A guest blog article by Greig Watts who is a songwriter and entrepreneur heavily involved in the music industry.
I recently recorded a podcast about acceptance and creativity, and it got me thinking about something I’ve noticed throughout most of my life. I’ve spent decades surrounded by songwriters, artists and producers, and I’ve met an awful lot of creative people who have ADHD, autism or other forms of neurodivergence.
Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. Creative people often think differently. Music gives us somewhere to put ideas, emotions, obsessions and thoughts that don’t always seem to fit neatly anywhere else. In songwriting especially, thinking differently can actually be an advantage. We’re trying to create something that didn’t exist yesterday, so perhaps having a brain that doesn’t always travel down the most obvious road can sometimes be incredibly useful.
“Sometimes perhaps we should ask a different question: what are they concentrating on?”
Greig
his subject is personal for me too. Neurodivergence has been part of my family story for as long as I can remember, although growing up we didn’t necessarily have the language or understanding for it that we have today. I watched someone very close to me struggle in a world that didn’t really understand them. School certainly didn’t. They were labelled and misunderstood, yet I knew a completely different person — funny, loyal and incredibly musical, able to hear bass or piano parts and work them out without ever being formally taught.
I remember one occasion when some other kids were picking on them. At first, I nervously laughed along. I was young and probably doing what kids sometimes do when they don’t want the attention turned onto themselves. Then I looked at their face and suddenly realised this wasn’t funny at all. I told the others it wasn’t fair for everyone to pick on one person, and we walked away together. The strange thing was that the next day the other kids still played with me, but the bullying stopped.
I didn’t understand neurodivergence then. I just knew somebody I loved was different, and being different shouldn’t mean being excluded. As our family learned more about autism and neurodivergence over the years, lots of things from my childhood began to make more sense. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons acceptance has become such an important word to me.
But what about me?
I’ve never been diagnosed with autism or ADHD, and I’m certainly not going to diagnose myself for the purposes of a blog! But when you’ve spent a lifetime around neurodivergence, you do start noticing things, including things in yourself.
I can become incredibly focused when I’m interested in something. Music and football have occupied enormous amounts of space in my brain for most of my life. Give me something I’m passionate about and I can talk about it for hours. Give me complicated instructions containing three things at once, though, and you may lose me somewhere around number two! It’s something I’ve actually thought about before: why can I focus so intensely on one thing and yet struggle when several pieces of information are thrown at me together?
I’ve also been ridiculously persistent. I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing songs around the world, being rejected, getting back up and trying again. Even when one opportunity disappeared, there always seemed to be another tiny seed that kept me going. Is that neurodivergence? Is it personality? Is it learned behaviour? I really don’t know. Maybe it’s a mixture of things, or maybe it’s simply me.
And actually, I think that last possibility matters, because acceptance doesn’t necessarily have to begin with a diagnosis.
“Greig plods along in music…”
There’s a story from my childhood that makes me laugh now. I found one of my old secondary-school reports and my music teacher had written, “Greig plods along in music without much enthusiasm or interest.” Considering I subsequently spent most of my adult life working in music, I’d say she might have got that one slightly wrong!
But there’s something deeper in that story. I was interested in music. At home I was learning keyboard riffs by ear. I was listening obsessively to records, forming bands and, most importantly, wanting to write my own songs. I had no formal musical training, but my ears were telling me what sounded right, so I kept going.
What I wasn’t necessarily interested in was the way music was being presented to me at school. And that makes me wonder how many children with ADHD or autism have had things written about them such as doesn’t concentrate, isn’t interested, needs to try harder, or “He’s just too much…..”.
Sometimes perhaps we should ask a different question: what are they concentrating on? Because put somebody in front of the thing that genuinely fascinates them and you may meet a completely different person.
“Sometimes the people who don’t quite fit into everybody else’s world are the very people who introduce us to worlds we never knew existed.”
Greig
Robert the Weatherman
Looking back at my school years, I can see another interesting pattern. I was reasonably popular and part of the so-called “in crowd”, but I also loved spending time with people who didn’t necessarily fit in.
One of them was Robert. We called him Robert the Weatherman, because you could say hello to him and he’d launch into the weather forecast in incredible detail. And I loved that! Robert had his thing, and if you gave him the opportunity to talk about it, he would.
Another friend had her own individual style and a huge love of music. One day she handed me a cassette of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. That cassette genuinely changed my life. I became fascinated by how The Beatles had created those songs, bought a book about songwriting and started studying how songs worked. It helped open the door to the songwriter I eventually became.
I find that fascinating when I look back. Sometimes the people who don’t quite fit into everybody else’s world are the very people who introduce us to worlds we never knew existed.
Finding somewhere you belong
The more I think about all of this, the more I realise that the important word for me isn’t necessarily diagnosis. It’s acceptance.
When I was young, our house was a place where people gathered. My parents gave me enormous freedom to be myself, create and dream. There were always people coming and going, and friends have since told me they came to our house because it felt easier than being at home. I didn’t appreciate the significance of that at the time, but looking back I realise I grew up in an environment where people were generally allowed to be themselves.
Perhaps I’ve accidentally spent much of my adult life trying to recreate that.
I see it particularly at songwriting camps. People can arrive on the first day nervous, awkward and unsure of themselves. Then, over the next few days, something changes. They find their people. The barriers start coming down and suddenly nobody thinks you’re strange for obsessing over a melody for three hours, because somebody in the room next door has just spent three hours trying to find the perfect snare drum! Nobody thinks you’re boring because you want to talk about songs all night, and nobody tells you to stop dreaming.
For a few days, something that might make you feel unusual somewhere else becomes completely normal. More importantly, it can become useful.
And that’s why I think acceptance is so relevant when we talk about ADHD, autism and creativity. Acceptance doesn’t mean pretending everything is easy. Neurodivergence can bring very real challenges, and everybody’s experience is different. But I do wonder whether we sometimes spend too much time asking people to become better at fitting into environments that simply weren’t designed for them.
Sometimes, rather than changing the person, perhaps we should look at changing the environment around them.
Because I’ve seen what can happen when creative people feel safe enough to be themselves. They create, they contribute, they find their people and they often start believing in themselves a little more. Sometimes the very thing that made somebody feel different from everyone else becomes the thing that enables them to create something nobody else could have created.
Maybe that’s what acceptance really means. It isn’t about telling somebody that they need to fit in better. It’s about giving them enough space to discover where they do fit.
And perhaps, even more importantly, somewhere they belong.
You can check out Greig’s podcast episode ‘Acceptance and Creativity’ here!
