LIFE IN THE MOUNTAINS: WHAT IT REALLY MEANS TO BE NEURODIVERGENT.

By Beth Hayward

from The Neurodiva Dossier 1-6-26

Imagine you live in a society of wheat farmers

Now imagine your farm is high in the mountains.

Attempting to grow wheat on a steep rocky slope is both physically and mentally exhausting, and your yields are poor. The government machinery exists — but it was built for flat terrain and can’t navigate the gradient, so everything has to be done by hand. As a child, you trudged down the mountain every day to attend school on the plain, spent all day learning how to farm wheat on flat land, and trudged back up again at the end of the day, arriving home too tired for homework. Nobody ever taught you anything useful about farming in the mountains, because the mountains, in this world, are not considered a legitimate place to farm.

As an adult, the wind and rain and snow damage your crops. Despite everything you do, despite how hard you work, you cannot produce a viable harvest. The farmers on the plain observe your results and draw the only conclusion available to them: you must be doing something wrong. You must be lazy. You must not be trying hard enough.

You know, with absolute certainty, that you are trying as hard as you possibly can. But their conclusion has become your conclusion too. Clearly, there is something wrong with you.

And yet.

You live among wildflower meadows and murmuring streams. Waterfalls that erupt with leaping salmon. Ancient glaciers. Capricious icefields. Inquisitive goats and flamboyant butterflies and the clean sharp smell of pine trees. You can catch fish, herd goats, make cheese, collect honey, spin wool, carve intricate wooden toys. You can read the mountain weather with a precision that would astonish any plains farmer. You have navigated terrain that would defeat most people before breakfast.

But in this world, none of that counts. Wheat is the measure of everything. And by that measure, you are a failure.

This is what it feels like to grow up neurodivergent in a neurotypical world.

Not broken. Not lazy. Not deficient. Simply a mountain dweller in a civilisation built entirely for the plains — equipped with a completely different set of skills, strengths, and ways of moving through the world, none of which the plains have been designed to accommodate or value.

The neurodivergent brain — whether that’s ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, or any combination — is often described in terms of a “spiky profile.” Where a neurotypical brain tends to show broadly consistent levels of ability across different cognitive functions, a neurodivergent brain might be in the bottom fifteenth percentile for some things and the top fifth percentile for others. Mountains and valleys, as opposed to the flat plain.

I first encountered this graph in the book Neurodiversity Coaching by Professors Nancy Doyle and Almuth McDowall — the leading researchers in the subject in the UK – and when I looked at it, I didn’t see a deficit profile. I saw a mountain range. Dramatic. Demanding. Extraordinarily beautiful.

I want to tell you about a boy.

His mother — neurodivergent herself — had noticed signs of ADHD in him. He was struggling at school. She took him to a psychiatrist, who assessed him thoroughly. The tests showed the boy scored in the bottom fifteenth percentile in some areas and the top fifth percentile in others. A genuinely spiky profile — significant peaks and significant valleys.

Having established all of this, the psychiatrist told the mother he couldn’t diagnose her son, because when he added all the scores together and calculated the average, her son came out above average overall.

He had mathematically flattened the mountains and concluded, apparently without irony, that this meant the boy didn’t need support.

This is as cruel as telling someone with one leg that because they could hop faster than most people could walk, they didn’t need a prosthetic. Or telling someone living in poverty that because the average UK wage is comfortable, they had no grounds to ask for help.

The average tells you nothing about the individual experience of the valleys. And it is in the valleys — not on the peaks — that a neurodivergent person tends to struggle.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 56.

I did not choose my neurotype, any more than anyone chooses theirs. I inherited my mountain home. And for most of my life, I was too busy trying to grow wheat — masking, compensating, performing neurotypicality, exhausting myself fitting into systems that were never designed for my brain — to look up and notice what I was actually surrounded by.

The diagnosis changed that. Not because it solved anything, but because it gave me a map. Context. Permission, finally, to stop trying to be a plains farmer and start learning to be a better mountain dweller.

This is what neurodiversity coaching can do. It won’t make you more neurotypical, nor flatten the mountains to resemble the plain. But it will help you understand the terrain you actually live in, find the paths that work for your particular landscape, and most importantly recognise the value of what flourishes there.

Because things can flourish. Abundantly. Unusually. Sometimes extraordinarily.

And sometimes I look down from up here, and I wonder what would happen if more of the plains dwellers understood what treasures the mountains hold for the benefit of all, and that those treasures cannot be found without a mountain guide.

About the author

Beth Hayward is an executive coach and neurodiversity specialist with 25 years’ experience working with senior leaders across major organisations including Pfizer, BP, BMS, Coca Cola, Boots and the NHS. She holds an ILM Level 7 Executive Coaching qualification and a Postgraduate Certificate in Advanced Neurodiversity Coaching (Merit) from Birkbeck, University of London. She identifies as female, late diagnosed neurodivergent

Find out more and contact me on my website – https://haywardcoaching.co.uk/tailored-coaching/

For more information on ADHD, specifically check out https://adhduk.co.uk