The Community Trash

If you’re coming to this post, please check out part 1 first – all the experiences I laid out there taught me a lot about who I was and how it could further my career leading up to working on Edge, even without knowing that I’m autistic. I learned I’m extremely passionate about helping people and fostering close relationships, I earned specialization in escalation operations and know how to convince people do what I am asking for faster, and I understand what it takes to run a variety of communities without being whatever toxic person I was when I lived in Colorado. I love data, am passionate about how to protect it, and wanted to use all of this to make meaningful changes within a product. I knew coming into the Edge loops what skills I could highlight, explain my weaknesses and how I work around them, and show how passionate I was about improving the lives of everyone. (Could I say passionate more? I need another synonym for that. 🤭)

We’re up to December 2019 now. My role on Edge allowed me to flourish, I was offered the chance to build the community how I wanted without restrictions that would render my superpowers useless. I absolutely give the credit to my former manager and my assigned mentor; I connected with them both really well – my manager was a huge supporter in me being the best and most authentic me, my mentor kept me grounded in the face of corporate bullshit, and I learned how to play the game at Microsoft very quickly. Oh, what game, you ask? It’s a popularity game, and if anyone tells you otherwise they are either blind or lying – if the people who are looking at rewards for the year know what you are doing and have done, you get rewarded for it, even if the impact isn’t in hard data. I know this because my role consistently didn’t have hard data to prove what I did, but everyone on the team knew me and valued what I offered to the broader team. If there’s one thing that I learned how to do on Edge, it was making myself really popular, very quickly as the new communications owner and engagement specialist for the Edge Insiders and engineering team. I had no idea at the time that was also thanks to my autism – autistic women tend to be way more social than their male counterparts (but also tend to get taken advantage of more) and I often describe myself as an extroverted introvert (sometimes an introverted extrovert 😉). Being the person everyone knew, and being someone that everyone loved (their words, not mine, I have troubles seeing this, tHaNkS aUtIsM), my impact was well beyond numbers, and I was rewarded year after year for how good I was for the team.

Everyone talks about it at Microsoft but it’s a trip to experience first hand the firehose of becoming a Full Time Employee there. It’s overwhelming but I thrive in hectic situations like this – I was learning something new, which is inherently not boring, and that is key for autistic and people with ADHD thriving in a role. About 8 months into the role in mid-2020, I felt the stress building, and could tell my Lamictal wasn’t covering my anxiety anymore. My CBT wasn’t sticking, I was having panic attacks daily, crying from stress. I went back into therapy after my primary put me on Seroquel to reduce the new anxiety and the impact it was having on my sleep. This helped a lot, actually, but it wasn’t perfect. The pandemic and political climate wasn’t helping anything, either. I feel a lot of emotions, all the time, and when emotions are high from others I absorb it. It’s not fun, and 2020 was brutal for so many of us for so many reasons. My connection to emotions caused a lot of overwhelming bullshit to happen in my brain, combined with a great fear of the events unfolding in my country. The company encouraged people to take the time they needed to recover from whatever burnout they were feeling, but I don’t think a lot of people understand how much that time impacted the neurodiverse – stress reduces my ability to compensate and mask, causing a few issues both at work and home (and currently causing me depression).

We go through our first re-org on the Edge team shortly after; the team’s Product head was moved to another Microsoft team in favor of the Engineering lead, moving Edge to run under him moving forward. This was a worry for me on the team because that Product head knew the importance of my role and carved out budget to ensure we got someone like me into the seat for the Edge Insiders. This re-org ended up giving my immediate team some engineers we desperately needed to help us achieve some of the projects we wanted to deliver to the Edge Insiders – I had some automation I needed to help track social better because Sprinklr was NOT the tool for what I did, we wanted to revamp the website, and we wanted to build up a version of the program to have Insiders earn rewards. Well, my team ended up butting heads with the feedback engineering manager often over priorities, and my last three Connects had something mentioning “working better with others” when it came to conflicting priorities (though my last one called out specifically that I am autistic and working on my CBT). I am a bit stubborn when I am challenged, my brain translates it as someone treating me as if I’m dumb and I do not react kindly when I feel like this. Thanks to emotional regulation issues, it’s much harder for me to wait to respond with more thought when this happens. It was rare that the Edge team made me feel this way, but there were times I felt this from partners who looked at my title and decided I was not technically inclined. I worked very hard on carefully choosing my words and attempting (improving with practice, to my credit) to reduce my emotional reaction in certain situations. I learned humility, humbleness, and the art of convincing others to prioritize my work within my first year being on the Edge team, in large part thanks to this re-org. A happy ending here: that engineering manager and I bonded pretty well over our shared frustrations in general, we ended up discovering that it wasn’t her that was causing the priority issues.

