6 months later, the same head, a few more bruises, and a small field manual.
A while ago I wrote a piece straight from the heart and soul called Different brain, same meeting invite. A lot of you wrote back, some of you wrote back very long. A few of you wrote back with what I can only describe as relieved recognition (the kind people send at midnight, with three typos and one sentence that lands like a hand on your shoulder). You asked for more. You asked me not to stop. You asked for the part I left out, so here it is. The follow-up. Same wiring, different bruises. Life, as one says, goes on.
Let’s begin where most of my exhaustion and frustration begins: everything that even remotely resembles the open-plan office. Yes, indeed: 94% of the offices I frequent, including ours.
Open-plan was sold to the world as collaboration. (By architects who, suspiciously, never had to work in one.) It is, in practice, an acoustic assault disguised as a productivity strategy. For a brain like mine (HIP, HSD, ASD L1, DT*, EM** — *divergent thinker, **eidetic memory — the full Belgian neurocognitive tasting menu), an open office is not a safe and benign workspace. It is a sensory blender on its highest setting, plugged in directly to my very nervous nervous system. The hum of the ventilation. The slow-motion symphony of seven people typing at slightly different tempos. The laugh from the digital department corner that always lands a half-second late. The colleague who takes calls on speaker because his airpods “won’t connect” (they will, he just wants company). The smell of the microwave at 11.43. The fluorescent flicker most people stopped registering in 1998. I register all of it. At the same time. Continuously. There is no filter. There is no off-switch. There is only intake.
Let me say this now, so it colors everything that follows. Divergent does not mean superior. Not in any way. Different wiring shines in some rooms and falls flat in others. Neurotypical colleagues see things I miss, switch gears without melting, and keep momentum where I get stuck chasing implications. We are complementary, not competing. The point of this piece is not that the orchestra needs more of me. The point is that the orchestra plays better when every instrument is allowed to sound like itself. Including, especially, the loud cheerful trumpet two desks down. Just preferably not before my third coffee.
The current obsession with the full return to the (open) office, “to rebuild culture“, becomes, in my neurodivergent eyes, one of the great capital management mistakes of the decade. You do not build culture with people who have to put noise-cancelling headphones on to function. You do not build belonging by forcing forty humans to share thirty square meters of acoustic chaos and call the leftover stress “energy”. Culture is built in moments that matter. (And I am all for it: that’s why I keep showing up.) In small rooms with the right people. In corners designed for two brains and one whiteboard. In rituals chosen on purpose. In silence allowed without apology. In the right to walk out, think, and come back with something worth saying. Almost everything I have ever seen actually enhance a workforce, meaningfully, culturally, symbiotically, was built that way. None of it was built by an open office. Open offices broadcast. Culture compounds. Those are not even remotely the same verb.
Of course, there is Monday morning. Monday morning in an open-plan office is its own particular punishment for the neurodivergent. Monday is when colleagues, brimming with the residue of a weekend, blast their personal lives across the floor like a public service announcement nobody requested. The kayak trip. The in-laws. The renovation. The kid’s football tournament that, miraculously, every single parent in the room finds equally fascinating. I have nothing against any of it. I am genuinely happy your weekend involved a forest, a barbecue, and a child who scored a goal. I just cannot, neurologically, process all of it as background. My brain treats every voice as foreground. Every story as a thing requiring attention. Every detail as a new tab opened in a browser that already has 312 tabs open.
By 10.30 on a Monday, I have already done a full day’s emotional labor and I have not yet answered an email.
This is the part nobody believes until they live in this head. I burn roughly 75% of my daily energy on the things that the majority of my colleagues do not even notice they are doing. Navigating the noise. Filtering the input. Translating my thinking into linear sentences. Performing socially acceptable enthusiasm. Remembering that “how was your weekend” is a ritual, a greeting, a verbal handshake, and absolutely not a request for actual data. That 75% is the tax. The remaining 25% is what the company is actually paying me for. Imagine what I could do, what most of us could do, on 80% concentrated on the work that matters and 20% on the rest.
