 Hi there, my name is Matthew Saunders. I've known since I was small that I was different. We didn't call it neurodivergence back then. It wasn't called learning differences. People like me were called learning disabled and my disabilities were such that I was considered, it was considered bad enough that I was legally entitled to accommodations from the Canadian and Ontario governments where I lived at the time. I've been part of the Drupal community since 2006. I intended my first Drupal Con in 2007. I'm one of the founders of Drupal Camp Colorado. I sat on the association board of directors for about two and a half years and I helped found the event organizers working group. I'm a founder and currently the chair of Drupal Colorado Incorporated and if you can believe it, this is my 25th Drupal Con. I work in Pfizer and Digital in a senior management position. So I've got a standard disclaimer right now and that is that nothing I talk about today necessarily reflects the opinions of my employer. In 2019, I did a presentation at Drupal Con Amsterdam that touched on my neurodivergence while telling the story of my journey and it was called pivot points, recognizing opportunity, turning challenges into strengths. I'd spent quite a few years at that point researching my daughter's own challenges. We adopted her from social services at the age of five and her experiences before she came to us were really traumatic. So I read, I went to classes, seminars because I needed to understand as much as I could about her neurodivergence, so I could be her advocate. She has bipolar disorder, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, reactive attachment disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. But doing this research, I had light bulb after light bulb after light bulb go off in my head. As I started recognizing a lot of things that I was seeing in her and I was reading about in myself. So in a very real way, if it hadn't been for my daughter I would have just continued coping and I never would have understood my own ADHD and dyslexia and I certainly wouldn't have come to the explosive realization that I was on the autism spectrum. Now, back when I was a kid, there weren't a lot of resources to deal with these kinds of things. So I had figured out most of my coping mechanisms on my own by the time I went to university in 1989. And there were a few others that I hadn't sorted out until I had cancer in 2000 and we'll talk a little bit about that later. But the truth is I really didn't understand why I was different until much later. My personal epiphanies occurred between 2005 and 2017. And since then I've spent a lot of time reflecting and refining my own self-understanding. In my Amsterdam presentation I talked about my journey to being a technology leader despite challenges. And a large reason that my journey was challenging was my lack of diagnosis in my cognitive differences. And like I said, I also had a battle with cancer as a young man that profoundly changed the way I see the world. That cancer in a very strange way also might well be related to my learning differences and I'll talk about that as well in a little bit. Now I'm super lucky because my parents saved all of the diagnostic documents from 1970s and 1980s when I was initially having all of these problems. And what this practically means is that I can now filter through all those documents through the lens of the 21st century. And I don't think a lot of people have that opportunity. I also wanna say that this is my lived experience. I'm giving you insights into what's worked for me where my primary struggles have landed and while there are recognizable patterns for folks who are neurodivergent, every one of us is different. That said, I'll try to generalize my observations because the main goal of this talk is to help people who are neurotypical understand atypicals a bit and atypicals understand neurotypicals a little bit better and provide insight in how you can better relate and communicate from both those points of view. As a child, I was diagnosed with a reversal problem with extremely short attention span, anger issues and inflexibility. I was labeled as being oppositional. Abrupt noises were and still are painful to me. I experienced sensory overload very easily. It was observed that my visual mortar integration was poor. In the 1970s, there wasn't the vocabulary, the sophistication, the understanding to really define my challenges. But in today's terms, I would have been diagnosed differently. I would have been diagnosed with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder. The spectrum now includes what was called aspergers. Now, I grew up in Canada and autism wasn't diagnosed there until 1980. Even so, I wouldn't have fit the diagnosis back then because they really were using the word autism at that point to describe significant deficits. Aspergers wasn't recognized in Canada where I grew up until the 1990s. And it's also interesting to add that when you've got multiple disorders, comorbidity can make it really difficult to identify what causes what. However, I had a great mental health professional that I worked with who said to me, often it doesn't matter what the diagnosis are, it's more important to treat the recognizable symptoms. As a side note, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders at the DSM no longer recognizes the label aspergers. In 2013, it was removed. And I think it was partially because it was discovered that Dr. Asperger played a critical role in identifying children with disabilities during the racial hygiene measures of the Third Reich. Many children were sent to Spiegelgrund in Vienna where they were sometimes euthanized or used as subjects in experiments. And that association has been pretty upsetting to some members of the community. That said, on the other side, there are many folks in this