiped out the second I got home. I was essentially putting on a neurotypical mask but didn’t realize it—and that’s not sustainable for the job applicant or for the boss or company as a whole.
For me, I find myself having to split between what I’m perceiving on the surface of a work-related conversation and what my mind and body are picking up under the surface. Take this hypothetical job interview:
GREG (JENARA’S POTENTIAL BOSS): What was it like living in Nepal?
JENARA’S INSIDES: Is he asking whether I’m unreliable because I’ve traveled so much? Is he trying to assess whether I’m going to pick up and go travel again? I see his balding head and heavy eyes and wedding ring—is everything okay at home with his family? I feel really sad. What happened to him? What were his parents like?
JENARA’S OUTSIDE: It was awesome!
GREG: How do you approach interpersonal challenges at work?
JENARA’S INSIDES: Oh God, does he want the whole story? My extensive take based on the latest research and writing and my totally alternative, unconventional thoughts on the modern workplace? Will that be too much information for him? Wait, I’m really smart—maybe I should just share all of that? But wait, will that make me look like I can’t follow neurotypical norms and hence am somewhat of a rebel who can’t follow marching orders?
JENARA’S OUTSIDE: I’m a strong believer in open communication, being clear from the start, and having dialogue when things don’t go as expected.
Does this sound familiar? As neurodivergent individuals, we are almost constantly having to hold two realities simultaneously, because we pick up on so much external stimuli and have the repeated unfortunate experience of having our ways of interacting shunned and rejected.
Mental Health at Work: Leading the Conversation
I’d like to see neurodivergent entrepreneurs, designers, researchers, media executives, and policymakers inserting more of their full selves into the world, and I’d like the rest of us to celebrate those full selves more. It’s also important that journalists, conference organizers, and university departments cover stories about neurodivergent folks and invite those folks to the stage.
Leigh Stringer, for example, is a writer, designer, and conference organizer who is shedding light on how office design affects well-being. She has focused on the impact of artificial lighting on mood and sleep, as well as how nature and biodiversity reduce anxiety and depression. For example, “living green walls” covered with a variety of plants evoke positive psychological responses, and hearing multiple birds sing has been found to be more relaxing than hearing one single bird. Stringer also says an important new area of research “has to do with choice about how, when, and where people work. Choice and autonomy can go a long way in improving health and performance,” and she has collaborated with the Harvard School of Public Health and elsewhere on new areas of research on the intersection of work, design, and well-being—with applications that can benefit neurodivergents as well as help determine how neurodivergents can have more input.
Over in the UK, Barbara Harvey at Accenture has helped spearhead a deeper look into mental health at work and how workplaces can better support people and remove stigma. “Over the last five years we’ve seen a tremendous increase in the public debate around mental health,” she writes to me. Her team ran a number of surveys and found that increased media coverage and an awareness campaign run by the royal family and partners have helped people feel more comfortable talking about mental health now as compared with a few years ago. “The fact that people feel they can speak more openly, combined with a better understanding of how mental health touches people’s lives, has created a force that is requiring government and employers to focus on solutions and approaches.” I ask her about how such change happens and how stigma begins to fade. “By starting a conversation,” she says. “When leaders and colleagues speak openly about the topic, they help make it safe for others to do so.” Princes William and Harry, in particular, have shared openly about challenging times in their lives, how they sought help, and how talking with colleagues helped them feel less alone and more connected.
Harvey says programs need three elements: buy-in and support from a leadership team, resources in place to meet the needs of employees, and awareness-building through everyday conversations about mental health. In the UK, 15 percent of the Accenture workforce, about eighteen hundred employees, has been trained as “mental health allies,” that is, “colleagues others can approach in the knowledge that their discussion will be kept completely confidential.” Accenture’s goal is to have 20 percent trained as allies and 80 percent trained in basic mental health awareness.
“For a long time mental health at work has been seen as a minority issue,” Harvey writes. “Many companies have approached mental health in a reactive way, responding at the point when someone needs help.” But, she says, reframing mental health as something we all possess and recognizing that it can fluctuate among and within individuals help to normalize the conversation, and, ultimately, she wants to see companies be more proactive. She especially has faith in millennials as a demographic that prioritizes mental health.
