Accommodate Thyself
What type of person comes to mind when the term neurodivergent comes up? For those of us with different brains some things are a lot more interesting, and some things disappear completely. There are differences in these blind spots depending on how a person's brain evolved and the specific changes from the accepted baseline. This means the term can be applied to anyone from people with ADD to those with synesthesia. It's a nice little umbrella term that allows those of us with neurological labels to advocate for ourselves without the immediate stigma of whatever our diagnoses might be.
Most neurodivergent people feel like they're inherently different from others. This idea is generally reinforced by social interactions and societal expectations that don't make much sense to us. My story in this area starts early, and like most N.D. people I spent a lot of time trying to understand why some people reacted to things the way they do. I was unlucky enough to be part of the late 90's anti-depressant craze that pushed so many of us to self harm and suicide. Now that we've learned those drugs were targeting an almost unrelated part of the brain, it makes more sense. Science has been catching up and daily I get to read articles that map out brain function with more detail than ever before. There's been the opportunity to understand more about the enhanced brain connections, and the chemical differences that make us who we are. The research is showing just how little it takes to change the human brain, and how big the impact of small changes can have.
For me one of those changes involves the inability to tell the difference between fear and surprise. They look and sound the same to me. Most of the time this difference does not matter, but if I'm not paying close enough attention to context clues I might react poorly to a facial expression or startle response. The last time this happened I was house shopping. On top of being great at their job Our realtor, Katie Haraguchi has a great sense of humor and we spent a lot of time making each other laugh. One time she tried a jump scare when we were going into a storage shed and I only looked over. She smirked and said “You didn't have any reaction at all.” All I could do was smile and shrug because I missed it. There's more that ties in to how my brain actually processes fear, but generally situations like this end up being “funny stories.”
There was one time however that I had to confront this in a large corporate setting where the results were less than desirable. I had spent two weeks researching and developing a training module specific to communicating effectively in telephone and virtual environments. During the first interactive portion of the training there was an exercise where I read off sentences in different tones and emotional inflections for others to identify. Because I already knew I was going to have issues between the two emotions I spent time practicing the tones until what I was doing sounded different in my head. I was sure I had it and went in with confidence.
When we got to the fear and surprise versions of the sentences everyone ended up confused by how I said them. They agreed the sentences sounded basically the same. I was able to explain why it had happened and we went around the room and had them give their versions of the sentences. They had no problems identifying them between themselves, but I had to admit to being lost when we did the exercise blindly. It was an amusing moment, but I really thought I had the difference down, so it was also an important lesson. The next class did the exercise in pairs.
The training module was successful, and was used to re-train the entire call center staff. In the end I had to change the training to accommodate myself. It had the side effect of making the class more engaged, involved, and sure of how tone works. Understanding this limitation also allowed me to change the format of the messaging so everyone would benefit. The one downside is that the second class did not get the literal example of a person not being able to identify an emotion in front of them.
