Personal Background

I identify as Autistic, have ADHD and Borderline Personality Disorder, and deal with psychosis and dissociation. I’m also chronically ill and deal with chronic pain and fatigue, hypermobility, arthritis, as well as other issues that have yet to be pinpointed. Having these perspectives allows me to help my clients that also deal with these or similar issues. The way physical and mental disabilities affect functioning and especially how they intersect is often not addressed in productivity (such as tidying, cleaning, etc) spaces, leaving people to feel as if there’s something wrong with them. My goal is to not just make things work while taking into account that neurodivergency can have physical symptoms, and physical disabilities can have mental symptoms, and that the line between them is never as clear cut as people seem to think. 

Tidying Background

As a child, due to unmanaged ADHD, depression, and anxiety, I began to develop hoarding tendencies. I hadn’t been taught how to clean and struggled greatly with both getting rid of things I didn’t need as well as putting away the things I kept. My bedroom floor was regularly impossible to cross and would be covered with multiple foot tall piles. While part of what helped me as a kid was watching the Hoarders tv shows, this just scared me into keeping things clean and brought a lot of shame to keeping things I liked. Towards the end of high school I started to learn about Marie Kondo and her considerably more compassionate KonMari method. It taught me how to be gentle with myself and did not shame my attachment to the things I owned.

I also realised that a lot of the ideas taught people how to tidy by building a foundation of skills and had solutions for a lot of problems I found myself and my neurodivergent peers encountering. Over the past five years, I integrated these concepts and practises into my life as well as sharing them with people close to me, before starting NeurodiversiTidy to share with even more people. 

Expansion to Executive Functioning Support

Over the first two years of running NeurodiversiTidy, I learned that the reason that so many of the people I work with have a hard time with the organising process is the sheer amount of executive function it requires. Executive function has many components, including ones that're more well known such as starting tasks and staying focused, as well as ones that are less commonly acknowledged, such as emotional regulation and adapting to change on the fly. The process of decluttering, organising, and maintaining tidiness in one's space touches on all facets of executive functioning, and if there's a particular part of executive functioning that a client struggles with, it is often beneficial to work with them to build it in other parts of life as well. As I did more work on executive function support with clients who started as tidying clients as well as with people in my personal life, I realised that more likely than not there were people who would benefit from that support outside of the framework of tidying, and decided to expand my offerings to include different types of that support.