Beyond the “Disability Card”: Reframing Survival as a Neurodivergent Strength

When I watch back my 2017 speech at the Rock Star Awards, I do not just see a younger version of myself speaking on a stage. I see someone trying to make sense of a life that had already demanded far more than most people ever saw.

For anyone who does not know my background, I am autistic, dyslexic and dyspraxic. Today, I am the founder of Divergent Thinking, where my work focuses on helping organisations understand neurodiversity more deeply and create environments where different minds can genuinely thrive.

But long before any of that, my life was shaped by experiences that felt much more like survival than success.

That is why this speech still matters to me. It captures a moment when I was beginning to understand something I now believe very strongly: the qualities neurodivergent people build through surviving environments that do not fit them are often misunderstood, undervalued and rarely named as strengths — but they can become some of the most powerful assets a person carries.

You can watch the full speech here: Nathaniel Hawley Rock Star Awards 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRy9AMGin4

What neurodiversity actually means in this story

Before I go further, it is probably useful to explain what I mean by neurodiversity, because this word gets used a lot and not everyone encounters it in the same way.

Neurodiversity is the idea that there is natural variation in how human brains work. Some people are neurotypical, meaning their cognition broadly fits the dominant expectations built into schools, workplaces and society. Others are neurodivergent, meaning their brains process information, communication, learning, attention, coordination or sensory input differently.

In my case, that includes:

• autism, which affects how I process social information, sensory input and the wider world

• dyslexia, which affects reading, writing and language processing

• dyspraxia, which affects coordination, sequencing and certain aspects of organisation and movement

These are not minor details in the story. They shaped how school felt, how other people interpreted me, how I understood myself, and how much effort everyday life often required.

But what I have come to understand over time is that neurodivergence was never the whole problem. The real difficulty was what happened when a neurodivergent child had to survive systems and circumstances that had no real understanding of his brain.

The hardest part was not simply being neurodivergent

I think this is one of the most important things for readers to understand.

Yes, being autistic, dyslexic and dyspraxic created real challenges. School was hard. Communication could be hard. Learning was often filtered through systems that did not fit me. I was often misunderstood, underestimated and measured against standards that did not reflect how my brain actually worked.

But in that 2017 speech, I made clear that the hardest part of my journey was not just the labels.

It was what was happening around them.

I was dealing with a home life that had reached breaking point. I was dealing with family crisis, instability and responsibilities that no child should really be carrying. At one point I had to call the police on my own father to save my mother’s life. I later became a full-time carer for my mum at an age when I was barely capable of looking after myself. Eventually, I had to make the agonising decision to sanction her for her own safety.

That context matters because neurodivergent people are often not only carrying the weight of difference. They are also carrying trauma, poverty, family breakdown, mental health crises, caring responsibilities or exclusion. When all of that sits on top of a brain that is already having to work harder in a neurotypical world, the strain can become enormous.

So when I talk about survival, I mean that very literally.

Why the “disability card” framing never felt right

Part of what I was pushing against in that speech — and still push against now — is the way society often expects neurodivergent and disabled people to present themselves.

You are often allowed one of two roles.

Either you minimise everything and prove how well you can cope, or you are expected to tell your story in a way that makes your struggle easy for other people to consume through sympathy.

I have never felt comfortable with that.

Because yes, I am neurodivergent. Yes, I am disabled in certain contexts. Yes, my life has involved real adversity. But I have never wanted that to be understood only as damage.

That is what I mean by moving beyond the “disability card”. Not denying disability. Not pretending struggle is not real. But refusing to let difference and hardship be interpreted only through lack, pity or limitation.

What I wanted to say in that speech, and what I still believe now, is that a neurodivergent life shaped by survival often develops strengths that mainstream systems do not know how to recognise.

Neurodivergence shaped how I survived

One of the things I understand much more clearly now is that my neurodivergent brain did not only make life harder. It also shaped how I got through it.

For example:

• my dyslexia pushed me away from conventional text-based learning and towards more visual, creative ways of understanding

• my autism shaped a kind of intense focus and systems thinking that later became part of my work

• my dyspraxia made certain practical things harder, but also forced me to think differently about process and adaptation

At the time, though, nobody would have called these strengths. They would mostly have been seen as deficits or problems.