community who are also highly suspicious of the diagnosis being rolled into autism spectrum disorder. So this brings me to my first small insight for you. If somebody shares with you that they're neurodivergent and describes it as aspergers, be sensitive to refer to it in that way with that person. It's how they're identifying. Likewise, if somebody shares that they're on the spectrum, there's a really good chance that they don't identify with the label aspergers. So try to be sensitive to how people talk. When I was three, I had a tiny little red tricycle that I adored. I would beg my parents to put me on the saddle. Once I was sitting on the trike, I would just sit and scream. I would just scream and scream and scream. And my parents couldn't figure out why I would just sit there and haul her at the top of my lungs. It took me over a year to learn how to ride it. Much later in 1977, I was identified educationally as a high-risk child due to delays in eye-hand coordination, spatial relations, motor skills, and visual memory. This was the reason I was screaming. I literally couldn't figure out how to make my legs move the wheel. And I could see other people doing it. Now, at the point to this, is that people on the spectrum can anger quickly and they can have a lot of difficulty calming themselves. So we have to learn skills to cope with an increase in that irritability. But first, before we can even do that, we have to be able to identify emotions. Dr. Kelly Blankenship and Dr. Noha Minshawe of the National Library of Medicine wrote, individuals with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders also exhibit difficulty modulating their anger, which may lead to further difficulties in their social interactions. Because they have difficulty interpreting their own subtle changes in emotion, they're often only able to describe extreme emotions. I simply couldn't express my frustration in a normal way, and this led to extreme outbursts. My emotions either seemed elated or extremely angry, and there didn't seem to be much subtlety in there, not much nuance at all. This would continue well into my teenage years, and I had very few friends because they couldn't identify with me. As a young boy, I would often get into verbal and sometimes physical altercations with my peers, despite being very small for my age. I would become outraged, and enraged if I felt that I was being wronged or insulted. And you know, children are cruel, so rather than trying to help me calm down, they found it funny to just wind me up until I was a complete mess. In grade seven and eight, in an attempt to sort out my learning difficulties, but also cater to my intelligence, I ended up being both enrolled in the gifted and the remedial program at the same time. This meant that I didn't fit anywhere. I didn't fit in with the gifted kids because I was in the remedial program, and I didn't fit in with the remedial kids because I was in the gifted program, and regular kids didn't want to have anything to do with me. It was an extremely lonely time, and that ran all the way through high school. This had social impacts of its own that really didn't resolve until I went to university. However, I do think it saved me from being relegated solely to the remedial program, and this strategy quite likely saved me from a life of being dependent on others. As I got older, I was baffled by how people reacted to me. I wanted to figure out why I had trouble making and keeping friends, and what eventually worked for me ultimately was in the moment journaling. When I found myself feeling angry or sad or excited, I would take a deep breath, identify where those emotions were coming from, and I'd write it down in the notebook at the time, and I'd write down the reactions that people were having to me in that moment, good or bad. So in the last two years before going to university, I was able to start identifying what my self-destructive behaviors were around other people, and then I could start to short-circuit them, using reason rather than instinct to figure these things out. Now that social impact of being an experiment by mixing remedial and gifted programs was on its way to resolving when I attended university. When I arrived, I realized nobody knew who I was, so they had no idea that when I was younger, I was prone to outbursts and so forth. I learned at the university that I could start to define my own identity. I learned that I could fake it until I made it. That exercise of writing down what I was feeling, when and why, that allowed me to flourish both academically and also socially during this time. People liked me, and it was the first time in my life that that had happened, and it was a profound thing for me. I would note that these feelings of anger that I get though are nearly never directed personally at another person. When they fade, and that happens quickly now, I have no feelings of animosity towards the people that it might have seemed that that anger was directed. This can be really, really confusing for the other person or persons, because they don't understand how somebody can 180 so quickly. It can also be really confusing for the neurodivergent person, because they've let all this stuff go, right? They can't conceive why people are still upset with them. So to this day, my emotions continue to be extreme, and I use a variety of self-soothing techniques to smooth things inwardly and outwardly. Sometimes this manifests itself as box breathing, or lightly tapping my shoulders. Sometimes it's repetitive movements. Sometimes it's using a fidget. But I've identified ways that I can calm my brain down, slow things down. So when you work with those on the spectrum, please consider that their feelings can manifest very much differently than yours. They may feel deeply about things that you wouldn't expect. You may be surprised by what they feel so deeply