There are phrases you forget. Others hang around.
This one came from a leader two gigs ago. Years later, it still hasn’t left:
“An above-average series of unfortunate events.”
Interesting way to put it. Especially when you know what the “events” were.
My daughter had died.
Jubilee spent 393 days in the NICU. For more than a year, our family learned to live somewhere between home, work, church and a hospital room. Then she was gone, and we had to figure out how to live in a world that kept moving without her.
Money was tight. Really tight. I kept working. Kept functioning. I donated plasma on my lunch breaks for extra money until one day I nearly passed out afterward. Something inside me was running out of road, and I didn’t understand why.
I know more now.
Earlier this year, my spectrum results came in. Suddenly, parts of my life that had never quite made sense started talking to each other. The masking. The exhaustion. The mental real estate consumed by unresolved conflict. The invisible cost of navigating environments that seemed to cost other people almost nothing.
Then I looked back at that season: bereavement, financial pressure, neurodivergent burnout. All stacked on top of each other before I even had the language to understand why my own wiring made some of that weight so costly to carry.
So, sure. “Unfortunate events.” Might as well call a hurricane an above-average amount of wind and rain.
I don’t believe that leader was trying to be cruel. I can’t know everything behind the words. But intent isn’t really why the phrase stayed with me. It stayed because language can be technically defensible and still be painfully inadequate for the human being standing underneath it.
That’s where I’ve landed on something I wish more leaders understood:
Context isn’t the enemy of accountability.
I haven’t always communicated as clearly as I could have, and I certainly haven’t navigated every professional situation perfectly. Being neurodivergent doesn’t absolve me of responsibility. Neither does grief. But context isn’t an escape hatch from accountability. Understanding someone more fully makes accountability more accurate.
If somebody who was once engaged suddenly isn’t, get curious. If performance changes after catastrophic loss, get curious. If someone trusts you enough to disclose a disability, get curious.
Not “What’s wrong with this person?” but “What’s happening to this person?”
I’ve started calling that holy curiosity.
There was real kindness during Jubilee’s 393 days. Coworkers gave their time. People helped me get to the NICU. My employer gave our family flexibility during an impossible season. Distance has helped me appreciate those things more, not less.
I’m also a words-of-affirmation person. Looking back, I can see times when I was waiting for care to arrive in the language I understood best while missing some of the ways people were already speaking it. That’s mine to own.
But kindness and understanding aren’t necessarily the same thing. The fairest way I know to say it is this: I received more kindness than I knew how to appreciate at the time, but less intentional understanding than I needed.
We also understand neurodivergence differently than we did when I was growing up. People like me can make it through school, relationships and entire careers without understanding why seemingly ordinary environments exact such an extraordinary internal cost.
We know more now. That should make us more curious now.
We talk about grace. Truth. Mercy. Restoration. Bearing burdens. Eventually those words have to clock in. They have to survive somebody’s grief affecting performance, somebody’s disability complicating communication, somebody making a mistake, somebody becoming inconvenient.
Jesus had a way of refusing to reduce complicated people to the most immediately visible thing about them. He noticed. He asked. He moved toward suffering.
Maybe that’s where better leadership begins too.
There is another place where this conversation matters just as deeply: the church. Faith communities can be remarkably good at showing up when tragedy arrives. But what happens when the meals stop, the crisis passes, and grief or special needs simply become part of a family’s everyday life? That’s where I want to go next—in Part Two, When the Church Moves On.
