We Are Not Broken, We Never Were...
Let me begin with a confession: I spent the first thirty-one years of my life believing I was defective. Not in the dramatic, self-pitying way — more like a quiet, persistent hum underneath everything. A suspicion that other people had received an instruction manual for living that had somehow been left out of my delivery.
I masked. I performed. I studied neurotypical behavior the way a linguist studies a foreign language — analytically, from the outside, always aware that fluency was possible but native-speakership was not. I got very good at it. And I was exhausted, always, in a way I could never quite explain to people who had not felt it themselves.
When I finally received my autism diagnosis at thirty-one, sitting across from a clinician in a beige office that smelled faintly of hand sanitizer, I did not feel relief right away. I felt grief first — for the years spent thinking I was the problem. And then, slowly, something that felt very much like coming home.
Neurodivergence is not a malfunction. It is a different relationship with the world — one that comes with real challenges and, often, extraordinary gifts.
This blog is for everyone who has felt that same displaced feeling. For the child who couldn't sit still and was called disruptive. For the teenager who memorized social scripts so she could pass. For the adult who still wonders why small talk feels like performing surgery without training. For the parent who just received a diagnosis for their child and is sitting with a cocktail of fear, relief, love, and overwhelming Google search results.
So — What Is Neurodivergence, Exactly?
The term "neurodivergence" was coined in the late 1990s by sociologist Judy Singer, who is herself autistic, as a way of framing neurological difference not as pathology but as natural human variation. The word gained traction in the autistic self-advocacy community and has since expanded to encompass a wide range of neurological profiles.
Neurodivergent minds include — but are not limited to — autistic people, people with ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, Tourette syndrome, and various anxiety and mood conditions rooted in neurological differences. What these profiles share is not a list of symptoms so much as a fundamentally different way of processing information, sensation, emotion, and the social world.
QUICK CONTEXT
Roughly 15–20% of the global population is estimated to be neurodivergent in some form. That is not a small minority. That is one in five people sitting in your office, your classroom, your family dinner.
The neurotypical world — and I use that term without malice — was largely designed by and for people whose brains process input in a particular, majority way. Open-plan offices optimized for spontaneous collaboration. School systems that reward sitting quietly and speaking in turn. Social hierarchies built around eye contact, small talk, and reading unspoken rules. For people whose brains work differently, navigating these environments can feel like running a marathon in shoes made for someone else's feet. You can do it. But it costs something.
Why This Blog, and Why Now?
Because despite the growing visibility of neurodivergence in public conversation, so much of the discourse still centers on what neurodivergent people cannot do. On deficits. On intervention strategies designed to make us more palatable to a world that hasn't examined its own assumptions.
I want to write about the full picture. The challenges, yes — and they are real, and they deserve honest examination. But also the texture and particularity of neurodivergent experience from the inside. The unexpected gifts that are often overlooked. The strategies that actually help versus the ones that just make us perform normalcy more convincingly. The community that is forming, loudly and joyfully, online and off.
I will write about autism, primarily, because it is where my personal experience lives. But I will write about ADHD, about twice-exceptionality, about the particular experience of late diagnosis, about parenting neurodivergent children, about the workplace, about relationships, about the way neurodivergence intersects with gender and race and class in ways that have been historically underdiscussed.
I am not interested in inspiration porn. I am interested in truth — in all its complicated, contradictory, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal specificity.
You will find no "overcoming" narratives here. Not because I don't believe in growth — I do, fiercely — but because the framing of disability as something to be conquered by sheer willpower has always struck me as both dishonest and unkind. We are not tragic figures waiting to be uplifted. We are people, full and complete, navigating a world that was not built with us in mind.
A Note on Language
Language in this space is genuinely contested, and I want to be transparent about my choices. I use identity-first language — "autistic person" rather than "person with autism" — because this is the preference of the majority of autistic adults who have weighed in on the question. I recognize that preference is not universal, and I respect those who feel differently.
I use the word "neurodivergent" broadly and "neurotypical" as a useful shorthand, not as an accusation. I try to hold complexity: that the same trait can be both a genuine difficulty and a genuine strength depending on context, that experience varies enormously within any diagnostic category, and that diagnosis itself is not the beginning or the end of anyone's story.
I am glad you are here. Whether you are newly diagnosed, long-diagnosed, undiagnosed but quietly certain, a parent, a partner, an educator, or simply curious — this is a place for you. We have a lot to talk about.
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