Spiky Profiles

Noticing the peaks and troughs in what you can do

A spiky profile sounds like something I might have written on Hinge after one too many messages that just said “Hey”. But actually, it refers to the wildly varying abilities that many neurodivergent people have across different domains of their skills. The most striking example for me recently was the fire fighting union leader I met who struggles to tie his shoe laces. It’s hard for people to get their heads round because most of us have a cognitive bias that expects people who are good at some stuff to be good at others. I love the metaphor I heard that suggested imagining the abilities of neurodivergent people as a mixing desk with some faders turned up high, and some down low. Time management? Low. Ability to spot visual patterns, high, etc. A school report that ranges from As to Es depending on the subject (My English teachers loved me, my Home Economics teachers thought I was a health hazard). The disparities can be due to sensory processing differences, motor co-ordination difficulties and our Executive functioning issues. Plus sometimes due to our brain machinery only being fired up by what actually excites and interests us. (I am a proud Monotrope, living in a society designed for polytropes).

My own peaks in the spiky profile tend to be around words. I write, I’m (sometimes) articulate. I have a PhD. I once had to compose a poem live during a forty five minute edition of Radio 4’s Front Row and perform it in front of an audience including Bob Geldof. Surely I must easily be able to do simple co-ordination tasks like hand out booklets to a workshop crowd? But physical co-ordination and sequencing tasks is a definite trough for me.

Remembering I’m a body too

This example is in my head because I had to do that this week. I was on a meditation retreat. Just before the session, someone asked me to hand the yellow booklets out if the teacher mentioned them. To them, it must have seemed a simple ask. But I think I was more nervous than when I wondered whether Bob Geldof would think “Live Aid” really did rhyme with “Grenade”. The teacher mentioned the booklet and I leapt out of my seat, grabbing them and indiscriminately slapping them down on meditators’ tables. Some handed them back, because the experienced meditators already knew the words but there was no way my brain had spare processing energy to register that whilst it was already processing “Move in some sort of sequence without treading on humans or tables or falling over, and divest yourself of these items”

Then I sort of caught myself in the act of being in a body. A frenetic body in a room of gently meditating people in woolly shawls and soft socks. I slowed down and took a breath (part of my new learning) and composed myself into a performance of calm. It got an unintentional slapstick laugh and a “Slow down grasshopper” from the teacher. I was able to make a slightly more processed guess at which tables to put the rest of the booklets on, or respond to people stretching out their hands to receive them.

At least the “Does wordy things/but is physically clumsy” is a socially understood stereotype. People can really struggle when the incongruence is across other dimensions. Like the aforementioned fire fighting union leader who struggles with shoe laces. Or organisational managers who can’t pay their bills on time. Extroverts who can’t bear making phone calls. Teachers who struggle with spelling. These gaps get internalised too. “You can do THAT but you can’t do THAT? You must be lazy/making it up/exaggerating”.

A Spiky Profile Within A Spiky Profile

Just above, I’ve said I’m good with words. But the greater noticing I've been doing in the last few months and which I’m sharing in this newsletter, along with good neurodiversity affirming/neuroqueer sources, means that I can see that words are sometimes my nemesis. I am a writer- a being made of words I thought- but it turns out I often need fewer, oh so many fewer words.

I went to the same week-long retreat this time last year so I can easily see the difference in what I’m registering about myself. I know that the auditory processing required by lots of people talking in a dining room will drain me of some of the eight types of energy I mentioned in my newsletter last week (sensory mainly, but also processing energy and communication energy). A dining room hubbub can feel like bees are buzzing in my head. A cacophony. On the first night I ate in the overflow dining room. There were only two of us and people kept popping in to tell us there was room in the main dining room. They were being kind and meant well- but it can be hard for people to recognise that other people might not be being unsociable or feeling left out as they might feel in that situation.

(I was surprised that at the annual U.K retreat for autistic people, Autscape, only a minority of us chose to eat in the quiet dining room. I spoke to some attendees who said it was a sensory challenge to be in the main one, but the FOMO and the wonderful conversations meant they were willing to weather the sensory stuff. And I think for most people their auditory processing just wasn’t as much of a thing as it seems to have become for me).

On subsequent nights of the retreat I ate in the main dining room along with twenty other people at three tables. I began to realise it was much easier to basically monopolise one person and have an in-depth conversation about something of interest where I could hyper-focus (much easier when you’re already at an event where you know you share some interests!). The group conversations, already challenging when you’re trying to figure out turn-taking, which feels like jumping onto a moving boat on a fast-flowing river, were even harder in the noise. I did worry I was pulling people away from a group conversation they might rather have- and just had to turn down the volume on any internal voices around that. (Quite literally one of the points of meditation anyway. Lucky I wasn’t at an event about the power of ignoring your inner self).

A few months ago, staying at a hotel while doing a project with some other artists. There was soooo much talking during the day I had the strong feeling “I really, very much do not want to hear any words for a long time”. One of the other artists was already having a capacious continental breakfast when I came down. But a combination of thinking that I recognised he was also a person with a tendency to suffer from word-surplus, and my own better needs-noticing meant that I felt I could say to him “I’m not being rude but I’m not ready to produce words this morning so I’m going to sit at another table. See you later on”. Honest, it was fine. Maybe it was because we were both creative types. From Yorkshire.

I didn’t quite have that confidence at last week’s retreat, in a setting where there was an emphasis on community and togetherness. But I did give myself a permission to leave the table earlier than most other people. And maybe it helped that through this year I’ve shared with a friend who was also at the retreat, some of my sensory struggles (Plus she’s seen my spoken word theatre show about neurodiversity). In the past, she might have been encouraging me to “Join in!”, but now she would gently ask how I was doing in the chaos or say “Hope you have some nice quiet time” when she saw me leaving. Given that I’m not quite ready to stand up in the middle of a room and shout “I’m neurodivergent and I really need some quiet!”, it’s a lovely thing to have someone subtly adding to your sense of permission to do these things, when your own can still quail a bit.

And of course these things are situational and fluid and when I got home to my nice, quiet flat, I thought how wonderful that there weren’t twenty people in it, and in a few days I might be wishing for some gentle hubbub and more conversations. As Buddhists say, getting comfortable is hard for EVERYBODY - it’s like shuffling about on the head of a pin trying to find some balance amid our competing internal and external energy flows. Here’s to more of it. And more noticing. May you accept your profile whether it’s Yorkshire vowel-flat or stormy sea spiky.