The Writer’s Path
“I’m thirty-six and have been working as a freelance writer for half of my life. My grandparents live in midtown Toronto, and I’m a very autistic creature of habit, so I came back here to live,” writer Sarah Kurchak tells me over the phone. We found each other on Twitter—Sarah wrote a powerful and tender article about her relationship with her mom and the kind of unconditional support she received throughout her childhood. When we spoke, Kurchak had just returned from her annual adventure of covering the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). “I have weird intense areas of focus that are very rewarding,” she tells me, also referring to her career as a music journalist.
“I knew I would never be able to do the work I wanted to do if I had to pay off student loans, so I made a naive gamble to intern at television stations and magazines and trade my labor for on-the-job education, and I ended up at a music magazine. I don’t have any formal training, but I picked up a lot of skills,” Kurchak says. Her story is somewhat common across neurodivergent-identifying folks because of her ability to focus intensely and her insistence to learn differently from neurotypicals. “Journalism was always an accident. Recently I’ve been shifting to personal essays and critiques, because I think that’s where my strengths are.”
Referring to her experience at TIFF, Kurchak explains that navigating the film world has surprising benefits and a compatibility with her neurological makeup. “At a certain level, the film industry is so nakedly upward-grasping that everyone’s motives in social conversations are so obvious that they’re easy for autistic people to track. And it’s actually kind of more comfortable, because you know what everyone wants from you. And you know when they don’t want it anymore. And so it’s kind of a relief. Everyone else is stuck on ‘Oh, that’s so fake.’ But lots of social interactions are fake. This is actually sort of weirdly honest in its own way, and I can handle that.” I know what she means. When I’m at conferences and everyone is networking, and I know it’s a sport, that can be empowering.
But there are other components Kurchak can’t handle, she says. “The crowds are getting to me more year after year. I think last year was the first year I almost melted down in line for a press film.” She also mentions glaring lights and noise, with loud screens and more. “I’m also starting to feel a little isolated by all the cliques. I feel a little lost when I see everyone else connecting and networking and I’m just lonely.” She wishes all the neurodivergent folks could come together at the festival for a shared purpose such as talking about how to navigate the sensory overload.
Kurchak was twenty-seven when she was diagnosed. “We always knew I was different, but just never had the language for it. I can’t remember the first time I heard the word ‘autistic.’ Doctors were analyzing my gait, I felt awkward, but sometimes too smart, and my parents were just practical and did whatever seemed to work for me as a person. I credit everything I’ve done right to them. I was lucky enough to be born to them.”
In her early twenties she started to hear about Asperger’s, and one day while reading a checklist of “symptoms,” she resonated with every single item. She started to look into testing, and nothing was available for people over the age of eighteen. She felt like the Canadian government health system couldn’t help, and she couldn’t afford private testing. For a while she accepted the fact and moved on. But when she had a meltdown over something relatively small, her mom rushed her to get tested, telling her, “I know we can’t afford it, but this is something you need to know because you’re not going to be able to piece together anything else if you don’t have the foundation of understanding of what’s actually going on with you.”
After a lifetime of knowing that “something was up,” Kurchak and her mom were able to finally understand every detail during the diagnostic process. Kurchak felt that diagnosis was important because she wanted to feel differently about her childhood, that is, she wanted to feel proud instead of beating herself up for her failures, as she puts it. Diagnosis finally helped her understand why she felt different both as a child and as an adult in work settings.
“I still don’t feel like a grown-up,” she says of her life as a freelance writer in Toronto, living with her husband in a small apartment. But she’s found a sense of community with other music journalists. “These people are so much weirder than me that I can totally fly under the radar.”
Burning Woman
I first encountered Lucy Pearce, Irish author of Burning Woman (2016), on Facebook after reading that book. She eventually was diagnosed with Asperger’s, and with time she came out about it. “I was always aware that I didn’t fit in,” she tells me in an email exchange.
