On Being a Neurodivergent Writer at a Writers' Conference

As I was drafting this piece, the news broke about the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory parade. Please consider donating what you can to an organization against gun violence, like March for Our Lives or Everytown for Gun Safety.

If you’re curious about the contents of this post, please refer to footnotes (*, **, ^, ^^) for more information.

I have cried in some of the loveliest places in the world. Venice during Biennale. Kensington Gardens in early spring.

Usually, it’s because I’m in an incredible place, and I’ve packed my schedule to the brim in order to experience as much of it as I can in the time I’m given. If I don’t check myself, I literally wreck myself—all those beautiful stimuli make me crabby, cranky, and at times weepy, till a break sitting under a quiet plane tree isn’t negotiable. It’s necessary.

Now, I can add a low-light, sensory-sensitivity room in the Kansas City Convention Center to that list.

Networking and Overstimulation: The Rock and a Hard Place of Conferences for Neurodivergent Writers

Networking, a mainstay of the conference circuit—and the key reason I booked flights to and from middle America in early February—is, in my experience, a major catalyst for social anxiety and overstimulation.

When you’re networking, you're not just making small talk. You're making weaponized, strategic small talk that aims to convince the other person to like you enough to do the thing you want them to do. If you network "incorrectly" as a neurodivergent person* (i.e., make a social faux pas, as I sometimes do, especially if I don’t have a script for the situation), you can either create a false sense of connection with people you'll later realize were just being polite or you might give yourself a spiral of anxious thoughts when you can't communicate in the smooth way you wanted to. Couple this with the energy drain of always “being on," usually in a hyperstimulating situation full of crowds, noise, and fluorescent lighting, and it's a recipe for burnout, time spent limping back to baseline afterward.)**

How I (Do My Best to) Work Around This

You'd think I'd never attend writing conferences, workshops, or in-person events if I feel this anxious or overstimulated, and hey, some neurodivergent writers don't. It’s a delicate dance between protecting your energy and promoting your art. When we don’t, though, it presents a substantial risk of being “out of sight, out of mind” in an industry built on who knows whom. (There was actually an AWP virtual conference seminar on this very topic, and I’m sure they talk about it much better than I do.)

A screenshot of the event description for the virtual panel “Autistic Writers on the Inaccessibility of Professional Writing Spaces,” presented at AWP 2024.

Despite my less-than-glowing endorsement of networking just now, I do find writing conferences to be a net positive. Among the thorny moments, there are blossoms—moments of creative inspiration and encouragement; strong connections to be made and lessons to learn. I’ve gone to AWP and other conferences before and had a middling to good time, if I also needed some recovery at the end or afterward. As I prepared to attend AWP in Kansas City earlier this month, I put a game plan in place to keep burnout and overstimulation to a minimum and to maximize my enjoyment of the event.

The game plan I settled on was two-pronged. There were things I would do to mask up and put my best most socially acceptable foot forward, and there were things I would do to unmask and unwind for the marathon/not-sprint that is a multi-day conference.^

Masking up primarily involved having concrete goals for the conference (networking, meeting people I genuinely connected with, getting some fresh opportunities as I determine what my writing life looks like post-Bookouture) and having a morning routine to get my “game face” on in pursuit of these goals.

Unmasking involved having a wind-down routine in the evenings and building physical exercise into my schedule to take care of pent-up energy as a result of overstimulation. (I also packed some stim toys, but these don’t always work if I’m already majorly overstimulated and therefore close to meltdown territory.) Essentially, I was doing my best to acknowledge limitations that, for me, are relatively newfound by not trying to be and do everything.

So, How Did It Go in Kansas City?

I’m pleased to say that having specifically stated goals for the conference worked! I got some incredible networking done at the book fair, including productive conversations with April Gloaming, Barrelhouse, and Typewriter Tarot and a total moonshot in which I pitched myself as an alum who could come back as a workshop instructor for the Aspen Institute’s Summer Words program. (We’ll see.)

I strove for quality over quantity when it came to AWP panels this year, attending a grand total of three. I’m glad I made room in my schedule for networking, though. Because I had my eye out for connection, I made it in places I otherwise wouldn’t have, including a communal table in the conference’s expo hall, where we commiserated over the price of tacos. (And guess what? Birds of a feather flock together… a lot of my new crew are neurodivergent too.)

Meltdown! at the Conference

There’s a famous title card in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that threatens: “Tuesday.” If Stanley Kubrick had been directing my AWP experience, it would have read “Friday.”

On Friday morning, all was going great. There had been some unexpected changes to my schedule on Thursday, but I’d volunteered as an event floater, made some new connections, attended a panel, and caught up with a dear friend for dinner like a champ. I was even in bed and watching Dimension 20 by ten p.m.!

