I Wasn’t the Problem; the Environment Was: Re-reading My 2015 BBC Newsbeat Story
I recently went back and read an old BBC Newsbeat article about me from 2015. The headline still lands heavily: “Social anxiety: ‘I spent years scared to leave my room.’”
At 23, I was the face of a statistic: 35% of unemployed young people were too anxious to leave the house. At the time, the story was framed around my struggle — my fear, my anxiety, my difficulty coping with everyday life.
And to be fair, that struggle was real.
But reading it now, as the founder of Divergent Thinking, I see that story very differently.
It was not only the story of a scared young man. It was the story of a neurodivergent person trying to survive in environments that had never been built for him.
You can read the original piece here: Social anxiety: “I spent years scared to leave my room” | BBC Newsbeat
Back then, I thought the problem was me
In 2015, I was still making sense of my own experience largely through the lens of anxiety.
I talked about feeling like a robot. I described the exhaustion of trying to fit in. I was trying to understand why ordinary things — leaving the house, socialising, going to meetings, being around people — felt so impossible for me when they seemed effortless for others.
At that stage, I still saw the issue mainly as something inside me that needed fixing.
I felt as though I was failing a test everyone else had been given the answers to.
That is what hurts when I read it now. Not because the anxiety was exaggerated — it absolutely was not — but because I can see how little language I had then for the deeper truth underneath it.
What I did not fully understand then was neurodiversity
I knew I was autistic, dyslexic and dyspraxic. Those labels existed in my life. But I did not yet understand what that really meant in a fuller, more liberating sense.
I did not yet understand neurodiversity as a framework that could explain not just my differences, but the mismatch between my brain and the environments I was being asked to navigate.
If I had truly understood that back then, I think a lot could have been different.
I do not mean the anxiety would have vanished overnight. I do not believe in that kind of neat rewrite. But I do believe I would have carried far less shame. I would have blamed myself less. I would have recognised that my anxiety was not a random personal weakness. It was often the completely rational response of a neurodivergent brain under chronic strain.
I was not simply “scared”.
I was overloaded.
I was masking.
I was trying to survive social, sensory and cognitive conditions that felt hostile to the way I naturally processed the world.
That is not the same story at all.
The 2015 version of the story focused on the symptom
The Newsbeat article was written through the lens that was most available then: anxiety as an individual mental health struggle.
And again, that was not false. The anxiety was real. The fear was real. The avoidance was real. But the emphasis was still on the symptom rather than the conditions producing it.
That was the dominant way many of these stories were told at the time.
The implicit question was:
How does Nat overcome his anxiety so he can function like everyone else?
But if I were telling that story now, in 2026, I would ask a different question:
Why were the environments around me so overwhelming, rigid and neurotypical that functioning in them felt unbearable?
That is a very different frame.
I was not broken; I was overloaded
This is the line I keep coming back to.
I was not broken.
I was overloaded.
As an autistic, dyslexic and dyspraxic person, I was living in systems that often demanded exactly the things that cost me the most:
constant social interpretation
eye contact
fast processing in groups
sensory tolerance
vague expectations
rigid norms about how to appear competent
pressure to seem effortless in settings that felt anything but effortless
Of course I was exhausted.
I was trying to run my brain through environments that treated neurotypical functioning as the default and expected me to adapt invisibly. I was using enormous amounts of energy to mask, compensate, perform normality and absorb discomfort without being seen as difficult.
What Newsbeat captured as anxiety was, in part, the visible expression of that invisible labour.
Re-reading it now, I see the social model much more clearly
One of the biggest shifts in my thinking since 2015 is moving from a more medical model view of distress toward a more social model understanding of disability and difference.
Back then, the story still sat largely within the idea that something was wrong with me.
Now, I would say something more precise:
there were things that were hard for me, yes — but the environment was also making those things much harder than they needed to be.
That changes the moral weight of the story.
It means the question is not only:
“How does this individual cope better?”
It is also:
“What is it about our schools, workplaces, recruitment systems, offices, social norms and expectations that makes so many neurodivergent people feel like they are constantly failing at being human?”
That is a much more honest question.
And it is a question that sits at the heart of the work I now do through Divergent Thinking.
My “spiky profile” was only a problem in the wrong environment
Something else I understand much more clearly now is the idea of the spiky profile.
