Teaching while AuDHD

If I had stayed in teaching, I’m not sure how long I would have lasted, to be honest. I also may never have come to the conclusion that I am neurodivergent.

Recently it dawned on me why the structure of the teaching / instructional day was so difficult for me to manage at times. On days in my job now where I have lots of meetings and not a lot of time to process the content or tasks of those meetings, I’m definitely more prone to a meltdown or skirting other commitments or responsibilities.

For anyone who’s been in the classroom for any amount of time, you know that “planning time” rarely means that you get an uninterrupted block of time alone in your classroom to engage in the deep work necessary to keep the lessons flowing.

Instead, planning time is full of meetings, parent calls, grading, staff or students stopping by – which just means more interruptions. It’s kind of taboo to close your door and keep to yourself (at least this was the social rule I interpreted), but there were definitely times I would hide out in my classroom with the door locked and lights off. (Who are we kidding, the big lights were always off.)

When did I get the time to just sit in silence and process or soak in the day’s events? To have a few minutes to myself? And on top of that, I needed to make sure my brain was in the right space to plan for the next day, week, whatever. This meant taking on the grueling task of transitioning my thinking into a place where I could really focus on doing deep work.

In my teaching role, I was often piloting curriculum, so I was adjusting slide decks we’d created the previous summer, trying out new activities, and in the moment making changes to improve for the next time I taught that. I taught three of my own classes, plus I supported my students by working with their other classroom teachers which meant I was at their mercy of when they would send me their lesson plans.

For all the grandstanding the education system does about being inclusive and providing opportunities and a quality education for their students, overall public education had become a poor fit for my neurodivergent brain. I would say that maybe the ADHD side of my brain did a little bit better since I had constant stimuli in new experiences in a fast pace everyday. But the autistic side of my brain drowned.

As with any job, there’s the actual work you do and then there’s the unwritten social work you do. Unfortunately the latter is just as important in some places as the former, because if you don’t get the social part right, the actual work part will be much more difficult.

Secondary schools were usually friendlier than elementary schools. In secondary you usually had people who had studied at depth their favorite subject; for some it was a special interest. (That was my case, I have a master’s degree in my special interest of linguistics.) It’s a little bit more acceptable to be quirky or eccentric, though not as acceptable as in the post-secondary environment.

What I found in elementary schools was that the students were at their apex of weirdness and quirkiness, but the homogenous social order of the staff was held in high regard. It was tough for me, an undiagnosed AuDHD teacher, to fit in socially. Since I had a role where I was the only one of my department in my school, it was easy to just stay on the outside of the social circle.

As with most of my jobs throughout my life, I didn’t really make friends with people I work with. (There have been very few exceptions, and these colleagues-turned-friends went through a rigorous vetting and approval process to ensure they’re “safe.”) Blurring the lines of professional and personal relationships has been difficult for me, as it is for lots of AuDHDers. There are unspoken rules to both kinds of relationships that I just don’t pick up on naturally.

And in addition, I was so invested in my jobs that I did not want to jeopardize them by having a work relationship go sideways. They say about romantic relationships in the workplace, “Don’t shit where you eat” and I’ve kind of used that as my guideline for work friendships as well.

I would say as I’m learning more about my own brand of neurodivergence, and as I’m getting older, I’m doing a better job of knowing how to blur those lines and be open to new friendships. Fortunately at this moment in time I have a really amazing group of friends, most of whom are also neurodivergent, and that feels very comforting and safe. I regret that it’s taken me the larger part of almost 40 years to get to this point. I wish it hadn’t.

Something still unknown is how I will fare in a job if I’m there longer than 5 years. The longest I’ve ever been at a job has been 6 years. Even in that 6 years, I moved locations. It’s been a fear of mine that at some point, I will have been at a job long enough for people to get to know the “real me,” and that when they meet this person, they will reject her.

This fear if rejection is not based on my experience in the workplace, since I’ve not been at a job long enough for this to happen, but it can be a reality for AuDHD folks who mask heavily on a daily basis. My mitigation strategy is to slowly unmask more and more so that I can show up as my real self as much as is safe and comfortable. This is hard work. This takes vulnerability and having to trust people. It takes a willingness to find the nuance and live in that liminal, blurred space.