Sometimes it’s not a Bad Horse, Sometimes it’s a Zebra

Recently, while on safari in Mauritius, I found myself staring at a zebra and thinking about autism, which is perhaps not the most conventional response to seeing wildlife in its natural habitat, but it did remind me of something I came across shortly after being diagnosed with ADHD and autism:

you can spend your entire life thinking you are a terrible horse, only to discover that you are
actually a perfectly good zebra. It is slightly twee as metaphors go, and I am usually suspicious of anything that sounds as though it belongs on a motivational mug, but unfortunately it is alsof ather accurate.

Learning the Rules by Watching

For much of my life, I thought I was a bad horse. Everyone else seemed to have received some sort of handbook explaining the mechanics of being a person and I had apparently missed the distribution list, so I did what many neurodivergent people become extremely good at doing: I watched. I learnt how long eye contact was supposed to last, when you were meant to contribute in a meeting, how enthusiastic you should appear about things that did not warrant quite that level ox enthusiasm, how much personality was considered acceptable in a professional setting, and the peculiar choreography of small talk. There are, apparently, correct facial expressions for different parts of a conversation, and there are also moments when everybody laughs despite nobody having said anything particularly funny. Eventually, you learn the rules well enough to perform them without appearing to think about them.

That, in its less dramatic form, is masking. It is not necessarily about inventing an entirely different personality or consciously pretending to be somebody else; often it is thousands of small calculations, adjustments and corrections made so routinely that eventually you stop noticing you are making them at all. The problem is that other people stop noticing too. A person who masks effectively can look confident, sociable, composed and entirely at ease, while internally their brain is running what feels like several dozen background processes just to make the situation appear effortless. The better you become at masking, the easier it is for everyone around you to assume that it costs you nothing.

And that is where masking becomes particularly difficult, because after years of successfully convincing other people that you are a horse, you can start expecting yourself to behave like one too. If everyone else can spend an entire day in a noisy conference room, move directly into networking drinks and then suggest dinner as though this were a perfectly reasonable sequence of events, the obvious conclusion is not always that perhaps this is actually quite a lot of stimulation. More often, it is: why can’t I do this properly? The same applies to fluorescent lighting, ambiguous instructions, telephone calls, open-plan offices, unstructured networking and any number of other things regarded as entirely ordinary because they happen to be ordinary for the majority. Instead of asking whether an environment works for you, you begin measuring yourself against the people who appear comfortable in it, and when you repeatedly fall short of a standard you were never particularly well designed to meet, difference starts to feel remarkably
like failure.

A Later Diagnosis Changes the Footnotes

This is one of the stranger parts of receiving a neurodivergent diagnosis later than childhood. The diagnosis does not change your history, but it does rather dramatically change the footnotes. Experiences you had previously filed under lazy, difficult, oversensitive, antisocial, disorganised, dramatic or simply not trying hard enough acquire another possible explanation, and there can be a peculiar sort of grief in that. Not because being autistic or having ADHD is inherently tragic, because it is not, but because you realise how much time and energy you spent trying to correct things that were not necessarily defects in the first place. You were trying very hard to become a better horse, and nobody had thought to check whether you were one.

Workplaces do the Same Thing

This matters far beyond individual self-understanding, because workplaces often do exactly the same thing. Organisations increasingly say that they value neurodiversity, which is excellent, but cognitive diversity tends to become marginally less fashionable once people begin displaying actual cognitive differences. It is easy to like neurodiversity when it means innovation, unusual problem solving and fresh thinking; it becomes slightly less convenient when it means somebody would rather have the instructions in writing, does not make much eye contact, needs a quiet room, dislikes unnecessary phone calls or finds an apparently harmless networking event more exhausting than the eight-hour working day that preceded it.

We attach an extraordinary amount of meaning to behaviours that often have remarkably little to do with competence. Eye contact becomes confidence. Talking frequently in meetings becomes engagement. Comfort with ambiguity becomes adaptability. Enjoying networking becomes commercial ability. Speed of verbal response becomes intelligence. Sometimes those interpretations are correct, but sometimes we are simply rewarding people for being convincing horses. The danger is that organisations begin to confuse familiarity with capability, and then wonder why their supposedly diverse workforce gradually learns to behave in exactly the same way.

That presents an obvious problem for any business genuinely interested in diversity of thought.
You cannot recruit people because they think differently and then spend several years performance-managing them into thinking, communicating and behaving exactly like everybody else. At some point, diversity has to be allowed to look different as well. That does not mean abandoning professional standards or pretending that nobody ever needs to adapt; professional life is, to some extent, an elaborate exercise in not doing precisely what one feels like doing at any given moment. The distinction is between adapting deliberately because a situation requires it and constantly editing yourself because you have concluded that your unedited version is somehow unacceptable. One is a skill. The other becomes exhausting.

Back to the Zebra

Which brings me back to the zebra. Standing there in Mauritius, the metaphor suddenly seemed almost embarrassingly obvious. Nobody looks across the savannah at a zebra and thinks, what a disappointing horse. We do not wonder why it has failed to lose the stripes, why it cannot behave more like the animal standing next to it, or whether some executive coaching might improve its neigh. We recognise that it is a different animal, built differently, with different characteristics, and we judge it accordingly.

Human beings, despite our supposed sophistication, are sometimes rather worse at this. I spent years trying to work out how to become a better horse. These days, I am much more interested in understanding the zebra, what it actually needs to function well, and whether some of the things I once regarded as flaws were simply evidence that I had been using the wrong benchmark all along.

And perhaps that is the more useful question for workplaces too: not how do we make everybody resemble the same model of competence, but whether the model itself was ever as universal as we assumed. Sometimes it is not a bad horse. Sometimes it is a zebra.

By Mitzi Danielson-Kaslik MICA CG, Risk, Governance & Compliance