Let’s Talk Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Neurodiversity Celebration Week – Speaker‑Labelled Transcript

Welcome to the University of Manchester Neurodivergent Staff Network podcast.

It's Neurodiversity Celebration Week, and I wanted to talk to some of my neurodivergent colleagues about a range of topics.
I'm Matthew Harrison, one of the co-chairs of the Neurodivergent Staff Network, and I'll be talking to Amy, Hannah, Marianthi, and Simon.

Matthew:
I started off by asking Amy, what has changed for you since you found out that you were neurodivergent?

Amy:
I definitely felt a sense of purpose and like I could achieve a lot more, especially after I started medication probably around two years ago.
It definitely changed my life and I realised that I was able to do things a lot easier than before.

So before I would think, oh gosh, I can't do this or it's going to take me forever.

Whereas when I started the medication, I realised how much I was able to do and that there actually wasn't anything wrong with me and I wasn't lazy.
It was just that I needed to do things a little bit differently or I might have just needed a little bit of help.

And it definitely gave me confidence to express things, especially in the work setting, if I didn't feel comfortable or I didn't understand something.
Whereas previously I would just sit and I just feel a little bit stupid and think everyone else knows what they're talking about.

Whereas then when I found out, I did start looking into, how the brain works and I realised, I just need things in different contexts.

Marianthi:
So this was put to me as a very tentative suggestion by my therapist when I was already 42 years old.

So it's changed a lot in how I perceive my own self and my own life.

And it's been a little bit of a tween journey because I started accepting it more as I started seeing that in my daughter as well.

So I'm no longer bashing myself when I feel that that I'm avoiding a certain task or I'm trying not to start a certain task or I have intrusive thoughts about how to approach a specific thing that I have to do and rather I think I've started becoming more conversational with myself and trying to lessen that critical aspect of what my brain is telling me most of the time.

And also I've I've started to make the journey towards changing the way that I work and function and incorporating a lot more rest in my personal life because I realised that this was the source of a lot of anguish on my part, that I didn't have the rest that I absolutely need and quiet time that I need to recharge.

So that was a great development for me and I wouldn't have done that before realising what is going on.

I was diagnosed at the age of 44, so very similar. And we've been managing all our lives not knowing this.

And as you say, you're kind of bashing yourself for not being able to do as much as you think other people are doing or struggling in ways, we're struggling with things that other people don't seem to be struggling with.

And now, when I look back, and the things that I've done in my life when I was struggling with, being autistic and probably ADHD, but not realising it, I think, wow, how did I do that?

You know, I now feel proud of some of the things that I was able to do.

Matthew:
What about you?
What about you, Simon?
Can you relate to any of that?

Simon:
Yeah, so for me, I was diagnosed last year with autism, so another late diagnosis.

But I I spent my life masking. I was very, very good at masking.

And most people went, yeah, slightly quirky, but just slightly odd. That's it.

And then once I got the diagnosis and realized that I didn't have to mask as much and I could be myself, and I hadn't realized I was masking.

It's only when somebody tells you, right, actually, this is what you've been doing.

And you go, Okay, great. That's I can just be myself. And for me, the cost wasn't in not being able to do things. I could do everything, but the cost was stress and exhaustion.

And so I was able to do most things that everybody else was doing, but I was getting far more tired far quickly, far more quickly.

And then going, I don't need to mask as much. I don't need to. I can just, this is me.

And consciously having to unmask, which is interesting because I'd spent most of my life unconsciously masking and now going, actually, I don't need to mask.

I'm going to put a conscious effort just to be myself.

It turns out it's okay. And then I don't get as tired as quickly. You know, the scenarios where I do have to mask.

That's fine, okay? I will get through life doing the bits. It's just picking the times when I need to do that.

But there's other times when I can just relax and consciously make the effort not to pretend that I'm somebody else.

And that means that I have a much better understanding of my limits and I can see when I'm going to likely to have to do that to mask and
preemptively put things in place to go, I'm going to be exhausted by the end of this week because there's certain scenarios that I have to and the cost is this, but let's manage that.

