Designing Life With a Neurodivergent Brain
Think about a time you walked into a room and thought, I don't understand how this place works. Maybe it was a networking event where everyone else seemed to naturally know what to do. Most people feel that awkward moment briefly and move on. They grab a drink, join a table, and settle in.
But for some of us, that feeling becomes a habit of observation. I did not process until I was almost fifty that my entire life had been built around reverse engineering how humans work.
My earliest memories from the early 1980s involve a familiar scene: me in a corner of the class or the gym with a book. It was the perfect vantage point. I watched how people talked, how they laughed, how they reacted.
Of course I was teased for "staring" and making people uncomfortable. But I studied the kids who seemed effortlessly popular and tried to understand what made them so comfortable in the world. I chose the strongest kids in the class as my friends and protectors. Sometimes I helped them with schoolwork. Sometimes they simply found me curious.
The strategy worked, and I could move through the room more easily. I learned how to appear social and confident. I was a cheerleader. I performed in school plays. I got good grades. From the outside, I looked like a kid who belonged.
But internally, something very different was happening. I was not simply participating in social life. I was studying it. I searched for patterns, copied tone and energy, and tried to anticipate what weird quirk of mine might disrupt the illusion. Because making friends quickly became easy, but they always eventually moved on to someone less awkward.
Over time, my brain built a simple equation.
Fitting in equals safety
Being weird equals danger
Being myself equals being weird
So I tried to follow the rules perfectly. The irony, of course, is that trying to follow every rule perfectly is one of the fastest ways to stand out. For years I thought I was building personality. In reality, I was building personas, archetypes, versions of myself designed to match each environment I had to navigate. What I did not understand yet was that my brain was building something. It was learning to map systems.
When I eventually received my AuDHD diagnosis, it was not a surprise. At 49, I finally had language for decades of experiences. My brain was not broken. It was simply running a different operating system.
The world, however, is largely designed for a single operating system. If you are running something different, you learn early that you have to translate. That translation showed up everywhere in my life. I needed structure. I needed clear pathways. I wanted plain expectations and direct feedback.
Chaos did not scare me. In fact, it was a goal. I loved finding messy situations and building processes that brought order and clarity. At work, that instinct led me to roles where I could create new programs, systems, and frameworks. Designing structures energized me. Ironically, once the system was built, my brain often lost interest. I was ready to move on to the next puzzle.
Early in my career as a manager, I was hiring for a role on my team. My team lead realized that I was less interested in the candidates who had been in the same role for over a decade. She challenged me. "If everyone operated like you, we'd be living in quicksand." She asked me to consider that while there is great value in people who could solve problems and design more efficient systems; we also needed people to run the steady state when those systems were built.
Some people are operators. They maintain and run systems. Others are builders. They design them. My brain has always been a builder. And that conversation made me appreciate the value of the operators.
The design instinct shapes how I teach leadership today: through frameworks, lists, and structures that help people make sense of complex environments. These tools are not simply productivity tricks. They are the systems my brain built to survive and navigate spaces that were not designed for the way I think.
People often hear me talk about rules, but there is an important nuance here. I do not learn rules so I can obey them. I learn rules so I can understand how systems actually work.
Understanding systems changes the way you see rules. Rules are there to maintain the status quo.
The rules of Harvey, IL pointed toward a very different future.
If I followed those rules, I would never have gone to Harvard. I would not have taken a year off mid-college to intern in Washington DC. I would not have the life I have today. Pattern recognition helped me see that the path forward was not compliance. It was navigation.
Social rules are rarely transparent. Think about a show like Downton Abbey or Bridgerton. Behavioral expectations depend on the setting. From the boxing club to the ballroom to court, one has to show up with different personas. Race, gender, and class add layers onto the expectations.
Modern workplaces operate in much the same way. There are official rules and then there are the patterns that actually determine outcomes: who gets promoted, who gets heard, and who gets invited into the room.
Over time, I realized that success rarely comes from rigid compliance. But it can come from pattern recognition. Neurodivergent brains frequently excel at this type of mapping. We notice inconsistencies between what systems claim to value and what they actually reward. We see how things are meant to work, how people believe they work, and how they truly function.
Everything I built to survive eventually became the foundation for how I teach leadership. My experiences have led me to three lessons that apply far beyond neurodivergence.
Designing systems for the outliers often reveals the hidden rules for everyone. When you create environments that work for people who think differently, you expose the assumptions that were invisible before. Transparency benefits all brains, not just neurodivergent ones.
Order is not rigidity. It is support. For me, structure functions as assistive technology. Lists, visual boards, spreadsheets, and planning tools create scaffolding that makes expectations visible.
The most powerful people in any room are translators, not gatekeepers. Translators name the hidden expectations. They teach shortcuts and help others understand how the system actually works.
You can try this mindset yourself. Think about a space in your life or career that feels confusing. Instead of reacting, observe. What behaviors get rewarded there? What behaviors get ignored? Who succeeds, and what patterns do they share?
Once you begin mapping those patterns, the environment becomes less mysterious. Those patterns form a blueprint. And once you understand the rules of a system, you are no longer trapped by them.
For most of my life, I thought something was wrong with me because I could not simply exist in the world as it was presented.
Now I understand something.
My superpower has always been observation.
And when you see how systems actually work, you gain the power to redesign them.
