Neurodiversity: Leveling Up Our Perspective (Pt. 1 of 3)

50th Annual Joseph Trachtman Lecture

• Understanding Neurodiversity: Rethinking What’s ‘Normal (Pt. 1 of 3) — this podcast
• Neurodiversity in the Workplace: Barriers, Bias, and Belonging (Pt. 2 of 3) — posts April 28
• How to Build Inclusive Workplaces: Practical Strategies for Neurodiversity and Culture Change (Pt. 3 of 3) — May 5

“Neurodiversity: Leveling Up Our Perspective,” that’s the subject of today’s ACTEC Trust and Estate Talk.

I’m ACTEC Fellow Peter Gordon of Wilmington, Delaware. I’m a Past President of the College and had the privilege of selecting the 2026 Annual Joseph Trachtman lecturer.

The Annual Joseph Trachtman Memorial Lecture has long been a cornerstone of ACTEC’s Annual Meeting. It brings together leading voices in trust and estate planning to explore the legal issues shaping our profession. This year marked a special milestone. It was the 50th anniversary of the lecture.

Our Trachtman speaker was Haley Moss, an attorney, author, and nationally recognized advocate for neurodiversity. Haley was diagnosed with autism at a young age, yet she built a remarkable career helping others better understand how neurodivergent individuals think, communicate, and navigate the world.

Haley challenges assumptions, broadens perspectives, and encourages greater inclusion within our professional practices and in our communities. In this special anniversary lecture, Haley shares her personal and professional journey offering insights that go beyond doctrine and into the human experience. Her story invites us to think differently, not only about the clients we serve, but also about how we listen, communicate, and shape a more inclusive future.

This is part one of the three-part lecture series, which will focus on understanding neurodiversity and rethinking what is normal. But before we begin, I want to share with you what Haley’s parents told us about raising Haley. They told us that when Haley was two or three, she was not verbal but could do a hundred-piece puzzle. They could not take Haley anywhere. She would scream wherever they took her. That was her earliest form of communication.

Haley did not begin to talk until she was in the first grade. The parents they told us that society, friends, and family closed the door to her. The parents of her friends’ thought autism was contagious or that their children would learn to behave like Haley if they were around her. Haley was never invited to her classmates’ birthday parties. Haley’s parents said Haley’s childhood was a series of closed doors, obstacles, and barriers, all of which she had to overcome.

And now, Haley Moss.

Advocacy Starts with Showing Up

First off, thank you all for being here. I know that sounds like a very simple thing to start this morning off with, but I really am grateful you all are here. Let’s be frank with each other for just a moment, it is a Saturday morning, and you chose to wake up early, get dressed, get breakfast, put on your lanyards, and come to yet another day of conference programming, and to listen, and learn, and open your hearts and your minds to something that maybe you’re a little bit less familiar with.

For that, I thank you, because that is actually a form of advocacy, that you advocated for yourself to be here. I know many of us probably are thinking about going home, we have other obligations, maybe you wanted to sleep in – I know I personally would have loved to have slept in a little bit – but you chose to be here. And for that, I am eternally grateful, and that is the note that I really want to start our day with, is on that note of advocacy and gratitude.

Why Neurodiversity Matters More Than You Think

Before we get started on neurodiversity, which I know is a very exciting theme. It might be a little bit new to you. If it’s new to you, that’s okay too. That I really don’t want to just dive straight into just inspiring people, I know that sounds very radical to say up here, because that’s what happens a lot with stories like mine, is that they are reduced down to a moment in time; that if you just go by the story that’s often told about me, of once upon a time, I was non-speaking, and fast forward a little bit, and now I’m a lawyer, that really doesn’t tell you an awful lot, does it? It tells you two very specific moments in time, and as much as it pains me to say it, it is no longer 2019, and I am no longer 24 or 25 years old, going through the motions of that first big girl lawyer job, where the moment seems to end when you are on the Today Show.

To learn more about Haley Moss, watch her appearance on the Today Show.

Instead, life goes on, and there’s so much more that I personally wanted to do with my life, and with the stories that I have to tell.

