The Mask That Made Me

Although I was not sure why until quite recently, I spent over thirty years struggling with something I was never going to be good at anyway. Not the work itself. The performance required to fit in at the office. The overlooked social cues. The off-putting intensity. The frequent mistranslation of the way my brain processes a problem into language that sounds like everyone else’s understanding. Throughout an international career, I have repeatedly felt the sting of missed opportunities, lost-in-translation moments, and ruffled coworkers when my brain operates at a frequency the room cannot quite receive.

In the professional opinion of a specialist, I exhibit all the hallmarks of high-functioning autism, which would formerly have been diagnosed as Asperger’s syndrome. I did not receive this as a revelation. I received it as a name for something that I had always known was there, that I had always (mis)managed, and that I had never quite been able to explain to anyone—including myself.

What I have come to understand is that this is not simply a story of struggle. It is a story of struggle, recognition, and—unexpectedly—authentic change.

The Engine and Its Costs

My neurodivergent pattern-recognition brain is built for seeing what others miss: hidden roadblocks, inefficient procedures, the structural flaw buried three layers beneath the surface that everyone else has normalised into invisibility. I undervalued this trait for decades—I acknowledged it but I had no framework for understanding why it came packaged with such persistent social friction.

The early years were tough. In one of my first senior roles—managing an entirely new platform and taking command of a US$50m deployment budget—my boss received a complaint from a colleague: “How can you stand working with that guy?” His reply: “Because he’s good enough to get away with it.” I was not, in those days, trying to be difficult. I was simply trying to get the job done as efficiently as possible. The idea of moderating my approach to accommodate colleagues I perceived as insufficiently dedicated to excellence or frankly incompetent never entered my mind. Office politics were a distraction from the task. Getting the task done was the point.

This is a known neurodivergent trait—the unswerving focus on the objective, the impatience with process for its own sake, the directness that reads as aggression in environments built on careful social choreography. It saved me once, when I questioned a new departmental policy from the director. What could have been career-ending was instead defused because he knew from my reputation and dedication that I was not looking for a workaround. I was simply asking for direction on how to best accomplish my task within the agreed parameters. A distinction that seems obvious to me remains, apparently, genuinely unclear to many people around neurodivergent colleagues.

This lean, problem-first approach is simultaneously the most valuable thing I bring to an organisation, and sadly, one of the traits that led to those missed opportunities. Many neurodivergent people will recognise this tension without needing to have it explained.