There comes a point in life when you have to accept that some of your “quirks” may, in fact, be a system. And I am beginning to suspect I have a system.
I should start with the obvious disclaimer. I have not been formally diagnosed with anything, and I am not about to diagnose myself via TikTok, three Instagram reels and a woman called Becky telling me that if I hate the big light I definitely have ADHD. But the older I get, the more I understand myself, and the more conversations I have about neurodivergence, the more often I find myself thinking, Oh. Followed fairly quickly by, OH. And occasionally, Well, that explains a lot.
The funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have started paying quite so much attention to any of this if it hadn’t been for my daughter. She began recognising patterns in herself and wondering whether she might be neurodivergent, and in trying to understand what she was describing and work out how best to support her, I started reading. And researching. And listening. The more I learned, the more I found myself thinking, Hang on. I do that. Or, perhaps more accurately, I have ALWAYS done that.
That is where it became particularly interesting for me, because I wasn’t only recognising things in the woman I am now. I started recognising the child I had been too. Things I had struggled with, adapted around, hidden, pushed through or simply accepted because I didn’t have any other language for them. Looking back now, there are experiences I understand very differently. There were things I genuinely struggled with and had no support for because nobody, including me, knew there was anything to support. And somehow, I still excelled.
I don’t say that as some triumphant “look what I overcame” story. If anything, I find myself wondering what it took out of me to do that, and what might have been different if I’d understood myself then the way I am beginning to understand myself now.
“Neurospicy” is one of those slightly ridiculous internet words I actually quite like. It is broad, informal and leaves room for curiosity. I use it here deliberately because I am not claiming a diagnosis. I am noticing patterns.
And apparently, I have quite a few.
My brain rarely has one thought at a time
I envy people who appear to think in straight lines. A, then B, then C. My brain is more like A, C, J, a brief but apparently urgent thought about whether the tassels on a bookmark are the correct shade of purple, back to B, an idea for something I should write in six months, D, remember to send that email, another idea, Google something completely unrelated, and suddenly I have designed an entire campaign that nobody asked for.
The terrifying part is that it all connects in my head. I can see the architecture. Other people may be looking at me wondering how on earth we got from a table centrepiece to patriarchy, childhood socialisation, brand strategy and whether a sentence needs a comma, but I know how we got there.
There was a bridge.
You just didn’t see it.
I can be scattered and ridiculously organised at exactly the same time
This one has confused me for years because I can create an extraordinarily detailed framework for something. Categories, timelines, colour coding, asset lists, contingencies, exact dimensions, what happens first, what happens next, what connects to what and why. I love a system. I NEED a system.
When my daughter turned ten, she specifically asked to spend her birthday with me instead of having a party. I don’t think she realised quite what she had unleashed.
Ten felt significant anyway, but the fact that she had chosen a weekend away with me made it even more so. So I planned us a proper mother-and-daughter London getaway. We did a boat cruise with a mini tour, had afternoon tea at The Rubens at the Palace and went to see Beverley Knight in Sylvia. That last one had an extra little layer for us because her grandma is called Sylvia too. It was one of those lovely coincidences that made the whole thing feel even more personal.
Now, most people would probably have booked the hotel, sorted the train tickets, made a few reservations and called it a weekend.
I had documents.
Printed documents.
For a weekend getaway.
To London!
There was a plan. There were timings. There was information. I had essentially produced a small travel pack for two people going from Birmingham to London, because apparently simply arriving and seeing what happened would have been an act of extraordinary recklessness.
The funny thing is, I didn’t experience any of this as excessive. I loved it. The planning was part of the gift. I wasn’t simply organising where we were going; I was building the experience before we even arrived. The anticipation lives in that for me. I like knowing how the pieces fit together. I like imagining how one moment will lead into the next. I like the detail.
And honestly? It was glorious.
This is the contradiction. I can curate an entire milestone weekend down to a printed itinerary and, in the same life, have to send apology letters to my nieces because their birthday presents are late. Not because I forgot to buy them. Oh no. The presents were bought. They were wrapped. They were sitting in my house in plenty of time.
They just somehow failed to complete the final stage of the journey.
So now the beautifully chosen, carefully wrapped present arrives late with a note from Auntie explaining that yes, I absolutely remembered your birthday and yes, your gift has technically been ready for weeks.
I realise this defence is not as strong as I think it is.
I once described myself as scattered rather than disorganised, and I still think that is one of the most accurate things I have ever said about myself. I am not somebody who doesn’t plan. Good Lord, do I plan. Sometimes I suspect all the planning is partly how I keep hold of a brain that wants to wander into seventeen rooms at once.
