Am I more than neurodivergent?

In order to identify as neurodivergent, I have first had to understand what I diverge from.

Most people hear the term neurodivergent and hear that I am diverging from ‘typical’.

Typical neurobiology.

But typical does not exist. It isn’t a biological fact at all, it isn’t defined in the DSM and even if it were, there’d be no evidence it existed.

Typical = well behaved, well masked, well hidden, well oppressed, well hushed, well productive, well compliant, well white, well man, well healthy or at least pretending to be.

Neurodiversity is a biological fact, difference among us. Diversity.

So what do I diverge from? An ideal. A threat. A drive for conformity. Populations, generations of people hiding who they are to protect themselves from rejection, abandonment, disapproval and for many, far worse.

In our doing so, learning we should also project that same fear onto others in order to create a society that normalises our experience of fear fails us. Abysmally. Intergenerationally.

The world I have lived in has been a mirror for me-one that brings into my field what I fear, until I have grown, learnt and unlearned. Until I have begun the process of remembering who I am, only then did the mirror shift and change; new people, places and things finding their way to me and I them.

I am grateful for the language that has been created in order for us to shift away from being pathologised; and created pathways for us to find one another, us lot who have been socially shunned and intentionally misunderstood by those committed to a culture created on the back of lies, lies and more lies. Based on violence, segregation and survival.

There is no typical. It is neither defined, or undefined.

It’s bullshit.

Even when we share commonalities in our brains, our nervous systems, our neurobiology; we are still individual, yet we continue to shift the gauge on what is autism, ADHD, PDA, schizophrenia, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, all forms of neurodivergence based on the ways in which we all show up and show more of who we are, without fear.

We are seeing the luminosity of humanness in it’s many forms and we are driven to understand it all via the lens of pathology, some of it, only the almost socially acceptable forms such as autism, ADHD, etc, merging into a becoming of identity and culture.
For those of us with less power and privilege across many areas socially, institutionally, this is all we have. Our kinship. It is everything.

These layers, traits, characteristics, definitions, labels, have saved my life. They have saved me from myself. Understanding I am what is known as autistic, PDA, ADHD, CPTSD and more that I don’t speak about publicly has kept me alive because in the emergence of identify and culture, my experience of humanness was normalised; is normalised.

Today, I am curious as to how much I concede with the fallacy of ‘typical’ by identifying as neurobiologically divergent because, I ask myself again, what am I diverging from?

I wonder if there is more volition in standing in my power as me. As true to who I am, as an act of resistance without having to other myself as divergent from something that does not exist.

I do diverge, it’s true.

I diverge from compliance with minimising the power and beauty of diversity.

I diverge from pathologising myself.

I diverge from being convinced that I am broken.

I diverge from actively accepting white supremacist views and approaches, imperfectly, due to my conditioning I am always seeking to undo.

In my true acceptance of my madness, my trauma, in all of the parts I have had to be in order to survive..

I am more sane, more whole and more present than any version of typical I have ever attempted to be. And I have been many.

I have longed for your acceptance, your approval, your love until I realised I was longing for my own acceptance, my own approval, my own love.

While I am divergent, I am far more divergent than neurodivergent.

Because, I am far more expansive than a neurobiology.

So many hear the term neurodivergent and still subscribe to the pathology: the idea of brokenness, of defect, of impairment.

I am divergent, and this is a reclamation of the power that lies within who I am and who I have always been.

Who we are, and who we have always been.

I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts on your own personal identity and culture regarding neurodivergence if you feel you'd like to share.

KF