Meetings, procedures and workgroups deserve their own paragraph, because they were designed, with great earnestness, for a brain that is the statistical average. Which is fine. I am not the statistical average. Meetings assume that thinking happens in real time, in spoken sentences, in front of other humans, on a schedule. None of those four things is true for me. I think slowly when I am performing and quickly when I am alone. I think in images, not sentences. I think in branches, not bullet points. By the time someone has finished asking a question, I have already mapped seven possible answers, three of which are interesting, one of which is the actual answer, and I am now busy editing it back down into something that will fit the rest of the room. The rest of the room rarely waits: the rest of the room has an agenda. The rest of the room has a coffee break in eleven minutes.
Procedures are worse. Procedures are the institutional belief that a process designed for the middle of the curve serves everyone on it. (It does not. It serves the middle. The edges, by definition, are not served. The edges are accommodated when they complain loudly enough.) Work-groups are an exquisite torture invented by people who have never watched a divergent thinker try to wait their turn while six neurotypicals brainstorm out loud. I love brainstorming. I just need to do it on paper, alone, in silence, and then bring you the result already structured. That is not how work-groups work. Work-groups are democracy with snacks and, yes, screaming loud colored post-its. And when the work itself is shallow, when complexity is missing, when nothing intellectually serious is on the table, boredom becomes a slow, quiet burn-out nobody talks about. Bore-out is as lethal as burnout. It just wears nicer shoes.
There is also the contrarian setting, which I will not pretend is always charming. My wired instinct, when I see a plan, is to find the part of it that will fail. Not because I want it to fail. Because I can already see the route from here to the cliff. I see ironclad disasters in slow motion (I have seen them often enough to recognize the shape from across a room). And it is one of the loneliest feelings in professional life to watch a group of intelligent, well-meaning people walk steadily toward a wall they cannot see, while you, the one who can see it, are politely asked to “keep things constructive”, or “to hold your horses; be patient”. I have learned to phrase the warning in three different registers. The diplomatic version. The structured version. The one that finally works, which is usually a metaphor involving something on fire. None of it is comfortable, all of it is necessary. The cost of not saying it is higher than the cost of being the difficult one. But it often comes at a very real cost: for me.
Sometimes I want to shake people. Gently. Affectionately. Just hard enough that the slide deck falls out of their hand and they look up, and try to see what I see.
Then there is the signal nobody reads correctly: silence. If I do not respond, it is not personal. It is not disinterest. It is not passive aggression. It is my brain raising the small red flag that I have run out of social fuel and I need the room to myself for a while. The radio silence is the message. The unanswered email is the message. The closed door is the message. (My wife reads this perfectly after twenty-three years.) Please do not chase me into the corner I retreated to. I am not sulking. I am recharging. The version of me that comes back after an hour of quiet is the version that solves your problem in eight minutes. The version of me you would have squeezed an answer out of during the meeting would have given you a three-week detour and a regrettable email. It’s also a safety valve: trust me, things can erupt brutely if my silence bubble is respectlessly pierced. A warrior in me will take my defense, and (speaking out of experience) you will most likely not like it.
Which brings me to the strongholds.
I have a small number of physical places that function as decompression chambers for my nervous system, and I treat them with the seriousness of a sailor who actually wants to make it home. My car is one. The car is a moving Faraday cage of silence and jazz, where the only voice I have to manage is my own (and a couple of others in my head). My bath is another. (Mock all you want. The bath has saved more strategic projects than any consultant ever billed for.) My office, when the door is closed and the music is right, is the third. These are by no means luxuries. They are survival infrastructure. They are how I avoid the slow, expensive crash that comes from running a high-intake nervous system on open-office settings for too long. Take any of them away from me and you take productivity with it (and courtesy). The math is not very subtle.
Let me say this carefully because it sounds dramatic and it is not meant to: most modern offices make it easier for someone to bring their dog or their pet tarantula, than to bring their neurodivergence. I love dogs. I am not anti-dog. I am pro-honest-comparison. There is a dog policy. There is a desk for the dog. There is a water bowl. There is a Slack channel for the dog. There are not, in most companies I have walked through, any of the equivalent accommodations for a brain that needs quiet, distance, structured asynchronous communication, low fluorescent lighting, and the right to disappear for an hour without a reason being demanded. The dog gets a bowl. The neurodivergent employee often gets a divergent performance review.
The asymmetry is funny only on the surface.
