Every morning, at an hour most people would still call night, I wake up and my aging grey head feels like a Swiss army knife someone unapologetically forgot to fold back in. Too many blades sticking out, all sharp, all ready, none of them labelled. That’s the reality of walking around with this scientific alphabet soup of brainwiring: HIP, HSD, ASD L1, DT*, EM** (*divergent thinker, **eidetic memory). The extended autumn full neurocognitive tasting menu. Before -like most people- you assume it means gifted, special, some mysterious higher gear… hold your horses. My truth is far less glamorous. It means I maneuver half blind through a world designed for brains that don’t work like mine, and I’ve learned to make it look easy. Until it isn’t.
We need to set the scene… the best comparison I’ve ever found is this: imagine living your entire life in an office (or a house for that matter) built for someone slightly different than you. Same species, wrong calibration. The chairs never sit right, the conversations move in odd angles, the logic feels rearranged by someone who doesn’t believe in corners. Nothing is broken, nothing is catastrophic, nothing is dramatic. It’s just… hopelessly misaligned. It never stops, and you can’t really explain why. You learn to adapt because everyone around you seems to be swimming just fine in currents that feel like undertows to you. By the time I reach the end of my day, I’m wiped out and drained in a way that’s hard to explain without sounding precious. The exhaustion is real. It’s the cost of constantly translating myself, of moving in shadows, of translating back into another language, of projecting my cerebral images into something other people might understand (apologies: ‘recognize’ is a way better word!).
My brain simply doesn’t follow the scenic route from A to B (you might have noticed). It grows trees instead. It jumps. It teleports. It flashes. It roams. Give me a question and I’ll get you ecosystems instead of a straight answer. As a colorblind person, I move in more shades of grey than most people can fathom. A simple “what do you think?” becomes a fireworks show of consequences, patterns, memories, side-doors, detours, and tiny warning bells most people walk past without noticing. I realize it must be infuriating or tiring for people around me. It certainly is for me. And still, I (almost) never talk about it. I think most people around me have no idea about my neurodivergence (and never will have an idea on the energy level it costs me to keep them at that level of blissful unawareness. They probably label me as ‘strange’. Neurodivergence is not a badge I wear; it’s simply how my head moves. I see connections everywhere, even the ones people prefer to ignore. And then I compress the whole thing to a two-sentence summary because the meeting is already running late and someone wants to talk about budget. I’m not overthinking, nor playing princess. I’m simply thinking in stereo and images. Layer on the sensitivity and the world becomes a constant flood of input. I don’t observe a room, I’m not in it; I absorb it. The flicker of the light. The mood drop in someone’s voice. The palpable tension between two people who swear they’re fine. The fifty-seven micro-signals floating through the air of an open office. I can’t choose to notice. I just do. High sensitivity is sold as softness, fragility, delicacy. And it is.
My daily reality is that it’s a cognitive bandwidth set to maximum intake. The strength shows in empathy, intuition, nuance. The weakness shows when my nervous system runs out of space by noon. That is why I hide in corners, in meeting rooms, in my library, in my bath, in a hotel room, at the safe side of the noise, away from the window, never back to a door. Why I create a safe space around me, with things that create a barrier, a framework, an anchoring point. Books. Screens. Walls. Away. It’s why I abhor long meetings, why I hate the “non-dis”, why non-decisions drain me. Why I need to wait for a controlled peaceful moment before my higher functioning can kick in. It happens when people are away. The door is closed. Silence and jazz soften the air… I am alone, and I can be me.
Add memory into the mix and suddenly you’re the keeper of every detail nobody else remembers. Slide 14. That meeting in March. The promise someone made and forgot. The book I read in 1996, the hesitation in the voice of Bruce Sterling in 2002… The pattern repeating for the third time in five years. Eidetic memory is useful in strategy, research, analysis, (passing tests in high school and university 😊), troubleshooting… but it comes with a cruel joke: it remembers the emotional stuff too, all of it in glorious HD. Most people’s past fades. Mine sits next to me and takes notes.
And then comes masking: the art of pretending my personal operating system matches everybody else’s. It started early in my life, and became instinctive and automatic. I learned (the hard way) to iron my ideas into linearity (because linearity is the norm). I learned to chameleon my way through a school system that was (is?) built for the opposite of my functioning. I soften my intensity and range. I do my uttermost best to silence my instinct to dig deeper. I act like noise and commotion don’t bother me. (it kills my energy). I rehearse the small-talk manual. I even show up for dry-runs. I’ve taught myself to blend in so well that even I forget the seams. People like me for being adaptable, present, reliable, creative, professional, easy, benevolent. Inside I’m running two systems at once: the real one and the performed one. Nothing drains energy faster than self-compression.