And other times going, you know what?

I don't care. Nobody else is going to care.

Because it turns out I work with a lot of very nice and friendly people who just go, yeah, fine, whatever. If that makes you happier, go for it.

Matthew:
It's really interesting, I think, that you're the first person to mention masking.

And I'm really, I'm massively pro discussions about women and girls not being diagnosed because they're so good at masking and they do it, from being a very young age, they tend to be better at it than boys and men are.
But clearly you are an example and I'm an example and my son is an example that men do it too.

But actually, what I think is that the conversations that have been started by neurodivergent women and how they've been missed and also misdiagnosed have really helped men as well who mask. We were diagnosed for the same reason that a lot of women weren't diagnosed.
So I will carry on talking about women being undiagnosed and masking until I drop dead probably.

Last but not least, Hannah, what are your thoughts on this question?

Hannah:
Yeah, so I've been nodding through a lot of the answers that everybody's already given.

I definitely relate to a lot of that.

So I was also late diagnosed. I was diagnosed as autistic at the age of 39.
But I actually first suspected that I was autistic when I was 16, after learning a little bit about what was then called Asperger's syndrome.

And there wasn't much understanding back then of how autism often manifests differently for women and girls, similar to what's just been said.
So I was told by people around me at the time that I didn't seem autistic.
And I actually had a neighbour who worked with neurodivergent children, and she said that I couldn't be autistic because autistic children are disruptive and I wasn't disruptive.

So there was that kind of stereotype, which is mostly based on kind of boys, but also not even entirely true for boys, right?

So I completely buried that idea for 20 years. I felt kind of embarrassed for having even brought it up until my late 30s when I finally kind of went to get diagnosed.

And like a lot of sort of late diagnosed or late realised people, a big part of that kind of realisation for me was going back over all of those difficult experiences that I'd had growing up and seeing them in this new kind of light that actually I was grappling with something that my peers mostly weren't.

So the biggest change for me, I think, has just been that realisation that I wasn't failing, that I was just different and Neurodivergent people often talk about realising that you're a normal zebra rather than a failed horse.
And I think that really kind of sums it up well for me.

Matthew:
I think, was it, was it Simon Baron Cohen?

It may not have been him, but it was someone in that era many years ago who coined, I think came up with the phrase, the extreme male brain.
And as you say, that describes a certain type of autistic child, always boys, disruptive, really struggling with their environment and kicking off because they were really, really struggling.

But it doesn't describe everybody at all.

It just describes a fairly, probably quite small minority of autistic people.
So yeah, even professionals were getting that wrong and some even still do.

Okay, so let's talk a bit about neurodivergent community.

Have you found it feels different talking and meeting with other neurodivergent people or people that have similar experiences to you?
Hannah?

Hannah
Yeah, so I think it's definitely helpful to kind of build those connections with people who have similar experiences.

Although I will say, I think sometimes that's an assumption that if you meet someone who is also autistic, that you will kind of have a natural affinity, but we can also be quite different from each other and have kind of different experiences as well.

But I'd say for me, more than a process of kind of finding people more like myself, I've discovered that a lot of people who are in my life already when neurodivergent.

So there's this kind of stereotype that neurodivergent people tend to travel in packs, whether we actually know it or not.

And a lot of my friends and family have also been diagnosed in the past few years, either with autism or ADHD.

There's been a kind of domino effect where one person gets diagnosed and they talk to the next person and they're like, oh yeah, I think that might actually be me as well.

So I think through that sort of process, we've all gained a better understanding of each other than we had, as well as of ourselves.

Amy
I would also, I mean, I don't really know that many people that are neurodivergent, especially in my age or any of my friends. I mean, I have my suspicions, but they haven't been diagnosed or they may not know.
But obviously both of my, one of my sons is autistic and the other one is on the pathway now.

