Blackie (Blackbird)
There’s a particular kind of clever that gets girls through school undetected. Not the loud kind, not the disruptive kind, the kind that reads three books ahead and forgets her gym kit and talks too much in the wrong moments and not enough in the right ones, and still does well, so nobody looks any further.
That was me. Gifted, they said, which turned out to be a word for coping so effectively we can’t see the mechanism. High-achieving through school, through university, through a career spent working with neurodivergent children and the educators who support them. I know this territory. I’ve spent years helping schools see children who weren’t being seen, understand minds that weren’t being understood. I am, in that world, something of a native.
The irony of sitting in that room was not lost on me.
Then perimenopause. The oestrogen drops, and it turns out oestrogen had been doing a great deal of quiet administrative work, keeping the executive function ticking, smoothing the edges, running the workarounds in the background. Without it, the workarounds stop working. The thing you’d been compensating for all your life stops being compensable. The scaffolding comes down and the joins start to show.
Which is how I found myself in my forties, in a small room, being asked whether I was easily distracted.
There was a blackbird in the hedge outside the window.
She was busy. That’s the first thing I noticed. Not perched, not singing, but working, ferrying material, making decisions, completely absorbed in the business of building something that would hold. There’s a kind of focused intelligence in a bird at work on a nest that anyone who knows anything about neurodivergent minds would recognise immediately. Total absorption in the task that matters.
I watched her in his pauses. While he noted something down, while he moved from one question to the next, I was tracking her progress in the hedge. Not instead of listening. As well as. That’s not distraction, it’s the way my attention has always worked, casting wide, holding more than one thing at once, moving between registers without losing any of them.
The questions are designed for a particular kind of difficulty, a kind that tends to show up clearly in boys, in school, in the moments when the system catches you not complying. They’re less well designed for the woman who complied beautifully for decades, who learned to stap up every chink before anyone noticed the gaps, who built her own rickle of workarounds so skilfully that it looked, from the outside, like a perfectly sound structure.
He was working through his process. I was watching the blackbird work through hers, and answering his questions, and noticing the particular quality of the light through the glass. All of it at once. That’s the thing the tick-box doesn’t capture, has never captured, and I sat across from someone using a framework I know as well as he does and said yes, no, sometimes, it depends, and kept my mouth shut about the rest.
She didn’t need anyone to assess her capability. She just needed the right conditions and enough material to work with.
I knew what the outcome would be before he told me.
“Taivert but no daft.” That’s the phrase that came to me when he delivered his conclusion with the careful neutrality of someone who doesn’t know you already knew. Taivert, scattered, wired differently, always have been. But not daft. Never daft.
The confirmation mattered, even so. Not because it told me anything new, but because it meant the scaffolding I’d been building all my life finally had a name, and names have a way of making things real, of making them something you can put down rather than just carry.
What I hadn’t known, until recently, was how much of the coping had been chemical. How much oestrogen had been doing in the background, quietly and without acknowledgement, and how its departure would strip the workarounds back to nothing and leave the original wiring exposed. The midlife diagnosis isn’t a coincidence. For women like me it’s almost a pipeline, gifted child to high-achieving woman to perimenopause to finally, in a small room with a clipboard and a blackbird in the hedge, getting the paperwork done so you can get access to the right chemicals.
As I left she was watching me through the glass. The only one in that room who actually saw me.
Blackie
There’s a wee blackie in yon hedge
Just ootside the windae
Ower his shudder as he plowters
Sairly through the questions
That spier tae define me.
“Am I easily distracted?”
Whit? By her nest biggin?
As she staps up chinks in that rickle
Ae sticks tae mak a braw hidie? Naw.
I’m jist stappin’ the gaps in his hirplin process,
Takin tent o her
While he’s daein his deekin’
As much yaise tae me as I am tae her
I can read and tick boxes an aw ye ken.
His interpretation atween us
Lik the glass pane aetween
Thon busy blackie an me.
I think “just coont the boxes ye didnae scribe”
But I dinnae. I haud ma tongue.
I ken the ootcome onyway
(Mah hairdresser disnae need tae inform me
That I’m no towie-heidit tae.)
Confirmation of whit I’ve aye kent,
Taivert but no daft
I’ll glegly big ma ain byke
(He’s tae cack-haunded no tae mak a slaister)
Blackie stops, keeks at me through the windae,
She sees me.