Lindsay Clancy is on trial for strangling her three children, but her lawyers are putting the mental health system on trail. Clancy had three psychiatrists prescribing medicine at the same time. She had twenty prescriptions simultaneously. One of the prescribers had never had a postpartum psychosis client. Another did not know Clancy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. All the prescribers could have looked at Clancy’s records and they didn’t.

Mere mortals are unable to challenge the mental health system. Clancy is an experienced nurse and she kept incredible records of her own treatment — qualitative and quantitative. Her records are more thorough than the doctors’, which is why she can challenge institutional mental health providers.

Husbands, take notice. Every trial about postpartum psychosis has a spouse who was oblivious to how serious his wife’s condition was, and he left the mother alone with the kids. Andrea Yates’s husband left her alone with the five kids for an hour every morning even though her psychiatrist said to never leave her alone with them. Clancy’s ex-husband (he’s ex now that the kids are dead) said he had never heard the word psychosis before she killed the kids. But Lindsay was googling questions about psychosis long before the day of the killings. He thought the mental health issues were hers to handle. Meanwhile he was taking control of other things: he decided that if Lindsay was not going back to work, he would fire the nanny.

I noticed this right away because I had postpartum psychosis. It happened after my second kid. The first had already been diagnosed with autism, and at three years old we attended early intervention 40 hours a week. My second was born with a major facial deformity: hemifacial microsomia. We had a team of sixteen doctors to address the problem. I was so scared I wouldn’t bond with the second kid that I never let go of him. Held him all day.

I was also working. Nino was laid off, and I was supporting us by writing. I wrote a column right before I received the epidural. But months later I couldn’t write anymore, so I was submitting articles that had already been published. I knew I would get found out eventually.

We were already in early intervention, so we had a social worker helping us parent. A week before my psychotic episode, Nino and I were sitting across from the social worker in our living room. I stood up to try to get the baby to stop crying. And while I was bouncing I said, “I want to just slam the baby’s head into the wall.”

The social worker stood up and said we need someone else to support our family.

I remember feeling abandoned. But only for a second. Because the baby was crying.

Nino and I were together most of the time. He managed the older kid in therapy, and I went there, holding the baby, not wanting to miss talking with the therapist or time to bond with the baby. We were like a parade.

At night, Nino put the older one to bed, then he sat in the kitchen, because we were in NYC in a 500-square-foot apartment and the living room became the bedroom at night. I was holding the baby and doing the dishes, slowly, with one hand. And I picked up a knife and pushed it into my head. I remember it not getting in. Like, my skull was too strong. So I pushed harder. Slamming the knife like I could make headway.

Nino took the baby from my arms. He called 911. I screamed that he couldn’t take the baby. So he told me to put the knife down and sit in the chair and he’d give me the baby. Then the ambulance came.

He stayed with the older kid. I went to the hospital. In the ER I said I wouldn’t leave the baby.

They told me it was okay to leave the baby to go to the mental ward. “The baby needs you to be safe and healthy,” they told me.

I told them I won’t bond with the baby if we separate. “Look at his face,” I said. “It’s a mess. I am scared he won’t feel loved.”

One nurse stayed with me. Then a social worker. People had conferences. I remember feeling like I hadn’t slept as well as I was sleeping in the ER, under constant surveillance and ER chatter all night long.

People told me I can’t go to the mental ward with a baby. So I said I’m not going. People tried to explain how serious it was. I tried to explain how messed up his face was.

Finally the doctors agreed to let me stay in the ER. They were not allowed to release me when I was a danger to the child, but they wouldn’t be violating the law if they let me stay in the ER. I had a bed, and a social worker, for three days. It was support I could not get when I had two kids and a husband and 40 hours of therapists all over NYC.

The hospital called Nino and told him I couldn’t be alone with either kid. I remember thinking that sounded crazy. We can’t do that.

But we did it. Nino took one kid to multitudes of therapists, and I stayed at home with the baby and a nanny. The nanny was $75 an hour because we had to use an agency — we needed one on no notice — and we needed someone who was okay being in charge of not letting me use a knife again. Or anything else.