This is where the workplace becomes a theatre of mismatch. Open offices are marketed as “collaborative”, but for a sensitive, divergent brain they’re a sensory blender. Back-to-back meetings kill the depth I need to think clearly. The culture of quick wins and quick answers leaves no oxygen for people who need context to avoid driving everyone off a cliff. And worst of all: when the work isn’t stimulating, when everything feels shallow, when complexity is missing… boredom becomes a slow, quiet burn-out nobody talks about. Bore-out is as lethal as burnout, it just wears nicer shoes. I need intellectual fuel to power up my boilers. I need to spar, read, discuss, draw, close my eyes, write. I need quality discussions. Outside of the box call-outs. Contrarian views. My writing defines the images in my head. The space around me defines my energy level.
There’s also this ridiculous stroke of luck I live with every day: I married a woman who has been walking through this neurological minefield with me for twenty-two years without losing her humour, her patience, her love or her ability to look me straight in the eyes and say “enough, focus”. She navigates my mental side-quests with a mix of affection and iron will that really should qualify as a superpower. I know damn well that my wiring isn’t the easy version of a husband, and somehow she treats it like a library to explore rather than a problem to fix. And then there’s my daughter, ten years old and already a tiny force of nature, who treats my weirdness as if it were an expansion pack for her universe. She thrives on it. She asks better questions because of it. She sees the world sideways with me and thinks it’s normal that her dad’s brain runs like a multidimensional pinball machine. If ever there was proof that difference, when loved properly, becomes possibility … it’s the two of them.
Let’s get one thing straight. None of this makes me superior. I don’t want to be part of that (way too popular and populistic) narrative. Different wiring shines in some situations and falls flat in others. Neurotypical colleagues see things I miss. They navigate social nuance faster, switch gears without melting, keep momentum where I get stuck chasing implications. Put us together and you get a team that actually sees the whole elephant instead of arguing over the tail. Cognitive diversity is not a spiritual concept, or a hidden superpower. It’s a practical advantage. But only if everyone is allowed to function in their natural form.
The cost of pretending otherwise is brutal. When you grow up adapting, you start ignoring your own limits and calling it resilience. You treat exhaustion as personality. You treat overwhelm as private weakness. You accept environments that actively drain you because you don’t want to be the “complicated” one. Until one day the system crashes and you realize the act wasn’t harmless. It was expensive. And it was silent.
Here’s the thing: there are clues. You can build a life that fits your brain instead of constantly contorting yourself to fit the room. It starts with treating your needs as real. Quiet isn’t a luxury. Focus isn’t a diva request. Depth isn’t negotiable. Free-agent-structure, clarity, pacing, autonomy… they’re golden ingredients, they’re oxygen. Then there’s the calendar, that sneaky battlefield where you can reclaim mornings for thinking, afternoons for quieter tasks, and the right to protect yourself from the death spiral of meetings. It also helps to state your rules of engagement out loud, calmly and without apology. No drama. Just truth. People collaborate better when they know what they’re collaborating with. Sigh. Not everybody is ready for that.
And maybe the most important clue: find people whose brains sing in the same key. The relief of not being too much, not being odd, not needing to translate … that’s fuel. That’s healing. That’s home (at home or at work) . When places adapt to minds like mine, they don’t become less efficient. They become smarter. Quieter rooms help everyone. Clearer communication saves time. Autonomy lowers stress. Cognitive diversity prevents stupid mistakes. A true hive builds systems that don’t waste talent.
The older I get, the more I understand that my difference is (most probably, the jury is still out on that one) not a malfunction. It’s an instrument that was left out of the orchestra for too long. When I work in ways that match my wiring, everything I used to compress becomes usable. Everything I used to hide becomes valuable. Everything that once felt like effort becomes flow. Different doesn’t mean better. It means essential. It means complementary. It means part of the ecosystem we pretend is simpler than it actually is.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, chances are you care. Maybe about me. Maybe about yourself. Maybe about the beautifully messy spectrum of ways a mind can work when the world isn’t looking. Maybe just about making room for people who navigate life with a slightly different compass. Whatever the reason, thank you. Really. It matters more than you think.
