I took a test recently that made me feel stupid. I want to talk about it, because I don't think I'm the only one who's been made to feel that way by something that was never built for the way my brain works.
It was a cognitive assessment for a job — one of those automated screenings where the questions come with a timer. Thirty, maybe forty-five seconds each. The clock ticking in the corner.
The problem is that I have a brain that needs a little more time to read and process. That's not a character flaw. It's how I'm wired — I'm neurodivergent, and reading comprehension under a ticking clock is genuinely one of the hardest possible formats for me. By the time I'd actually read and understood the question, the timer was nearly gone. I was answering on instinct and panic, not ability.
When the results came back, one of the categories said I had "room for improvement."
And for a few minutes, I believed it. I sat there feeling like maybe I really was less capable than I thought. Less smart. Not enough.
The reframe that took me a minute to find
Here's the thing I had to remind myself, and I want to remind you too, in case you've been here:
The test didn't measure my ability. It measured how fast I could read under pressure. Those are not the same thing.
I write for a living. I've been published. I craft words and brand voices and designs that people pay for and connect with. The idea that I have "room for improvement" in verbal reasoning isn't a finding about me — it's an artifact of a format that gave me no room to actually show up.
A test that can't accommodate the way you think isn't measuring your intelligence. It's measuring its own narrow definition of how a brain is "supposed" to work. And when your brain doesn't match that definition, the test calls you the problem.
It's not you. It's the test.
The difference between insufficient and unaccommodated
This is the distinction I want to hand you, because it changed how I felt about that whole experience:
There is a world of difference between being insufficient and being unaccommodated.
Insufficient means you don't have what it takes. Unaccommodated means you have what it takes, but the situation refused to make room for you to use it.
So much of what neurodivergent people are taught to read as personal failure is actually just the second thing. The timed test. The open office that's impossible to focus in. The instructions given once, out loud, with no way to go back. The meeting that moves too fast. The form with no flexibility. We get told, over and over, in a hundred small ways, that we're falling short — when really we're just being asked to perform in conditions designed for someone else's brain.
You are not broken because a system refused to bend. The system not bending is a fact about the system. It is not a verdict on you.
What I did instead of believing it
I said so. In the feedback box at the end of that test, I wrote — honestly and clearly — that the timed format wasn't accessible, that it didn't make room for people who process differently, and that it didn't reflect my actual ability.
I don't know if anyone will read it or do anything with it. But I needed to say it, because the alternative was to quietly absorb the message that I'm "less than," and I'm done doing that. I spent enough years believing the broken thing was me.
And honestly? A company that screens people through a test that can't accommodate a documented difference is telling me something about whether I'd want to work there in the first place. I was evaluating them, too.
If you've felt this
If something out there has recently made you feel slow, or stupid, or not enough — I want you to ask one question before you believe it: Was I given a fair chance to show up as I actually am?
Because if the answer is no — if the format, the clock, the conditions, the expectations were built for a brain that isn't yours — then the result isn't data about your worth. It's data about the thing that wouldn't make room for you.
You are not too slow. You are not too much. You are not insufficient.
You are, sometimes, just unaccommodated. And those are not the same thing — no matter how many tests try to convince you otherwise.
Neurospicy and thriving (mostly). You're allowed to be exactly the way your brain is.
If your brain runs a little differently and you want to wear that out loud, the Gifts for the Neurodivergent collection and the Funny Mental Health Shirts are where the self-aware-and-slightly-unhinged crowd hangs out.
Every order sends 10% of proceeds to 988 and The Trevor Project.