about. Please avoid approaching this as overreaction. That will simply make things more challenging. But none of this makes those feelings less valid or real. For me, I'm found it totally fine if somebody comes up to me and says, hey, what's up? What are you feeling? Why do you feel that way? And I'm happy to talk about these things. What drives me nuts is when those feelings are dismissed. So if you're in a long-term personal or professional relationship with somebody who's neurodivergent, learn what triggers are likely to lead to these extremes. And you can help an awful lot just by understanding. I experience the same extremes in emotion at the other end too, joy. The Asperger's Autism Network writes, many feelings such as fear, anger, and joy seem to be experienced more intensely by those with Asperger's profiles than by average people. In addition, some individuals with Asperger's profiles report that they deeply internalize other people's feelings. So when someone else is upset, they themselves will find themselves quickly upset as well. I feel joy unbelievably deeply. I remember when I was a choir boy, singing solos in places like St. John the Divine in New York, feeling like I was being filled with joy. Or as an adult, going to the Coventry Cathedral and the juxtaposition between the bombed-out church that they left as it was from the Blitz that was then purposefully built in integration with the new. Well, I was brought to tears. I've been to two Drupalcons in Barcelona and both of them, I attended a La Mercia Festival. Both times I sat at the street level under the fireworks and it felt like I was absorbing joy directly from those lights. I will add that both times I had to leave before the festival was over because it was too much, the noise, the lights, all of it. But in that moment, it was magnificent. Most recently, I became certified as an open-water scuba diver. And the pure joy that I felt while I was swimming with turtles and gliding across forests of coral, it was all-encompassing. So I want folks to understand that folks who are neurodivergent, their feelings really matter and they're really deep. As a child, it was observed that I had a massive vocabulary and excellent word discrimination compared to others in my age group. My verbal IQ was scored in the 99.8th percentile. However, traditional learning was nearly impossible for me. It was recommended that you treat Matthew as if he was hard of hearing. These are direct quotes, by the way, from one of these documents that I was talking about. Treat Matthew as if he was hard of hearing and maintain eye contact while giving oral instructions. Eye contact, are you crazy? And his attention span is so short and he's so easily distracted that it's possible for him to not hear or retain oral lessons. But here's the thing. If you were to sit me down in a music concert or an opera or an operetta, a Broadway show, I would sit in complete silence, watching, absorbing, until intermission. And then I'd go nuts, right? And then the show would start back up again and I was right back into it. I was able to pay attention. But it wasn't in the ways that teachers and classrooms wanted me to pay attention. My mind was quick to sort out a problem but I could only focus on one thing at a time and often obsessively. It was, you know, if that thing interested me. My handwriting was atrocious. I would scramble letters up. I'd put them backwards. It was awful. And my parents were told, Matthew's never gonna learn to read or write. Be prepared for that. That report of an extremely short attention span wasn't correct. I needed the proper motivation and the obsessive behaviors that come with those on the autism spectrum when something's interesting made those literacy predictions false. You see, my siblings and father were part of a church choir and I desperately wanted to be part of that experience. I was in second grade. I couldn't read. And under normal circumstances, children in second grade should be able to read 50 to 90 words per minute. The choir master had me try to read from a hymn book. I just couldn't do it. And he told me that until I could read, I wouldn't be able to join the choir and I was inconsolable. I felt stupid and I felt left out. This turned into fury. It was a red tricycle moment. Initially, my parents saw this as being oppositional behavior, but it occurred to my mother who was a nurse that they needed to steer that anger towards something more productive. I was very fortunate. My dad was an English teacher and he sat down with me every night writing letters, words and then short sentences, longer sentences and eventually short stories on the back of used dot matrix paper. We spent two months or so every night after supper drilling. Mom and dad would find me drilling on my own, often having to force me crying because I did not want to stop to go to bed. And 10 weeks later, I went back to the choir master, asked to be tested again. He was like, what? What are you talking about? Well, after the test, he asked me to join the choir. I'd learned to read in less than 70 days and not only that, I was reading above grade level, both in speed and comprehension. This is known as repetitive obsession. Those on the spectrum when they find something interesting can learn that thing incredibly quickly. They can learn that thing very quickly if they're motivated. And if you're on the spectrum and you have tasks that you aren't particularly interested in, something that's worked for me is to change the rules on that task and turn it into a game. So for example, I do a lot of budgeting work at work. I hate spreadsheets, but if I can start to do things like use pivot tables and manipulate things in ways that weren't expected, suddenly it becomes a game, suddenly it's far more interesting. And I can find myself actually getting into doing that work. So when you're working with