How to Switch Off a Neurodivergent Mind - Part 2
We live in a time when neurodivergence is having its moment.
More and more well-known people are speaking openly about theirs - Florence Welch, the voice of Florence + The Machine, and gymnast Simone Biles, to name two you might not have heard about yet. And many of them describe it with the same word: a superpower.
They're right. Partly.
Neurodivergence really can be a superpower - if it has the freedom to show itself. Given that freedom, it generates value: for the person and for everyone around them.
But let's be honest about the other half of the picture. Neurodivergent people often struggle with things the world considers trivial. Organizing the day. Remembering commitments. Starting a task. Stopping one. (We'll come back to that last one - it deserves a chapter of its own.) If you judged neurodivergence only by this list, you'd have a hard time calling it a gift.
The truth is that the superpower doesn't come as standard equipment. It appears when a neurodivergent brain is fueled and given space - to generate, to create, to offer the perspective nobody else in the room has. Same brain, radically different outcomes. The variable is never the brain. The variable is the conditions.
And here is where the superpower narrative, told without context, becomes dangerous. Because it plants an idea in organizations' heads: the idea that they already know what to expect from us.
Which brings us to the second way to switch off a neurodivergent mind: expectations.
It comes in two flavors, and they're both wrong.
Flavor one: the company expects a neurodivergent person to be a flawless executor. Following operating instructions to the letter. Precise, methodical, a machine for detail.
Flavor two: the company expects them to be the creative soul of the team. No need for rules, no need for structure, endlessly imaginative, ideas on tap.
Either way, we have a problem. Yes - in both cases. Because neurodivergence is a spectrum, and inside that spectrum there are different people, brains that work differently, and - this is the part that matters - different needs to work well.
One simple question would be enough. A question to ask, and to ask yourself, about anyone you work with:
What does this person need to function at their best?
It's a question worth asking about everyone, neurotypical or neurodivergent alike. But it becomes crucial when a mind works differently from the ones around it - because that difference is exactly where discrimination likes to begin.
When the expectations of a company, or of a manager, take none of this into account, a neurodivergent person doesn't just risk switching off.
They risk getting sick.
Because what you say to us carries a different weight than you think. (Don't worry - we'll come back to that, too.)
This was the second way. Unfortunately, the list is not over.
