When support isn't supportive

The exhausting emotional labour of making yourself understood and advocating for your needs as a neurodivergent adult

Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash

Before discovering my neurodivergence five years ago, it didn’t occur to me that I could be supported to get through life. It seemed like it was completely up to me to make things work and if they didn’t, I just had to try harder. If I reached my limit to cope, the shame of failure was mine to deal with alone.

As a small child, I knew I was different in a way that I couldn’t put words to. I also knew that there was no place for my difference in the business of being normal. Asking for help with things that others seemed to take in their stride would have exposed my difference and invited humiliation. All I wanted to do was blend in and be as inconspicuous as possible.

When you don’t believe your needs matter, it doesn’t occur to you to articulate them. You don’t develop the language to identify and talk about your inner experience and awareness of your internal state atrophies. You overcompensate through perfectionism, people-pleasing and hyper-independence because those things keep you from drowning in a sea of shame.

At a time when I was struggling to keep my head above water, the prospect of being supported in my neurodivergence was like a life raft. But it’s a massive leap to actually seek out that help. When you’re starting from a deeply ingrained belief that your needs don’t matter and your shortcomings are your problem, those first attempts at self-advocacy can feel very shaky.

Although reluctance to acknowledge that you need help is often put down to internalised ableism, the really scary thing is not knowing how your requests for help will land. There’s a lot of emotional labour that goes into making yourself understood when you’re up against people’s unexamined cognitive bias. Many workplaces simply do not have the psychological safety for people to be open about who they are and what they need. It’s an incredibly vulnerable position to be in and exposes you to all kinds of negative consequences from being misunderstood, stigmatised, discriminated against, victimised, performance managed and sidelined.

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It’s not as though support is automatically forthcoming when you’re diagnosed with ADHD or autism later in life. Yes, you can get meds, you can get therapy but there’s no clear pathway for how you navigate the rest of your life as a neurodivergent person. Although you’ve changed profoundly, the world around you hasn’t and it still falls on you to bridge the gap.