Like many neurodivergent people, I have areas where I struggle significantly, and areas where I am exceptionally strong. That profile only becomes framed as a failure when the environment insists that I must be evenly competent in a narrow, standardised way.
My lows were real:
social processing in loud, chaotic spaces
administrative detail
vague instructions
sensory-heavy environments
pressure to perform normality
But so were my highs:
high-level strategy
storytelling
pattern recognition
seeing connections others miss
intense focus
creative problem-solving
The tragedy of so many systems is that they notice the lows first and miss the highs entirely.
That is one reason workplace needs assessments matter so much to me now. They help shift the conversation from “what is wrong with this person?” to “what barriers are distorting performance, and what strengths are we failing to make use of?”
The irony is that the traits I feared were the same ones that built my future
This is perhaps the most striking thing when I look back.
The very differences I was trying so hard to hide in 2015 are deeply bound up with the work I do now.
The intense focus I once experienced as isolating.
The different processing style that made social spaces harder.
The way I noticed patterns, questioned systems and thought outside conventional lines.
Those are all part of why I have been able to build a career speaking, consulting, creating and helping organisations understand neurodiversity more deeply.
In 2015, I was effectively trying to fix the parts of me that would later become central to my voice.
That does not mean all struggle is secretly a gift. I want to be careful here. But it does mean the story was always more complex than “anxious young man needs to overcome himself.”
Sometimes the thing you are trying hardest to suppress is also where much of your power sits.
I no longer ask how to force myself into every room
One of the simplest ways I can describe the difference between then and now is this:
Back then, I felt that my goal was to become the kind of person who could enter any room and cope with it.
Now, I think much more carefully about the room.
Is it structured in a way that works for me?
Is it sensory-safe enough?
Is it worth the cost?
Do I need support, breaks, adjustments or a different format?
Is this an environment I should be forcing myself into, or one I have outgrown the need to prove myself to?
That is not avoidance. It is discernment.
I am no longer the person in that BBC headline, not because I have become effortlessly neurotypical, but because I have stopped assuming the answer is always to push myself harder into spaces that damage me.
I do not ask for help to leave my room in the same way now. I ask much bigger questions about why so many rooms — workplaces, cultures, systems — are built in ways that trigger fight-or-flight in the first place.
If I had known then what I know now
I think about this a lot.
If I had truly understood neurodiversity then the way I do now, I think things could have been very different.
I think I would have:
felt less defective
spent less time trying to pass as normal
understood masking much earlier
recognised overload instead of only weakness
stopped moralising my distress
asked better questions about fit, support and environment
treated myself with much more compassion
Would it have made everything easy? No.
But would it have changed the story? Absolutely.
It would have meant I was not only trying to survive symptoms. I would have been able to understand the system around them.
And that is powerful.
To the people still living inside that headline
There are still many people who will read that old Newsbeat line — “I spent years scared to leave my room” — and recognise themselves in it.
If that is you, I want to say this very clearly:
You are not weak because the world feels overwhelming.
You are not failing because environments others find ordinary feel unbearable to you.
And if you are neurodivergent, there may be reasons for your distress that go far beyond “not coping well enough.”
Sometimes anxiety is not only about fear.
Sometimes it is about chronic mismatch.
Sometimes it is about sensory assault, social decoding, cognitive overload and years of trying to survive systems that keep asking you to become someone else.
That does not mean support is not needed. It absolutely is. But the support should not only focus on changing you. It should also focus on changing the conditions around you.
Final reflection
Re-reading that BBC Newsbeat story now, I do not feel embarrassed by the younger version of me. I feel compassion for him.
He was doing his best to survive a world that felt punishing and confusing. He thought the answer was to fix himself enough to earn a place in it.
What I know now is different.
I was not the problem.
The environment was.
And once I began to understand that — once I stopped treating my neurodivergence as something shameful and started seeing how deeply the conditions around me were shaping my distress — everything began to shift.
I am not “fixed”.
I am better understood.
By myself, and increasingly by others.
And that has made all the difference.
You can read the original BBC piece here: Social anxiety: “I spent years scared to leave my room” | BBC Newsbeat
To explore more of my work as the founder of Divergent Thinking, visit the blog or learn more about workplace needs assessments.
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