somebody on the spectrum, young, older, in between, a good tactic is to find out what amuses them, challenges them, interests them. They can excel under those circumstances. So if a work task is proving difficult to complete, look for another way to make the task different. Fall into a way that amuses them. I had behavioral issues that included some pretty angry outbreaks. In retrospect, I realized I was having significant challenges with transitions. I was irritated with unexpected change. So when I feel myself tensing up and I can recognize that fight or flight response occurring over something as stupid as my wife asking to use my car or making an unexpected shift in a shopping pattern, like going down the wrong aisle the wrong direction, or somebody at work adding some tiny new requirement to a project, what I have to do is I have to stop because I can feel these things trigger me. So I stop and I box breathe and I ask myself, is this actually a crisis? Is it a problem? What are the implications if I push back? Before I started engaging in that strategy, my first response would be to argue, which had negative professional and personal impacts. But this never came from a place of actually trying to be oppositional. So if you work with somebody or live with somebody on the spectrum and you see this fight or flight response on what seems like it should be a simple conversation, take a breath and ask yourself, what am I missing? Help me understand the risk here. The moment you do that, you have shifted the context of your conversation with your friend, colleague or partner. And that, for me, that shifts me immediately into solutioning rather than defending, explaining rather than fighting. Dr. Marsha Eckerd wrote on Asperger's 101 site, before schools and parents and families labeled behavior as oppositional defiant disorder, they need to explore the thinking of the child involved. Those certain explanations of behavior might seem intuitive to the parent or teacher. This behavior might not be intuitive to the child with autism spectrum disorder or nonverbal learning disorder. Ideally, once the teachers and parents get it, they'll be better able to be helpful and provide meaningful explanations and valuable insight instead of creating a negative experience. It takes time, but it's worth it. As a child, I didn't understand consequences. I did not understand that if I did action A, it would result in consequence B. Good or bad. And because of that, I found myself having to think through scenarios so I understand what happens if I do this thing, what's gonna happen later. That happens really quickly now. Like, I've intellectualized it at this point that it can happen in a moment. But I've intellectualized these responses rather than have learned them through osmosis. I never realized until adulthood that most people actually just naturally extrapolate these things. It was like, what? Really? Learning to do this has been essential to my success. And that doesn't mean that I don't understand kindness or decency or I don't understand the difference between right and wrong or goodness or anything like that. In fact, I'm highly sympathetic to the problems of others and I find myself really eager to please. All right, names. Remembering names is so difficult. I've never been good with them. I remember faces, places, events. I remember landmarks. But keeping a person's name in my head is so difficult. If I'm introduced to somebody five minutes later, I have no idea what their name is. Names jumble up into a picture of these Drupalcon name tags that I've put up here and they blend into nothing. This isn't just in my personal and professional relationships. I also have a hard time with names in books, movies, TV shows. I see the pictures of these people in my mind but it doesn't connect to a name. So remember when I said that my testing indicated that my attention span was terrible? Learning new names is obviously tightly connected to the short term memory. And the best way for me to remember someone's name is to create a mnemonic device in the moment or associate that person's name with something else or repeat that person's name over and over and over and over and over again. Now you can imagine when you meet somebody, that's a little awkward, right? They're looking at you like you're completely crazy. As you say, schnitzel, schnitzel, schnitzel, schnitzel, right? Like that's, it's really bizarre. And this also can be really awkward when you're asked to introduce someone you're with to another person. And it's someone that you should absolutely know the name of. So I plan ahead of social gatherings and meetings, right? I remind myself of the people's names that will be there and I write a note on my phone or on a piece of paper that I put in my pocket. So you may be around me and you'll see me look, go into my pocket, pull out a piece of paper, put it back in my pocket, that's what's going on. I'm trying to make sure that I understand who it is that I'm talking, remembering the name of who it is that I'm talking to. And stimulus and stress make this way worse. Names go out the window completely when I'm stressed out. I can even forget the name of a close friend. Crowds freak me out, there's just too much stimulus. I get anxious just thinking about going to the shopping mall. I find it exhausting meeting new people and figuring out how to negotiate those new relationships. If I know that I'm gonna be in a situation like that, I'll often pick one person who I know and trust and say, hey, can you just keep an eye out for me? I may become uncomfortable and may need help to get out. So if someone on your team is on the spectrum and they say that they're experiencing too much stimulus, believe them, help them get to a quieter place. For me, lower lighting can help as well. And don't be offended if they don't remember your name. If they ask you to