And I do think it is easier sometimes when we're out and you know, we go to a lot of SEN days and we see other families and speaking to other families that are experiencing the same thing about us, I feel like it's a lot easier to speak to them and they understand your struggles and understand absolutely everything that you're saying.

Whereas, speaking to other families whose children may not be neurodivergent or some of my friends with children, I find it a lot harder because we don't really have a lot of common ground because, our experiences of being parents, like everybody's, is different.

So I definitely find it a lot easier to speak to, families with children that do have different needs.

Marianthy
I just wanted to add something to that because I thought it was really great and I was nodding along.

Yes, to discovering people in your immediate environment.

Yes, to discover that you have more to talk about and maybe connect on with other families or with other people that you realise that they're in the network at work is amazing and such a lot of common ground.

What I wanted to add there was about the online community and I've learned so much because especially when I started off with my therapist suggestion.

She first told me, I know you're a person that wants to look at studies and wants to find out things that have been, you know, substantiated and there's evidence around that.

But there's none of that at the moment for women that are late diagnosed.
So this was only four years ago, four and a bit. So it's come massively along and she urged me to find communities online and see whether I could swap experiences and try to realise some things about myself through those.

And this was absolutely game changing for me because I didn't realise that this is such a big thing.

And I think it exploded after the pandemic when a lot of people and a lot of women realised this for themselves.

So I'd like to shout out for the online community.

Yes, there can be a little bit of difficult discussions and so on, but I found it to be a very a great community for solidarity and for supporting each other and obviously depends on who are the people, but the specific creators out there that have created a community around them.

And that community is life-saving at times for me.

Matthew:
Going back to what Amy was saying just a minute ago, let's talk a bit about the impact on family life or any caring responsibilities.

Now, I can definitely comment briefly here. My son is also autistic. We think my wife is neurodivergent.

And so Simon was saying earlier, just getting really exhausted with masking at work and all of that stuff. I kind of burnt out in recent years.

And it does have an impact on how effective I am as a parent and how much I can do at the weekend and things like that.

Simon:
Fully agree with those. So. I've got two kids.

One of them we suspect is neurodivergent, the other probably also neurodivergent.

It was interesting that Hannah talked about the domino effect. So I got my diagnosis after my sister started getting a diagnosis.

I was off for stress for three months last year. And during that, she was getting her diagnosis and went, Why don't you get one?

To which I went, Oh, right, life makes a lot more sense now.

And then I've got other family members that have been neurodivergent.

So that community kind of comes in and then you start seeing the traits in your kids.

And so we start looking at the behaviour and almost become hypersensitive to it and going, okay, are they, and can we get them some help early and help them with an early diagnosis?

Or is that just normal behavior? And just trying to balance that.

But aside from the diagnosis, like you, I think evenings and weekends in the run up to my burnout and subsequent diagnosis, I was utterly useless at home in terms of being able to engage with the kids.

My wife was doing most of the life admin and taking on quite a large burden of that.

I was off for an extended period. I've got myself back into a better space and we've we understand what I'm good at and what I'm not good at.

So, you know, I'm not particularly good at talking to people, unsurprisingly, strangers especially.

So going to birthday parties and socializing with all of the parents.

My wife does all of that because she knows that it's going to be really stressful for me.

So I'll do other things. And so we can start working out what can I do and do without huge amounts of stress?

What can she do that she's better suited? And so we allocate life responsibilities according to what can we do best which has been really, really helpful.

And then managing to unmask at work means I'm less tired at home, which means I've got a bit more energy to engage with the kids.

So it's been really helpful for my family to understand what my limits are and what my best ways of working are.

And sometimes you can't get the perfect thing.

So it's just like, we're just going to have to buckle up and deal with this, fine.

But we go into that knowing we're going to have to do that and that there's consequences will come a couple of days later. And so we'll plan for that.
So if there's going to be a really hectic weekend where there's lots of social engagements with friends, family, going out in public, whatever it is, the weekend after we'll try and be a little bit quieter because we know that we all need a bit of downtime to kind of get that recharging.

