There’s a common sentiment in professional circles of ”you can teach someone how to do something, but you can’t teach them to show up,” and....

...I just don’t think thats true. Not when someone’s neurodivergent, at least.

It resembles ”you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink,” which is fine except why the hell would an animal not partake in an essential resource. Something is not adding up here.

(yes I know the saying isn’t literal but it ties in ok)

If you have a student or employee who has said ”I want to do this” and you give them the resources and they don’t, but they keep trying, or they‘re wildly inconsistent, or they’re getting some stuff but not others, guess what:

you haven’t given them the right resources.

I think the problem is that most people have never had to “learn” how to be on time, eat, talk to people, communicate their ideas, sleep, manage household tasks. But for neurodivergent people, these are skills that have to be taught and honed just like anything else

Sometimes you’ll come across someone with ADHD who is ruthlessly organized. And like...are they just some exception to the rule? No!! They had to learn it to keep their life from falling apart at the seams every goddamn day!

For NTs yeah you can lead em to water/can’t make em drink.

But stick an ND person in front of a sink and they might stand there frozen because they‘re terrified of waterborne pathogens. Or don’t want to get water on their face. Or haven’t been told the water is there TO drink.

We really need to be better about thinking twice when it seems someone is ”not motivated.” Are they motivated sometimes? What are the conditions?

If they’re led to water but won’t drink—do they need a water filter? User manual? A cup? (Accommodations - instructions - a tool?)

There’s a million reasons I can think why I’ve backed out of smth that was REALLY important to me. Anxiety kept me from sleeping. Meetings too early in the morning. Scared to ask questions for fear of ridicule. Scared to ask for extensions or admit I was having a hard time.

And the only, -only- thing that helped me out of this was collaborators who were understanding.

One of my profs learned “behind on project” for me meant ”having a breakdown” so he’d let me cry in his office then tell me “nothing is make or break, Em. Don’t put so much into it.”

“It’s just a job, Em. Literally. Nobody should cry over their job.”
thats not going to work for everyone but it helped me panic less. By junior year I was fudging deadlines on purpose so I could sleep & do decent work. (I’d tell him “this is late” and he’d be like “lmaoo nice.”)

(All of this, of course, in a sea of elders who were like “IF YOU DO NOT TAKE ADVANTAGE OF LITERALLY EVERY RESOURCE HERE YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING YOU EVER LOVE.”)

What my professor was teaching me with those meetings was:
-emotional regulation
-nuance, gray area thinking
-prioritizing

aka 3 huge things ND people struggle with. These are workplace skills, too, that prevented me from “showing up.”

(srry, crying quick.)

I don’t have like a solid plan for this thread (yay ADHD!) but its important to keep in mind that I wear my heart on my sleeve and so it was obvious when I was struggling and upset.

Not everyone is like that, and folks who are more reserved might read as “apathetic.”

Just, you know. Use your brain. If something doesn’t seem to make sense—“it seems like they really wanted this job but they never hit deadlines”—you probably don’t have the full picture.

and you’ll have to dig deeper. But that’s why you’re a leader, right? Because you care?

On the flip side, ND people, your most important job coming into adulthood is figuring out what you need. I know that everyone through childhood called you lazy/dramatic/slow but if you don’t communicate your needs no one will meet them and you’ll feel 40 by the time you‘re 25.

(I know that many conditions prevent people from getting what they need. But you need to at least KNOW what that is and communicate it so you, or someone else, can work towards getting that for you eventually!)

You need to SAY when when you need more instructions. Tell them you‘re insecure about your communication style; have a hard time with mornings; need hard or flexible deadlines; silence or white noise. People only will provide what they’re willing to but at least it’s something.