How to Switch Off a Neurodivergent Mind - Part 1

"We've always done it this way."

Five words in my language - si è sempre fatto così. Six in English. Either way, they work fast, they work quietly, and they work every single time.

If you want to switch off a neurodivergent brain, this is where you start.

People say these words for different reasons. Sometimes out of naivety. Sometimes out of fear. Sometimes out of plain laziness in front of change. Sometimes as a justification after the fact. And sometimes it's bigger than any single person: it's the culture of an entire organization, held up as a shield against anything that pushes for something new.

These are words that should give anyone goosebumps - neurotypical brains included. But for a neurodivergent mind, they do double damage.

First, they describe the landscape: a workplace with little appetite for the new, for unexplored solutions, for thinking outside the perimeter of what already exists. That alone is discouraging for anybody.

But second - and this is the part that hurts - they forbid a neurodivergent brain from doing the very thing it does best. Seeing what others don't see. Finding connections nobody thought to look for. Landing on solutions that have never been tried, precisely because "the way we've always done it" was never the only way.

When an organization's culture is soaked in we've always done it this way - when those words, one after another, block every single proposal for change - the worst possible thing happens to a neurodivergent person.

They switch off.

The enthusiasm and energy that were so appreciated at the interview, and never once valued in the day-to-day, slowly turn into bitterness. Creativity doesn't die - creativity migrates. It moves outside the company walls, and it takes something else with it: the desire to give anything of one's own. A neurodivergent brain doesn't stop being neurodivergent because of a company. But it can absolutely decide to spend itself elsewhere, if everything around it keeps repeating - explicitly or not - that the way it works is not okay.

And here comes the cruelest part of the story. Because sooner or later, that same person will sit in front of a manager who says: "I expected more from you. At the interview you struck me as someone who changes things - and nothing has changed."

The same manager who blocked every push. The same culture that met every proposal with those five words.

Organizations love to say they want neurodivergent people because they think out of the box. And it's true - we do. But nobody survives for long in a context that anchors them, irreparably and without appeal, to a past that doesn't belong to them, while denying them the one thing they actually need: the space to think about the future.

This is Part 1. Unfortunately, there are more ways to switch off a mind like ours - and I intend to name them, one by one.