So it's really just helped understand what our limits are and then share the responsibilities and not just offload them onto one person.

Matthew:
Yeah, I'm smiling here because this all sounds incredibly familiar.

I've not been as sociable at all over the last couple of years and sometimes I feel a bit guilty about that and I'm trying to learn not to do that.

Amy, can I go back to you because you talked about some of this earlier on.

Amy
Yeah, at first I definitely found it very hard to process.

So my first son was already diagnosed and I was halfway through my pregnancy with my second son when I got an ADHD and autism diagnosis.
And then I just felt all this sense of guilt of thinking, oh my gosh, I've gave it to my first son.

And, you know, is my second son going to be the same?

Because both of my children are non-verbal, which obviously brings a lot of different barriers with that as well.

So it was really hard at first.

And, you know, me and my husband both work different shifts because my son couldn't attend an SEN school at first and nobody had taken for after school clubs.

So then in the end my husband left work and became a stay-at-home carer and he looks after both of the children while I'm working.

I think it was quite a difficult thing to process.

And obviously we're still in the very early stages because my second son has now just been sent off to the paediatrician.

So at the moment, our life's a bit up and down and you never really know what you're going to expect.

And then mix that in with lack of sleep because both of them don't know what sleep is for some reason.

But I did think it was quite hard at first.

And then after I'd had my second son, I could start medication because you can't start it while you're pregnant.

So, coming, just having a baby, then starting ADHD medication.

And I was put on antidepressants for five years because they didn't know I was neurodiverse. They just kept saying, take these, take these.

So having a baby, starting that, then coming off different medication and then having two children to have to deal with was, it was extremely hard at first.

And some days are better than other days and we're getting into a little bit of a routine now, but we found it that if you have children that are neurodiversity, it seemed like it was impossible for you both to work full time, especially when they have high care needs because, you know, there's not a lot of support out there.

Not a lot of schools will have after school clubs.

So we did find it quite difficult, but they're happy and that's all I always say.
I care about that they're happy.

Matthew:
Yeah, we've been doing quite a bit of reading up on some of the challenges that some parents faced and potentially considering homeschooling simply because of the challenges in a normal school environment that our son really struggles with.

Finally, Marianthi, have you got anything to add on this?

Marianthy
Yeah, so I did mention that I started looking at my daughter and recognised some of the traits. It was amazingly quite difficult to persuade my partner that our daughter seems to be exhibiting those traits rather than showing him that I do.

So some of the times at the beginning were quite difficult in terms of, you know, accepting and working with us within constraints or restrictions or in making things better for our child and accommodating her needs.
'
So it's been a long journey, I would have to say, but with more and more teachers, specialists and people that are recognising what's going on, adding their voice, I think that's incredibly important when possibly a parent or a partner doesn't want to see something that's in front of them.

It's been a long, long journey for us too, but I think we're getting to a point where we're recognising when things are becoming too much or when, you know, we're putting too much pressure, we should ease off or when we're trying to do too many things at once as a family and socially and so on.

So those concepts that we just talked about with Simon and Amy, I think it's incredibly important for that to be the acceptance so you can incorporate those changes into everyday life and make things better for everyone.

So, yeah, if it doesn't happen at the beginning, my advice would would be to persevere and, you know, talk about things openly and and list some help and list some people that might be, you know, coming with the order of authority.

If you cannot get through to someone that is incredibly important to get there to.

Matthew:
I'd like to move on now talking a bit more about the workplace.

I want to ask if any of you who have had success with reasonable adjustments or have you even disclosed your neurodivergence at work?

I'll briefly start.
When I first got my diagnosis, you know, we were working in or working in offices and I started to understand some of the things that I was struggling there.

And my line manager at the time suggested moving me into a different office.

And that made literally no difference whatsoever. It was still bright lights. It was still kind of, disruptions and so on and so forth. I then had, once I moved into my next role, I had a pretty nasty kind of burnout where I was unable to work for, I think it was about 3 months on that occasion.
It was really quite bad. And when I returned, I think it was understood by my line manager in that new role really how important it was for me to be able to work from home.

