Drafting in the Margins

There is a particular kind of madness involved in deciding to write a book while being a full time teacher. Not the glamorous, café based, novelist sort of writing. The sort done at 9.47pm with a laptop balanced on a pile of unmarked exercise books. The sort fuelled by reheated tea and a brain that has already run twelve cognitive marathons that day.

Teaching is immersive. It is emotional, relational, improvisational. You are constantly reading faces, managing energy, scanning for misunderstanding. By the time the house is quiet, my executive function is frayed at the edges. And yet that is when I open a blank document and ask my brain to produce structured, coherent thought.

Some evenings it feels heroic. Some evenings it feels absurd. But the deeper challenge has not been time. It has been identity.

I am very comfortable in a classroom. I know how to guide discussion, how to coach a student through confusion, how to build an argument live on a whiteboard. Writing a book removes all of that feedback. There are no nods. No puzzled faces. No “Miss, that makes sense now.” Just silence. Silence can be brutal.

And then there is the more private fear. The one I do not say out loud very often. I am AuDHD. My brain is wired for pattern recognition, intensity and precision. I default to structured sentences. I compress ideas tightly. I analyse before I emote. I can sound, on paper, colder than I feel in real life. When I reread chapters, I sometimes wonder: does this sound human enough? Is it too clinical? Too analytical? Too neat? In an era saturated with generative AI, there is an extra layer of paranoia. Will someone read my carefully structured argument and think it lacks warmth? That it feels mechanical? That it is “too polished” to be personal? The irony is that every sentence costs me something. It is not generated. It is wrestled, but that fear sits there anyway.

Because writing publicly means being interpreted. And interpretation is something I have not always navigated easily. As someone who can miss subtle social cues, I have learned to overcompensate by making my thinking explicit. That habit shows up in my writing. I define terms. I build arguments carefully. I avoid ambiguity. Part of me worries that clarity will be mistaken for coldness.

There is also the fear of rejection, which feels more intimate than I expected. Not just “this proposal does not fit our list.” But what if the subtext is: your voice is not needed. Your perspective is not distinctive. Your synthesis is derivative.

Teachers are used to being evaluated. Observations. Results. Performance management. You develop resilience. But a book is different. It is not just your output being assessed. It is your worldview. And yet, in the middle of all that fear, something quietly transformative happened. One evening, I scrolled through the document and realised it was no longer a collection of fragments. It had chapters. Transitions. A beginning, a middle, and a coherent arc. It was imperfect, yes. But it existed. That moment was unexpectedly emotional. Not because I thought it was brilliant. But because it was complete.

For months, the book had lived in notes, in voice memos, in scribbled reflections after difficult days. It had been a companion thought rather than a concrete object. Seeing it assembled felt like assembling myself. The ideas I have been testing in classrooms, in coaching conversations, in leadership meetings, had found a structured home.

Writing clarified me. It forced me to articulate what I actually believe about flourishing, about autonomy, about cognitive load, about human systems. It exposed contradictions. It tightened my thinking. It made me braver in my professional voice. And perhaps most importantly, it gave me a mastery experience that had nothing to do with exam results or school metrics. Finishing a draft as a teacher is a peculiar kind of rebellion. It says: I am not only a conduit for curriculum. I am a creator of ideas.

The fear of being perceived as too clinical, too analytical, too “AI sounding” has not disappeared. But I am beginning to see that my structure is not a flaw. It is part of my cognitive fingerprint. My brain seeks order. It builds scaffolding. It names patterns.

That does not mean I lack warmth. It means my warmth is expressed through clarity and integrity. And perhaps that is the deeper lesson.

We ask our students, especially those who are neurodivergent, to trust that their differences are strengths. To believe that the way they think has value. Writing this book has forced me to apply that belief to myself. The terror of not being accepted is still there. Submitting a manuscript feels like stepping onto a stage with the lights too bright. But the draft sitting on my laptop is evidence of something more powerful than fear. It is evidence of endurance.

It is evidence that I can hold a long thread of thought across months of teaching, leadership, life and complexity. Whatever happens next, that matters. Because there is a profound shift between “I hope I could write a book one day” and “I have written one.”

The second sentence changes the way you inhabit your own mind.