We’re all different. Let’s embrace it and talk about it.

As dyslexic Black man with ADHD, Wesley Faulkner has maneuvered through difficult challenges in the personal and professional realm that have challenged him. But lately, he’s creating his own path, paving the way to inclusion and acceptance.

TAMAR: Hey, everybody, I am delighted. I’m so excited I have one of my older friends in the podcast realm, at least as far as the people I’ve interviewed. Wesley Faulkner from Texas. Hi, thank you so much for joining me.

00:35

WESLEY FAULKNER: Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be able to be a guest on your show.

00:39

TAMAR: Yeah, yeah . I I’m very, very honored that you’re here. It’s been amazing. We’ve worked together, we’ve kind of had these experiences together. And we met it up like SXSW conference in 2009, 2007. It’s been a crazy, crazy trajectory for us. And I guess that kind of leads into where are you now? I guess you’re in Texas. Talk a little bit about that and tell everybody where you’ve kind of come from and where you are today.

01:18

WESLEY FAULKNER: Yes, I’m in Texas. I’m in Austin, specifically. I have a wife and two kids. They’re very young daughters. They’re eight and five. I’ve had an interesting journey through technology from being on the repair side, like working on computers, like cracking them open and replacing components and like reinstalling operating systems to working on high end, flying out to multibillion dollar companies and fixing their systems to marketing, to talking to people who are end users and now I’m on kind of the merger of technology and marketing and dev rel. My job is to explain the usage of the building blocks of technology for the next startup or company to build something amazing for their customers on top of our technology and the specific company that I work for. And I do that for  Daily, you’ll find them at daily.co it’s an video API that allows basically any company or any developer to integrate video into their application or their website.

02:33

TAMAR: Cool, cool. Awesome. So, in the context that we’ve known each other both personally, professionally, you’ve had, I guess, your fair share of struggles and whatever. And I don’t know if that ties into your rise above adversity story, but I know you probably have one that you want to share. So go and talk to me, let me know a little more.

03:03

WESLEY FAULKNER: Well, I would say, I’m not rising above it, I feel like I’m making my way through it. I think that adversity just kind of morphs and changes, and the shading may be a little bit different. And I feel like the fight is ongoing. I don’t feel I can ever let my guard down in terms of adversity because it comes in different forms. Sometimes it’s self-esteem. Sometimes it is negative thought that comes externally. Sometimes it’s just waking up in the morning, or sometimes it’s just writing an email. There’s different forms that I struggle with, I don’t think we’ve covered it, but I have dyslexia, also ADHD. And through that, it’s really taking a toll on my mental illness. And when I say illness, I take it as an illness of health in general, like people would say that they get sick and they catch something, I feel mental illness can be the same thing where we all struggle with mental illness from time to time, and it shouldn’t be stigmatized. Only a subset of people get it. I think it’s one of those things where we all get it, we all struggle. Some very seriously, some maybe not, but it’s something that is a spectrum. And just like my learning disabilities, as it’s considered my neuro diversity, it started off in school where I could not learn to read. For the longest time I think I started reading when I was in the middle of third grade.

TAMAR: Wow.

WESLEY FAULKNER: So I was eight plus and one day it just clicked and it was one of those things where it wasn’t. It was the concepts that I couldn’t grasp. It was just it felt like out of reach. And there was never an adjustment to say, hey, he’s struggling with this way of learning. So let’s try this new way, it was always just rinse and repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse and repeat. And it kind of, I would say, that’s definitely the start of my journey because I had to find my own way. In a world that was not meant for me, that wasn’t going to change for me, and wasn’t going to adapt to how I operated.

TAMAR: Right.

WESLEY FAULKNER: And the scho