Open Letter to all the Frightened NeuroSpicy Leaders Still in the Closet

(Cross posted to both newsletters if you're both in Technology and HR Leadership)

Can you believe it? They have a name for it all. The unfitting. The eternal hardship. The awkwardness. The uncertainty that we ever do the exact right thing or worse, the inability to do but the exact right thing. The reason we saw stuff faster than others and wanted everyone to run as fast and as hard as we did. The reason we struggled with these ever-changing rules of “how to be” in society in a way that pleases it. The cause behind why we had to overthink everything. The reason why we needed the word to make more sense and we had it stuck on this insane difficulty level whilst others seemed to waltz on by.

We’re Autistic. On the spectrum. Neurodivergent. Think Differently.

There are many flavours of diagnosis and no one person is autistic in the same way as another, we all know that by now, but how many of us have had to go through life without knowing or without talking about it in the corporate world is an ever staggering realisation for me.

When we first stepped into the business world some 20 or even 30 years ago, this was not a thing. We could not be that. Only unruly boys in primary schools were ADHD. Only some quirky programmer colleague had Aspergers. Only some distant cousin was Dyspraxic. Girls hadn’t had the mystery vaccines and/or the refrigerator mothers who had apparently caused this, as they were never diagnosed. Safe a couple of comedy-fodder characters nary a representation in the media of other Autistic people. And none of those were even remotely connected to our workplaces. Because you see, to our insanely unknowing minds, that minority was infinitesimal and we needn’t worry about them if we were already in the workplace. That was them. Not us. We were already here and achieving.