Neurodiversity in the workspace.

I have been noticing and appreciating the apparent spectrum of neurodiversity among my colleagues in the local coworking space.

During my interval-training-style sessions of writing the Talking Heads post, I was frequently joined (anonymously, at a silent close distance) by one such colleague who made herself comfortable on a nearby couch with a journal and pen. For a full hour, she would write steadily and intensely without ever once stopping to look up or lift her pen off the page. Me being the perennially neurotic, self-conscious, stop-and-start, struggling-with-lifelong-writer’s-block kind of writer, I felt naturally envious of this person’s ability to stay so extremely focused on the pure act of writing, inhabiting that space so fully and selflessly that she did not seem to notice at all the colleague who approached her asking to borrow a phone charger and stood for a full minute before her in dumbfounded wonder at being so blatantly ignored. Conscious rudeness or unconscious byproduct of being laser-focused on her task? I believe it was the latter, since I have actually had several minor courteous encounters with this fully absorbed notebook writer when she was in a more socially oriented mode. A few days later I saw her seated solo in a collaboration booth conducting a Zoom meeting through an audio headset. I noticed that she has a louder-than-usual speaking voice, i.e. everyone could hear her quite audibly even from across the large room through all the customary ambient noise. So maybe her inner voice is similarly loud and has the effect of drowning out all distractions when she’s engaged in deeply personal journal work.

Neurodiverse colleague #2 is a person I confess to having a hard time not staring at, because of how they are both at once totally in control and totally out of control. Or rather these modes don’t happen at the same time but cycle on and off with apparent regularity within the same person. I see the person seated for the most part quietly and peacefully in front of their laptop, occupied in the graceful clicking & swiping movements that characterize the choreography of the modern-day information worker. Then seemingly out of the blue, in response to some stimulus from the screen, they experience a full-on emotional meltdown. Their face contorts, goes red, hot tears well up in their eyes. Heaving great yet still-silent sobs, they get up from their desk and pace restlessly back and forth across the room until the feeling eventually subsides. Then they settle back in place and when next I look over they are again absorbed in mundane work at their laptop, a peaceful half smile on their face.

I remember feeling great anxiety & discomfort the first two times I witnessed this, not knowing if a major life crisis was at hand or if the person might require intervention to avoid hurting self or others. But now I know better. This high emotional distress, this meltdown, is a regular occurrence that happens several times a day; the person seems highly sensitive and easily triggered, such that I have wondered if they are involved in social work of some kind, around distressing issues & circumstances. Yet their emotion seems more akin to intense frustration (of the terrible twos variety) than sadness. Whatever it is, I have learned to admire their ability to self-regulate and self-soothe without impacting or even being noticed by other people with the exception of, it seems, me.