remind them, just tell them. Timeline this. This is something that can be both a symptom of ADHD and of those on the autism spectrum. So I'm not really sure where it comes from for me. But when I was 12, my father was writing to the Ottawa Board of Education trying to get some additional help for me. And he said, Matthew has no proper sense of time. It took him a very long time to understand yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He has no notion of days, years, or months, or of getting somewhere on time. And this is still largely true. I have to go completely overboard to make sure that I've got things like calendar reminders to get to places on time. I can't estimate how long it'll take me to go from point A to point B. So I often use Google Maps to find out. Because I don't really understand time, just because it says it'll take 20 minutes doesn't mean that I'm actually gonna understand what that means. Sometimes time for me goes by incredibly quickly. In a moment, sometimes it's very, very much drawn out. And it has no real relationship to the amount of time that actually has gone by. Being a remote worker has been a huge boon to me because I can frequently just use my calendar to see what comes next. And I do struggle with deadlines. So I overcompensate and I start tasks really early. When I find something really interesting, I can hyper-focus, I might miss meals. I'll often look at the clock and wonder where the time went. So what I do, what to do? So the first thing is, wear a watch. Smartwatch is awesome. Have clocks in multiple rooms. So every room that you're gonna be in, in your home, put a clock up. Use technology to prompt you with alarms like Siri, Google Home, Alexa. Use a stopwatch to time tasks that you know you'll do repeatedly so you can intellectualize, setting up these alerts for yourself when you should start to do a task. Then do the math backwards from the deadline to figure out when you should start and then double that time. My anxiety levels go through the roof when I realize I'm imminently gonna be late for something. And it deregulates me. I make mistakes at those times if I don't force myself back into self-regulation. Things like trying to find parking in time, in a tight time constraints, can completely unhinge me. And if I've got a critical set of tasks that I have to complete after I arrive in that place, cognitive skills have gone completely out of the window because the fight-or-flight response is in full force. As a result, I overcompensate. I always plan to be early. I usually give myself 15 to 30 minute buffer because if you're always early, you can never be late. Give yourself enough time to self-soothe and collect yourself. Observe if 15 minutes is enough. Do you need more? Do you always need to do certain tasks when you arrive somewhere? Plan for all of that. Use your intellect to compensate. When I was little, I had no sense of distance, either. So I would run halfway up the front yard if I saw a car coming to avoid it. And at 12, I was still considered to be a hazard to myself and others because I wasn't good at judging how far away something was. My eye-hand coordination was poor. I didn't have a sense of my own physical space. I don't really have a sense of how far a mile is. And back in the 1970s and early 80s, nobody could have possibly made the connection between shortsightedness, poor binocular vision, astigmatism, and ADHD. You see, ADD wasn't added to the DSM until 1980 and then ADHD in 1987. Many of the symptoms are shared with binocular vision dysfunction. This is the lack of ability to properly focus because your eyes are misaligned. Those with ADHD and ADD can present with these symptoms. And in the 70s, I was diagnosed as having a lazy eye. I didn't have a lazy eye, but I was diagnosed with having a lazy eye so I had to wear a patch for a couple of months and it didn't do a damn thing. This is all a long way of saying, I overcompensate because I can't properly judge these things. One last bit of connected data that couldn't have been understood at the time either has to do with the fact that I'm red, green color blind. So, our of the journals reports that 33% of the general public has astigmatism. When you go to those on the autism spectrum, it's 73% of us. The National Library of Medicine reports about 8% of males have color blindness. Then when you look at those on the autism spectrum, it jumps to roughly 30%, three and a half times more prevalent. The medical community didn't make any of these connections until about 2017. To mix all of this up, I'm also direction blind. So, I've got spatial impairments and I think it's partly due to my dyslexia. I have trouble with left and right. Somebody gives me directions to go north on First Street and then travel west on Green Avenue. I'm a mess. But if you tell me, go up to the Arby's and then turn towards the school, it all makes sense. I'm fine. So, again, I have to give myself extra time to get places because if I don't, I get lost, confused, anxiety levels go up, dysregulate, all bad. Shortly after moving to Colorado, to start my first full-time professional job, I discovered a lump in my left testicle. That lump tripled in size over the space of about 15 days and I needed surgery and chemotherapy. The chemo was pretty painful at times and to this day, my hearing is affected. I have neuropathy in my fingertips, permanent tinnitus in both ears. It was intense and I was in the doctor's office taking chemo through a port that they installed in my chest here pretty much every weekday for about two months. So I brought a work laptop to the clinic, spent my days coding, an application for work and when I got home, I'd curl up in a little ball, sweating and just miserable. So in 2017, it's weird that all these things sort of are connecting in 2017. But in 2017, the European Association of Urology made the connection