Rethinking the Typical “Overcoming Adversity” Story

And so often, the stories that are told about disability, or neurodiversity, are exactly like that: that you overcame adversity. That you somehow transcended disability in some way, shape, or form, which isn’t necessarily true. I am very proudly autistic, and still struggle plenty to this day, but there’s also so much joy in my life. There are so many experiences that I have that are not very different from the ones that you get to have, too, or that you have already had, or you would like to have. I think that’s something I really do hope that we think about throughout our time together, too.

And to give a little bit more of a formal introduction, I am very proud of the work that I do. I was diagnosed at 3, like you heard with my family, talking about those different trials and tribulations, and all sorts of interesting things. What they did not mention on TV is I was famously kicked out of preschool. So, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, to every job I’ve ever applied to, I was not allowed to put on my resume, thanks to the wonderful folks at Career Services, who told me this was not a good idea, that I was a preschool dropout. And I really thought that it made for a great story, at the very least.

But I was kicked out of preschool for a couple of different reasons.

1. One, I was not hitting the same developmental milestones as my typical peers.
2. Two, I was not very good at coloring inside the lines. I would just take the crayon and just scribble, scribble, scribble. Apparently, that’s not what three-year-olds are supposed to be doing. Who would have thought?
3. And number three is I did not quite master the art of drinking from a cup. So, I have my handy glass of water, I know now this is what you do. But in preschool, my model was our family dog. So, I thought you were supposed to just lick it and lap it up like your dog does, because that’s what I had seen before. Apparently, that’s not what preschoolers should be doing.

All of this is some of those moments that led to my diagnosis in the first place, and I recognize what a privilege it was to have been diagnosed as a younger child. Something that comes up a lot, and it actually came up in committee yesterday and even today at Books After Breakfast, was how girls in particular are less likely to be diagnosed with autism or at younger ages. I recognize being late-speaking and not hitting other milestones was really kind of that catalyst, especially in the late 90s. All of us were there, it was a different time. You know, the dial-up internet, the Backstreet Boys, what else was there? Yeah, we just didn’t have the same level of information, pretty much, is probably the best descriptor I have. That autism really wasn’t in the collective consciousness beyond perhaps the movie Rain Man. And as my resume may or may not suggest, I am not Rain Girl.

And I say all of this not to make you laugh, but really just to give us something to think about when we do eventually dive into those stereotypes, kind of learning and rethinking what we know or at least believe about neurodivergence and neurodiversity. I really am a huge nerd about this. I love getting to talk about anything in disability rights, the Americans with Disabilities Act, anything in between. My past life in practice was in healthcare litigation, mostly representing hospitals against insurance companies, and we also had a very active international law practice doing anti-terrorism matters, which sounds very dangerous and very sexy to talk about at cocktail parties. However, most of what I did was look at spreadsheets and get to connect terrible human beings and entities to each other and how they were at play, which was also pretty cool, but it really was not as dangerous and fun as it sounded to talk about, unfortunately for me.

But I digress. And then I ended up getting to advocate because my personal story got legs, and I recognized that I would rather people understand and that this was something I was passionate about, and I thought that I would take maybe a year or two off from practice to get to educate people for fun, and somehow I have not been in practice now for six years, so the joke is on me, and finding your passion really is a very cool thing after all.

If Neurodiversity Is New to You, That’s Okay

So without further ado, I do want to jump right in. I know there are some of you who are probably sitting here thinking, I have never heard the word neurodiversity before today. If that is you, please do not feel bad, okay? This is new to a lot of people, and it’s very fun to get to be that first person to sometimes talk about it because I don’t have to break any bad habits right away. That is very exciting for me.

Now, that being said, when we think about neurodiversity, I actually am thinking about every single one of you, okay? I don’t care if you have a disability or a diagnosis, but as a group, we are actually neurodiverse. Every single one of us has a unique human experience with how your brain processes information, how you think, how you communicate, and interpret all sorts of external stimuli.

