For most of my career I worked hard at being unremarkable. Not at the job — at being a person at the job. I kept the queer parts and the neurodivergent parts folded away where they couldn’t cost me anything, and I told myself that was professionalism. It wasn’t. It was camouflage, and it was exhausting, and it quietly taught everyone around me that people like me apparently don’t exist in tech.
I’m done doing that. And lately I’ve started wanting to do the opposite — to talk about this out loud, on stages and in writing, to whoever will listen. This post is me saying that intention into the open so I can’t quietly take it back.
Representation isn’t a nice-to-have
Here’s what folding myself away actually did: it removed a data point. Every time I passed as a tidy, neurotypical, unmarked engineer, I made it a little less imaginable that an autistic, ADHD, queer woman could be standing exactly where I was standing. I was, in a small way, helping to keep the door looking closed.
When you grow up not seeing anyone like you doing the thing you want to do, you quietly conclude the thing isn’t for you. I don’t want to be another absence in that picture. Visibility sounds abstract until you remember it’s just the everyday act of letting people see that you’re here, doing fine, taking up the space.
The talks I wish someone had given me
I think a lot about what I needed earlier and didn’t get. Nobody told me that struggling to start tasks wasn’t a moral failing. Nobody explained that the sensory overwhelm had a name and that I was allowed to manage it. Nobody modelled being openly queer and openly neurodivergent in a technical career and being respected anyway.
So those are the talks I want to give:
- What it actually looks like to work in DevOps with an AuDHD brain — the real accommodations, not the inspirational poster version.
- Why accessible and inclusive defaults make teams better, not just kinder.
- How to show up as your whole self at work without burning out from the masking, and what managers can do to make that safe.
- The honest, unglamorous middle of a neurodivergent career: the wins, the wall, and the bits nobody puts on LinkedIn.
Not as an expert with it all figured out. As someone a few steps down the same road, turning around to say: it’s walkable, and here’s where the potholes are.
Why me, why now
I’m not the most senior engineer in any room, and I’ll never be the slickest speaker. For a long time that felt like a reason to stay quiet. I’ve flipped it: the point isn’t polish, it’s honesty. There are plenty of confident people on stages already. There are far fewer who’ll stand up and say “this is hard, here’s how it actually feels, and you’re not broken for finding it hard too.” That’s the talk I can give that not everyone can.
And the timing is simple. I finally have the words for how my brain works. I’ve finally got an environment where being open about it is safe. The masking already cost me enough years — I’m not interested in spending the next ones quiet too.
So: if you organise a meetup, a conference track, a panel, an internal lunch-and-learn, and you want someone to talk plainly about being neurodivergent and queer in tech — about accessibility, about masking, about building things that include everyone — I’d genuinely love to. Reach out. I’ll bring the honesty. You bring the audience, and maybe the coffee.