Warami.

To say I took a break from writing is understating the facts.

I was a journalist once, eager as the day was long to find truth, evidence and facts and share them with the wider public in the hope of creating an informed populace. It’s only since having my eyes opened to my own experience as a neurodiverse/ADHD person that I can appreciate how much my passion was an extension of my own attempts of making sense of the world.

I will surely go into more detail in post not yet written, but suffice to say that if you are neurotypical, your brain works quite differently to mine. A neurodiverse brain is functionally different to that of a neurodiverse person.

We neurodiverse people do not just see some things differently, or have slight differences in communicating; we literally live every second of our experience differently to the majority population of neurotypical folk.

I place huge emphasis on the word different, not better or worse, not magic or superpowered, just different.

The understanding of this difference is in my opinion vital to communicating and working with us neurodiverse people.

We live in world populated by people who are conditioned to believe that the norms they encounter in their everyday experience are the standard by which they measure others. A simple example is the presumption that if someone is taller than me, they are “tall”, whereas if they were shorter than me, they are “short”.

If we like something it is “good”, and if we do not it is “bad.”

We humans have a nasty habit of using ourselves as the measuring stick by which we make judgements. If someone acts like us, and agrees with us, we are more likely to include them and be comfortable around them. Unfortunately the inverse is also true; when someone acts in ways we don’t immediately comprehend, humans have a tendency to alienate, ostracize, and exclude those that do not conform to our own deeply held prejudices.

This is an unconscious process that happens so quickly it is overlooked by most, but has catastrophic consequences for we neurodiverse folks.

Imagine you work in a role that requires a lot of handwriting, and you are right-handed. Every day for work you are forced to write with you left hand. Now imagine everyone else you work with is allowed to use their dominant hand, but you alone are forced to use your left-hand.

Would your work be at the same standard as your unencumbered peers?

Would the quality of your work be representative of the amount of effort put in to the task?

While the answers to these questions may seem obvious, this very situation is one face by neurodiverse people every single day.

We are called weird, odd, stupid, slow, difficult etc, when we are struggling to conform to a way of being that is entirely false, entirely artificial, and incredibly harmful in the short and long term.

If neurotypical people had just an ounce of understanding of the amount of patience, kindness, and strength it takes to deal with the assumptions placed upon us, I would love to believe the world would be a better, fairer, and more equitable place.

As with most of the topics I will cover, there is ample publicly available information to educate yourself on experiences different to the familiar; all that is needed is the motivation to change, to grow, and to learn.

Yanu.