And since then, I've worked from home virtually all the time. And I'm able to control my environment here. I can control the lighting, the heating. I can quickly get, you know, get water or whatever. I can make food that doesn't upset my stomach. I can, you know, get outside if I need to. I don't have to be on the train. I don't have to be stuck in traffic and the things I think it's, difficult to describe why those things are hard, but, trains and buses can be smelly and noisy and, really quite unpleasant places to be for, sensory kind of reasons.

Hannah, can you relate to any of that?

Or have you got any thoughts about disclosure at work or reasonable adjustments?

Hannah
I mean, so I also have a physical health condition.

So a lot of the reasonable adjustments that I have in place for that are also helpful from an autism perspective, which means I don't always necessarily have to disclose that I'm autistic.

I'm a wheelchair user, so people can already see that I'm disabled.
But so things like working part-time, limiting the number of hours of teaching that I do in a day, or working from home when I don't need to be on campus, all of these are helpful for my physical condition, but also to avoid kind of social and sensory overwhelm, like you said.

But I think a lot of the adjustments that help me aren't just the kind of formal things that we would put in a DAS letter, for example.

They're also the smaller things that I do to accommodate myself.

So, one thing that I've always found difficult is unclear instructions.

So because autistic communication styles tend to be quite literal and quite kind of specific and detail oriented. We sometimes find that neurotypical ways of communicating can feel a bit vague or sort of full of subtext that's difficult to interpret.

So, but then when we ask clarifying questions, those are sometimes interpreted as kind of back chat or trying to challenge someone rather than just a request for information.

And this actually, this is something that happens in the classroom too, with students kind of questioning teachers.

But similar to what I think Amy said earlier about asking questions, that's something that I've been working on for myself is just to ask the clarifying question rather than kind of quietly stress about whether I've understood something correctly.

And also treating questions from students and colleagues in the same way that I would want my questions to be treated.

Simon.
So when I got my diagnosis and I came back after my burnout,
I went full transparency. So I wrote a three page document that explained what had happened and the fact that I was autistic and that this is what I understood that meant.

And these are now my rules of engagement. So I send that around my entire research group.

My colleagues that I worked with, PhD students, postdocs, and I just went, this is me, accept it.

As much as I'm understanding myself, you need to understand how I work as well.

So the clear, concise instructions, the blunt feedback, or the feedback that's perceived to be blunt, when actually it's just clear and concise, it just lacks the emotional kind of padding that goes around it.

The inability to go, how was your weekend?

or the extra effort required to hold a social type conversation because I don't care or not that I don't care.

It just it doesn't register as a thing that I should be caring about in our transactional discussions that we're kind of having.

So I have this set of kind of guidelines for interacting with me, which I share either in written form if I need to, or I sit down with new researchers, new students in my teaching with my master's students.

First lecture, hi, I'm autistic. This is how we're going to deal with each other.
Because my view of it has very much been, it's a factual based thing. So I attach little emotional baggage to the, this is my health problem.

It's like, this is just a factual summary of what's happened to me. This is our interactions and so everybody is clear. This is how I expect to behave. This is how I expect, or this is how you should expect me to behave. This is how I'd hope you would behave.

With a view to normalizing it, insofar as I'm autistic and the response should be, so what?

I'm neurodivergent.

Meh.

Okay, great.

How does that impact me?

Well, it shouldn't really.

I'm just, this is how I talk.

How are you going to talk?

How are we going to interact?

Let's find some common ground.

So that's been quite productive.

So far, I've not had any major pushback, but I've been very lucky to have a very strong support group around me.

And the reasonable adjustments that were made, you know, like you, I now work from home two days, well, not as much, but I, I've got a lot of student facing stuff, but I try and get two days a week at home.

I'm just formalising that going, I need to break my week up because if I do 3 consecutive days in the office, I am spent.

That is me utterly useless Thursdays and Fridays.

