Mid-life crisis
For Wanda Deschamps, being diagnosed with autism at 46 changed her understanding of herself and shifted her career path, as she embarked to make neurodiversity inclusion the norm rather than exception
It wasn’t until she was 46 years old that Wanda Deschamps finally understood why she’d always felt “different.” Despite steadily climbing the ladder in her 25-year career in the philanthropic sector, she’d faced challenges in navigating the work world. “I’ve always been talkative and inquisitive,” she wrote in a Broadview magazine article about her experiences later reprinted in Reader’s Digest. As a child, she sometime wore people out with her questions; as an adult, her questioning might be praised for its precision in one setting and then criticized for being perceived as undermining in another. She tended to speak quickly and forcefully—attributes often judged positively in older male colleagues, but viewed less positively in a less senior female employee. She often looked confident to others, but was inwardly insecure and anxious about social interactions, and so would rehearse what she might say in advance—which sometimes led to her coming across as inauthentic or practiced.
Deschamps didn’t understand why behaviour praised in one work situation might be criticized in another. And so she felt like she was hiding—though she wasn’t quite sure what she was hiding. “I was always changing and modifying my behaviour,” she told me, “always hiding aspects of myself in different environments.”
That hiding came with a cost: a growing burden of anxiety and stress that culminated in a mental health breakdown in 2017. By then, two of Deschamps’ sons had been diagnosed as autistic, and Deschamps began to wonder if she too might be autistic. Testing revealed that she was. “Finally, everything started to make sense,” she wrote in Broadview magazine. “I couldn't get over the positive effect of the diagnosis.” But that positivity didn’t extend into her then-workplace: she sought accommodations based on her diagnosis but instead lost her job.
Her experiences led her to launch Liberty Co, which she describes on the company website as “a consultancy focused on increasing the participation level of the Neurodiverse population in the workforce with a special emphasis on autism.”
As Wanda and I talked, the importance of understanding and learning about neurodiversity as a leader and team member became obvious to me. In fact, I began to think of situations where some of these issues could have been at play but there was little awareness and understanding, which wasn’t helpful to the individual or the team. I knew that with my newfound knowledge that I could be a more inclusive, aware and effective colleague to everyone’s benefit.
Read on for more from my conversation with Wanda Deschamps. (Note that this conversation has been edited and condensed.)
Leigh: How do you self-identify?
Wanda: I identify as both an autistic woman and a woman with autism. Some people are really particular about identity first and some people are very particular about person first and I'm fine with either. I also identify in the same way as a neurodivergent disabled woman and as a woman who is neurodivergent. To me, it's not as much what you put first, it's that I identify as autistic neurodivergent.
Leigh: And the word neurodivergent, when did you start using that word?
Wanda: Australian sociologist Judy Singer coined the term neurodiversity in the 1990s, and I started using the term neurodivergent and neurodivergence applied to myself probably around late 2018 or early 2019, I think. I was only diagnosed in 2017 and I would say then, first, I more used the term autism, and then neurodiversity in 2018 or 2019.
Leigh: Does the term neurodiversity help create more of a community? Do you find that's a useful way of identifying?
Wanda: Yes, it's community. It's also the neurodiversity movement. It's an umbrella term that is so important because of number of reasons, such as dual diagnoses. I feel it's important to talk in terms of neurodiversity because if you're autistic and ADHD, you're not necessarily separating and saying, one's more important than the other. [Neurodivergence is an umbrella term that describes variations in cognitive function, and can include dyslexia, autism, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and other cognitive traits.]
Leigh: How was your career path affected by the challenges that you had?
Wanda: They're difficult to separate. I had a 25-year career in the charitable sector before I became an entrepreneur. I existed in this duality and it was very confusing. Outwardly, I was successful and I progressed and I had some senior positions. Internally, it was always another story and the anxiety was always there. In a number of ways my career was also ordinary, in the sense that I progressed, I was always employed. Many autistics and neurodivergent individuals struggle to secure employment. I was pretty much always employed.
I was definitely hiding aspects of myself and that was part of the duality, that I was always changing and modifying my behaviour. That's quite common with autistic women and one of the reasons why our mental health pictures are very poor and why it's often a mental health crisis that then leads us to diagnosis. So yes, I was always hiding aspects of myself in different environments, downplaying and modifying, changing. Something that was really confusing for me was that I didn't have to hide and downplay some aspects of my personality in some environments and then I did in others. I always say that there was a wide range of reactions to me, which made it even more confusing than if it was all bad. I'm not saying if it was all bad, it would have been better. However, it was confusing because there was such a wide range of reactions.
Leigh: Can you explain that a little bit further?