It took a community, and both our 401Ks, to care for two special needs kids without letting me be alone with either one of them. I used to think we were so irresponsible for cashing out the 401Ks. So irresponsible for neither of us working. Now I’ve seen what happens when a spouse continues going to work in the face of postpartum psychosis. It’s a full-time job to allow a mother to keep bonding with the baby and keep parenting the other kid while still maintaining awareness that she could be dangerous.

I want to tell you I was annoyed by the surveillance. But it was so, so scary how quickly I put the knife in my head. It was so, so scary that I could have been separated from my kids. I just wanted to feel like that wouldn’t happen again.

As years passed, foggy memories made me wonder if the psychosis really came on that fast. How could I be caring for the baby one second and putting a knife in my head the next?

Then I was in the emergency room with Z for his traumatic brain injury. His headaches were so bad he was vomiting for the second day straight. They gave him an IV of anti-nausea medicine and I sat by his bed holding his hand.

All of a sudden he told me he needs to rip out the IV. He said he needs to get out of his skin. He scratched at his body. He was yelling: “I need to get out.”

I said, “You’re okay. The medicine works. It will get better.”

He said, “Get away from me or I’ll kill you. I want to kill everyone.”

I opened the door. Said to the first nurse I saw, “My son’s trying to take out his IV and he’s telling me he wants to kill me.”

Ten nurses and doctors were in the room immediately. They were holding him down. He was screaming, “I need to tear off my skin! Let go! I’ll kill all of you!”

I was standing in the doorway saying things like, “He’s a good boy. He practices cello six hours a day. He never breaks rules. He’s such a nice boy.”

No one was listening to me. But five minutes later they told me and Z that psychosis is a known side effect of the medicine he was taking. Akathisia. That’s the word they used.

I didn’t realize it was psychosis until I was listening to commentary on the Lindsay Clancy trial. I felt a little like her husband: I did not know Z had psychosis even though I was standing right there.

I am so lucky I had the doctors in NYC who kept me in the ER with my baby. Lindsay was upset being away from her kids. I would never have taken medication because I would have had to stop breastfeeding. But Lindsay wanted to get better so much that she took the medicine.

Pay attention. This trial affects you. You need to understand psychosis so you know it when you see it. And pay attention to who is going online to criticize Clancy. They are mental health providers who don’t want to believe they’re in a corrupt, poorly regulated industry. But they are.

Lindsay Clancy is going through hell in this trial. But she’ll save so many women from going through hell themselves.

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1. When a school tests your kid, that’s not really testing. Even the most high-functioning autistic kid is very, very expensive for a school district, because that kid has the right to so many extra services. Schools don’t like to spend money on one kid. So schools do the bare minimum: test for a narrow range of issues and default to “your kid is fine” unless the kid is disrupting the classroom.

2. Schools don’t have to help your kid make progress. Schools have to make a reasonable effort to help your kid make progress. So schools tell you “we love your kid” and “your kid is doing great” and anything else they can say so you don’t sue. There are about ten schools in the US that make a reasonable effort. That’s why when parents sue a school for not meeting the standard, the school loses.

3. Even private evaluators don’t want to tell you the truth. It’s too much work. A private evaluation is more thorough than a school evaluation, but evaluators still won’t tell you everything, because you’ll argue. If they tell you your kid has gait problems and you’ve never noticed, they don’t want to fight with you about how gait affects school success. If your kid has pragmatic language issues, they don’t want to spend an hour teaching you what pragmatics are and why ignoring the problem means your kid can’t get help from teachers.

4. An evaluation without parent support does nothing for your kid. Research shows interventions don’t help children unless they come with support for the parents. But most evaluators hand you a report and disappear, because writing a report is 1000 times easier and more profitable than supporting a family. So why am I telling you to get your kid an evaluation anyway? Because the evaluation was never for the school, and it’s not even really for your kid. It’s for you, the parent.

