THE SUBJECT I WAS NEVER GOOD AT

I should probably tell you something before I go any further with this column: I am not a tech person. I failed GCSE maths three times. For most of my life, if a conversation turned towards computing, or coding, or anything with the word “stats” in it, I would find a reason to be somewhere else.

I’ve sat with that discomfort rather than write around it, because I suspect I’m not the only one who feels it. Tech is not everyone’s favourite subject. That sounds obvious written down, and yet so much of the language around technology at work, in the news, in every “upskill or get left behind” article is built on the quiet assumption that it should be. That fluency with tech is the baseline, and if you don’t have it, something is a bit wrong with you.

Running from the subject

The maths and the tech avoidance were never separate for me. They arrived together, and they’ve stayed together. I actively ran from anything that smelled like computer studies or statistics, the one notable exception being a stats module I somehow got through during a postgraduate in Neuroscience and Education, more out of necessity than newfound confidence. Outside of that, there has been a fairly constant hum of FOMO. A sense of being behind everyone else, of missing some induction session that explained the rules to the room while I was out of it.

That feeling followed me into my career, oddly. When I first became a therapist, one of my quieter anxieties wasn’t about the clinical work but whether someone giving me instructions involving a logo, a piece of software, or a “just click here” would understand that my brain doesn’t take those instructions in easily. That I needed it explained differently, or more than once, without that being treated as slowness.

The stereotype that doesn’t hold up

This is where I want to bring in the lens I use most in my clinical work, because I think it matters here: neurodiversity.

There’s a persistent stereotype that autistic people are naturally tech-savvy, that the wiring runs one way, logical and systems-minded, comfortable with machines in a way it isn’t with people. It’s a stereotype I’ve watched do real harm, because it isn’t true nearly as often as people assume, and it quietly writes out everyone whose brain works differently and doesn’t find tech intuitive.

I see a version of this play out clearly in South Asian communities, including my own. We are, collectively, loaded with tech geeks, engineers, IT graduates, and the cousin who fixes everyone’s laptop at family gatherings. A lot of that isn’t organic interest; it’s the well-worn script of South Asian parents steering their children towards medicine, law, accountancy, or tech, often regardless of what that child’s brain was actually built for. Somewhere in that script, neurodivergence rarely gets seen at all. If you’re pushed down the tech route and you struggle, the assumption isn’t that your brain might be wired differently; it’s that you’re not trying hard enough. And if you’re neurodivergent but not in the tech-flavoured way people expect, you can become something like white noise: present, but not really registered, because you don’t match the shape anyone was looking for.

This isn’t just a feeling I’ve picked up clinically, either. Researchers studying young neurodivergent South Asians online have coined a term for exactly this: marginalised neurodivergence, the specific, compounding kind of invisibility that shows up when someone belongs to a minoritised ethnic community and has a brain that works differently, and neither space quite makes room for the whole picture. Their work found young South Asians turning to platforms like TikTok precisely because family members had waved away their neurodivergence with some version of “just push through,” and because achievement-focused cultural expectations left little room to ask whether the achieving was actually costing them something. It’s the same pattern I meet in the therapy room, just given a proper name.

Which is really the question sitting underneath everything I’ve written so far, the one I don’t think gets asked properly: where does neurodivergence actually stand in relation to tech? Not the flattering, oversimplified version brains wired for logic, therefore wired for machines, but the real, messier version, where some of us find tech genuinely hostile territory, and the people around us keep being surprised by that, because it doesn’t fit the story, they’ve already decided about how our minds work.

It’s not a story I’m inventing to make myself feel better, either. Read the tech sector’s own coverage of neurodiversity, and you’ll find the same framing again and again: neurodivergent minds as a talent pool to be tapped, pattern recognition and attention to detail as innate strengths, big employers building entire hiring pipelines on the promise that these brains are simply better suited to the work. It’s well-meaning, and I understand why it’s taken hold. It’s a much easier pitch to employers than “just do the right thing.” But it quietly writes a second stereotype on top of the first one: not just that autistic people are tech-savvy, but that being neurodivergent and being good at tech are practically the same trait. I’ve spent a career meeting the people that framing leaves out.

Teaching myself, because no one else would meet me halfway

I want to give you a concrete example, because I think it says more than the theory does. A few years ago, I needed a website and some basic design work done, and I did what most people do: I found a web designer. More than one, over time. And more than once, I came away feeling like the person I’d hired hadn’t really understood what I needed or couldn’t translate my brain’s version of “this is what I mean” into anything usable, or simply lost patience with how many times I needed something explained.

So, I taught myself Canva. Then, when that stopped being enough, I taught myself Wix. I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert in either, I’m still not, and I still hit walls with both, but I got further teaching myself in my own time, at my own pace, going back over the same tutorial four times if I needed to, than I ever did sitting across from someone whose job it was to help me. That’s not a compliment to Canva or Wix so much as a fairly damning observation about how little patience most tech support, professional or otherwise, has for a brain that needs things said more than once, or differently, or slower.

As tech grows, so does the promise of a friend inside it

There’s a newer angle to all this that I can’t leave out, because it’s already changing how neurodivergent people relate to tech: AI, increasingly pitched by companies, by users, by headlines as something close to a best friend.

I understand the appeal, clinically and personally. For someone who’s spent a lifetime feeling one beat behind in conversations, or bracing for the moment a person’s patience runs out, an AI that never sighs, never rushes you, never makes you feel slow for asking again, is genuinely something. A lot of neurodivergent people I work with have described exactly that relief, a space to think out loud, to ask a “stupid” question without the social cost, to rehearse a difficult conversation before having it with an actual human being.

But I’d be doing this piece a disservice if I stopped there, because the same qualities that make it a relief can just as easily make it a hiding place. A conversation with a machine never says no, never has its own day it’s struggling with, never asks anything back of you. That’s restful in small doses and quietly isolating in large ones, especially for people who already find human connection effortful and are prone to withdrawing from it. The risk isn’t the tool. It’s mistaking the absence of friction for the presence of a relationship and letting one slowly stand in for the other.

So: not a warning, and not an endorsement either. Just an honest account of something, I think we’re only beginning to understand the shape of that as tech grows more conversational, more patient, more available at 2am than any person could reasonably be. It’s going to matter enormously how neurodivergent people, in particular, are supported to use it as a bridge back towards other people, rather than a permanent substitute for them.

What I’d want people to take from this

I don’t have a neat five-step fix for any of this. What I have is a request, really: that we stop treating tech fluency as a proxy for intelligence, capability, or worth. Some of the sharpest, most capable people I know, professionally and personally, still feel their stomachs drop at the word “spreadsheet.” That isn’t a character flaw. It’s just a different brain, in a world currently organised around one particular kind.

Neurodivergence and tech don’t sit in the neat relationship the stereotype promises, not for me, and not for a lot of the people I sit across from clinically. Some of us are still catching our breath, quietly teaching ourselves in private rather than admitting how much we’re struggling in public. If this piece does anything, I’d like it to make that a slightly easier thing to admit.