I’ve heard it my whole career. I stopped apologizing for it (kinda…I’m a WIP).
It usually happens at a conference. Or on a Zoom right after a kickoff call. Someone pauses, smiles in a way that I’ve learned to read carefully, and says, “Your energy is so very…”
And then a pause.
Sometimes the sentence finishes. Sometimes it doesn’t. The word that lands in the blank is almost never the one I’d pick for myself. “Big.” “A lot.” “Intense.” Or, charitably, “bright.”
Quick aside: I know the difference. Folks have told me they love my energy and meant every word, and those compliments have carried me through hard weeks. I’m writing about the other version, the one where “energy” is a polite stand-in for something else. Keep the real ones coming. Please.
For most of my career, I’d laugh, agree, and quietly file it away with the other comments. Too much. Too fast. Too animated for the room. I’m a dyslexic thinker. My brain doesn’t move in straight lines, and apparently neither does the rest of me.
I don’t apologize for it anymore (more accurately, I am trying not to). That shift, from absorbing the comment to letting it sit where it belongs, is most of what I want to talk about here. The other part is what it taught me about how we build teams, partnerships, and client relationships, which is, conveniently, also my job.
I’m publishing this in May, which is Mental Health Awareness Month. Most of what I have to say about being neurodivergent in this industry is also a story about mental health, even when nobody calls it that. The cost of masking, the slow drip of being told your wiring is the problem, the small daily decisions to make yourself smaller in the room. Those add up and they show up as anxiety, PTSD, and burnout long before anyone names them as such.
Three Scenes
First grade. We’re learning to write on the lines. I write between them. Not above, not below, between. My teacher decides this is a problem worth solving during recess, in a separate room, with the kids who aren’t doing it right. I am six and do not have the language for what is happening, but I have the feeling that something about how I see the page is wrong, and the fix is to be removed from the other kids until I see it correctly.
Years later, my little brother is diagnosed with auditory and visual dyslexia. Watching him get tools, language, and a name for the thing is the first time I consider that my own brain might have a name, too. It does. Dyslexia. The relief of that word is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t needed one.
First real job in communications. I tell a coworker I’m dyslexic, in the spirit of “here’s something useful to know about how I work.” The response is not “How can I support that?” or “Thanks for telling me.” It’s a question: why did you go into writing and communications?
I think about that question a lot. Not because it wounded me, but because it’s the cleanest example I have of how our industry can hear “neurodivergent” and immediately start measuring whether the person belongs in the room. Note the direction of that labor and how the burden of proof lands on the person who just disclosed. They’re the ones expected to reassure the manager or coworker, shrink the ask, and justify the career. Meanwhile, the assumptions the person carries about who belongs, what “good” communicators look like, and what a “normal” brain does at work go unexamined. Making a room accessible starts with naming what’s already in it.
The Publicist’s Reframe
I spent five years in talent publicity before I moved into the nonprofit world. Then communications at buildOn, PR at StockX, back to international development at Village Enterprise, then into agency life at Media Cause, and now at Teal Media. Six environments. Same brain. Same energy. Wildly different reactions to both.
Publicity teaches you something specific: how the world perceives a person is a story, and stories can be edited. You learn to identify the line that’s going to get pulled into a headline, the photo that’s going to circulate, the quote that lands, and the one that doesn’t. You spend your days managing how other people are seen and celebrated.
The hardest reframe of my career in was my own.
At some point, probably around the time I joined Village Enterprise, I started naming my dyslexia in interviews. That sentence looks simple on the page, but it wasn’t. Most neurodivergent people I know treat disclosure as a calculation: do you lead with it and risk the raised eyebrow, hide it and risk being misread, or mention it halfway in and hope the timing lands. For years, I’d done some mix of all three, and none of them felt good.
So I tried a different frame. Not as a disclaimer or as a request for accommodation, but as information: “Here’s how my brain works. Here’s where I’m strong. Here’s where I’ll need a teammate who runs in straight lines.”
Something cracked open, and the conversations got better. The roles got better. The teams got better. Not because anyone was lowering a bar, but because I’d stopped pretending the bar was the only thing that mattered.
My energy isn’t a bug in the system. It’s how I see the holistic picture before I can explain it. It’s how I find the through line in a messy client brief. It’s why I tend to know what a campaign wants to be before I know how to spell out the rationale. The big-picture instinct and the energy people comment on are the same thing…you don’t get one without the other.
“Your Vibe” Is Doing a Lot of Work
There’s a small irony in the fact that “your energy” and “your vibe” have become the culturally acceptable ways to tell someone they read as different. We’ve gotten more polite about the observation without getting more curious about what it means.
We’ve also gotten louder about the impolite version. Recent presidential comments mocking a sitting governor for his dyslexia put the old stigma back on a national stage, framed as an insult that anyone is supposed to understand. The political feud isn’t really my interest here. The fallout is.
In the Associated Press story covering the response, Lia Beatty, a 27-year-old who has dyslexia and runs a university neurobiology lab, said something that stopped me cold:
“The harm isn’t necessarily in the headline. It’s what happens quietly. It’s the student in the classroom who stops raising their hand, the college applicant who hides how they learn, the employee who doesn’t pursue a promotion that they’re more than qualified for.”