between the prevalence of testicular cancer and learning disabilities. The work lead's author, Dr. Mehran Ashbar said, we found that people with learning disabilities are not only more likely to develop testicular cancer, but they're far more likely to die from it than the general public. And people with learning difficulties are four times more likely to die of testicular cancer than the general population. And for me, this was another data point that just kept connecting dots. Now I will say this. For me, the cancer wasn't negative on balance. It took me a while to figure that out, but it represented another step towards me becoming less rigid. Remember when I talked about my childhood, how it was impulsive, short tempered at times, often inflexible, obsessed with a single thing and bad with transitions? I could be really impatient with people and I would often quibble about small things and found it extremely difficult to let those things go, often to the detriment of my personal and professional relationships. That went right through until I was almost 30. But the experience of having cancer forced me to confront the fact that all that small stuff didn't matter. I learned that holding on to those kinds of trifles and letting them stress you out was counterproductive because when you're treating something that will 100% kill you otherwise, your perspective can change. Now I don't want any of you to learn this lesson by having cancer, right? And you don't have to necessarily. But I do want you to, I'm gonna give a public service announcement here. If you're a guy and particularly if you've got learning differences, do self checks in the shower regularly. If you catch it early, it's easy to cure, but if you don't catch it early, it can make you awfully sick and will kill you. When I finished high school, I wasn't ready to go to university. I wasn't mature enough. I didn't have enough self-awareness. High school had been difficult. And while I never failed any classes, I had a hard time concentrating. I was socially was extremely awkward. I didn't understand people well, they didn't understand me. I misread intentions and it was often bullied. 9th grade I was taped up on a football goalposts two feet off the ground. People broke into my locker and left biology lab crawfish and fetal pig and snake in my locker. Just awful things. Junior high had followed me. And I felt alone. I was bullied and largely out of tribe. And ever since then, every success that I have is colored with somebody's gonna figure out that I'm worthless. This is when impostor's syndrome began in my life. I was happiest when I was able to do things on my own. Things that required repetitive actions. This meant I excelled in art classes where repetition and techniques like crosshatching were valued. I did decide with the help of my parents to take a vocational art program for high school graduates. And I worked in a coffee shop but all of that didn't really feel right. I was adrift, I felt deeply sad, felt like a fraud, fake and useless. But unbeknownst to me, I was about to head off to the best place that I've ever been in my life. And that was Bishop's University in the Eastern townships of Quebec. So when I arrived there and did a tour, there were only 1700 students. My largest class was 40 people. My smallest was seven. I was in a situation where teachers really, really cared about the students. Really took an interest in them. And so I was in a situation where I got scholarships to go there. It was awesome. And I was waiting to be bullied and shamed. But none of that actually happened. Everything just started falling into place. So high functioning people with ADD and ADHD can do well in the workplace and school and so forth. But undiagnosed, they may attribute symptoms to anxiety and depression. It can affect your self-esteem. You can feel things like you have character flaws that lead to feelings of shame, lack of confidence. You get praised for how hard and long you work. And you're just sitting there going, man, it's because I can't stay on task long enough. This can make you feel like a fraud. And it can lead to that feeling that someday somebody's gonna figure out that I'm just faking it. This last story is really general advice. It doesn't really just apply to people with learning disabilities, but it is doubly important to us. After finishing my bachelor's degree, I moved back to Ottawa. And I worked as a lighting tech for a theater company. And I realized, while I enjoyed it at the time, I really didn't wanna be a lighting technician for the rest of my life. So I enrolled in a non-profit management program at the University of Ottawa, which led to a job in an experimental dance company. And I had also applied to go down to Virginia and do my masters down in Virginia in fine arts focused on arts marketing. That job was curious though. It represented my real first step to becoming a software technologist. So this was back in 1995, and I was hired to work on the white website. And I said, sure, I can do that. And then I was like, what's a website? And we didn't have Google to Google what's a website? So I did know what the internet was because I was using Telnet at the time to log into a giant multi-user game called LambdaMu. I met my wife there actually, and I asked a friend on LambdaMu who I knew sort of had this kind of stuff going on, what this web thing was. And he pointed me to a bunch of really useful information. So suddenly I was a webmaster, really had no idea what I was doing. But even so, I'm sure most people who were in my situation were in the same boat because in 1995, there were only 23,500 websites in the world. But one of the insane things that the company did that, the dance company did that summer, was collaborate in real time across five different cities with the Canadian Broadcasting Company. And they produced a piece of work in