So when you need either a Tuesday or a Wednesday at home, that's fine.
My other main one that I have, which is so trivial, but it makes a big difference is just wearing a hoodie at any time.

Like one of my safe spaces isn't a room or a building.

It's just putting my hood up. And I've always done this ever since I was a kid, not realizing what it meant. So I now have university branded hoodies. I will wear them to virtually everything.

And if I've come out of a meeting, and that's I just need to clear my head. The hoodie goes straight up.

I don't care if I'm coming out of a meeting with senior leadership or with PhD students.

I will walk in and have walked into meetings with my hoodie up and then pulled it down.

Almost daring anybody to challenge it, going, look, you have coffee and the ability to do whatever. I need my hoodie up to to cope with this.

And again, just kind of normalizing that and going, it's okay to be slightly different because everybody is, even if you're neurotypical, you know, everybody is different within the bubble of being neurotypical or neurodivergent.

So let's just have some level of acceptance that is it impacting you?

No.

Would I do this in, you know, if a minister came by and needed to visit while I, yes, probably.

I don't really care. You know, there's only certain things where I'll put my suit on the rest of the time.

This is me.

Marianthy
That's so great.
I really love everything that you talked about so far.

For me, it seems that I've never actually acted when I thought about it.
It's the words reasonable adjustments.

I've gone through a long career, almost 20 years of holding firmly in my head that the moment I gain a new manager or I change jobs, my first task is to actually start managing up and explaining to this particular person or my team.

If I do have a team that I manage, what are the rules of engagement?
As Simon said, you know, this is the way we're working all together in the best way possible.

Tell me what your needs are. I'll tell you what my needs are.
So some of the needs that I've always communicated are clear deadlines, because if you don't give me a clear deadline, whatever the task case is going to go to the bottom of my priority list, there's nothing to be done about it.

It will come up again. Why not do you have a deadline?

Tell me exactly what you want me to do.

If you just leave it very, very vague, it would stop me from even starting about it because I will get very stressed about what it is I'm supposed to be doing.

So I will always go back and ask for clarifications, making sure that I understand what this question is asking and depending on the importance of them as a stakeholder or sometimes the seniority, sometimes, you know, I will handhold that requirement stage more or less.

If they are, you know, my team, I will make sure that I will spend some time to discuss how best to work all together and explain that, you know, if you do this for all of us, this will be, you know, the best way we can work as a team.

And I think everybody has found it very, very useful because I insist so much on clarity and specificity that it makes it really difficult for people to be vague and just, you know, allow for scope creep in projects or anything like that.

I really don't deal with scope creep.

So that that was one of them.

Since I realised that I probably am, you know, neurodivergent.

Yes, I've discussed this at work and I'm very grateful for the university environment because most of the people are so incredibly supportive.
They don't seem to think, you know, twice about this.

I think there's a little bit of acceptance that it's a very good environment to be quirky. A very good environment to be university and that you know diversity is actually a form one another form of diversity that we are celebrating and we're really thankful about because we wouldn't be much as a community without it.

So I'm very grateful for this and for being at the university at this point that I really have this about myself.

Matthew
I think you make a good point.

And I was thinking while I was listening to a couple of you talk that we are quite lucky where we work. There are lots of people out there working in organizations who, first of all, organizations that are not as large and small companies or whatever, and your boss might just not really understand, not have an awful lot of capacity for taking it on board, even though it is their legal duty to do so, I think we're quite lucky.

And having the DASS service to kind of back us up is really good as well.

Amy
So I've always worked in my team probably nearly nine years, so pretty much when I started the university.

So everybody, I was quite comfortable with everybody.

I think I actually might have just walked into the office one day and said, I've just been diagnosed with this. And it was just like, okay, you know, what do you need?

Is there anything that you need from us? And it was just a very comfortable thing.

And like you said, I am very lucky because I know a lot of people probably wouldn't experience that in certain workplaces.

I didn't have to really ask for any reasonable adjustments.

So when we moved from the Roscoe building to John Owens and we went to an open plan office, which was very different to where we were, there was small little rooms.