Just to prove this point, actually, we’re going to do a quick little exercise together. Don’t worry, I’m not going to call on anyone in particular, you don’t have to be that awake for me, okay? I promise. So just to play this game really quickly, we’re going to talk about the room for a minute that we’re all in together. And just a show of hands, how many of you are cold in here? Okay, that’s a good amount, thank you, okay. On the flip side, how many of you are warm? A couple of us, great. And how many of you are just like, you know what, I have no clue, I’m just comfortable, I’m just here? Thank you very, very much, I really appreciate it. Good job on audience participation today, you all get an A.

So, that being said, I can go off to the side, I believe over there is a thermostat. And the thermostat is going to tell us objectively whether it’s hot or cold, right? But if I ask you who is correct, the people who are warm, the people who are cold, or the people who are like, “my body is in homeostasis, life is great, I am comfy.” Every single one of you is correct. Nobody is wrong, because that is how your brain and your body are making sense of this space. On the flip side of that, I personally am cold, my hands are cold, I probably blame touching the water bottle. But I also have a very different experience of this space, because I am standing up here, and you all are in the comfy chairs. Although some of you may argue that those chairs aren’t very comfortable. Also, I have a different experience of the lights, and usually when I’m up here, I get to be annoying and say that the lights are too bright, because I have a lot of different sensory differences. And thankfully they are actually, at least to me, more on the mild side. But they do have all sorts of fun little crystals at the top, sorry if you all are going to now be distracted by the chandeliers like I get. But those fun little crystals distract me now and then, so I have to avoid looking at the chandelier, so I’m not like, oh pretty, crystals hanging from the ceiling.

That might be how my brain’s making sense of the space, while you all are trying to make sense of me, the slides, the other different stimuli, while I’m trying not to focus on one face in particular, or to just, no matter what I do, avoid the crystals, because otherwise I’m just going to sit there and be like this for the next hour, and I don’t think that’s what you all are hoping for.

What Is ‘Normal’?

But when we think about how we all work differently, and our brains do, we usually like to categorize this in two different groups of people; we like to think about the neurotypical people as one group of people, and usually people like to say these are the normal people. However, I would like to challenge that, because what is normal? What is normal for you, is not normal for me, or normal for the person next to you. It really is fake, for lack of a better description.

Also, my favorite kind of bone to pick with normal, is none of you are going to describe yourselves as such. If any of you come up after today’s lecture, and you come to talk to me, not one person in this room is going to come up to me and say “Haley, I am just a normal person.” You are not going to introduce yourself with that as the number one descriptor, I guarantee it. How many of you have ever told someone, I am just a normal guy, as my “hi, how you doing?” Exactly, nobody raised their hand, nobody even said anything, I heard a little bit of a leg snort at first. That was perfect, thank you. Y’all are really wonderful.

And when you do go to talk about yourself, or introduce yourself or your brain, you’re going to tell me about your family, you’re going to tell me about your career, you’re going to tell me that you’re creative, or you’re determined, or that you’re hardworking, or that you’re curious. You’re going to tell me literally anything else, except normalcy. So that’s why I don’t like to think normal is a very good descriptor. Instead, I like to think of neurotypical people as the majority of people. That their brains are the ones that really work aligned with what we expect as a society, our cultural expectations and ideas, and what kind of that dominant narrative of communication might look like, and how we do that. So, I look at neurotypical people as being better at this stuff than I am, for lack of a better description.

When I think of our neurodivergent people, on the other hand, I think of a minority of people. And when I think about this minority of people, I think of people who might be communicating outside of what we expect, who might be thinking outside the box, who might otherwise be marginalized in this very specific way.

Neurodivergence and Communication

And neurodivergence really is hallmarked with communication, thinking, and processing information. Not necessarily a difference of opinion, every single one of us has opinions, and they all differ from each other. That is just a human experience. But how we think things through, and how we process that information is very different.

So, I did mention I have some of those more sensory issues. I know even at breakfast, we were having this discussion, and those who I met had the pleasure of meeting last night, that I am a sensory avoider rather than a sensory seeker. So, I do not like to try new things. I am very anxious about trying food, for instance. I am someone who likes quiet more so than being in a loud, crowded space. If you were at dinner with me last night, you might have noticed I started kind of drifting towards the corners of the room because they were the quieter spaces. All those little things make a difference, and that makes sense in my brain, but might not make sense in the way that you communicate and think about things.