Now it’s early 2021, I suffer my second confirmed disc rupture (maybe actually the 4th or 5th looking back on my life), it was now time to work with my medical team to get a breast reduction and to kick that off I received a diagnosis of big ole titties (macromastia); I had already lost 60 pounds (~27 kg), practiced 16/8 intermittent fasting diet for my diabetes, and was active daily. I talk about this because this little thing (lol, little) drastically improved my self-confidence. Do you know what a cocky autistic person looks like? Of course you do, it’s what Elon Musk has been doing for the past couple years in the public eye. But confidence and I went a different route; I was more humble thanks to my experience but comfortable in my skin and felt more like “me” than I ever have in my life. I think it’s important to note that I had thought about a breast reduction since I was 17, I have always had a much larger breast size than what should fit on my body, and the disc ruptures helped justify the surgery (which itself is a whole other story).

At the end of August, 4 weeks post-surgery, I visited my mom who was also hosting my cousin – the same one who was diagnosed BPD a few years prior. This was an amazing bonding experience because I hadn’t seen them since 2001. We talked a lot about mental health, childhood abuse, our oddly similar lives despite living across the country from each other, and the fact that my cousin was chasing an autism diagnosis. I took the AQ-10, a brief online version of the autism assessment, they shared with me after they explained that the website was created by a neuropsychologist who wanted easier access to this information available, I dug into symptoms for autistic women, and holy shit – everything made sense. My brother is autistic, our maternal grandfather didn’t speak until he was 3 so we’re pretty sure he was autistic, and my cousin is my mother’s sister’s child – the dots were lining up. My 9/10 score was not too much of a shock after this research (NINE OUTTA TEN, BABY) and I used that score to help get an appointment with a neuropsychologist who specializes in diagnosing autistic women. I chatted with her about a month after reaching out on her website and got an appointment for testing the following March; the wait was worth it. This initial call made me realize things like me adjusting my seams on my clothing, pushing hair off of my skin, making sure my food didn’t touch, and pain tolerance were all related to sensory issues that came with my particular autism. *more light bulb clicks* Unfortunately, things at work quickly spiraled after this. Fun story time!

In late 2021, Buy Now, Pay Later was introduced into Edge with a huge amount of backlash. I helped the PM from the Shopping team draft the comms for the announcement to the Edge Insiders and went in with good faith that they knew what they were doing. I didn’t do much research into the impact of BNPL services on those who were neurodiverse and in low income areas, but I also hadn’t seen anything from the community that would have screamed “don’t do this shit”. I knew of the services, personally didn’t use them because I’m hyper-aware of not messing up my credit, and the PM was really good at giving me and my team all the benefits of the implementation. I came back from our first family vacation in Hawaii to the largest PR disaster I’ve ever been involved with, which my amazing direct report shielded me from until I was back in office (Alex, I will never be able to repay you for that 😭🙏). While I was spending my anniversary doing a coffee farm tour, the announcement post went up and everyone hated it. It was an immediate explosion. Alex, bless her, tried her fucking best to get people to pay attention to the negative attention and stress that it was not normal in our community to get this kind of visceral reaction. Vendors at Microsoft often need an FTE back up even if they are more experienced than the FTEs they work with, so when I got back and caught up I had to actively step in to stress the kind of situation this was, drag in people’s managers, and petition leadership to listen. Everyone seemed to be furious it was being implemented and this is how I learned why it matters – it disproportionally affects those with impulse control issues and those in low income areas, as well impacting the credit of those who don’t make payments – up to 43% of people using these services; when those points were brought up to people in leadership positions who could do something about it, nothing seemed to be enough to change course. We were told that it was the messaging that ruined the entire announcement, and that people just wanted something to be mad about or hated new things. I mention this not to call anyone out, but so you understand the ridiculous amount of stress I went through from high on life, thinking things were changing for the good, to absolutely wrecked within a couple weeks. My job was to bring these angry voices to the people who would make a change, why weren’t the right people listening to the users? What is the point of my job? I had full on career existential crisis that continued on until I was laid off over a year later.