5. A private evaluation is how you manage the school. The school doesn’t work for you, so you need someone who does. You cannot see your own kid’s learning profile intuitively. A kid with dyslexia has ADHD. A kid with poor working memory has gait and vestibular issues that affect attention. It’s all interwoven, which is exactly what the school doesn’t want you to know, because the costs add up fast. Your kid has a right to those services, but you can’t advocate for a kid you don’t understand.

6. The IEP preserves your kid’s rights — and teaches your kid to use them. You might think your kid doesn’t need an IEP. Consider that 20% of kids in the Ivy League got extra time on their SATs. That’s because smart parents of smart kids advocate for their kids effectively in school, and it starts with the IEP. It’s also where your kid learns self-advocacy: kids who understand they’re autistic at an early age do better in college because they understand how to manage their environment. In grade school, you model advocacy. By high school, your kid practices on their own.

7. The stakes are too high to skip this. Autistic kids are six times more likely to attempt suicide than neurotypical kids. The best protection is using the IEP to remove structural stigma at school — and you can’t remove what you haven’t identified. That learning process starts with the evaluation.

Bottom line: you don’t get an evaluation to find out if your kid is autistic. You get an evaluation so you can get an IEP, understand your kid, and model self-advocacy in a world full of structural stigma. Also, recognize that kids today are much more accepting of autism than your generation, so your fear of labels might actually be part of the stigmatization you’re trying to shield your kid from.

But remember rules 3 and 4: an evaluation is only as good as the evaluator, and an evaluation without ongoing parent support leaves you hanging.

So I’m having a live conversation with my favorite evaluator, Megan Cawlfield. I’ve worked with families all over the US, and every time a family needs an evaluation, I bring in Megan. That picture up top is Megan mid-evaluation, teaching a parent how about their kid’s movement. Megan and I will talk about how to get an evaluation so strong that it helps everyone in your family, and how to turn that evaluation into an IEP that works.

If you’re considering an evaluation or an IEP — or the school told you your kid is fine and you don’t believe it — join us Friday at 10am Eastern. It’s free if you’re a paid subscriber. Bring your questions. This is the conversation the school will never have with you.

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Two years into Z’s head injury we went to a pain clinic. The program was for families with a teenager in chronic pain, and people flew in from all over the country. Z was the only musician who couldn’t play music anymore. But there was an all-state field hockey player who hadn’t played in years but still went to every practice. There was a girl who’d been a ballerina her whole life and then suddenly couldn’t dance: she’d grown half a foot, and now her body was built for basketball. Her proprioception was off and now movement felt like violence.

About an hour in, I understood two things. First, everything they were telling us to do was what doctors had been telling me to do for Z for two years — and I hadn’t been doing it, because the things are boring and I didn’t trust them and I wanted there to be something else. Second, every parent in that room was autistic. The whole program was a parent intervention. The kids were only there because no parent would come to a thing called What You’re Doing Wrong.

Leading up to this: doctors kept telling me that Z feeling pain didn’t mean his brain was getting more damaged. He’s feeling pain? We’re done. Stop the exercises. Then the pain would feel worse, and Z and I would demand new tests, and the tests would show nothing was getting worse, and I’d be so angry I wanted to sue everyone. That exact story was all over the room: parents hunting for some other cause, because the remaining explanation was us not following orders.

Here’s the science the clinic taught, which I could finally hear once I understood whose intervention it was. Pain is output. It’s not a meter reading damage — it’s your brain issuing a signal, and the brain learns what to issue. Touch a stove, and a normal brain files it away: don’t do that. A perseverating brain files it differently: there’s a stove in this house, there’s a stove, there’s a stove.

One in four people will have chronic pain at some point, and most of them adjust, some without ever calling it chronic pain. What makes pain take over a life isn’t usually the injury but the brain not being able to redirect. And low ability to redirect is the definition of autism.