That is the tragedy of so many neurodivergent childhoods. The qualities being forged beneath the surface are often invisible because all anyone notices is the friction.

The “academic heist” was an act of neurodivergent adaptation

There is a part of the speech where I talk about being rejected from school because my grades were too low, and not being allowed back in the building.

For people who do not know this part of my story, it probably sounds unbelievable. I ended up breaking into the school to take textbooks because the system had effectively shut me out.

But what matters even more to me now is not just the act itself. It is what happened next.

Because I struggled with traditional text-heavy learning, I taught myself through YouTube videos and visual learning instead. That was not laziness. It was not cheating. It was a neurodivergent person finding a route into education that actually worked for his brain.

That is such an important distinction.

A lot of neurodivergent people are told they are “difficult” or “not trying” when what they are actually doing is adapting. They are finding windows when the front door is locked. They are using workarounds not because they lack intelligence, but because the standard path is not built for how they process information.

I passed my GCSEs after two years out of the system. That was one of the earliest moments where I began to understand that if the world closes one route, neurodivergent people often become very good at inventing another.

Survival built strengths that were invisible at the time

No one looking at my life then would have described it as leadership training. No one would have pointed to what I was living through and said:

• this is building resilience

• this is building empathy

• this is building adaptability

• this is building emotional intelligence

• this is building creative problem-solving

But that is partly what was happening.

Again, I want to be careful here. I am not romanticising suffering. I would never say trauma is good or that hardship is somehow worth it because you may learn from it. That is not my point.

My point is that when neurodivergent people survive in systems that were not built for them, they often develop extraordinary capacities that the world then fails to recognise because it is still too focused on what they struggle with.

That is why I now speak so much about spiky profiles — the idea that someone can have very high capability in some areas alongside very real difficulty in others. The “low spots” are often what the system notices. But the “high spikes” can be where some of the greatest value sits.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that now shapes my work through Divergent Thinking: helping people and organisations see beyond the deficits they have been trained to notice first.

Thriving is not about becoming less neurodivergent

One of the lines from that speech that still matters to me is the idea that life is not just about surviving — it is about thriving.

But I think that line can be misunderstood if we are not careful.

Thriving does not mean becoming more neurotypical.

It does not mean erasing the parts of you that struggle.

It does not mean finally learning how to “pass” so well that nobody notices your difference.

For me, thriving has meant something very different.

It has meant learning to understand my brain instead of fighting it blindly.

It has meant recognising that what once looked like weakness can also contain strength.

It has meant building a life and career that make use of how I think, rather than treating it as something that must always be apologised for.

That is one of the reasons workplace needs assessments matter so much to me now. They are about helping people thrive not by forcing themselves into the wrong shape, but by changing the conditions around them so their strengths can actually show up.

What I would want young neurodivergent people to hear now

If someone unfamiliar with my story watches that speech now, I think the most important message I would want them to take from it is this:

Neurodivergent young people are very often learning strengths long before anyone knows how to name them.

The child who has to hack the system to learn may later become a brilliant problem-solver.

The young person who feels everything deeply may later have unusual empathy and insight.

The teenager who never fit the standard path may later be the one most able to challenge broken systems and imagine better ones.

But first, they often need someone to see beyond the labels.

That is why recognition matters. That is why reframing matters. That is why so much of my work now is about helping people understand that neurodivergence is not just about support needs. It is also about perspective, innovation, resilience and value.

Final reflection

Looking back at that 2017 Rock Star Awards speech now, I do not see someone playing the victim card. I see someone beginning to tell a different truth about disability, neurodiversity and adversity.

I see someone saying:

yes, this has been hard.

yes, the systems failed me.

yes, I have carried real pain.

but no, that is not the whole meaning of my life.

The deeper meaning is that survival shaped me.

Neurodivergence shaped me.

And the very things the world once treated as liabilities became part of what made me capable of building something meaningful.

That is still my mission through Divergent Thinking, through the blog, and through the wider work I do now: helping people see that difference is not something to apologise for, and that many of the people who had to struggle hardest just to get through are exactly the people with the insight to help change the system.

Because sometimes survival is not just endurance.

Sometimes, when understood properly, it is the beginning of power.