Nobody sits you down at the start of a design career and gives you the honest version. You get the technical stuff, the software tutorials, the design principles, the portfolio advice. What you don't get is someone pulling you aside and saying, look, here's what this actually feels like, and here's what to do about it. So consider this that conversation. I'm writing this for two groups of people. Those just starting out, finding their feet in their first studio or agency role

Let's start with a number: somewhere between 15 and 20% of the global population is neurodivergent. That's not a niche. That's not an edge case. That's roughly one in six people sitting in your user research sessions, abandoning your checkout flows, quietly giving up on your app and going somewhere else because the experience was just too much to deal with. I'm writing this as a parent of a neurodivergent little monkey, and, now due to that little monkey and her struggles, I