And then we joined with other teams and other teams came and sat in our office and everything was online.

Now that did become very difficult when there's multiple people on a call at once or every single desk is full.

It gets very overstimulating and especially the bright lights, because some of the buildings have real bright lights in them.

I didn't actually have to ask for anything. I think my manager sort of noticed, you know, about the lights thing.

I think I'd made a few comments some other people had. So they went and just put a dimmer switch in so you could dim the light switches.

And then our director, she has an office, a private office, and she doesn't really use it.

And she just said, okay, we're going to turn my office into a quiet workspace for two people.

You know, you can go in there, no phone calls, no chatting really.
It's just to go and get your head down if you're a bit overstimulated.

So I don't think I've ever really had to ask for anything.

I think, you know, my team are great at just seeing if there's something that needs changing, then they'll automatically do it.

So a couple of weeks ago I came into the office and all the desks were booked out and our manager had said, I've noticed all the desks are booked out today, so I've booked my office out for you all day just in case you need it if it's a bit overwhelming for you.

So I think things like that are just great, you know, that you don't have to ask for it.

Your team just knows if it's something that you would need.

Matthew
Yeah, that's sounds brilliant.

And I think kind of not only what you were just saying, but what Marianthy touched upon before comes back to this idea that's been discussed in the network a few times.

It's a bit of a line management lottery.

I've had the bad and now the good.

And there are lots of people across the university who are struggling to get their voices heard or their needs met because of just the structure of the team that they're in.

And a lot of the time, I don't necessarily blame an individual line manager.
There's a kind of a, there's an awful lot of expectation on individual line managers and they're not necessarily equipped to deal with it.

Amy
We are actually in the process of creating a course for line managers called Supporting Diverse Needs to try and help with, you know, the scenarios like Matthew just said.

Brilliant.

Hannah, did you want to come back on this one?

Hannah
Yeah, I agree that academia in some ways is kind of a more accepting place to be neurodivergent, but it's also in the industry where there are a lot of people on precarious and fixed term contracts, kind of casual contracts.
And I've certainly known a lot of disabled people in academia who are understandably nervous about disclosing their disabilities for that reason.
And I know when I was, I'm A lecturer now, but when I was diagnosed as autistic, I was on a fixed term contract as a postdoc and I felt worried about how, you know, if I was open about that, how it might kind of affect my chances on the job market.

So I do feel my feelings kind of changed once I got into that permanent job.
And I do think it's kind of incumbent on people who do have that bit more job security to be able to kind of think about how we can make academia more accessible, inclusive.

And part of that is about speaking out about our own experiences like we're doing here today.

Matthew
Final question, and it's quite a big one.

I want to talk about embracing your new, in inverted commas, self.
What does neurodivergence mean to you?

What positives have come out of understanding yourself?

I want to go to Marianthy first.

Marianthy
So thank you, Matthew.

This took me quite a bit of time to just even formulate, to be honest.
For me, it means most of all acceptance, means that, you know, I've been this person for all of my life.

I didn't know what was different, but I was always told, you're a little bit different.

You do things a little bit differently.

It's mostly about acceptance and learning to talk to myself with compassion and a way that, you know, I managed to utilize my best strengths rather than what I've really suffered with, which was self-bashing and negative self-talk that went on for quite some time, especially when I found things to be difficult.

So I hope this is something that is resonating with other people.

But for me, it means, first and foremost, accepting oneself, making sure that we work to our own strengths, identifying those strengths, and letting go of anything that you think is a weakness or something that you cannot do really well.

Get people around you that are complementing your own strengths and then you can do that magic of delegating what task is better for everyone.
But yeah, it's been really a great journey for me towards self-acceptance.

Simon
I don't think I can follow that. I think that covers almost everything.

It is that acceptance. I am who I am and I celebrate that.

So I'm really good at some things. One of my close friends who helped me through this all last year said, you know, what is your autistic superpower?
Okay, so what, you've got autism means you are outstanding at certain things and rubbish at others.

