Setting the Stage
If you’re new here — The Divergent Talent Alchemist exists to rewrite the rules of work, identity, and worth on neurodivergent terms. One unmasked truth at a time.
And today, we’re sitting with one of the most misunderstood truths out there: what it means to be 2e — twice exceptional.
The shortest version: 2e means you’re gifted and you’re neurodivergent. Two exceptionalities, same nervous system, at the same time. Both real. Neither cancels the other out.
But here’s where it gets sticky — and why so many of us go decades without a name for it: the giftedness hides the struggle. The struggle hides the giftedness. Sometimes they mask each other so completely that neither gets seen. And the result? A whole lot of us walking around hearing “You’re so smart — why is this so hard for you?” — and quietly believing the problem was us.
So that’s the framing. But what 2e feels like from the inside — that’s the conversation Kevin and I had.
Meet Kevin
Kevin Davis and I met on LinkedIn, and the moment we started talking, we realized we’d been moving through the world holding a lot of the same truths. Kevin is a writer, a sought-after public speaker, an advocate for neurodiversity, a girl dad of three, and a Principal Benefits Consultant at EPIC Brokers with 25 years in the industry. He sits on the board of the Neurodiversity Employment Network of Philadelphia. He has a photographic memory, an autistic savant diagnosis, OCD, and a highly sensitive personality. He’s also one of the most generous human beings I’ve come across.
And later this year, he’s releasing his first book: Behind the Song with Kevin Davis, Volume One: Songs of Joy — 31 songs of joy, one for each day of the month, complete with the story behind each song, Kevin’s reflections, journaling prompts, and an accompanying Spotify and Apple Music playlist. Eighteen years of music therapy distilled into something you can hold in your hands. Put this one on your radar.
Redefining “Gifted”
Kevin said something early in our conversation that I’m still sitting with:
“What I started to recognize is it was probably a better way of describing my lived experience than ‘gifted’ — because gifted sounds like you’re good at everything. And the truth is, I’m actually really exceptional at some things, and really not good at all at other things. They call that in the neurodivergent space a spiky profile.” — Kevin
That label — gifted — gets handed to a lot of us early and then becomes the lens we see ourselves through. We start believing we should be good at everything. So when we’re not good at something, the only conclusion left is the problem must be me.
Kevins reframe: “I am not gifted. I am twice exceptional. I have a spiky profile. Some things I’m extraordinary at. Some things I genuinely struggle with. Both are true.”
That distinction matters — because the word gifted loads us up with a perfectionism we didn’t sign up for, and other people’s expectations we never agreed to carry.
How 2e Shows Up at Work (And Why People Mislabel Us)
Kevin named the word that comes up most often when 2e folks get punished for being 2e:
Insubordinate.
“We question things, and that’s just part of our nature. We actually are questioning them because we want to learn — but it goes back to the perfectionism. We want to do it right. So when we ask for extra details, they feel like we’re challenging them, or saying we don’t agree, or saying we find what they’re saying is nonsense. But our intention is more pure than that. Our intention is — no, no, we’d like to do it right. We’d love the best instructions you can give us.” — Kevin
Both Kevin and I have been on the receiving end of this misread our whole careers. The questions we ask out of care get coded as defiance. The pattern-spotting gets coded as arrogance. The honest observation about a broken process gets coded as “who do you think you are?”
And here’s the part that floored me: Kevin shared that he’s read about people confusing neurodivergence with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Let me say that again. Empaths — people whose entire wiring is set to feel everyone else’s feelings — get mistaken for narcissists. Meanwhile, actual narcissists tend to find us, because we make excellent supply.
The mismatch is not subtle.
The Invisible Org Chart
“There’s the org chart on paper, and then there’s the actual org chart that’s operating within an institution. As twice exceptional, I can see the unspoken org chart — and that comes with an additional level of pressure.” — Jen
This is the part of being 2e that almost nobody outside the community talks about. We can see the politics. We can see who’s protecting whom, who’s afraid of whom, who’s being set up to fail. And we cannot pretend we don’t see it. So we say the quiet part out loud — usually because we’re trying to help — and we wind up with a target on our back.
That’s when the fawn response kicks in.
Fawning: The Stress Response Nobody Names
Kevin recently read Meg Josephson’s Are You Mad at Me? and it cracked something open for both of us. (I bought it the second we got off the call.)
“People-pleasing is not a personality trait. It’s actually a common survival mechanism known as fawning — an instinct often learned in childhood to become more appealing to a perceived threat in order to feel safe. Yet many people are stuck in this way of being for their whole lives.” — Meg Josephson, Are You Mad at Me?
