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Wordsted

About me

I‌'m Ruth, a neuroinclusion specialist, writer, editor and disability rights campaigner.


My passion for accessible information and usability comes primarily from the frustrations I face when attempting to access, purchase and use the products and services I need.


My background in intercultural education has given me the tools to approach problems from different perspectives. My career in languages has made me obsessive about plain English. I have a gift for crafting language in a way that conveys meaning clearly, accurately and concisely.

How I got here

In March 2020 I had been working as a freelance translator for 12 years.  I had chosen self-employment after leaving the British Embassy in Paris where I worked as a researcher and policy advisor. 

Whilst I loved my profession and the flexibility of working for myself, I had never been able to stick to the kind of consistent routine needed to manage my finances, find new clients and develop my business, despite spending a fortune on self-help books, courses, business coaches and software.


  

I could focus on translation, but only at the cost of dropping everything else in my life as deadlines approached. The house would look like a scene out of Seven, I regularly cancelled social plans and I had an on-again-off-again relationship with, well, clothes. After each deadline my brain would shut down and I spend several days in a zombie state to recover.


When I wasn’t working the days were filled with brain fog and crippling indecision, particularly in the afternoon where I would spend so long trying to decide what to do that I would do nothing.

I would beat myself up a lot. I was lazy. I was inefficient. I was useless. I wasn’t a real translator.

All of this changed in March 2020. The fact that I can pinpoint the exact date shows just what a momentous change it was.


I really needed new clients. One of my biggest clients had switched to

automated "translation" (don’t get me started) and was only offering post-editing work. Post-editing is the process of correcting the machine’s output. I agreed to give it a try.

It was torture. Whereas previously I had been paid by the word, this was paid by the hour and there was no way of knowing how long each assignment would take. It involved page after mind-numbing page of a combination of tricky technical translation (the bits the machine couldn’t manage) and data entry a monkey could do (correcting typos in the easy bits).

My brain refused to switch gear between the two. My mind wandered off, my eyes glazed over, my brain got fuzzy. I just couldn’t engage with the text and I knew I was doing a bad job. Translation was the one thing I was supposed to be good at and I couldn’t even do that any more. I dreaded every project that came in.


To add to this hell, I’d just stopped vaping in an attempt to deal with crippling insomnia. I had suspected that Citalopram was the culprit so had already stopped taking that with no issue (well, with no depression anyway. It had never occurred to me to monitor my concentration) but I still wasn’t sleeping.

So, I threw my vape away. All I had to do was sit out the cravings. But after five weeks they showed no signs of subsiding. Stranger still, I couldn’t sit in one place for more than five minutes. I found myself getting up from the sofa and dancing around as if I had no control of my own body. I couldn’t stop fidgetting. It felt like I still needed the nicotine. It made no sense. All of the Google search results had informed me that the cravings would subside after a couple of weeks but they seemed to be getting worse.

In desperation, I tried a new search term, using words that actually described my personal experience, rather than the words everyone else uses to describe theirs. “Nicotine self medicate”, I typed.

And that, that was the moment everything changed and everything
began to fit. After 43 years I’d finally started asking the right questions and searching in the right places. I had ADHD.

Since then I have been through a lot.  I've begun the long and complicated process of understanding my brain (it turns out I'm autistic too!) whilst simultaneously battling to access support and services, communicate effectively, fight stigma and advocate for myself and others like me.   Every attempt to strategise my way out of my difficulties failed, leaving me ashamed, exhausted and hopeless.

It wasn't always like this. As the equality lead at the British Embassy I had organised conferences, briefed ministers, accompanied high-level visits, led policy seminars and drafted reports.

Whilst invaluable, that experience pales in significance to the lesson I learned when I was at my lowest ebb: you can't think your way out of executive dysfunction and you can't strategise your way out of disability and the cost of trying to do so is too high. 


I believe that the benefit of considering atypical brains in communications and processes far outweighs the investment. Our brains deserve more than home-made workarounds. Let’s work on the upgrade together.