Also, autistic people have a survival skill of mislabeling our own sensory wiring as toughness. Me: I don’t feel heat and I get burned all the time. That’s not high pain tolerance, that’s sensory integration dysfunction — missing output. Meanwhile I process cold as actual pain and wear a coat in weather nobody else considers weather. Too much signal, too little signal, never the normal amount: that’s autism in every domain. Pain is one of those domains.

The clinic also said something I haven’t stopped thinking about: chronic pain patients are the loneliest people there are, except for autistic people. Loneliness isn’t a mood, it’s a disorder, and it travels with chronic pain — which means an autistic kid in chronic pain is getting it from both directions, and his brain treats the pain and the loneliness as one fused thing. The longer nobody intervenes, the better the brain gets at reminding him. The pain isn’t worsening. The brain’s commitment to it is.

So what works is exactly the list you’ve been ignoring your whole life: exercise, regular sleep, going outside in daylight, eating like an adult, seeing people. Plus one trick that sounds fake and isn’t — when the pain spikes, put your whole face in cold water. It switches the brain off the pain channel. Not for long. But doing it every time teaches the brain there’s no reward for ringing the alarm, and the alarm rings less.

CBT doesn’t work for autism — it runs on the frontal cortex, and if we could leverage self-discipline to change our lives we wouldn’t have autism. But chronic pain is the exception, because pain functions like an external deadline. We can’t do discipline for abstractions; we can do it when something is ruining our lives in a way we can feel. The clinic’s whole bet is that the pain itself supplies the urgency the autistic brain is missing. It’s the only context I know of where CBT works on us.

So the clinic worked on us, eventually — but not because the science was new. The science fits on a post-it note. What took two years was the diagnosis nobody was willing to say out loud: the kids weren’t refusing treatment, the parents were. Every demand for a retest was me looking for a cause that wasn’t me. The program never confronted us about it, because you can’t — we’d have left. They just kept calling it a clinic for teenagers, and waited for each parent to look around the room and recognize the place.

Z kept in touch with the kids. The compliance problem was ours — the parents enforce the rules or nobody does. But parents can’t fix the loneliness half, and the clinic knew it: the kids left with a group chat, the only other people on earth who understood chronic pain. It didn’t last years. It didn’t need to. Each kid got to watch the others move forward.

I’m starting a small group for autistic people with chronic pain, because I want to see what happens when we talk about the pain without having to explain the autism first — the sensory problems, the perseveration, the routines we can’t change, the loneliness, and the constant question of whether to listen to your body or teach your brain to stop sounding the alarm.

We’ll meet on Zoom once a week for six weeks. There are four spots and two are taken. The cost is $195.

If you want one of the last two spots, reply to this email and tell me a little about yourself. We’ll pick a meeting time that works for all of us.

The post I took my son to a pain clinic and every parent there was autistic appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Once you know your personality type, you read what you’re bad at and you think: so what? That’s how you know it’s your type. The thing other people think is your weakness is, indeed, your weakness. In their eyes. Because it’s important to them. It’s not important to you.

I’m an ENTJ. People always write about how ENTJs come off rough and don’t take time to say things nicely. This is correct. And I don’t care. I mean, I care when people tell me I hurt their feelings, but not enough to, like, become an INFJ — the master of delivering bad news with kindness.

Z took this picture of me. I was coaching someone and Z heard me say, “It doesn’t matter how much you love the idea. It’s not a business. It’s a wish.” Z sent me the picture with the caption: Breaking another person’s heart. I saved it all these years because I was proud.

I wouldn’t want to be an INFJ because they think everyone shares their values and then they’re disappointed in everyone for not living up to those values. If you tell an INFJ this is their problem, they’ll be like, yeah. I know. But they’re not going to stop orienting their lives around their values.

INFPs don’t make a lot of money and they don’t care. I mean, they care like I care about being nice: lip service to ensure it doesn’t get totally out of control.

We usually talk about type in terms of what people care about. But what we don’t care about is what makes us really unique. And what we don’t care about is intrinsic: it’s not changing. Every type gets to pick which problems count, and every type quietly picks the same way — the big, type-defining problem doesn’t make the list.