Most of us learned the four trauma responses as fight, flight, freeze. Fawn is the fourth — and for a lot of 2e folks, it’s the one we’re swimming in without ever naming it. When you’ve spent your life being called “too much” or “too sensitive,” fawning becomes the strategy that keeps you safe. You make yourself smaller. You agree with things you don’t agree with. You apologize for taking up space.
“I realized that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life… When I’m not able to fix things, I wasn’t always admitting it. I would try to people-please and be apologetic about that aspect of myself.” — Kevin
The breakthrough, for both of us, is the same one: self-care isn’t selfish, and other people’s feelings are not your responsibility to manage.
Givers, Takers, Matchers — and the Personality Most Likely to Succeed
The book Kevin called the most impactful book of his life is Adam Grant’s Give and Take — and the framework inside it is one I wish I’d had a decade ago.
Grant identifies three orientations people bring to their relationships and their work:
Takers — try to get more than they give. You know them. They keep score in their favor, take credit they didn’t earn, and treat other people as resources to extract from. The narcissists. The bullies. The ones who somehow always end up with more than they came in with.
Matchers — keep the score perfectly even. Quid pro quo. I’ll do this for you if you do that for me, but not a drop more. Most of the world operates here.
Givers — give more than they take. They share knowledge, make introductions, mentor without being asked, help people who can’t help them back.
Here’s the twist that flips the whole framework on its head: the least successful people are givers. And the most successful people are also givers. Same orientation. Wildly different outcomes. What separates them?
Selfless Givers vs. Otherish Givers
Selfless givers put everyone else first, every time. They say yes to every request. They give until they’re depleted. They cannot say no — partly because they don’t want to disappoint anyone, and partly because their self-worth is tangled up in being useful. They get exploited by takers, taken for granted by matchers, and end up burned out at the bottom of every chart Grant studied.
Sound familiar? It should. This is where most 2e empaths live by default. Fawning is selfless giving dressed up as virtue.
Otherish givers give just as generously — but with three things selfless givers don’t have:
Boundaries. They say no when something doesn’t align with their values, their bandwidth, or their goals. They don’t owe anyone an explanation.
Discernment about who they’re giving to. Otherish givers know the difference between an investment and a leak. They go above and beyond for the right people — fellow otherish givers, people whose intentions match their own. With takers, they protect themselves. With matchers, they keep it transactional and don’t over-extend.
A win-win mentality instead of a win-lose one. Otherish givers are not playing a zero-sum game. They believe their generosity can compound and create more for everyone, including themselves. Their giving is strategic, not sacrificial.
The shift from selfless to otherish is not a personality transplant. It’s a redistribution of where your generosity goes. You’re still a giver. You’re just no longer pouring yourself into vessels that have a hole in the bottom.
“There’s only one category of people I go above and beyond with — and it’s other otherish givers. With takers, I have boundaries. With matchers, I just don’t need to go above and beyond — which is our normal fawn response. We want to go above and beyond with everybody.” — Kevin
What This Looks Like in Practice
You stop apologizing for saying no.
You stop trying to win over the person who’s already decided not to like you.
You stop giving your best energy to the people who treat it like it’s free.
You start asking: does this align with my values? before will this make them happy?
You start trusting the red flag the first time you see it, instead of painting it green and hoping for the best.
You start treating your gut — that pattern-recognition superpower that 2e folks have in spades — as the defense mechanism it was designed to be.
“Don’t paint the red flags you see in somebody else green. If you see the red flag, it’s a red flag. Trust your gut. We have it as a special gift as a neurodivergent person — we sense things about people way faster. We’re supposed to use that as a defense mechanism, not give it over to somebody else.” — Kevin
And the other meme Kevin shared, which I’m now thinking about constantly:
“Not everybody needs to like you. You don’t like everybody, do you?”
Read it twice. Let it land. The amount of energy you spend trying to win over people you wouldn’t even want at your dinner table is the same energy that’s missing from the relationships that actually deserve you.
On Shame — A Detour Through Brené Brown and Adam Grant
While we were prepping, I went down a rabbit hole on The Curiosity Shop — the new podcast Brené Brown and Adam Grant are doing together — specifically their episode on shame. A few things struck me hard enough that I want to share them here:
Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.” One is about the self. The other is about behavior.
Guilt can be adaptive — it’s the engine of repair in relationships, the signal that you did something that didn’t align with your values.
Shame is not adaptive. It’s the silent driver behind perfectionism. As Brené said it: “When perfectionism is driving, shame is riding shotgun.”
The #1 shame trigger in the workplace is fear of irrelevance — followed closely by back-channeling, comparison, favoritism, gossiping, teasing, and tying people’s productivity to their self-worth.
