It Was Normal To Me

What we now call neurodivergence, I grew up simply calling home. 

I was raised in a full house — my brother and two sisters from my mother’s side, all under one roof, always in motion. As the oldest, my role was to help care for them. That role changed as we grew — less about the gap in our ages, more about everything we lived through together. By the time we were grown, my siblings weren’t just family. They were my closest friends. 

 

What Was Normal or Common 

Here is what was normal in our house: 

Quarterly ER visits for a broken bone. 
Something left on the stove, and the house nearly burning down. 
A kid disappearing for hours, then reappearing with a half-finished project — later forgotten. 
Board games started with excitement and abandoned in frustration. 
Concentration that only came alive in noise, never in quiet. 

And here is what was common, but not normal: 

Getting in trouble at school for talking too much.
Parent-teacher conferences about academic “issues.”
Being sent to sit facing the back wall.
Counting on fingers, out loud, well into high school.
Fighting to finish homework, then fighting to make sure it actually made it to school the next day. 

I didn’t know, growing up, that what was normal for my siblings and me wasn’t normal for everyone. That there were even names for it. ADHD. Dyscalculia. 

 

How Life Experience Shaped My Leadership 

I’m thankful for growing up in a neurospicy home, and for the friendships with my siblings that came out of it. The stop-and-go. The impulsiveness. The different ways we each communicated. All of it shaped me into a more inclusive leader. The homework battles, the frustration at school, watching my siblings get discouraged by systems that weren’t built for them — that gave me compassion I carried into my own leadership. 

What another leader might call opposition, I learned to see as curiosity and innovation. What someone else might judge as laziness, I learned to see as someone needing a different rhythm, or different hours. 

Nineteen percent of Americans identify as neurodivergent. I’m grateful my life gave me the practice to lead well within that reality — to work with people whose brains don’t match the “typical” that most workplaces were built around. It was never something I had to learn. It was already normal to me.