real time in front of all of these audiences. And it just blew my mind away. So when I got down to grad school, I explained to them what I'd seen and how that had affected me. And they said, okay, you know, Matthew, here's, we're gonna give you the chance to figure out what it is you wanna study. Obviously it isn't arts administration any longer. So rather than researching arts administration, I produced three multimedia works, each layering on the previous, experimenting with the web, imagery, live action theater, streamed live feeds, pre-recorded video. What this meant was I needed to learn to code, to manage people, to string together networks, learn codecs. So this boy that was never supposed to learn to read or write was suddenly becoming a technologist. And all of this led to me working for the university after graduating, teaching copyright law, videography, developing the first database-driven tourism website with the Virginia Tourism Board back in 1998. So what I'm saying here is never be frightened to ask for what you need and want. The worst thing that somebody can say is no. Don't be frightened to do bold, crazy things. Do something that takes you completely out of your comfort zone and assume if you keep applying pressure, you will make it work. Be fearless. Don't let the perceived consequence of failure cripple you because the real consequence of success can be life-changing. So I want to admit something. I was afraid to start talking about my own personal mental health challenges. I was frightened to discuss my learning disabilities. My neurodivergency was something that I have heavily masked my entire life. I didn't want to be different. I didn't want to be perceived as being different. I didn't want my professional career or personal relationships to be prejudiced or destroyed because of these pieces of myself. And when I was a child through the school of hard knocks, that's when I learned to hide that part of me. I learned that I should put it away in a little corner and protect those dirty little secrets. But remember when I was talking about becoming a dad earlier in the talk? Well, I had to take the time to put myself into a situation where I had to learn and talk about this stuff because I needed to be able to advocate for her. So I wouldn't have learned any of these things about myself if I hadn't had the courage to spend the time learning about my daughter. And this all led to me at this point having the courage to talk about these things publicly. Now, I have a few last takeaways before I pause for questions. A few stats here. It's estimated that 1% of the population has autism spectrum disorder. When you look at software developers, those who self-identify, it jumps to 4%. There's way more of us than 4%. I guarantee it. 4.4% of the population has ADHD and 20% have dyslexia. High functioning autists gravitate to industries like software development. You have these people in your life. You may be one of these people. Some of them you may not even know that they're in this circumstance because they're masking themselves. So keeping all of that in mind. Use empathy. If you are on the spectrum, you're gonna have to work twice as hard to understand how others perceive the world. And if you're not on the spectrum, but you have those who are on the spectrum in your life, you have to work twice as hard. Rather, they have to work twice as hard to understand how your autist friend, colleague, or partner thinks. Please make patience central to your life. Patience is a muscle that needs to be exercised. Those with ADHD and autism become irritable more easily than atypical people, rather more easily than typical people, and they can lead to outbreaks of anger. Practically this means if you're neurodivergent, you really need to monitor why you feel the way that you do. And if you're neurotypical, help your friend by watching out for warning signs and triggers. Kindness, that should be your go-to even when you're feeling upset. Assume people are always approaching a situation with good intentions until they absolutely prove otherwise. Be kind. And on that note, thanks very much for listening to me. I appreciate it. And I'd be happy to take some questions if you have. And if you wanna ask a question, come up and ask it in the microphone so it gets recorded. Hey, thank you. Yeah. What do you write on your papers with the names? Because I have the same problem, I don't know what to write on. Yeah, yeah, so I actually do little doodles of the person that I know that I'm gonna be around. And then I'll write the person's name right beside it. And yeah, that's the way I approach it, yeah. I gotta come bother you. No, what resources do you have any resources for both more typical and neurotypical people to help them along? I know your family was an inspiring source for your successes in life. Do you have any other resources? So almost all schools now should have a resource person or persons who can help out with that kind of stuff. I'll tell you this, my experience with my daughter was that I had to fight like hell with the school board to get the help that she specifically needed. However, they legally cannot deny you those resources. So you just keep pounding on them until they give up. Sometimes you have to grind them into the ground in order to get those resources. They don't want to assign people to programs like that because they don't get any additional money per head for those kids, but those kids are much, much more expensive to be educated. But your kids have the right to an education. It's literally, it's in the law. And they have to find ways to accommodate. Yeah, come on up. So I was interested about, we often group in web accessibility, neurodivergency. And it becomes a real gray area like what divergencies we're speaking to, how to articulate that, and the WCAG doesn't really speak directly to it. And I'm curious