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The Wrong Planet Goes to Work: Neurodivergence, employment, and why the system isn’t built for us
In middle school, a career aptitude test told me I should go into sales or retail management. I'm now a therapist who sees 45-55 neurodivergent clients a week from a home office, with my old dog snoring in the corner. It took forty years and several collapsed careers to get here.
This piece is about the wrong planet and its job market — why work is so hard for so many of us, what the data says, what happens when you can't get past the interview, and what might actually help. Real talk. Some hope. A hobbit hole at the end.
When Your Instruments Lie: Understanding Alexithymia and Interoceptionin Neurodivergent Adults
I am a licensed clinical therapist. I specialize in neurodivergence and complex trauma. I help people understand their nervous systems for a living. And I spent an extremely expensive evening at an NFL game completely unable to access or regulate my own.
That's not irony. That's alexithymia and interoceptive differences, doing exactly what they do.
If you've ever been asked "how does that make you feel?" and found yourself genuinely unable to answer — not deflecting, not avoiding, actually not knowing — this is for you.
When Different Brains Fall in Love: An Honest Guide to Cross-Neurotype Relationships
My wife and I have a recurring conversational style that goes something like this: I'm in the middle of explaining something that matters to me, and before I finish the first 15 seconds, she's already somewhere else. From her perspective, she was connected, building on what I said. From mine, I've been talking to the ceiling.
We've gone through this cycle more times than I can count. Both of us are certain the other doesn't listen. Both of us, I've come to believe, are partly right.
I'm a late-diagnosed autistic adult. My wife is, as far as we know, neurotypical. We're both therapists. We both have a history of trauma. We're both, it turns out, surprisingly bad at applying our training to each other.
This is what I've learned.
When Neurodivergence and Trauma Meet - and why the distinction may matter less than you think
I've spent thirty-nine years in therapy. Through all of it, I got better and better at one thing: understanding, in exquisite detail, exactly why I felt so messed up. What I couldn't do — for most of those thirty-nine years — was change any of it.
I was diagnosed as autistic at 56. I also have complex PTSD. And once both pieces were on the table, I started to understand something I now consider one of the most important questions in my clinical work: when neurodivergence and trauma grow up together in the same nervous system, trying to separate them is often the wrong problem to solve.
What Happens When I Speak: An Autistic Therapist on Unmasking, Silence, and the Cost of Being Seen
What Happens When I Speak
I made a video on a Wednesday morning before my first session. Not the polished kind — the raw kind. I talked about what I'm watching happen in my community as Medicaid cuts ripple through Oregon. I talked about getting bullied for speaking up. I talked about the exhaustion of being a person like me in a world like this one.
Then I shared it with the people I love most. And mostly got silence.
If you're autistic, you know what that silence does. Your nervous system — already hypervigilant, already scanning for rejection — registers it as data. You got it wrong again. Too much. Wrong topic. Put it away.
I've spent most of my life learning to be quiet. Not quiet as a spiritual practice. Quiet as armor. And here's what nobody tells you about that kind of silence: it doesn't protect you. It just means you're invisible and in pain, instead of visible and in pain.
This is a piece about unmasking, rejection sensitivity, and what it actually costs to use your voice when you've been told — in a thousand ways, over a lifetime — that who you truly are is either too much or not enough.