Then you look at somebody who's neurotypical and they're rubbish at some things and outstanding at others.

So you just have to find out what you are good at. For me, it's organization and planning.

What am I not good at?

Holding a conversation with a stranger.

So as Marianthy has said, you collaborate, you find people who jigsaw in with you and go, right, I'm going to go to a conference, which is one of the most stressful things to do because it's a bunch of strangers who want to talk to you.

I can't cope with that. I have to.

But if I go with somebody else who I know is very good at the social side of things, I can lean on them and I can contribute. I'll do all of the organisation and planning.

You do all of the conversations and we complement each other or whatever the task is, you go, I'm good at this, I'm weak at that.

You're great at that.

Let's work together because that's going to get the solution.

So I'm proud of being neurodivergent.

I think kind of coming back onto Hannah's point for the last question of those who are secure and stable.

You know, I was in a very privileged position of having being senior enough that I didn't particularly care what other people thought.

I had a secure job and a very strong support network.

So I feel it's incumbent on me to try and act as a role model where I can to go, you can get this far up and you can be like me or you can be different or, you know, that's fine.

And can I try and influence discussions that are going on at the top in some way?

Can I help from the bottom up?

Can I act as that conduit?

So I'm proud to be neurodivergent and I will use it where I can, either for myself or for others.

Matthew
I could say similar things in terms of sort of just accepting who I am and not being embarrassed anymore.

I felt so embarrassed just to be me for my whole life.

And that's still there.

You know, I went through that for over 40 years feeling that way.

And it's never really, maybe never really going to go away.

But I can try and I can sort of ignore it now.

I know it's just a hangover from the past and my life experiences.

Hannah.

Hannah
Yeah, I really relate to that.

I think I grew up with a lot of shame about being different and just starting to kind of let go of some of that has been a big relief.

We've talked a bit about masking and I think that's really a process of hiding a part of yourself.

And we do it to avoid rejection.

But the cost of that is often that people don't really actually know you and you don't feel seen.

And so as well as kind of the extra effort, obviously, that goes into masking every day.

So I think trying to learn to let myself be known has been a really difficult but also worthwhile thing.

And another positive is that I think I've gained a better understanding of a lot of people around me as well, particularly when I have students who might be neurodivergent.

I think particularly in the kind of current political environment where there's been a lot of scepticism over whether certain forms of neurodivergence are overdiagnosed, it's really important to me to be that kind of safe person who is ready to help meet a student's needs rather than kind of doubting them and finding ways to really work with their brain rather than against it.
So I think that that's really one of my favourite parts of the job is being able to support students in that way as well.

Matthew
It does take a long time to start to understand how your brain works and why you struggle with certain things.

And then, as Simon was saying, kind of start to adjust the things that you do and don't do and how you go about things so that you can manage in a way that doesn't burn you out immediately.

Amy
I would probably say that one of my most positive things was, like everybody else has said, you know, masking from probably a really young age and, you know, knowing that I'm different or thinking, Oh gosh, why am I like this and nobody else's?

And I always thought that was such a bad thing.

And then when I realized that, especially my eldest son, my eldest son is like me and he does a lot of things like me. And I watched him do things and I was like, oh my gosh, I love that.

He loves the way that he experiences different things and he thinks the outside is amazing.

And I watched him and then I realized, oh, we are very similar. And then I was thinking, I love all these things about him and I'm exactly the same.
So it's not a negative thing at all. I think you're just processing in your brain for so long, especially if you've not been diagnosed until later on in life, thinking this is the wrong way to do things, because you're taught a certain way that you need to do everything.

And then if you don't fit into that shape, it looks a little bit different.

So I definitely would say that was one of the most positive things is, you know, not having to mask anymore and realising that you don't have to be the same as everybody else.

Matthew
Thanks to Amy, Hannah, Marianthy and Simon and to the other network members who made topic suggestions.

If you'd like to know more about Neurodiversity Celebration Week, please visit neurodiversityweek.com.