Yes, we're ALL Neurodivergent now

 What's your diagnosis?

Many of us have got a diagnosis these days. Lots of adults are being diagnosed rightly or wrongly with ADHD. There are lots of people on the autistic spectrum too. It seems to be getting larger. It's almost galactic in its proportions these days.

It's easy to dismiss all these things now as the latest hook to hang your coat on, as though we're all automatons devoid of free-will and and our neurological make-up is to blame for any discrepancies in our behaviour and societal misdeeds. 

Our behaviour is usually a mixture of nature and nurture, though we still have the fight or flight from our reptilian brain, there to keep us alive in extreme circumstances.

And while it's easy to mock the trendy new penchant for diagnoses later on in life, it doesn't half give you some relief. What I mean is, it can go someway to explain why you are who you are.

Disclaimer: I'm not a trans person. I've always been happy in my body and never for one moment doubted I was a male. However, I do exhibit a lot of classically non-masculine behaviours. Masking is one of them.

As a child I felt very awkward socially. What I said wouldn't go down well with the other kids - I was a follower not a leader. I was a cry-baby, and the following of others became outright copying.

A kid came to the school and I really wanted to be his friend. He seemed so confident and life was just easy for him - I thought. I don't know how he put up with me to be honest. I would have been a bit freaked out. The only things I didn't copy in the end were his taste in music (all that Goth crap!) and I couldn't get my hair to do what his did.

There were other kids I tried to be like too. But I wasn't tough or working-class or good at sport. So I didn't fit in with them either. 

I just wanted to draw things and play with Lego and play Dungeons and Dragons.

Why did I never fit in to one 'friendship group' as they call them now? To be honest I never saw the need for social cliques and I didn't really understand them, but I knew I ought to be in one. I would look at them and think - well, I like these people, and she's nice from that group - he's a nice person in that group, but you have to choose a group or you're an outsider. If you do choose a group you then like 3 of the people but the other 3 are arseholes and you just have to put up with them. 6 to one and all that.

So when I went to art school I reinvented myself with long hair (which I'd I'd always wanted) and trying to be cool, which tbh I wasn't very good at. I guess I was a late bloomer so when I was older (out of school) I was a lot more popular with the girls, which was nice. But it was all a bit of an act.

You're probably asking what does all this bollocks have to do with neurodiversity? Here's a list of my worst traits.

• Easily-distracted: can't concentrate on 70% of lessons, can't even start to revise, loathe exam times, can't read a book, 
• Lack of concentration: silly mistakes, lack of focus, 
• Copying others, behaviour, dress-sense, style,
• Oversharing, inappropriate information, too much information, wrong time, wrong place, faux-pas
• Inappropriate behaviour, saying the wrong thing, being outrageous, being obnoxious
• Oversensitive cry-baby, stress-monkey, worrisome, sleep-deprived, self-loathing
• Insensitive -smart-ass, gob-shite, harsh, hurtful

That's me. Now I'm not trained in any of this and I haven't had any diagnosis other than that of FTD, but I share a lot of the above traits with people with ADHD and those on the Autistic-Spectrum and seemingly always have done since I was little.

And while I may or may not have ADHD or be on the spectrum, at least by analysing myself and identifying the above, the elephant in the room is there for me to see it. Now I know its there I can train myself to be in the moment and identify when it is operating and either stop it or work around it. It's actually really handy for the person, not as an excuse as though to say "Yes, sorry I was being an arsehole - it's my neurodiversity" rather like the drunk would blame the bottle, but to acknowledge the signs and signifiers of behaviours and either mitigate for them or withdraw myself from a situation.

It's actually really pleasing to have this - it makes life easier and it makes liking myself a lot easier too. I'm kind and sweet-natured most of the time. I'm perceptive, a relatively original thinker and I am a very good judge of character. I'm an oddball and many of my friends are oddballs and characters. I'll help anyone who's a friend. I'm generous with my time and money. I'm all right in other words.

It's all right being a weirdo, oddball, nerd. In fact it's actually rather good.

The End of Dungeon Mastering

I've been running 2 campaigns for months and months. In fact, my Monday online group has been in the same campaign for over 2 years. But both are ending pretty much in the next couple of weeks, and I will be a player once more.

I'm a little worried that my brain will atrophy quicker now I will be sitting back letting someone else do all the hard work DMing, with all the planning, research and writing involved.

I have 2 new characters I want to use: a gnome wizard called Bibble Babble, and a Gloomstalker Ranger/Assassin for the longer in-person Sunday campaign.

Not to be confused with Babble Bibble!

I can't wait.

I will be back to DM though. It's been really good and I think I am a better Dungeon Master than I was before. You never stop learning, despite the fact you may have a leak in the knowledge banks...

Russell Group Wonk

‘I knew this country had had it. I was 9 years old.’

 I was always rather in awe of people who’d been to Oxbridge and other universities, and indeed, many of the cleverest people in the country go there. However, while there are obviously brilliant people who emerge from University, there are also a significant amount of also-rans who ended up at the top universities through an accident of birth by being born into wealthy families who can afford fees for the best public schools (an oxymoron to anyone outside of the UK), getting all the qualifications and all the confidence (not to mention the social networks) yet accruing none of the abilities a truly useful human should possess.

I’ll come to those later.

