Something I hear so often from women is that they wonder if maybe they “can’t” be neurodivergent because they did well at school, are intelligent, high-achieving and outwardly really successful. When you have early experiences of being second-guessed by others, it can leave you in this conundrum – you trust your intuition yet you doubt yourself.
This is where the idea of a wonky profile comes in.
A wonky profile simply means your strengths and struggles don’t line up in a neat, consistent way. Instead of a smooth curve, your mapped out abilities look like peaks and valleys. You might even be the outlier on the graph that researchers often prefer to delete. You might shine in reading, problem-solving, or leadership, but find the basics of organisation, time management, or numbers painfully difficult.
I often refer to this TED talk the happy secret to better work by Positive Psychology researcher Shawn Achor. It’s quite old now, but watching it changed my life, so I refer to it often. In this talk he says something like “I don’t want to delete the outliers – I want to study them”.
I am fascinated by outliers. The people who trained as high performing athletes and dancers as children and now they’ve retired, they struggled with basic life admin tasks. The ones whose challenges were hidden behind a lot of support and scaffolding. The ones who were so busy being brilliant that no one really bothered too much about their struggles. “Oh, she’s scatterbrained when she’s not on the stage or in the field performing but she’ll probably grow out of it”. And for ADHD, that’s what we used to think. That this was a childhood disorder you were supposed to grow out of.
I’m an outlier. My own profile is very “wonky.” I have significant dyscalculia AKA difficulties with numbers that go far beyond not being “good” at math. My brain can tell you what you were wearing when we first met in 1999 (cargo pants and glitter eyeshadow probably!). It cannot remember how to calculate a percentage, split the bill or even do some basic arithmetic without counting on my fingers. And yet, I otherwise excelled academically. Given my academic achievements and career as a clinical psychologist, my poorer maths skills have often been met with disbelief. So for a really long time I hid them. Over the years, I’ve heard versions of “you’re clearly just not trying hard enough” more times than I can count. It created layers of shame that I had to work through before I could see my brain clearly. I avoided certain careers and settings because I knew I’d be found out to be a fraud. Medicine? Didn’t even try to pursue it. Career in the defence forces? Nope. I knew they’d test my math as part of an aptitude test and find out I was a dumb arse. Even though I know that these kinds of tests (where they measure your math, verbal) aren’t actually the same as an IQ test and that they are biased towards people who don’t have a learning disorder.
That’s the nature of a wonky profile. On paper, the highs can obscure the lows. People around you dismiss your struggles because they don’t fit the stereotype. You’ve probably picked up the vibe that people even think you’re faking or exaggerating. I don’t know why I was never tested for dyscalculia as a child and why I was never offered tutoring. Most teachers just seemed to say “oh well, she’s really creative and good at English”
If you have skills that are clearly uneven – peaks and valleys where there is some secret shame? They are often the clearest signs of a neurodiverse brain.
