This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 37-year-old Rita Ramakrishnan, who lives between New York and Toronto. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Growing up, I felt like there was something wrong with me. I’d often get compared to my sister, who paid attention, while I couldn’t concentrate and was inattentive.
When I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2006, during my second year of university, the glass shattered. There was a reason for all the things I perceived as personality flaws.
I landed my first job out of college as an analyst at Accenture in 2010. I continued to work in consulting at PwC, then EY, before pivoting into tech.
Things didn’t always flow easily and beautifully during my career, and 17 years after my ADHD diagnosis, at age 35, I was also diagnosed with autism. I’ve had to fight to achieve the things I wanted, but I’ve realized my neurodivergence comes with unique strengths.
Tiomi Gao
It took me years to feel comfortable talking about my ADHD at work
After I found out I had ADHD, people gave me well-meaning advice not to tell others. There was so much stigma. When I graduated and moved into the workforce, I mostly hid my diagnosis. This only made me feel more isolated and furthered my mental health challenges, but no senior leaders around me disclosed they had ADHD, which signalled to me it wasn’t something you talked about.
After roughly six years in consulting, I pivoted into tech and felt more comfortable talking about having ADHD, because I’d had more professional success. When I ran my own team at Juul as a director of internal communications and engagement from 2018 to 2020, I disclosed early on that I had executive functioning challenges, and said my team should call me out if I ever missed a meeting with them because of that.
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I was unexpectedly diagnosed with autism in 2023
In 2020, after 1.5 years at Juul, I started a new job as a VP of people operations at Cadre, a real estate investment company.
Roughly a couple of years later, a therapist I’d been seeing suggested that I had autism. We discussed some of the diagnostic criteria, and I felt that, in some ways, I aligned with them perfectly.
Tiomi Gao
I’m highly sensitive to environmental stressors: Loud voices and fluorescent lighting trigger sensory overwhelm. I also have delayed emotional processing. Once, there was a bomb threat at my workplace and I was completely calm while everyone else freaked out. Three days later, when I was having pancakes with my sister, I started crying into the pancakes.
I sought out a more formal diagnosis, which I received in 2023, and the glass shattered again. I had to look at myself through a different lens, but I moved to a place of acceptance faster than when I was diagnosed with ADHD.
Over time, I’ve been able to identify my strengths as a neurodivergent person
I believe my neurodivergence enables me to absorb information and synthesize it quickly. As a consultant, I was often thrown into new situations with clients, where I had to learn their business rapidly. I’m built for that kind of thing: If I do some Google searching and watch some videos, I can sound intelligent while speaking about a topic by the end of the day.
Though I have delayed emotional processing, I can read rooms very well. I may not be able to understand an emotion someone is feeling, but due to the heightened sensitivity that comes with autism and ADHD, I can sense that they’re having an emotional moment and ask questions. Early in my consulting career, when I felt like I was mostly taking meeting notes and wasn’t contributing as much as I could, I used my emotional perception to build relationships with clients’ assistants, asking them how they were if it looked like they were having a bad day. They started giving me helpful tips about clients to help me make more meaningful contributions as we prepared for meetings.
Some folks think people with ADHD can’t focus, but there’s a state called hyperfocus where we go all in. There are times when my peers need to start and stop, but I can work on something for 16 hours straight. It’s been a significant driver of success for me. For example, in consulting, if a client hated the deck and we needed to change it overnight, it wasn’t a big deal to me.
Tiomi Gao
The problem with hyperfocus is that I eventually crash. Sometimes, I’d hit a burnout threshold, and my body would feel like mush. Wanting to prove that I can do things just as well, if not better than others, sometimes meant I overdid it and had to suffer for it later.
I’m passionate about helping neurodivergent people identify their strengths
In 2022, I became a part-time leadership coach while working full-time at Cadre. My autism diagnosis in 2023 inspired me to support neurodivergent people in the workplace, and I fell into a niche of neurodivergent coaching by accident when I took on clients who were neurodivergent.
I feel that society views effective leadership in a way that’s very geared toward a neurotypical mind, but I wanted to help people identify what’s beautiful about their neurodifferences and how there’s strength in that, so I became a full-time leadership coach in late 2023.
We all have great days and bad days, whether we’re neurotypical or neurodivergent, but it’s about how we take our bad days and channel them into something better.
Do you have a story to share about navigating neurodivergence in the workplace? Contact this reporter at [email protected].
