What’s Inspiring Me - Strong Female Character
August 2026
What I’m reading
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
Performing “normal” and what it costs.
What's Inspiring Me: unmasking as a business strategy, not just a personal one.
What's Inspiring Me: Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
Thank you very much, Instagram algorithm, for bringing Fern Brady’s book into my awareness. Yes, I did go to the link in her bio and purchased her book through the Independent Book Store in Edinburgh, Scotland. And, yes, I also needed the tote bag from The Portobello Bookshop to carry my new book around Massachusetts. (I’m proud of myself for only ordering those two things!)
I clicked “buy” on Strong Female Character because of one line in the marketing copy that stopped my scroll: Fern Brady was told she couldn't be autistic because she'd had plenty of boyfriends and was good at eye contact.
That's the whole diagnostic bar some people are still working from: can you perform at a “normal” level well enough that no one has to make room for you? Brady didn't get her diagnosis until she was thirty-four, and the book is about everything that happened in the years before that, while she was busy being convincing.
Ok, well there was that, and then the back of the book, and then the table of contents. No throat-clearing, no softening, no three sentences of context before you get to the point. Chapter titles that say the thing. Copy that doesn't spend a paragraph convincing you the book is worth your time; it just tells you what's in it.
It's raw, it's honest, it's curt.
Which is exactly how I like information delivered to me. Not because I'm impatient (ok, maybe a little), but because padding is its own kind of masking. It's the writer “performing” polite, “performing” palatable, “performing” easy to digest, when what I actually need is just the information.
Give it to me straight and let me decide what to do with it.
This book isn't just about the diagnosis itself; it's what she was doing instead of getting help.
She was masking.
Performing the "right kind" of woman, the “right kind” of employee, the “right kind” of person at a party, while the actual cost of that performance piled up somewhere she couldn't see it. And she survived much of it through comedy, turning her chaos into comedic material before it could just be chaos. A genuine way of processing what was too much to process straight on.
In my own work with neurodivergent entrepreneurs, I realize so many of us learned to run our businesses the way Brady learned to run her life: by “performing professional" instead of building something that actually fits how our brains work. By honoring who we truly are and the gifts we bring to the world.
Where in your business are you still performing the "right kind" of entrepreneur instead of building the one that's actually true to you?
What's Inspiring Me: unmasking as a business strategy, not just a personal one.