If you’re keeping track, I’ve just explained the course of 5 months from end of July to end of November 2021. The end of 2021 was such a roller coaster for me, I was praying that 2022 would be better. (We all know it wasn’t, cue more external stressors – like world events.)

Alex left Microsoft in early 2022 and I legit did not know what I was going to do with myself for a bit; she kept me afloat, now I had to train someone new on top of still trying to find out what my purpose on the team was. I was drowning with negative social media posts and I just inherited the ticketed support service from a teammate who moved to another Edge group, putting more responsibilities on my shoulders that I also needed to balance. I suffered a severe amount of burnout from November to March mostly due to absorbing all the negative emotions being thrown at me, burnout I don’t think I’m truly recovered from – I am scarred hard from that situation. March comes and I finally get to take my autism test. I cannot understate how much this diagnosis changed everything for me. I had an answer, one that felt right. It wasn’t just autism, though, no no! I got a surprise diagnosis of ADHD Inattentive type. Unexpected emotions came with this – I reflected on my life and realized all of the times we unintentionally abused my autism out of me, where I was made fun of for being weird, my teachers calling me a motormouth but being part of gifted & talented programs, making sure my food didn’t touch despite it all going to the same place, my lack of filter – everything made so much more sense but I went through a period of mourning. I could have had a different life, I think, and it was heartbreaking experiencing this hindsight. I will state that if I hadn’t gone through what I have I would not be the person I am today. However, getting my diagnoses helped me find my center again and I had a new purpose in life and on the team – being successful with autism as an example of autism that breaks the mold. I decided to found and lead the Neurodiverse@Edge Employee Resource Group because there wasn’t a section on the team – I needed to create a space that would be truly safe for those of us ND-types who are not comfortable being open about our diagnoses, offer guidance to colleagues and managers on how to best support their ND peers and direct reports as allies, and be a support system for the group.

In my diagnosis report, I learned a lot about myself and new tools that I could use to help with my deficiencies. I learned that my verbal comprehension is higher than my non-verbal. “Thinking out loud” is something I have to do if I want my brain to work faster; if I forget a word that I am trying to grab, I will start talking to myself about the connections to that word my brain keeps pulling, it’s super effective. I was introduced to mind mapping – I thought I was organized before with my note taking and task organization I did in a daily planner, but this blew. my. mind. I dove deep into how to use this tool designed to help improve memory and found one program that would cover everything I needed, Xmind. It combines the functionality on a tablet I wanted for tactile input and the A E S T H E T I C customizations I crave – UX and UI are both incredibly important to me. To learn how to use a mind map, my first attempt was planning my in-law’s visit happening a month later. My gods, people, I caught onto how easy this was for my brain immediately – I could create buckets of categories that made sense to me, and as I added more information I could see other buckets that could be built, and easily move the items that should be in that new category. I now use it for everything that needs coordination – company research for interviews, tracking what TV shows we’re watching on what platform (including what’s off season and cancelled), and for work I built up a template that I could duplicate every week to copy my daily tasks I was tracking and organize my work projects. I used to write my to-do lists and notes by hand but with the mind map I could just copy from the previous week, paste into the week I am organizing, easily hold and drag the list to the following day, and could create separate sheets within the same map to keep that week’s meeting notes separated from my tasks. I never lost a note, and I didn’t have to go digging through pages of a planner just to find something from weeks ago. I became a new force to reckon with; thanks to this productivity tool I was able to output more work than some of my peers while I was on a reduced work schedule due to my next disc rupture (5 or 6 now? I’ve lost count) in August – October 2022. I drove a Hackathon project to completion during this time, with our project winning 2nd place in our category. I will word vomit to anyone the good word that is mind mapping and especially stress for neurodiverse people (who have working memory and executive function issues) to adopt this form of organization.