if you had any thoughts on how web accessibility can relate, should relate, or maybe shouldn't relate to some of the topics you brought up. Yeah, yeah, that's really good. So one of the places that I can speak to personally is color contrast. Like things that for somebody who's not colorblind, things that seem completely reasonable in terms of color contrast, I can't see. Like you throw green text onto a red background. I'm screwed, I can't see it. It's difficult for me to see red text on a blue background. And often, like red text on a blue background is used as a, pay attention to this. And I'll end up doing something like using a screen reader for that. Because I just can't read it, I can't see it. Or I'll highlight it, because then it changes into the background, right? But you're absolutely right. We throw this notion of neurodivergency into accessibility, and nobody has really spent the time to start to articulate what that really means. So I don't have much for you other than observing you're right. Yeah, I've heard that as well. I've been working on an open-source accessibility project and one of the big issues that I see is the gray areas, right, where you want to package disabilities within accessibility, but you haven't really defined what are the outcomes, what do the users actually need in these paid places? Right, yeah. Any other questions, comments? Not so much a question, but I guess a comment on how things are these days. We have a 17-year-old daughter who is entering college this summer. She's neurodivergent, ADHD, she's had convergence and sufficiency, so difficulty with focusing. She can't read for more than, say, 20 minutes at a time or something like that. I mean, she's brilliant. She can read, but it's just, you know, it's painful. She's been through a lot of the bullying that you've been through. I've been through that when I was younger, and I always told people things changed as soon as I went into college. It just completely changed. And I've never been diagnosed with anything, and my daughter keeps telling me, you better, you should get checked, because a lot of the things that are happening to me, I'm noticing with you. But the thing that I wanted to comment on was sort of like this state of how things are these days, how things are perceived. She's coming from a project-based public school in Philadelphia. She's had tremendous support of 504 plan accommodations, and she's been accepted to 11 colleges, visiting nine colleges, it was nuts, but she finally picked one, but a lot of these colleges have accommodation programs. Yeah, bring the 504 with you and go into the accommodations department. I went in with my daughter when she went to university, and they were flipping amazing. Yeah, yeah, a lot of the colleges and some of them are built in, they have them all built in, some of them you have to sort of cobble together, but I think the state of things now is so much better than it was back then, but even given all that, she struggles with worthiness, fraud. I mean, I feel that all the time, so I feel like it's my fault that I sort of like gave it to her, but for anybody here who's dealing with children who might be having these issues, the programs are out there and the support is out there and it's so much better than it was before. They talk about the stigma being less and less and it's still there, but it is getting better. But that's one of the reasons that I talk about this stuff now, right? I think one of the easiest ways of dealing with the stigma is to literally be in a position where you're showing people who are highly successful in life, in their relationships, in work, with neurodivergency and making it normal, right? Like, everybody's got something going on. Everybody's in the spectrum in some way. It just so happens that we've defined this narrow band of what's normal, which is kind of crazy, right? Like, it doesn't make a ton of sense. Mine is more of just a comment and I've struggled with a lot of these things that you've talked about all my life and it's really frustrating to try and find that type of, I don't know, there's not really been a lot of talks about neurodivergency in a lot of the spaces that I've been in, so I just wanted to really thank you for doing this type of talk because it makes me feel really hard and I just wanted to say thank you so much for doing it. You're really welcome. I'm sorry, another question. That first thing for the lazy-eye story, that was the worst part of my schedule for many years, I know that. I used to be around people within the spectrum for years and I know how to deal with them and all their emotions and stuff like this. However, remotely, I have no clue what's triggering them and you know those conversations on Slack, Teams, sometimes I don't get an answer for 10 minutes and I'm like, oh crap, have I made a mistake? And I have no idea how to start discussing about those because some of those people, I've known before COVID and stuff, but some of them are joining us and I have no clue and it's really hard to start talking about it and what's triggering you? Just ask, what happened? Like why did you disappear for 10 minutes? You know, don't make a big deal about it, but ask, that's all we want, right? We want to be heard. We want people to understand us and the easiest way to do that is just say, hey, what's going on? What happened? And the thing is, for me, the only time I get upset about that kind of thing is if I'm dismissed. If what I'm feeling is dismissed as being overreacting or whatnot. If you come to me with good intentions and ask me what's going on, I'll tell you. And I bet you your colleagues would tell you too. Don't be afraid to ask. Yeah. All right, I think they're probably gonna kick us out of here because I was supposed to be done 12 minutes ago, but thank you very much everybody for coming. I really, really appreciate it.