I never really belonged, despite putting so much effort into being “normal.” Though “normal” was my goal, I never seemed to be very good at passing—and it took all my energy but very little of my interest. I wanted to fit in socially in order to be safe, nothing more. I have always really enjoyed being by myself—reading, thinking, drawing, writing. I connect deeply to a few special people, but socializing just isn’t what I do for fun.
. . . I can now see myself identifying my “not normalness” through my writing in the early part of my career, especially in my book Moods of Motherhood. But I had no name for it. My mother came across Elaine Aron’s work when I was a teen, so I knew about HSPs before I had my children. I knew this term was the closest to identifying my issues and I used it in my book, The Rainbow Way, as a way of describing my struggles with devoting myself to motherhood, and my deep-seated need to create. HSP is a phrase, I think, that united a lot of us neurodivergent folk before the awareness of Asperger’s in women started to appear. This high sensitivity impacted my whole life. But I was always a good girl, because I was so scared of causing conflict or upset that I couldn’t handle, and was always top of my class, so I never rang any bells for teachers or doctors. I managed to keep my struggles reasonably private and well-hidden, only interacting with the wider world when I was able—I was the queen of masking. Or at least I was until I was trying to manage mothering three children and running a creative career.
Pearce’s writing and art are poetic and mystical, infused with themes of spirit and both oppression and liberation. Her work is also a call for women to unite as they embrace their longings, sensitivities, artistic natures, and more. I found her work particularly compelling and helpful in the beginning of my neurodivergent awakening, even though she wasn’t using those terms and she hadn’t yet learned of her own neurodivergence or the larger neurodiversity movement. She knew she was sensitive and also identified all three of her children as sensitive.
But the sensitivity and struggles with one of our girls were much greater than either my husband or I could relate to or manage. She is extremely intelligent, hit all her milestones—so doctors and school just put it down to shyness and lack of firmness in us as parents. But I knew it was more than this. So I started researching, looking for answers. I had done a huge amount of reading on her behalf—Aspie [Asperger’s] heaven!—but hadn’t considered it for myself. After all I had been to university, I was married with kids, I was an established writer . . . and I was in my mid thirties. Surely something like that would have been picked up years ago. I, like so many people, had only had images of Rainman [the movie in which Dustin Hoffman plays an autistic savant] . . . as my touchstone for what autism looked like. But then two writers and entrepreneurs [in my field] came out as being Aspie. I identified so strongly with them and their work . . . and struggles. If they were Aspies and were also able to visibly function much of the time . . . then perhaps I might be too.
Much like Sarah Kurchak, Pearce had to eventually seek out private testing for herself and her daughter as public services were lacking. “The clarity and certainty it [diagnosis] has brought me has been immense. The relief. The knowing I no longer have to try—and fail—to be normal. That I am free to live life as me. That I am not broken or a failure. Nor am I imagining things. I feel like I am at last at home in myself, after 38 years. But I am still adjusting and processing the whole of my past through this new lens, and it takes time.”
Pearce continues, “The pieces of the puzzle of me have finally fallen into place and I have permission to be myself in my own way at last. This has helped me immensely on so many levels—finding the right medication, a wonderful therapist, a peer-support group, and being able to explain my struggles to others.”
Pearce also published a book that detailed some of her journey called Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing (2018). In it she pays particular attention to physical ailments, such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, that sometimes accompany sensitivities and neurodivergences—and that are often dismissed by the medical system because of gender bias. She is also the founder of Womancraft Publishing House, where she helps other women share their gifts through art and writing.