The gift was bought three weeks early. The card was chosen. The wrapping paper coordinated.
Why is the parcel still in my house?
No further questions at this time.
Then there is the hyperfocus
If something interests me, it can become my entire personality for the next several hours. Possibly days. I don’t just want to know a thing. I want to understand the thing, interrogate the thing, pull it apart, put it back together, work out why it works, improve it and then create a completely unnecessary document explaining it.
There are topics I can disappear into. Stories, systems, design, language, culture, women’s experiences, how people behave, why people behave that way, the tiny gap between what somebody said and what they actually meant.
And creative projects? Dangerous.
Give me an idea I care about and suddenly I have developed the concept, named it, built the visual language, identified twelve future iterations and started arguing with a font. Food becomes optional. Sleep becomes apparently negotiable. But that 2mm spacing issue?
We ride at dawn.
I notice things
This is possibly the biggest one. I notice when something is slightly off. The colour is wrong. The tone has changed. That sentence doesn’t quite mean what we think it means. That object was on the left in the previous version. Those two things are technically the same purple but spiritually they are strangers.
You changed the room. You moved the runner. Why is that programme suddenly the size of a dinner plate?
And once I have seen it, I cannot unsee it.
This can be a gift. It is a huge part of how I work. I see inconsistencies, patterns, gaps and connections. I can often feel when something isn’t coherent before I can articulate exactly why. It also means that when somebody says, “It’s basically the same,” there is a small part of my soul screaming, IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT THE SAME.
Apparently everybody does not experience this with the same level of urgency.
Interesting.
I have started wondering how much of being “difficult” is simply me being visible
This is the part I have become much more conscious of as I have got older. There was a time when I spent a lot more energy reading rooms, second-guessing myself and trying to make sure everybody was comfortable with me. Am I saying too much? Should I soften that? Do they think I know enough? Do I belong in this room? Should I make myself smaller? Should I smile more? Should I make this sound nicer?
For a long time there was an element of performance in that. Not dishonesty. Survival. People pleasing. Imposter syndrome. Constantly checking whether I had earned the right to occupy the space I was already standing in.
Then something shifted. I stopped feeling like an imposter in the room. I started owning what I am good at. I stopped apologising internally every time I had a strong idea, noticed something other people hadn’t, questioned something that didn’t make sense or challenged a way of doing things that everybody else appeared perfectly happy to accept.
And I stopped being quite so interested in performing niceness.
That does not mean I stopped being kind. I need to say that very clearly because we have somehow confused the two. Niceness can involve smoothing things over, making yourself more palatable, diluting what you mean, smiling when you aren’t amused or pretending something hasn’t bothered you because acknowledging it might make somebody uncomfortable.
Kindness is different.
I can be direct and kind. I can disagree with you and be kind. I can have boundaries and be kind. I can say, “That doesn’t work for me,” without wrapping it in fifteen apologies and still be kind. I can notice a problem, name it and refuse to pretend I haven’t seen it, and I can do all of that without being cruel.
What I am increasingly aware of is that when you stop performing the version of yourself that makes other people most comfortable, some people experience your authenticity as a personality change. Suddenly you are “a lot”. Opinionated. Intense. Particular. Difficult. Too direct. You ask too many questions. You notice too much. You care too much about things other people consider minor.
And I have wondered more and more whether some of the friction I have experienced in spaces has always been because I was doing something wrong. Sometimes I was simply no longer translating myself quite so heavily for everybody else’s convenience.
That question has probably heightened my curiosity about neurodivergence more than any list of symptoms ever could, because I am beginning to look back at moments when I felt misunderstood and ask:
Was I actually behaving badly? Or was I behaving differently?
They are not the same thing.
Being useful can make you vulnerable too
There is another part of this that I have become more conscious of as I have got older. When you are somebody who notices things, solves things, thinks ahead, makes connections and can throw yourself completely into something you care about, you can become very useful to people. Add kindness, people pleasing and a tendency to make yourself readily available, and that usefulness can quietly become an expectation.
I have often been the person who will help, fix, organise, think it through, make the thing better, stay a bit longer, take on one more thing or use a skill simply because I have it. And because a lot of those things come naturally to me, I haven’t always stopped to ask whether I should be doing them, whether the relationship is reciprocal, or whether somebody has simply realised that if they leave a gap long enough, I will probably step into it.
That is something I am having to unlearn too.