The cleverest person I’ve known was my friend Martin. Martin had got a scholarship to Oxford to do law. It wasn’t the course he wanted to do but he said having the scholarship took any choice away from him.

So Martin was at Oxford, and what did it for him was land law - apparently it does it for a lot of law students, as it’s tedious and boring. He failed his exams and they threw him out. They then asked him back in and kicked him out again. 

To his knowledge he was the only person ever to get kicked out of Oxford twice, which was a sort of badge of honour for him.

He bummed around for awhile, getting a job as a hospital porter and travelling to Italy. Then he became a stonemason which is how I know him, as he was my first employer.

Martin was incredibly eccentric. My first experience of him on site was he would pull the Times out of his bag only to discover (to his anger) that his mother (who he lived with) had already completed the crossword that morning. This happened everyday.

Martin started lots of projects around his house and never completed any of them. I went to his house once as I was in Leytonstone. I thought I’d pop in for a cup of tea and a chat. He met me at the door, looking slightly shell-shocked. He told me I couldn’t come in as it was ‘ghastly’ in there. As though some horrible crime had been committed in there and it was too shocking to see. We ended up chatting on his doorstep.

He lost a load of tools I’d sold him then found them a few years later down the back of his sofa.

Things I remember he told me:

“When I was a little boy I was playing with my toy soldiers in the lounge. I think I was recreating the Battle of Ypres. The television was on and it was 1963. The Rolling Stones were on, and I looked at these Herberts jigging about and I knew then this country had had it. I was 9 years old.”

“When I was 9 I realised I needed to get to Oxford University. In order to do that I needed to learn Ancient Greek. In order to do that I needed to go to Newcastle Grammar School.”

Martin Duncan-Jones

He was wonderful and exasperating at the same time. I fell out of favour with him several times and then fell back in favour too.

If you’d read a book you wished to tell him about he’d read it too and knew it better than you. It wasn’t to better you (although he was highly competitive intellectually) - it was because he never seemed to forget anything he’d read.

I remember one example of his intellectual pugilism when we were up a scaffold in Haverstock Hill and him having a polite conversation with a guy in his back garden. It was perfectly innocent until Napoleon was mentioned. Then Martin flexed his muscles and had a book-off with the poor guy. Have you read such and such? Yes. Have you read this? And on it went until the guy in the garden said er, no. 

“Ah. Ah. Wonderful book. If you had read that you would know that blahh and blah and you would also know that….” and Martin proceeded to rub the poor bloke’s face in it. 

Like some of the cleverest people I know, Martin was a drop out. The education system was just too small and constraining for his particular intellect. He told me later that he should have followed his heart and gone to Cambridge to do Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Norse, as he had a huge love for the Viking Sagas. 

I miss him very much.

Television People

Some of the most underwhelming people I’ve met have been some of the best qualified. People with so much to prove as well. My experience in television was a great eye-opener about social disparity and what really constitutes intelligence, or rather the different types of intelligence there are.

We have an education system that seems to grind out the creativity of a child and puts them through a sausage machine where the child becomes a facsimile of their parent, ready to go into the city or slot into whatever grey part of society is required. 

Is this what we’ve come to?

“Don’t think of them as children, think of them as economic units.” Kenneth Baker (important historical figure).

So what did I experience in TV? Well, I worked in the London BBC so I am only referencing that rather than the whole of the corporation. I experienced a culture of snobbery; people who’d been to minor public schools desperate to be further up the chain than their contemporaries “Oh she’s jealous of me because I’m posher than she is.” Baffling to this comprehensive school kid.

First thing I was asked to do at Home Front was to draw 16 equidistant circles on a square wall - a circular mirror was provided, and nobody there could work out how to do it. These were people who’d been to serious universities. So I did it and people were amazed. This was stuff an 11 year old could work out.

Another thing I realised was these people talked about themselves and what they got up to with their mates over and above everything else. They didn’t talk about art or literature or politics or ideas, just how hilarious and great they and their chums were.

You've probably been on a train or in a restaurant and table of 20-something 'professionals' are shouting about how hilarious they are, to the annoyance of everyone else. 

Yes, that's them.

None of them had any practical skills but they made up for it with a rather ruthless Machiavellian streak of ambition. 

At another place I worked as a PA to a rather difficult man who was an Executive Producer for dramas. He was really talented and clever, and unusually for an EP he was great at the creative development of the script but also the business side of the production. However, this grammar school boy had a total inferiority complex and was unbelievably and unnecessarily rude to everyone he could be rude to - this is another media trope that your importance is demonstrated by your rudeness to your subordinates.

The guy in the next office was seriously as thick as a brick. But he’d been born in Malaysia to a very wealthy family, gone to boarding school and then a Russell-Group uni, and knew he had a divine right to tell everybody else what to do. His emails were hilarious David-Brent affairs. They were composed of management-speak and no substance whatsoever. And he got away with it too.

This is one of the things about the UK. Public schools give kids a huge amount of confidence - they know when they leave school they’re going to be running this, telling these people what to do, heading up this public body and so on. Meanwhile the kids in the comprehensive are told you’re going to be working for them, you’re going to be under this manager, don’t get your hopes up, people like you don’t get to do this and so forth.

Just think of all those people with huge talent who missed out over the centuries because they were the wrong sex, wrong colour, wrong social caste.  

What bollocks.

Rant over.