I also might need extra time to process something, or that filter might be broken from my brain to my mouth, and I might say something that seems a little bit blunt. And then people think that I don’t care, or I am being rude when I am just saying the thing that I thought of, and I didn’t want to be rude or anything. I just wanted to be honest, because I always thought that honesty was the best policy, but apparently there is a limit on that.

That is the neurodivergent experience in a nutshell, is you learn that, and then you’re like, I didn’t know there were caveats. Nobody told me there was a caveat to honesty. Oh my God, that’s so confusing. A lot of these things that you all think are inherent social rules, like you got to know when to kind of rein in the honesty because feelings or something else, or looking at people means you’re paying attention. That stuff is stuff that people actually had to teach me. That is a great way to kind of set that tone of how differently we learn and communicate too.

Neurodiversity Includes Every One of Us

And when we think about neurodiversity and neurodivergence, we are very quick to categorize, which is a helpful descriptor at best. And I say this because neurodivergence does not necessarily exist or is dependent on a singular diagnosis. And usually, I spend a lot of time in corporate, and my corporate friends really like to hone in on neurodivergence as autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, full stop. However, this is not necessarily accurate. We really like to kind of hone in on the autism, ADHD, learning categories, because these are the folks that are viewed as having some form of superpower. They might be more creative, they might be really kind of self-motivated in some way, or they might have some form of savant skill, or whatever it is that is viewed as a competitive advantage of sorts. But that isn’t always necessarily true. The autism spectrum is very vast, first and foremost, on that criticism. And also neurodivergence is not a gatekeeping mechanism.

And that was something that was really discussed in those early definitions. And the person who coined the term neurodivergent, Kassiane Asasumasu, is very adamant that neurodivergent and neurodivergence is not necessarily exclusionary, it’s just an umbrella term for all sorts of different things, and deviating from what we consider this norm-a-majority, neuro-normative culture, essentially.

So it also does include our folks who have things like Tourette Syndrome, intellectual disabilities, psychiatric and mental health conditions, and also acquired cognitive disabilities. I know being in trust and estates, especially acquired cognitive disabilities, are probably something that we think about quite a bit. So, our folks who have things like Alzheimer’s, dementia, other forms of cognitive decline, or even a traumatic brain injury, can all be a part of that neurodivergent spectrum.

And what makes neurodivergence and disability so interesting to me, I know we love to talk about diversity as a whole, we love to talk about differences, is neurodivergence and disability are not always something that you are born with, like yours truly, but it is something that can be acquired, and there really isn’t that much that separates us from that experience. It actually is maybe a split second. And I say a split second because something can happen, God forbid, to somebody tomorrow or today. You never know.

This actually is something that I thought about with a dear friend in law school. We were working our first summer internship together, and on the way to work, she was in a bad car accident. And she ended up having two herniated discs in her spine and suffered a traumatic brain injury from that. She ended up essentially having a little bit of a difference in personality after that, and her vocab recall just wasn’t what it used to be. She’s fine now, she made partner, she has a new baby, life is going great for her. I don’t say that to scare anyone, I just say it is that she was essentially transformed almost overnight by this specific experience that she had at 22 years old.

Strengths, Differences, and Different Ways of Thinking

And that’s the thing with neurodivergence. Yes, you can be born with it. Yes, you can discover that about yourself later in life, or you can acquire something through just being alive. That’s what’s cool about neurodivergence and disability is we think it’s this singular other experience, but it can happen to you, to someone you know, someone you work with, someone you love, that it probably is closer to home than you might be thinking it is.

I know earlier today and yesterday, I was talking to people who were mentioning that their children, their grandchildren, some other family member is neurodivergent, or even themselves. And I think that’s a really great baseline to have, this is not something that is so removed from our personal lives, or even just siloed into our professional lives because of the folks that we work with or possibly represent, but really it is an everybody issue.

But when we think about neurodiversity, I don’t want us to think of it as this doom and gloom thing. It’s very easy to make that jump of disability, neurodivergence equals Bad Thing; capital B, capital T. I don’t like to think that way. Instead, I like to look at this as differences. Yes, it is legitimate disability, but the neurodivergent brain has so much to offer that we all have different ways that we process information. And in some ways, we might be overcompensating. And in other ways, we might just have these different strengths that are unique to a different individual.