There is a difference between being generous with what I have and allowing constant access to it. There is a difference between choosing to help and becoming the person everybody assumes will help. And there is definitely a difference between kindness and making yourself so available that other people never have to consider what their dependence on you is costing you.
Part of owning my gifts has been learning that I don’t have to prove them by constantly giving them away.
Being capable does not make me endlessly available, and being kind does not require me to be easy to use.
Words can hold me hostage
There are people who can write a sentence, read it back and think, “Yep. Fine.” I would like to meet these people.
I can spend an unreasonable amount of time on one word because the first word is accurate but not emotionally accurate, and the second is emotionally accurate but doesn’t sit properly in the sentence, and the third sounds like something ChatGPT would write on LinkedIn beneath a photograph of a handshake.
So now we have a problem.
I care about what language does, not simply what it says. Who does this word centre? What assumption is hiding inside that phrase? Does this sound compassionate or patronising? Are we saying participation while retaining all the power? Have we used three different sentences to make exactly the same point?
And once my brain gets hold of one of those questions, we may be here for some time.
I make connections constantly
This is probably one of the things I like most about the way my brain works. A conversation becomes an article. An article reminds me of something I noticed six months ago. A news story connects to a conversation about gender, race, power or storytelling. A sentence somebody says casually lodges itself somewhere in my brain until another idea comes along and suddenly the two are having a meeting.
I collect fragments. Ideas. Images. Phrases. Contradictions. Little moments that other people may have already forgotten. Then, often much later, they connect.
That is probably where a lot of my creativity lives. It is also why “Can you just focus on one thing?” has never felt like particularly useful advice.
The things are talking to each other.
And yes, I can overthink
Spectacularly.
I can replay a conversation and examine the wording, the tone, what was said, what wasn’t said, whether I misunderstood it, whether somebody else misunderstood me and whether I should have phrased sentence four differently.
My brain is excellent at investigation. Unfortunately, it occasionally forgets that not every situation requires a full public inquiry.
There is a difference between discernment and rumination, and at 44 I am still learning where one ends and the other begins. That matters to me because I don’t want to romanticise every difficult habit by putting a cute neurodivergent label on it. Some things need managing. Some things need boundaries. Some things are exhausting.
And some things are simply me.
Maybe the biggest shift is that I am getting more curious and less critical
For years, certain things came with judgement. Why can’t you just finish one thing before starting another? Why are you making this so complicated? Why can’t you leave it alone? Why do you need everything to connect? Why are you still thinking about that? Why did you remember the obscure detail but forget the incredibly normal thing you actually needed to do?
I am asking different questions now.
What helps me work well? Why do I create systems around particular tasks? Why do some things take enormous effort while I can work on something fascinating for six hours without noticing the time? Why does detail matter so much to me? Why do ideas arrive in clusters rather than orderly queues? Why have I sometimes felt out of step with people even when I was entirely comfortable with what I was saying or doing?
And perhaps most importantly, how much energy have I spent trying to make my brain, my communication and my personality behave in ways that look more “normal” to other people?
There is something strange about acquiring language in your forties for experiences you had as a child. You can look back with adult eyes and suddenly realise that some of the things you criticised yourself for, or simply learned to endure, may have needed understanding rather than endurance.
I did well. I excelled in plenty of ways. But doing well and finding something easy are not the same thing, and I think that is a distinction I am only really beginning to appreciate.
I don’t have a neat answer yet. Maybe one day I will explore all of this properly. Maybe there is a diagnosis somewhere in my future. Maybe there isn’t.
But recognising the patterns has already given me something useful: language, compassion and permission to work with my brain a little more instead of constantly being annoyed that it did not arrive with the operating system I thought everybody else had.
It has also given me permission to consider something else. Authenticity will not always make me easier for everybody to understand, and I am learning to be okay with that.
I want to remain thoughtful. I want to remain accountable. I want to remain kind. But I am no longer interested in confusing kindness with making myself endlessly palatable.
So am I neurodivergent? I don’t know.
Am I neurospicy?
Listen.
There are currently approximately 46 tabs open in my brain, three of them are playing music, I am mentally redesigning something completely unrelated to this article, and somewhere in the distance a task I was supposed to complete yesterday is waving at me.
I’m just saying.
The evidence is becoming interesting.
Filed under: OFF SCRIPT
Personal reflections that don’t always arrive with a neat argument. Off Script is where I think out loud about the things I’m noticing, unlearning, remembering and still trying to understand. Sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable, always personal and rooted in lived experience.