So when I started to feel panic seeping in after a Friday morning panel I’d had on my itinerary from the beginning, it was a bit of a surprise.

I was standing at the front of a conference room, along with a crowd of other writers, talking to some of the panelists who had just wrapped their Q&A. They were kind and encouraging, but I definitely felt the “move it along” energy many agents have when fifty desperately #AmQuerying writers are peppering them with questions. In my own low-defenses state, this felt a lot like rejection, and given the stimulation of travel, the day before, and the fascinating but hard lessons I’d absorbed during the panel,^^ everything started slipping.

It’s hard to describe how this slippage feels physically. It’s somewhat akin to a panic attack. My breathing gets fast, my thoughts spiral, and I feel a wash of adrenaline that makes me want to wring my hands or move or scream or cry until it’s exorcised from my body.

This is embarrassing to experience in public, so I moved as quickly as I could to the low-light space, where I found a small room with two other figures huddled inside. No lights were on at all, which was its own surprise. I guess a completely dark room is what some people need, but I’d pictured soft, yellow light from a table lamp, and this contrast felt like I was being shoved into a broom closet to have my meltdown. I walked to the back wall, where I slumped down and cried until I felt like my emotions and nervous system were a little more under control.

After a brief moment at the book fair, which told me they were absolutely not under control, I retreated to the hotel for a reset in the form of a warm shower. I took the afternoon off from the off-site reading I’d planned to attend to support a Jacksonville-based author, who graciously understood.

I was able to rally, though, and attend two back-to-back industry happy hours on Friday night. I was certainly not as masked and professional-presenting as I would have liked to be, but (a) people are already lowering their own inhibitions at happy hours, so they don’t mind a little wackiness, and (b) as one of my dear friends said, I was in a safe space, with her and some other kind souls. (Honestly, I don’t think I would have gone back out again if not for them.) So Friday wrapped with some good, cathartic conversations about the struggle of art versus business; I met some lovely new faces; and Saturday was a brand-new day.

Limitations? Consider yourselves acknowledged.

I’d like to point out that my Friday meltdown happened with my schedule and my game plan fully on track for success. It wasn’t staying out late or pushing my schedule to the limit that did me in. It was the stimulation of an evening spent traveling, followed by a day with more human interaction than I have on a usual basis. Sometimes, when you’re neurodivergent, you do everything you can to protect yourself, and it’s the “normal” stuff that makes you go under. When you do, you just have to pinch your nose and dive.

A big part of my new normal is learning that I don’t always know what will drain me. I went home, moderated an author talk on Tuesday, and because it was creatively stimulating, I was fine. Meanwhile, my original plan was to send a bunch of emails and DMs when I got to the airport on Sunday, connecting with new people I met at the conference, but I was so worn out that I only got through half of them. In the last year, I’ve become a big proponent of “Do one thing to advance your writing life per day,” so I’m gradually chipping away at the rest of the items on the list.

Will I let my limitations get in the way of me networking, making important connections, and becoming a stronger, more compelling writer and author? Hopefully not. But will those limitations show their teeth with meltdowns, burnout, and a slow sense of limping two steps forward, one step back upon my return to daily life? Also yes.

A life full of striving and creativity really is about small bits of progress and not giving up, even if the definitions of “progress” and “surrender” change over time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for a nap.

Footnotes

*Most often, I see the term “neurodivergent” used to describe autistic and ADHD people. As of 2021, I have self-diagnosed as autistic, and as of this past Monday, I have a formal diagnosis of high-masking autism with pathological demand avoidance. It should be noted, though, that self-diagnosis of autism is valid for many reasons, including financial barriers to official evaluation and the fact that until recently much of autism research was focused on white, cis male children, whose autism presents differently than it does for adults, femme-identifying people, and people of color.

**If you've seen me out and about and are now thinking, "There’s no goddamn way Jessica has social anxiety or feels drained afterward, much less is autistic," well, thanks for falling for my masking. I'm decent at pretending to be extroverted and sooometimes normal, especially when it's helped along by liquid courage and the scripts and notes I've prepared for what I'm going to say, but I will not lie to you. I am usually depleted afterward.

^Masking, in the autistic sense, means passing for as close to neurotypical as possible, especially in neurologically mixed social situations. There are many autistic people who do not have the option of masking at will, so I want to acknowledge my bias and privilege here.

^^One extremely smart panelist had relayed some advice she’d gotten from her mentor not to start by publishing a book in one genre, that you have more creative freedom if you start with, say, lit fic than with sci-fi. As the author of two published romcoms who wants to write other types of books and is currently between publishers, this freaked me out.