So each type solves a problem from its own wheelhouse instead. ENTJs solve that we don’t have a good enough army behind us. INFPs solve that they don’t have enough meaning in their lives. ENFPs’ weakness is never committing, but the problem they solve is not enough opportunities opening up.

So what’s important isn’t to see your weakness. You don’t care. What’s important is to see your blind spot. The blind spot is not the thing you care about, and it’s not the thing you’re consciously ignoring — ignoring takes awareness. It’s the thing in between.

Personality type is most useful when it’s about the blind spot, because no one can just tell you and you know. Personality type is most fun when it’s about weaknesses, because it’s amazing what each type thinks is okay. The next Personality Type Office Hours will be about the difference. We’ll meet Tuesday, July 28 at 5pm.

Here are new personality type posts:

ENFJs: Nobody thanks you for the fight that didn’t happen

ENTJ trap: Making plans to make plans

Why my INFJ writing group failed

INTJs don’t get lonely, you get understaffed

INFPs: You ruin your writing when you make it coherent

ENFPs: You leave before someone tells you who you are

The post You don’t care about your weakness appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

When I was a kid my parents divided the house into rooms for cleaning. Two kids, two parents, twelve rooms: three rooms each. Nobody did their rooms, so I did them all. With no parents home between 8am and 8pm, I had to do something remarkable to get their attention.

It didn’t work. The only way to get their attention was to participate in their fights. That’s what I think of when I look at this picture of my childhood home.

My parents’ fights were always the same fight: they both had big jobs, but my mom had better executive function (not the word we used back then, believe me) and she was furious that my Harvard-grad dad couldn’t manage his time.

The fight took many forms: Dad is not home by 10pm, mom is sad, she needs me to witness her anger. Or dad is home at 8pm but acting out his 1950s fantasy of coming home to no responsibility, so my mom throws dinner at him. I tell dad, “I’m sorry mom did that,” and we pick the food off the floor together.

Where was my brother? Invisible. He’d disappear. Not that he had good parents. He had neglectful parents. I had enmeshed parents. Oldest daughter syndrome is enmeshment.

The pattern is parentification, then responsibility, then isolation, then burnout. The parents don’t do it on purpose. They just inadvertently expect the daughter to make their lives easier, or shine a light they can mistake for their own glow, or both. Autism makes all of it worse, because oldest daughter syndrome is fundamentally a boundary problem, and autistic families are death for boundaries. But the girl participates. Once your value in the family is service, you protect that value, because it’s the only one you have.

My oldest daughter syndrome amped up when my parents had two more sons. I was 16. Throughout the boys’ childhoods I was the one protecting them from family violence. I talked to child services, talked to the school principal, fielded phone calls when the boys ran away from home.

Last month an old boyfriend called. He’s the despicable boyfriend on the first page of my first book. I couldn’t believe he was calling. Then he said something that shocked me: “How are those two brothers of yours? I remember you were with them all the time.”

A friend was dropping her kid off at school in Boston and asked me to meet for coffee. She’d cried half the day. She asked if I felt that way when I dropped my brother off at college.

I had no memory of dropping my brother off at college. She said, “I was with you! I remember it so clearly.”

I didn’t remember because I had a new baby and I was supporting my family financially. I took my brother to college anyway. He stayed with us on his vacations — each of my parents had a million-dollar home and I had a 400-square-foot rent-controlled apartment.

When I had my second kid, my aunt said, “It’s nice for you to have your own, after raising those two boys.”

“What two boys?” I asked. No one had ever said that before.

Once my parents divorced and I started to understand how much I was doing for the boys, I didn’t do less. I did more, with more devotion. Because if I stopped, I’d have no value in the family.

Eventually the girl breaks. If she breaks outward, the parents tell people she has oppositional defiant disorder, which is a family disorder we pin on one child. If she breaks inward, it’s cutting or an eating disorder or going silent — the only ways left to be the one taking care of herself, since nobody else applied for the job. Either way the family describes the break as the girl’s problem, arriving out of nowhere, after years of her being so easy.