85% of people can name an experience that shaped who they thought they were. 90% can remember a teacher or administrator who helped them believe in themselves. That ratio is everything.
The antidote to shame is empathy.
Sit with that one alongside the 2e experience. A lot of us spent childhood being told we were “too much,” “too smart for our own good,” “showing off,” “not trying hard enough.” That’s not just feedback. That’s shame architecture being built into a developing nervous system.
The repair is empathy. From others, when we can find it. And from ourselves, always.
Music as Therapy
I’d be doing this conversation a disservice if I didn’t mention music. Kevin’s intense special interest — what the neurodivergent community calls a passion that lights up the whole nervous system — is music. He has near-perfect lyric recall. He takes five-mile walks not to exercise, but to listen to music uninterrupted, with physical wellness as the happy side effect.
Two Blue October songs came up in our conversation that I want to flag:
“Hate Me” — about self-forgiveness, written from Justin Furstenfeld to his ex-wife, but really to himself.
“Fear” — written for his daughter, about how fear of failure, fear of irrelevance, fear of judgment will eat you and spit you out over and over again. The hook: “I used to fall, but now I get back up.”
If you’ve never sat with a song that names your whole nervous system back to you — that’s what music therapy does. And it’s what Kevin’s book is built around.
Kevin’s Sage Advice
A few things Kevin said that I want every 2e person reading this to take with them:
Move past the label. Gifted came with strings. 2e gives you back the truth: spiky, exceptional in some places, struggling in others. Both real.
Lead with your values. When Kevin and I first met, the first question he asked me was “What are your top five values?” Try this. Notice who can answer it.
Don’t unmask blindly. Unmask strategically. “I think there’s a time and a place for when it’s appropriate, and with the right person you can already see you’ve got alignment with. If you do it in a blanket way, they’ll weaponize it.”
Be a culture ADD, not a culture FIT. “None of us will be culture fits anywhere. I’ve never been a culture fit anywhere. But I am a culture add.”
The hierarchy isn’t worth climbing if you have to sacrifice your values to do it.
Find your people. The ones you don’t have to fawn for. The ones who don’t paint your red flags green. The ones who can be otherish givers right alongside you.
Humility is a value. As C.S. Lewis put it (and Kevin quoted): “Not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”
The Reading & Listening List
Kevin is a walking library. Here is every book and podcast we referenced, in one place:
Books
Are You Mad at Me? — Meg Josephson (on fawning and people-pleasing — the one I ran out and bought)
Give and Take — Adam Grant (givers, takers, matchers — and how to become an “otherish” giver)
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking — Susan Cain
Weird — Olga Khazan
Me, But Better — Olga Khazan (working with the OCEAN personality framework)
The Neurodiversity Edge — Dr. Maureen Dunne (why neurodiversity at work is like financial diversification)
Love Your Enemies — Arthur Brooks
Find Your People — Jennie Allen
The Blue Zones of Happiness — Dan Buettner (purpose, pleasure, pride)
Drink the Coffee While It’s Hot — Jessica Hallahan (practical mindfulness for overthinkers)
Behind the Song with Kevin Davis, Volume One: Songs of Joy — Kevin Davis (releasing later this year — put it on your list!)
Podcasts
The Curiosity Shop — Brené Brown & Adam Grant (start with the episode on shame)
On Being with Krista Tippett — “Adam Grant — Successful Givers, Toxic Takers, and the Life We Spend at Work” (Kevin’s recommendation for a deep dive into the otherish giver framework — 51 minutes, originally aired October 22, 2015)
Connect With Kevin
If anything in this conversation landed for you, please go follow Kevin. He shares something inspirational on LinkedIn about four times a week — quotes, frameworks, top-five wellness lists, book recommendations — and his feed is genuinely one of the brightest spots on the platform.
Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kevindavis0925
He’s also actively booking speaking engagements. If your workplace, conference, ERG, or community group needs a speaker on:
Neurodiversity and neurodivergence in the workplace
Mental wellness at work (his top-five wellness frameworks talk is in high demand)
Embracing differences and building culture-add (not culture-fit) teams
Allyship, advocacy, and creating judgment-free zones
…Kevin is the person you want at the front of the room. Reach out to him directly through LinkedIn.
And keep your eyes peeled for Behind the Song with Kevin Davis, Volume One: Songs of Joy later this year. I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops the moment it drops.
One Last Thought
Kevin closed with a line from the Neurodiversity Employment Network of Philadelphia that I want to leave you with:
“What’s good for neurodivergent employees is good for everyone.”
Inclusivity of our differences as the baseline. Not the accommodation. The baseline. If a workplace builds for us, everyone else benefits too.
That’s the world we’re building, one unmasked truth at a time.
xo Jen