My “outsiderness” is actually an advantage; I am already neurologically seeing our culture from the standpoint of an outsider, whilst being aware of it from an insider perspective as a human, so am able to articulate this unique perspective. Once I was accused of being like Dianne Fossey observing gorillas in the way I was observing the dynamics in a group before I felt safe to share. This was said in a cruel accusatory way, but actually it was true. I do study humans and our culture, all the time. I am a thoughtful detached observer. I see the damage that our culture does to so many who don’t fit in to the white, middle-class American dream of capitalism, I see the damage it does to our greater ecosystems. And so my utopian, pattern-seeking, systems-loving, philosophical-scientist, artist-dreamer self longs to help find other ways of living—healthier, gentler, richer more nourishing, nurturing and creative alternatives to this dull, grey, loud, violent culture. This is the driving passion of my life and work, and thanks to the internet I am able to connect with so many exciting, passionate, creative dreamers around the world who are doing the same.
She concludes with this thought: “A woman in one of the Autism groups I am a member of recently said that autism is not a disorder, it is a community. I like that and am living into the truth of it more each day.”
On Sensitivity at Work
To tie some of these themes together, I want to share something Margaux Joffe told me. She has since become the associate director of Accessibility and Inclusion at Verizon Media:
I think we as neurodivergent people have higher levels of empathy—though technically it’s called “emotional dysregulation.” It’s not necessarily that we feel more than neurotypicals, but the automatic mechanisms for regulating our emotions don’t work the same way and so we feel higher highs and lower lows. It’s not that neurotypical people don’t have that capacity to feel, but they’re more regulated and so they don’t feel the same levels. So I think being empathetic people, we pick up on things that are unspoken and we pick up on the energies of those around us. Neurodivergent individuals are great people to go to when you want to get a temperature check on how people are feeling in a company, because they’re probably picking up on everything. We’re also more unfiltered and say what we think and feel and have a lower tolerance for bullshit.
Does any of this surprise you? I was thrilled to hear Joffe say this. Here I was talking with someone with major responsibilities at a leading corporation who was basically articulating where the many threads of neurodivergence actually converge—that is, in the area of sensitivity—and the case for embracing temperament rights and neurodiversity at work is born. (Not only that, but she wasn’t afraid to infuse corporatespeak with phrases like “picking up on the energies of those around us” and “lower tolerance for bullshit”—my kind of woman.)
On Sensitive Leadership
I also asked Susan Cain about how high sensitivity and well-being come up for her clients in workplaces or elsewhere, especially in leadership positions. First, she tells me about the widespread complaints about open office plans, which enjoyed some popularity with the rise of Silicon Valley but are now seeing backlash. Such plans are a serious concern for many HSPs and introverts, often provoking debilitating anxiety. “I can’t emphasize enough how much it bothers people,” Cain tells me. “There’s a special level of emotion and urgency around it coming from the people I work with.” Being constantly bombarded with sights and sounds and being observed and judged and on display—it’s really not working for people, she reiterates.
We often focus on neurodivergent employees struggling in a cubicle environment, but the truth is that many people in senior executive positions are navigating high sensitivity as well. Cain has been working with leaders across fields on introversion, sensitivity, and the broader themes of her book Quiet. “For sensitive leaders who learn how to manage their sensitivity in the often sharp-elbow world of the workplace—once they’ve learned to manage it, we know the upside can be quite powerful,” she says. “The ability to feel what’s happening on your team and talk to one team member in one way and another in a different way—the sensitivity can be a superpower in that way.”
What Cain says next is perhaps fundamental to the sensitive neurodivergent’s quest to power through, plug in to the neurotypical world, thrive, and make a unique impact. “I think the tricky part is that it’s hard to use that superpower when you’re feeling overwhelmed or anxious. Feeling those feelings can make us behave in a self-absorbed or selfish way even if that’s not who we really are. So what I see is that the first order of business is managing the tendency to feel overwhelmed or anxious. And then once you’ve got that nailed down, then your superpower is free to express itself.”
And it is this superpower that neurodivergent people are now learning to harness all over the world. We have needed a common language, a common vocabulary, to take with us to work and beyond that enables all of us to engage with the world at a depth that so many of us have craved for far too long.
Your Neurodiversity Footprint at Work
As I said before, I’m not a therapist. Nor am I a corporate executive. But being someone who has had to navigate work environments that essentially set up neurodivergent people to fail, I have some opinions on what companies could do better. So here are some of my practical suggestions: