The Days You Don't See

Some days I'm firing on all cylinders — sharp, quick, on top of everything at once.  Other days, my blood sugar is out of balance, my neurodivergence is doing its own thing on top of that, and the version of me that shows up is noticeably different.  Words don't come as easily.  I lose my train of thought mid-sentence.  I stumble over things I'd normally say without a second thought.

 

The people who work alongside me regularly know the difference.  They've learned to read the signs — a slower response, a pause that lasts a beat too long — and they adjust without making it a thing.  That kind of quiet understanding, built over time, is one of the more underrated gifts a good working relationship can offer.

 

The Problem With First Impressions

The harder version of this plays out with people who don't have that context yet — a new client, a recruiter reaching out on someone's recommendation, a first interview.  If one of those conversations happens to land on a difficult day, there's no shared history to soften it.  Just a person struggling to find their words, in real time, in front of someone deciding whether to take a chance on them.

I've felt that gap acutely — the distance between what someone is seeing in that moment and who I actually am, what I've built, and what I'm capable of on a good day. It's a strange, disorienting thing to sit across from someone and know exactly how far short the moment is falling from the reality.

 

Not Every Disability Is Visible

This experience has genuinely reshaped how I think about disability generally.  I’ve never really thought of myself as someone having a disability until one of my kids said it to me.  It's easy to associate the word with something visible — something you can see and immediately account for.  Mine isn't like that, and neither are a lot of others.  You can't tell by looking at someone whether they're managing a chronic condition, navigating neurodivergence, or simply having a harder day than most for reasons that aren't on display.

That's changed how I try to show up for other people.  I've become a lot more careful about assuming I understand someone's full situation from a single interaction.  The benefit of the doubt costs very little to extend, and it can mean everything to the person receiving it.

 

What It's Changed About How I Lead

This has filtered directly into how I think about commissioning work and building teams. I pay closer attention now to who I'm assigning something to, what a realistic timeline actually looks like for them, and what support — flexibility, clearer instructions, a bit more runway — might let someone do their best work within their own limits, rather than in spite of them.

None of us are operating at full capacity all the time. Pretending otherwise doesn't make anyone more capable; it just makes it harder for people to ask for what they actually need.  A good leader, I think, builds enough slack into the system that an off day doesn't become a crisis — for them or for the people around them.

 

Where I've Landed

We're all imperfect, managing something, on some kind of scale, most of the time.  The people who've made the biggest difference in my working life aren't the ones who never noticed my off days — they're the ones who noticed, adjusted, and kept going without making it a bigger deal than it needed to be.  That's the standard I try to hold myself to now, for everyone I work with.