I also adopted the use of focus features in Apple products like the background noise using the stream setting. Music can be used for background noise, but it’s more often than not a distraction for those with ADHD, pulling you into the lyrics of a good song and away from the work you were doing. Noise-cancelling headphones are a must have for someone with sensory issues, something I didn’t realize I had until working with my son’s behavioral specialists and the click of the light bulb where he got his from. My specific audio sensory issue is that I can pull anything I want to, and maybe don’t want to, with my ears picking up nearly everything around me and I can focus on specific sounds even in a crowded room; having noise-cancelling headphones with the stream playing helps me focus better. Monday mornings I blocked out 45-60 minutes first thing in my work hours so that I could ensure my weekly mind map was created. To help with my memory recollection, I started blocking out “out of office” time for 15 minutes after meetings to organize tasks and projects on my mind map before moving on to the next thing. Not once did I get pushback when I politely asked whoever set up a meeting with me to move it 15 minutes forward to accommodate for those breaks; in fact, I often got back a “holy crap, that’s a great idea, I should start that!” (In fact, you really should start it regardless.) I started working in chunks of time, used away messages/statuses on Teams to prompt people to leave me detailed notes when they want information from me (No Hello, please!), and drew a thicker work/life balance line to support my unique capabilities. Picking all of these up meant I also had to advocate more for myself – I sent an email to my fellow Growth org PMs detailing my diagnosis and what I was doing to shift how I worked moving forward. The reaction to that email was nothing but support and callouts that what I am doing will work for even the neurotypical! It took me about a month to fold all of these changes into my processes, mind mapping has a super heavy lift up front, and I spent a lot of time doing inbox zero for more organization. These all helped me be more successful during my last year on the Edge team, all because I got that diagnosis of autism finally. Whichever company hires me next is getting a high performer who knows her limits and superpowers, along with the organizational skills of a robot.

It’s ridiculous, this world was built for average and so many of us just don’t fit that. I literally cannot function like the average person and expecting the neurodiverse to fit in has caused us severe stress by essentially abusing us into conformity. That’s honestly my whole point of this, to bring to light how neurodiverse people can experience life, particularly if they don’t know they are ND and if they don’t advocate for themselves. Being neurodiverse is an advantage in the tech industry, but we still have “personality” tests barring people with autism and ADHD from qualifying, force people through stressful assignments just for an interview, and I can’t prove it but I sometimes feel that when I self-describe that have a disability I am immediately tossed aside (I am not the only autistic person noticing this pattern, either). “… autistic people in the right environment can be 140% more productive than their peers“, and yes, I can prove that I am that productive. Despite many tech companies actively sourcing autistic talent, hiring that talent is still a huge fucking problem, especially when you can’t say what disability you have when you self-describe (and I am aware of so many ND peeps who have been let go from tech companies this year). A lot of internal support or programs are nothing but lip service, touting a space of psychological safety while promoting those who actively make teams toxic and unsafe into higher positions of power. Leadership teams expect the culture work needed for improvements to be from the ground up when it should be a collaborative effort driven by leadership, top down, and also ground up from the individual contributors and their managers. I’m a believer of burning down the entire system we have built up, so I’m sure it won’t surprise you that I think to properly be inclusive and diverse we need to get rid of everyone in a C-Suite position at most tech companies and redo it all.

I didn’t want to end this on a rant, but that’s how things go with me, I suppose. I’m sad that I didn’t know how special I really am until my mid-30s, I probably wouldn’t have ruined so many friendships or burned bridges at places of employment. I want my story to be out there so that maybe I will be that “Halsey moment” to someone that she was for me – showing me that you can be successful regardless of having a disability that affects your executive function. And hopefully you learned something new about me – “never would have guessed” is something I am told often, and to that I say, “Yeah, that’s unconsciously intentional.”

– 🧜‍♀️🦄