CAF Story | Strength in neurodivergence
Video / January 15, 2024
Transcript
(TS) I am Lieutenant Colonel Trevor Semeniuk. I work at the Joint Warfare Centre in Shirley's Bay. I am the JCIS, the Joint Communications Information Systems officer there. I run a branch of about 15 highly skilled technicians. We manage an experimental test network there called CFXNet and that’s essentially my role.
So, I am a neurodivergent individual. As a young child, I had various autistic traits. I didn’t speak until quite a bit later. I very much liked my alone time. I still have problems with even English sometimes. I trip up on my words even as my primary language. As far as my time in the CAF, how my neurodivergence has affected me, some of the aspects, my desire to keep things the same and liking routines has been really tough with postings and changing jobs. Personally, I really like structure and rules. Things are kind of black and white which causes issues sometimes in social situations. It has advantages, you know. I also have ADHD and I think that’s what enables me to hyperfocus. I ignore hunger, thirst, pain, everything and I would just hyperfocus on the task. That’s served me very well in the CAF and that’s propelled me probably to the rank that I am at, my ability to work very hard at one task for a long time.
When I'm in a structured environment like the military where you know exactly what you have to do, where things even, I was at a mess dinner last night, right? You know exactly when you have to do what, and that for me is very comforting as somebody with autism because I don't really have to think a lot about the social situation because it’s just inherent in what we do. We get trained right from basic training how you address people and everything, and so that’s been really comfortable for me. I feel like it’s been a really great fit for my particular brain. Specifically, my trade as signals officer and some of the other trades I find in intelligence, I think it draws a lot of neurodivergent individuals because sometimes we have specialized skills in pattern recognition or different skill sets that bode well to some of the trades that we do, and quite often in technical fields, engineering, astronomy, some of these scientific fields, there's a lot of neurodivergence. I think the important thing right now is for us to recognize those talented individuals and promote them wherever within the CAF to keep them engaged and doing what they do best.