So I like to look at this as you might have people who are very creative. You might have people who are thinking outside the box, who might be able to focus really intensely on one specific thing. I think of my autistics and ADHDers especially as those who can hyperfocus on something and they go down those little rabbit holes of wanting to learn more and more and more and more. And then you kind of have to pull them up and go, wait, you got to come back to earth for a little bit.

And then I can sit there after eight hours and tell you, you know, I was really interested in learning more about figure skating at the Winter Olympics and I can tell you the podium for the last five Olympics and order of all four disciplines and who was there and what the drama was and what the scoring controversies were. And did you know this specific thing happened in 2002 at Salt Lake City? I can be there all day long in that little rabbit hole because I found it interesting. And you bet I did not know all of the drama from 2002 until I was watching the Olympics about three weeks ago. But I say that as a point to show kind of what happens when we get stuck on something. And sometimes we do need that help getting pulled out of it once in a while. My other neurodivergent friends might also be people who are very visual thinkers, or they might be very outside of the box in those ways too with their different strategies and different ways that they go about things.

I think about a story that I’ve heard about the lawyer, David Boies. And David Boies was really interesting because he’s a great trial lawyer and he has dyslexia. And he was once asked about his trial skills. And he said, I’m not a very good reader, that I read slower than most people. So, I have to memorize and have all that very visually thought out and prepared verbally because reading is not going to be my strong suit, essentially. And I thought that was very interesting because that was the thing that perceived deficit was actually what made him really talented in court, is that it was like you’re overcompensating for not being the best or strongest reader by being a really strong orator and being able to take that information and synthesize it in a different way.

And when we think about neurodiversity, I really like this idea of it. So, the term neurodiversity itself comes from an Australian sociologist in the 90s who’s also autistic by the name of Judy Singer. And she was writing about it in her graduate work and was corresponding with a journalist from the Atlantic, who was Harvey Blume. And when he wrote about this concept of neurodiversity in the 90s for the first time, he was really saying how neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring is best in any given moment?

And I think that’s a really powerful way to look at neurodivergence and really goes to this idea that something isn’t wrong, per se, is that we all have different forms of wiring and sometimes different strategies, different ways of thinking are more advantageous in the moment than others.

When the autism spectrum was first explained to me when I was a kid, one of the analogies we often were receiving was this idea of computer operating systems. That in a world full of PCs, there might be a Mac, right? And they do the same essential functions. They both compute, you can surf the internet, you can do all sorts of great stuff, but they don’t look the same in the interface and both of them have their different strengths and weaknesses. I say this as someone who – fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you are right now – I have a Mac up here and I love the interface. For me, it’s a lot easier. I love to do creative projects. I, once upon a time, was an illustrator before I went to law school, so I really do love getting to use Macs for creative projects.

However, I am also a gamer and playing games on a Mac is abysmal, it sucks. If I want to play games on Steam or on PC without having to go to my Nintendo or my PlayStation or one of my other consoles, I probably should have a PC. It doesn’t mean that my Mac is a terrible computer because it’s not exactly optimized to be playing PC games, it just means that that’s a weakness that it has. Just like my PC is not as wonderful for my creative projects. They have their different strengths and weaknesses just like all of us do.

Sometimes, however, we are a lot kinder when we talk about technology’s limitations and strengths than humans. We don’t say my Mac is broken because it can’t run the frame rate of this game. We are saying it’s not very good at it. Meanwhile, with neurodivergent people, sometimes they get the “is something wrong with you?” And I’m sitting there thinking, I don’t think so. I’m just a person. I don’t feel like something’s wrong and that actually, we will get to in a minute, is one of the biggest lies we’ve been told about neurodivergence, is that something is wrong with you, that you’re a broken human being.

Peter Gordon: That concludes Part 1 of this 3-part lecture on neurodiversity.

In Part 2, we turn to the workplace—examining the real-world barriers, biases, and challenges neurodivergent individuals face, and what it truly means to create a sense of belonging.

 

 

 

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