Hello friend!
I've been thinking about how neurotypical and neurodivergent folks might understand the concept of a “careless mistake” differently.
When I hear an error called a careless mistake, it hits me fully in the chest. It feels like a judgement, an accusation. What do you mean I didn’t care? I cared very much. In fact, I was making every effort not to make a mistake.
I think neurotypical folks fall into an “if I can do it, then you can do it” assumption.
I’m reminded of my cat Pip, at night when I’m getting ready for bed. Pip isn’t allowed in the bedroom when we’re sleeping. (He bites. I think he doesn’t like snoring.) The easiest way to convince him to leave the bedroom is to toss a few treats into the hallway and shut the door. His “kick out” treats are a big event in his day. He gets quite excited. He follows me around as I put my glass of water on my nightstand and pick up the treat container from the bureau by the door. I don’t turn the light on when I prepare for bed because I don’t want to wake my partner from her slumber.
So you can imagine me slowly, carefully navigating the room in the dark, straining to hear Pip’s purring and to make out the white patch on his back so that I can avoid stepping on him.
Cats have strong night vision. Humans certainly don’t. Pip doesn’t get out of the way when I’m walking toward him. He has no idea that I can’t see him. I walk slowly, and I can usually avoid him. But sometimes I bump into him. And when I do, he responds with the most offended and aggrieved meow, as if to say, “How could you??!” He doesn’t understand why I didn’t see him and avoid him. After all, he could see me. (Ok, stop overthinking the metaphor.)
Like a cat cannot imagine lacking night vision, it’s difficult for a neurotypical person to relate to being overwhelmed by the executive function requirements of a task. If they can do it, then it’s doable. And so if they see someone making errors on a doable task, especially if they’ve seen that person successfully complete the task before, then the easiest explanation is that the person chose to apply insufficient effort. They didn’t try hard enough, even though they could have. They decided not to pay attention. They didn’t care.
Corporate middle managers will tell you that an employee underperforms when they lack either skill or will. It’s presented as an either/or. When a worker messes up, you train them or you discipline them.
Alright. I can’t stop thinking about cats either. So let’s get weird with the metaphor. Consider what would happen if those middle managers were cats.
Have you envisioned a lot of coffee cups pushed off the corners of desks? Good. But let’s stay on topic. These are corporate cats. Profits and productivity matter to them. They only chase yarn on weekends.
These feline managers wouldn’t really care if the lights were on or off in the office. To them, it would be irrelevant to performance. Sure, a sunbeam is nice, but it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
If only a small percentage of their employees were humans, and the rest were cats, it would be even less likely that they would notice a connection between lighting and productivity. Instead, they would see problem employees who sometimes performed well and sometimes slacked off. Those employees had all the required training. Relying on their whisker wisdom, they know that if it’s not skill, it must be will. And even if those employees raised the issue of lighting, it’s not the managers’ direct experience, so they would find it very hard to relate to. After all, there’s always a little light coming in from somewhere, and isn’t that enough? It’s not as if the office is ever completely dark. And haven’t we all seen a startling shadow once in a while?
Having an alternate visual system leads to different priorities and assumptions, in addition to different abilities. The same is true for the different brain wiring of ADHD and other neurospicy folks. We can think of this like cross-cultural differences.
A “careless mistake” isn’t a result of our lack of caring. That’s a cultural assumption.
This means we can recognize and tease apart cultural meaning — specifically, equating executive function with caring. Executive function is morally neutral. The capacity of our working memory is morally neutral. Our ability to focus amid distractions is morally neutral. Our ability to track time is morally neutral. A “careless mistake” isn’t a result of our lack of caring. That’s a cultural assumption.
Another cultural assumption is that using tools or supports to assist our executive function is “cheating” or unfair, or just plain unnecessary. Trying to meet these expectations of neurotypical culture puts an incredible strain on neurospicy folks.
What would happen if we let go of these cultural assumptions — or at least began to hold them more loosely? We might be less quick to think, “there’s something wrong with me” if we’re unable to do a task the way a neurotypical person would.
What’s more, knowing that the judgement we could face is based on faulty cultural assumptions, we may feel more confident in our own knowing of ourselves, our knowledge of our strengths, capabilities and needs.
If one of those feline managers said, “There’s no need for extra lighting. There’s moonlight coming in the window,” we would know that we can’t see well enough by moonlight to do our job. We would also know, as they gazed at us with glowing eyes, that whether they understood our experience or not, no matter how hard we tried (or cared), we would not be suddenly able to see in the dark. We could trust what we knew about ourselves.
Our confidence in this knowledge means that we do not have to keep spending energy straining to see in the dark. We do not have to beat ourselves up for not being able to see in the dark. And we do not have to agree that flashlights and night vision goggles are cheating.
In other words, we do not have to hold ourselves to neurotypical expectations of executive function performance. And we do not have to take on the judgments that would have us feel guilty or ashamed for using assistive technology.
That is not to say we should throw up our hands in defeat, announcing that we’ll never be on time or remember a date again. Instead, it’s a commitment to accepting our strengths and limitations, and finding supports and systems for thinking outside of our brains. The power in this approach is realizing that even if we can perform a task the neurotypical way, we don’t have to do it that way. It can be easier. It’s ok for it to be easier. And when it’s easier, that leaves us with more cognitive capacity.
What do you think? How do you react to "careless mistake"? What other cultural assumptions should we question? Please share your thoughts.
Until next time!
Warmly,
Randy