That’s the part our industry needs to sit with. Every public dismissal of a neurodivergent brain gives quiet permission to a thousand smaller ones. The hiring manager who reads “dyslexic” on a resume and pauses. The colleague who decides the new account lead is “a lot.” The candidate who learns, somewhere along the way, not to mention how her brain works.
The mental health cost of that math compounds. You don’t have to be the person being insulted on a national stage to absorb the message. You just have to be in the room when a smaller version of it lands, and decide, quietly, to make yourself smaller too.
Our industry can do better than that. We can be the room where that message dies on arrival.
Agency Life Is One Long Group Project
If you work at an agency, you already know this. Most days are some version of a group project, and most of us claim we hated those in school. (And yet, here we are.) New clients every quarter. New teammates on every account. Constantly onboarding people into our way of working, while also trying to learn theirs.
Which means the question isn’t really “how do we accommodate neurodivergent people?” The question is “how do we work with each other on purpose, instead of by default?” Neurodivergence just makes the cost of getting that wrong louder.
This is, full transparency, also my literal job. I lead growth and client partnerships at Teal, which means I spend my days building the relationships this piece is about. I’m the person on the first call asking how a prospective client likes to be worked with. I’m the person checking in to see if the partnership is actually working. The neurodivergent lens didn’t come to this work as a side note. It shaped how I do it.
Two things I’ve come to rely on, both internally and with clients.
- A “Guide to Working With Me” document. We use these at Teal, and they’ve quietly become one of my favorite team tools throughout my career. Mine names how my brain works, the kinds of feedback that land, the kinds that don’t, my best hours, my worst, the moments I’ll need a teammate to balance me out. It is not a list of demands. It is a shortcut. A new colleague can read it in three minutes and skip the six months of guessing. The neurodivergent benefit is obvious. The bigger benefit is that it normalizes the idea that everyone has a way of working, and naming it out loud is a kindness, not a burden.
- Asking the same question of clients. Agencies love to walk into kickoffs with a process. We have decks about it. The trap is treating the process as the gift, instead of treating the partnership as the gift. Early in every engagement now, we ask: how do you like to be worked with? Where have past agency relationships gone sideways for you? What’s your team’s rhythm? Then we bend to meet our clients where they are as much as we honestly can.
That second part is where a lot of agencies tap out. Process is comfortable and repeatable. Process is what you sell. The truth is, the best client work I’ve ever done has come out of relationships where both sides named their working style early and then designed the engagement around that, not around a generic flowchart.
None of this is about lowering a bar. It’s about not pretending the bar is the only thing that matters. The same bar can be reached by very different brains, on very different timelines, with very different supports. The work is the same. The path to it isn’t.
If you take one thing from this piece, take that. Write your own guide. Ask your teammates for theirs. Ask your clients how they actually want to work, not how the SOW says they will. The neurodivergent person on your team will exhale, and so will everyone else.
Finishing the Sentence
Back to the title. “Your energy is so very…”
For most of my career, I let other people fill in that blank. The word changed depending on the room, and I usually accepted it, because contradicting someone’s read of you is its own kind of exhausting.
I’ll finish the sentence now.
My energy is so very mine. It’s how I see the whole board at once. It’s how I find a campaign’s heart before I find its outline. It’s why my best teammates are detail-obsessed, line-by-line editors who balance what I bring. It’s the reason I’m good at this job, not despite the wiring, because of it.
If you’re reading this and you’ve been the “so very” person in too many rooms, you don’t owe anyone the apology. You owe yourself the sentence.
Finish it.
A Few Things That Have Helped Me
If any of this resonated and you want to keep pulling the thread, here are four resources I come back to. They’re for the neurodivergent reader and the colleague who wants to be a better teammate to one. Both rooms benefit. And in a month dedicated to mental health awareness, both rooms matter.
- AI tools. Use them. They are a neurodivergent person’s best friend. Claude, Granola, Grammarly, whichever ones fit your workflow. They help me organize the swirl of thoughts in my head into something a teammate can actually act on. They draft the first pass when staring at the blank page would cost me an hour. They proofread the email I’d normally send my colleague to spot-check. They are the tool that puts me on the same playing field as my neurotypical peers, and frankly, they make my work better. If you’re neurodivergent and you’ve been hesitant, this is your sign. And yes, I used AI to help me write this article.
- Talk therapy. Just the recommendation. A lot of what neurodivergent adults are working through isn’t the wiring itself; it’s the years of being told the wiring was the problem. A good therapist helps you separate those two stories. Highly, highly recommend, but also recognize this isn’t easy to access or everyone’s cup of tea.
- Understood.org. The single best plain-language hub I’ve found for learning differences and ADHD. Strong on the practical, the workplace, and the parenting angles, without the clinical heaviness ( Nathan Friedman )
- Made by Dyslexia. Kate Griggs nonprofit is focused on reframing dyslexia as a thinking style. Her book, her podcast, and the org’s training work are the version of this conversation I wish had existed when I was in first grade.
Source: Whitehurst, L., Catalini, M., & Toness, B.V. “Trump’s dyslexia barbs stir anguish and anger, perpetuating a myth about the learning disability.” Associated Press, April 2026.
