The Mystery of the Failed French Plait: Finding My People at the National Neurodiversity Show.
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- 5 min read
The National Neurodiversity Show, CBS Arena, July 14 2026.
Review by Annette Kinsella.
Ok, perhaps the mystery of French plait incompetence is not worthy of Poirot or Vera. But to me, my inability to do my own hair has been an enduring conundrum. Since my teenage years, mastering any style more complicated than a scraped up ponytail was impossible.
Not in a glamorous, Parisian “I’m too busy being mysterious for a blow-dry” kind of way. More in a “why does everyone else possess the secret skill of creating the perfect braid while I stand in front of the mirror wrestling with a hairbrush like it is a furious badger?” kind of way. In a school system where a proficient hairdo was the ultimate flex, my inability was social suicide.
Liquid eyeliner was WORSE. Other girls seemed to slick a sooty geometric swoop across their eyelids with the calm precision of Renaissance painters, while my technique leaned more towards the "attempting delicate surgery during an earthquake" approach. The finished result looked like the ECG chart of a post-traumatic squirrel. In fact, if you'll grant me a moment to expand, my sister kindly did my eyes on one occasion before a night out. Prompting my best friend, on meeting me in the pub, to innocently inquire: "were you sober when you put your makeup on tonight?".
Don’t get me started on PE lessons. I was always the person standing awkwardly at the end while captains picked everyone else. The girl who could never catch, throw, kick or move in the way everyone’s body apparently knew instinctively how to do. I still feel triggered when I see a rounders bat.
Driving alone remains a work in progress, decades after passing my test. The idea that I might calmly navigate unfamiliar roads, process signs, mirrors, other vehicles, instructions and decisions simultaneously has always felt marginally more complicated than asking my brain to run a marathon while juggling flaming daggers.
For most of my life, I quietly wondered: what the hell is wrong with me? The answer, it turns out, might be: absolutely nothing.
It turns out I may have dyspraxia, a condition that is the natural bedfellow of ADHD, affecting physical coordination and awareness. I was diagnosed with ADHD just a few months ago. And suddenly, a lifetime of “why can’t I just do this simple thing?” moments began to rearrange themselves into something that actually made sense.
I probably never have discovered the dyspraxia link if I had not been lucky enough to attend the National Neurodiversity Show at the CBS Arena in Coventry on July 14.
Walking into that arena felt like someone had finally switched off the lifetime internal podcast on the enigma of why I found certain things harder than everyone else.
For anyone who has spent years feeling like a square peg being repeatedly wedged into a round hole - while everyone else insists the problem is clearly the peg - the atmosphere was incredible. It felt less like a conference and more like discovering a long-lost family you never knew existed.
There was kindness and acceptance everywhere. Nobody looked uncomfortable if you avoided eye contact. Nobody judged you for needing quiet time because the sensory assault of being in a busy public space became too much. Nobody expected you to put on your normal, wonky-eyelinered mask in the way often demanded by society.
The message was clear: this show was not about fixing people. It was about understanding people.
The exhibitors were all practical and useful, offering valuable scaffolding and tips for real-life problems, from negotiating school and workplaces to securing psychological support at the gym. But for me the seminars were where the real magic happened.
First came Henry Muller, familiar to many from the brilliant BBC documentary about neurodiversity with Chris Packham. His talk, The Internal ADHD Experience, captured something many people with ADHD will instantly recognise: the heartbreaking gulf between wanting desperately to do something and being unable to force your brain to cooperate.
Hearing someone describe that exhausting internal battle - the frustration, the shame, the feeling of constantly falling short despite trying so hard - was incredibly validating.
Next up was Lisa Negus from Unfrazzled with her session on ADHD and perimenopause. For many women, this combination is the plot twist nobody warned us about. Just when you think you have finally learnt how to navigate your brain, hormones arrive and rearrange the deckchairs, blissfully oblivious to the fact the ship's deck seems to have a new slope with added water feature that wasn't there before.
Lisa described that collision beautifully: declining oestrogen meets ADHD symptoms, creating a perfect storm of overwhelm, exhaustion and confusion.
Suddenly, the question was not: "Why am I useless at everything?”
It became: “Hang on. Has my brain been trying to operate with the instruction manual written in Vietnamese? Using invisible ink? On a delicate parchment that instantly crumbles to dust on exposure to sunlight?"
But the talk that stayed with me most was Charis Hawkley’s My Life as a Neurodivergent Woman.
Charis spoke candidly about living with autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia, and when she described the challenges that many people never even notice, including struggles with everyday challenges like hair styling, fastening buttons and applying makeup, I felt seen. There it was. Something I had carried as a private failure was being named as part of a wider experience.
Not laziness or incompetence. Not a personal flaw. Not being "weird". A different way of processing and coordinating the world.
That moment felt earth-shattering, in a good way.
Finally, Julia Roncella from Fontana Dyslexia brought everything back to solutions, focusing on visual communication and reasonable adjustments.
Her message was simple but powerful: small changes can have enormous impact. Breaking down a huge tsunami of instructions into one clear step at a time is not burdensome or lowering standards. It is giving people the tools to meet those standards. First Look SEN provides the same kind of support, but for parents and carers advocating for family members.
These were just a selection of the events on offer and I'm only sorry I didn't get chance to see them all.
I left the CBS Arena carrying a bag full of leaflets, a notebook full of ideas, and something much more valuable: relief. The kind of relief that comes from realising you are not alone. You are not lazy. You are not hopeless. You are not failing at being a person.
Sometimes you are simply trying to navigate a world designed for a different kind of brain, like trying to force a UK plug into a socket on holiday without a travel adapter. As Henry so aptly put it, an Apple computer with a Microsoft operating system.
And perhaps the most wonderful thing about finding your people is realising that the things you spent years apologising for might actually be the very things that make you who you are.
My eyeliner remains more Picasso than Rembrandt. I would still advise fellow road users to stay at home with the curtains drawn on the rare occasions I must put pedal to metal. My hair still won’t play ball effectively. As, in fact, won't the rest of me.
But now I know there is probably a reason for all this, and thousands of others are with me. And this has given me hope.
If all this sounds familiar, you're not adrift. You might just be one of "us".
Find out more: nationalneurodiversityshows.com/
For more support and information:
Unfrazzled: https://unfrazzled.co.uk/
Fontana Dyslexia: https://www.fontanadyslexiasolutions.com/
First Look SEN: www.firstlooksen.co.uk
Charis Hawkley: https://youtu.be/vwRhYXVluG0?is=utm2V4Tzva-dUtqqw
Henry Muller: https://presenterly.com/profile/henry-muller