Breaking is the good outcome. The girls who break young get to protect themselves. The ones who never break grow up and keep going. They don’t have kids, because their entire experience of children is that children are labor — they watched their parents resent the work, they did the work, and nobody volunteers for that twice. Or they become the one who takes care of the aging parents, and the siblings call her bossy and controlling. The parents call her bossy and controlling too, once the power flips. And it might be true. After forty years in the role, she is bossy and controlling. The family built her that way.

I assumed, without ever examining the assumption, that I would always be something like my brothers’ parent and they would always be something like my kids. They’re in their thirties now and they’re not interested. They want a sister, or they want distance, but they do not want the person who raised them, because needing her now would be pathetic. A sister who raises her siblings almost never gets to keep them, because they will not want the same relationship as adults, and hers is the version that requires them to stay children.

When I see an oldest daughter parenting her parents or her siblings, I want to tell her: this is not a real place for a girl to grow up, this love is not love that can feed you.

The girls don’t listen. I wouldn’t have listened either. So I’m talking to the parents — the ones whose lives are too interesting, too demanding, too unfair to do everything themselves, so it’s reasonable that their daughter picks up the slack. Parents never say it that way. They say, “She’s always been independent.” “She’s always been such a caretaker.” “She’s had a lot of problems.”

Three ways of saying the same thing: somebody had to clean the rooms, and it wasn’t going to be us.

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I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I’m embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding:

I measured the achievement kind of passion — the drive to get better at something and win. This is the thing competition researchers treat as the engine behind workplace success, and I’ve been fascinated by the topic for decades.

So I gave the standard competitiveness scale to 58 autistic women and compared their scores to the published averages for men and women. The autistic women scored significantly higher than neurotypical women. And they were statistically indistinguishable from neurotypical men. On the trait that predicts who will win at work, autistic women don’t look like other women. They look like men.

I get that 58 successful women and a borrowed comparison group, is not bulletproof. But research on autistic women is so sparse that 58 is a flood.

Women who’d tell you the most about competitiveness don’t spend their time filling out surveys for the love of science. So most research comes from mothers who bring their autistic kids in for free services. Those mothers aren’t tested directly — there’s a questionnaire researchers fill out about the mother, from watching her, to decide whether she’s probably autistic too.

This is because revealing to a mom that she’s autistic is the kind of thing clinicians will do almost anything to avoid. It’s like when a kid gets tested and walks out labeled ADHD, not autistic, even though it’s likely both are true. Getting real-time information about autism is nearly impossible because the conversation involves too much stress and conflict. (I’m the only one who is excited to give you that information.)

Anyway, I had access to a rare group in research: successful women who already know they’re autistic. I proposed a participatory study, where the subjects help decide on questions — the forward-thinking, subject-centered method everyone praises. The women wanted to talk about trauma. They wanted it on the record that most autistic women had traumatic childhoods — something the research already shows and no one will say to the women themselves, because no one wants to offend them.

The IRB would not approve the trauma questions. The ethics board whose entire function is protecting research subjects decided that asking autistic women about their trauma would be too traumatizing for them. So we agreed on a new set of toothless questions blah blah published paper blah blah.

But still, I had this clean little finding about competitiveness, and there was nowhere to put it. Harvard’s school of education said it wasn’t their field. The business school didn’t want research that says autistic women are as competitive as men, because professors built careers on telling successful women they are not as competitive as men.

So my data sat. For years. It’s still sitting.

What finally changed wasn’t the finding. I used to think universities owned research because they owned the methods. Then I realized that the methods are just the gates that AI is now crashing.

The finding didn’t become less true because nobody published it. The women didn’t become less right because the IRB wouldn’t let them talk about trauma. And the data didn’t stop existing because it belonged to no department.

So here it is. Imperfect. Unpublished. Belonging to no field. Which is still more than the people who study autistic women have managed to learn from the women themselves.

The post I have data showing only autistic women are as competitive as men. No one would publish it. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up.

