Below is my neurodiverse story.

My profile is a best guess because I have not had a diagnostic evaluation since I was six.

Since I am an adult, my story is deductively written. In other words, thinking through my story starts with the acts and works top-down to explain why I have experiences of resonance, dissonance, and their near cousins.

For young folks, the process is often inductive. “What story do these three characters tell?” rather than “How are these stories told by these three characters?”

  • Dyslexic

    Dysgraphic

    (Strengths – narrative memory, abstract thinking)

    (Weaknesses – procedural memory)

  • Personality (based on The Big Five)

    Abstract thinker

    High stick-with-it-ness

    Mildly extroverted

    Place other’s needs above my own

    Can handle stress relatively well

  • People,

    connection,

    learning,

    language,

    story,

    systems,

    art and design,

    big picture,

    technology,

    exercise,

    animals,

    how things work (people, tools, systems, etc.)

  • Reading,

    writing

  • I am not cognitively well suited to language-based tasks because I have a language-based learning disability. However, due to my personality and interests, I Love language and spend an enormous amount of time and energy thinking about and engaging with language tasks. I am a terrible student of world languages.

  • I spend a lot of my free time reading and creative writing.

  • Spelling,

    finance,

    and event planning.

  • My ability profile and personality are not well suited to these tasks. However, I do have some interest in them. Which pulls them out of the dissonance category, even though they are still challenging for me. Just ask my partner, Danielle.

  • Grammarly is a lifesaver for me and far better than traditional spell checkers. My wife is an excellent financial person; we work together to manage our finances. I ask for help and think of events as work tasks, improving my ability to plan effective events.

  • Creative problem-solving,

    teaching/coaching,

    collaborating,

    systems thinking,

    design,

    creative writing,

    visual art

  • I thrive when presented with a set of circumstances, a group of people, and the need for a solution. I am a good big-picture thinker; I can balance the needs of all the group members. I am fascinated by human behavior. My strong narrative memory skills help me remember all the puzzle pieces. Art and design are also forms of abstract puzzle-solving.

  • As many people do, I have built my career around my resonance.

  • Math!

  • I have no interest in math whatsoever. My cognitive profile is not well suited for math tasks, and my personality type is far more interested in human interaction than in the mechanics of math. Specifically, I struggle with procedural memory. If I were evaluated today, I am sure I would get a dyscalculia diagnosis.

  • Adults have the luxury of avoiding math. In school, I worked with tutors and took applied math classes. There is a lot of room for improvement in the math remediation space. Unfortunately, we have not yet cracked the code for math instruction as we did for reading instruction.