I will also confess something most people would not expect from a 1.78m, multilingual, executive-coded specimen who spends a lot of time in front of stages: this weekend I tried to watch the Eurovision Song Contest. As one does. The set, the lights, the camera cuts, the languages switching every three minutes, the crowd, the LEDs, the costume changes, the camera tilts, the audio compression, the sequins that catch the studio lighting in a way no human eye should be asked to track. Twelve minutes in my brain had to leave the room. Twelve minutes. Not because the show is bad. The show is excellent at what it does. The show is a precisely engineered overstimulation machine, and my synapses were screaming. Eurovision, like most modern entertainment, is calibrated for a nervous system that wants more. Mine is constantly negotiating for less.
A word on foresight, since several of you asked. The eidetic memory mentioned in the first piece has a sibling that gets less attention: pattern foresight. The thing where you watch a meeting begin and you already know how it ends. The thing where a colleague describes a project plan and you can see the three places it will break before the second slide. The thing where you read a strategy doc and the holes glow at you like spotlights on a dark stage. This is having seen the pattern often enough that the pattern is the first thing your brain reaches for. The lonely part is not the seeing. The lonely part is the watching. Watching the room not see it. Watching the decision get made anyway. Watching the consequences land six months later and being told, with some surprise, that “nobody could have predicted this.” (I could have. I did. I was told to be constructive.) That experience, accumulated over decades, leaves a particular kind of fatigue. Cassandra fatigue. It is a real condition. Look it up.
Here is the practical part, because I refuse to leave a piece like this without one. Quiet is not a luxury. Print this on a coffee mug. Put the mug on the desk of whoever still thinks open-plan is a productivity strategy. Quiet is bandwidth. Bandwidth is thought. Thought is the thing the company is allegedly paying for.
Async is not antisocial. Most of my best work happens in the gap between when you ask me something and when I reply. That gap is where the thinking lives. Compress the gap and you compress the answer. Compress it enough and you get the noise the procedure wanted, not the signal the problem needed.
Silence is a status update. If a neurodivergent colleague has gone quiet, do not poke. Wait. Trust. The answer is coming. The answer is better for the silence.
Routines are scaffolding, not rigidity. My morning routine is not a quirk. It is the rebar inside the day. Move it and the building wobbles. People who admire my “consistency” rarely understand that the consistency is what makes the rest of me possible.
Strongholds are sacred. Car, bath, office, library, hotel room with the curtains drawn. Build a few. Defend them. The bath, I will say one more time, is undefeated.
And finally, for the colleagues, managers, partners and friends of someone like me: cognitive diversity is only a strength when the surroundings are built to receive it. Otherwise it is just a quiet, expensive tax on the person carrying it. The accommodation is not difficult. It is not even costly. It is mostly a matter of permission. Permission to think slowly out loud or quickly, without having to wait (“I’m not finished”) or to rush. Permission to skip the Monday weekend recap (we love you, we just cannot process it before coffee). Permission to close the door, create a space. Permission to send the email instead of attending the meeting. Permission to be a fully functional adult who occasionally needs forty minutes alone to be brilliant for you for the next four hours.
I am writing this from my home office. The door is closed. There is jazz on, low. My coffee is at exactly the right temperature, which happens about once a month. My girls are downstairs. My brain, briefly, is not translating. It is just thinking. And from this small, fortified room, with no fluorescent flicker, no Monday morning weekend report, no procedure to follow, no workgroup voting on the color of the deck, no whatsapp message recalling that I have an email about a call I did not take, I can give you my full 100%.
Imagine what an office could do if it let people like me work this way more often. Imagine what a country could do. Imagine what a species could do. I know, I’m blasting it out of proportion. On purpose.
We are not, as the popular narrative would have it, broken versions of a standard model. We are also not, as the other popular narrative would have it, secretly superior. Both stories are lazy. We are different instruments, mostly left out of the orchestra, occasionally allowed in for a solo, and then asked why we do not play the second violin parts as cleanly as the second violins. We are not second violins. We never were. Hand us our instrument. Give us space. Lower the lights. And listen.
You might be surprised what the music sounds like.
If this resonated, the first piece is here: Different brain, same meeting invite.
More on this pillar: 100,000 Miles is the rolling sourcing project this writing belongs to.