The Scotts so clearly love their country and their team and each other, and they were having the time of their lives. I watched them wave their flag and wear their flag. And every day they wore kilts that encoded their Scottish family lineage — except for the drinking kilts, which are the ones it’s okay to spill on.

I was in my own city, enjoying their bagpipes, and drinking songs, and endless energy for fun.

But I felt like an outsider watching people who knew exactly where they were from, and I don’t feel that myself, even in my own city.

In the US you’re expected to say where your family is from. It’s a national pastime — everyone is from somewhere else and proud to name it. I remember when my kids first ran into this. I told them we’re Jewish, that after the Spanish Inquisition my family went to Eastern Europe and their dad’s family went to South America. “But what country?” they kept asking. “You have to say a country!”

There isn’t one. I can trace my DNA almost entirely to a small area where Poland and Latvia and Ukraine meet, and my family moved from shtetl to shtetl across it for generations. But those are all places that hated Jews. You can’t say you’re from a place that spent centuries trying to be rid of you.

And I’ll never feel from the US either. Every Jewish person I know has a passport and knows, somewhere in the back of their mind, that the people who didn’t get out of Germany in time were the ones who assumed they were safe. Every Jewish person I know is also exhausted and stressed by what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, which means the one place that was supposed to be the answer to all of this is its own source of dread. It is hard to feel part of something when belonging in one direction makes you precarious in every other.

So I watched the Scots and understood, with more force than I expected, that I could never be that, but also that I don’t actually want to be. The Scottish joy is the joy of the class clown: this will be fine, everyone will laugh, nothing bad happens to me. You can only move through the world that way if the world has agreed in advance to find you charming. If those same men had been Black, drunk in the street at 10:30 in the morning, they would have been arrested.

Their ease is not available to everyone, and I am not built for it. Jews can barely manage a party on Purim, when getting drunk is the instruction. It’s not our style. We are restrained where the Scots are gregarious, careful where they are careless. But I think it’s okay. What I was actually feeling amidst the fun, was how strongly I belong to something after all.

Not a country. A diaspora. I belong to a people defined precisely by not being from anywhere — held together not by a flag or a hillside but by the shared knowledge of having been moved along, over and over, and having carried the thing with us anyway. I feel it every time I can tell someone is Jewish: a small click of recognition, a guess at the family behind them, a culture I already know the shape of.

I didn’t know how much I felt this until I stood next to people who are not from the US — where everyone is displaced – but from Scotland where their tie to their place is everything.

Belonging means saying who you’re with and who you’re not. The Scots draw that line around a country. I draw it around a people scattered across all of them. I loved watching the Scots but I would not trade. One of the best things I did with two decades of raising my kids was try to give them this — not a country to be from, but a people to be of, so that wherever they end up standing, a few feet from someone else’s flag, they’ll know exactly who they are.

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Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves.

I kept wondering: if I’m really an ENTJ, why am I the world’s most failing ENTJ? Where is my Fortune 500 company to run? The breakthrough came when I stopped looking at what I was accomplishing and started looking at what I was trying to accomplish.

Now when coaching clients tell me their type, I usually see immediately that it’s wrong. I’m also smarter about typing my own neurodiverse family.

My kids loved Cards Against Humanity, so we played all the time. Nino used an X-acto knife to cut offensive words out of cards, and the cards he couldn’t salvage he saved. The kids assumed they’d get a box of cards when they turned 18. Instead, they got every confiscated card from every expansion pack, meticulously organized by topic. No one needs this. It’s an OCD project Nino invented for himself to assuage his need to sort and organize.

Once I separated autistic sorting from his larger goals, I could focus on his overriding belief that everything should have meaning and connect to people. That’s how I arrived at INFP.

In this week’s Personality Type Office Hours, I’ll show you how to work around the test by separating personality type from neurodivergence to identify core motivations. Join us Thursday, June 18 at 8pm ET. Paid subscribers only.

Here’s the link to become a paid subscriber if you aren’t already.

Here’s the link to the zoom session.

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