Wanda: I was always uncertain about speaking up and asking questions. For instance, I would present outwardly as very confident, but on the inside I was often doubting myself. I would ask questions in some cases and people would praise me for asking good questions. Other people didn't like that at all—there was resentment. So that was very confusing. In some cases around my performance, the same behaviour would be both highly praised and harshly admonished. So it was just very, very confusing. And so my personality ended up being more a product of people's reactions to me as opposed to my true self.
Leigh: Right, so you were kind of always reacting...
Wanda: Always reacting, always on guard, always practicing, anticipating people's reactions. So then it was like, I was practicing what I would say and then I would be accused of being inauthentic and insincere and disingenuous because I was practicing and I didn't come across as being authentic and natural. So I think you're starting to get a sense as to why I had a complete mental health breakdown. My mental health had a crisis point. And I wish I could say my situation is unusual, but it's not [unusual especially for women with undiagnosed autism].
Leigh: As far as helping organizations support people who are neurodivergent, if you look back, what would you have wanted for yourself?
Wanda: For people to suspend their judgments. People's reactions to me were, well, you're like this so you're bad, it's because of a moral failing or character flaw. There was never an effort to understand why I would struggle with communication and struggle in different areas. So, [in dealing with people’s behaviour, it would help to] suspend judgment and come from a place of understanding and wishing to understand, being truly inclusive.
Leigh Can you give an example that would happen to paint that picture of what it might feel and look like?
Wanda: I worked in fundraising in the charitable sector so targets and goals and things like that are really important. So I might be accused of being pedantic because I'm saying things like “Goals and targets are different things.” What I realize now is that people who might have been threatened by me would respond by attacking what I was saying because I was putting them on the defensive with my tone or my presence. But this was all very confusing to me because I was not aware of all these kinds of nuances. I was a very literal thinker and so if you were threatened by me Leigh, I wouldn't know that. And this is where having supportive peers and colleagues and supervisors is so essential, to have someone say, “Wanda, Leigh might be threatened by your knowledge and by your questions and the way that you're asking about the financial objectives. Maybe try approaching it this way instead.”
Leigh: Right, so it would be like they would feel that maybe your questions were opening up holes in their work.
Wanda Yes.
Leigh: I guess on the management side of trying to just work with different ways of processing, how can people gain more awareness? If you had had more awareness earlier about yourself, would that have been a better?
Wanda: Definitely. I take responsibility for not having a diagnosis and for not really taking charge of my mental health and for not being aware of the impact that I had on other people. So where was this coming from? It's a number of things: my own work ethic and my own desire to perform. I am very goal-oriented, I am there to get the job done. I didn't have a lot of patience. I lacked a sense of self-awareness. I should have softened my tone and my approach. So I projected a very confident personality, but inside, I had really low self-esteem and I lacked self-awareness. Because there were these two sides of me, I did really doubt myself. Not to blame other people, but another thing that was really confusing was that I worked for some people who spoke really strongly and made really strong statements and they got away with that.
I was diagnosed in 2017 and I sought accommodation in my workplace but instead lost my job. I was told I was too senior to have such accommodations and the person I reported to was too senior to implement them. I would never accept that today. You're allowed to have accommodations as long as they do not present undue hardship to the employer implementing them. My requests included seeking greater clarity, like reviewing my job description. This is very common with autistic and neurodivergent individuals: we look for clarity. We look for clear roles. We look for clear instructions. I was asking for role clarification.
Something I found out later, and this is something I always espouse in my work now, is that what's good for autistic and neurodivergent inclusion is good for everyone. I knew I wasn't the only one experiencing uncertainty in terms of my role and the role of my portfolio. I know everyone would have benefited from greater clarity.
That’s why I'm doing what I'm doing now: I want a smoother path for others. What happened to me does not have to be what happens to others, does not have to be the norm. We can change this. When you look at the sheer numbers, right now we're looking at 15 to 20 percent of the population is neurodivergent. However, there's underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis, so neurodivergent people might make up 30 per cent of the population. That's just a staggering number.
Interested in reading more about how neurodiversity inclusion might benefit workplaces? Check out “Working Toward Neurodiversity Inclusion” by Wanda Deschamps, published in Plans & Trusts magazine’s Sept/Oct 2023 issue and the blog post “Embracing Neurodiversity: Building an Inclusive Future” by Plans & Trusts editor Tim Hennessy.
the fix - 4
If you had the power, what’s one simple change you’d make today?
Full participation of neurodivergent individuals in the workforce.What’s the best advice you never got?
Believe in yourself
What keeps you going?
Helping create a smoother path for others, especially my two sons
What words do you live by?
Unashamed. Unafraid. Undeterred.