Browse 68 quotes about Neurodivergence.
“If we continue to feed a society that doesn't value individuality and human beings as they are, we begin to destroy them.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“What I learned is that it does not matter what you do, or where you go, schools are all organised around the same basic system. It's a system that will never work for a neurodivergent person, no matter how hard they try, because it's entire foundation is built against us.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“However, it's not fair that the only options we currently have for children like me is to either have their parents give over their lives to homeschooling, or to suffer in an environment where every ounce of them is riduculed, ripped apart or forced to changed.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“I look like you. Sound like you. Move like you.
Speak your language. But I’m not like you. I never was.”
Source: Octopus Mimicus: A Literary Memoir of Love, Autism, and a Different Mind
“We are socialized to hide key parts of our identity to avoid being seen as too bossy, too much, too little, or too [insert misogynistic term that only applies to women]. Women learn to be more reserved, shy and quiet in order to be the picture-perfect face of femininity and to avoid abuse and misogyny.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“I like that I have ten things on the go, all at once. I like that I'm always planning for the next thing. I like that I bring a high energy to my life, that I see it as a challenge. I like that my favourite thing to do on the flight home is to look at the airline route map to pick my next destination.”
Source: Notes to Self
“I want to start to dream about what transformative justice looks like when someone who causes harm is disabled. I want there to be something - anything - that isn't ableist written about the intersections of neurodivergence or psych disabilities and being someone who's caused harm.
Right now, if someone talks about how our psych disabilities or neurodiversity are intertwined in some way with how we've caused harm, either people fall into apologism: "they have psych disabilities, you can't blame them," or we're seen as monsters: "they have THAT disorder, they're toxic, stay away from them." Mostly, it's the latter, and the ableist demonization of people with psych disabilities as killers and monsters leaves no room for us to really talk about what happens when we are Mad and might cause harm.
I want something else. I want anti-ableist forms of accountability that don't throw disabled people who cause harm under the bus, into every stereotype about "crazed autistic"/"psychotic"/"multiple personalities abusive killers." Instead, I want us to create accountability recommendations that are accessible to our disabilities and neurodivergence.”
Source: Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
“It was an animal love, like an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and understands that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.”
Source: To Be a Man: Stories
“Society assumes that eventually we'll fade into an acceptance of what we should be, that we'll silence ourselves into a submission of the ideologies and expectations we've been taught. Divergent thoughts, ideas and emotions are pushed aside with the idea that eventually we'll learn to simply conform. We're taught that if a child thinks or acts out of the norm, don't worry, because they'll soon change their ways. Society often accepts difference in children, but it's not 'acceptance' so much as it is a confidence that those differences will fade.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“Divergence is nature’s way to expansion.”
Source: The Divine Refugee
“Your life is exciting. Discovering your identity is exciting. And you should be in no rush to figure out this huge puzzle all at once; there's no time limit, no award for the first and the fastest. Take the time you need to discover and accept who you are, to discover what your story is.
Give yourself the freedom to explore, to learn, to simply be in your own time, at your own pace. You deserve and need the time and the space and the opportunity to freely, openly, safely, whole-heartedly discover who you are and who you're supposed to be, free from fear, free from accusation, free from expectation.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“Character isn’t defined by who we pretend to be to survive — it’s who we are when the mask falls.”
Source: Silentwhisper
“We can create a more nurturing environment by surrounding ourselves with love and support, learning and becoming friends with our minds, and continuing to dismantle harmful social norms in ourselves and in our networks.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“Show them compassion, show them love, show them understanding. Protect them from the evils of the world, but don't hide them from it. Teach them to love and to be loved. Teach them to value and be valued. Teach them all that they are. Remind yourself and them that who they are is exactly who they're supposed to be.
It's not the child who needs to change, it's the world.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“Our society has taught us that if we act in a way that is different to the social norm, we are considered low functioning, stupid, dumb, childish, loony. And the thing is, perhaps those fears are valid. No one wants to see their child ridiculed. But why are we then determined to change the child, rather than the world around them? Why do we validate the wrong just because it's normalised, and ostracise the right just because it's not?”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“It feels like we’re living in a time where neurodivergence is more broadly understood, or even accepted – with people, learning about the ways conditions like Autism and ADHD have historically been underdiagnosed, or underreported, especially in women.”
“You can't use a new word to replace an old one without it holding the exact same correlation, segregation and complacency that the original term was associated with. Instead of the 1930s mindset of 'People with Asperger's are worthy of survival, but those who have autism are not,' we now see a twenty-first century version of that: 'People who are high-functioning are worthy of survival, but those who are low functioning...' It's just a more modernised, accepted vocabulary. Instead of 'worthy of survival', our new language is being 'worthy' in capitalism and 'worthy' of support.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“People don’t necessarily realize it when they contribute to the erosion of a child’s self-worth, but kids pay attention to how people treat them, and they get the message loud and clear. I wish I could say it didn’t distort their self-perception and make them more sensitive and insecure, but it does.”
Source: Grateful to Be Alive: My Road to Recovery from Addiction
“Sometimes I work so hard to keep myself calm all day, just to come home and let out all my feelings at once.”
Source: Sometimes Noise is Big: Life with Autism
“How can we possibly find love and sanctuary in our identities when the entire world has taught us that these identities are unwanted?”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“As I've gotten older and realised that society's expectations are only as firm as we allow them to be, I've discovered that allowing myself to unmask and be my authentic autistic self--stims and all--has unleashed more ability than I ever had when I was locking myself away.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“To be queer and Somali and neurodivergent is concentrated alchemy, and yet we constantly raid the cupboards of our souls like we are a people of lack. When you operate from a position of lack, you don’t realise you’re robbing yourself of everything worth preserving, and forgetting to toss away all the empty pursuits that lost their synthetic spell several generations ago. And suddenly, you’re wide awake in a new country, in a new decade, and you’re startled because you can’t remember how you got here or why you’re still feeling hunted by your own reflection. You can’t remember how or when or where or why you misplaced all your breezy dynamism—all that wildness of perception you used to project with such ferocity. Where did it all go? We have conveniently forgotten that we have always been fundamentally idiosyncratic and fantastic and fucking alive. Instead we feed ourselves and our children and our children’s children prosaic fuckery for what? Respectability politics? So that if we twist and try our damnedest to conform to standards that have never been coded into our collective DNA, that we’ll what? Somehow be less strange? Less weird and wonderful? That we’ll transcend the soul-snuffing snare that is the myth of the good immigrant? That if we mute all of our magic—everything that makes us some of the most innately interesting, individualistic and fun, funny beings in this boring, beige-as-fuck world—that we’ll win over whom? Folks who don’t season their food right or whose understanding of freedom is a shitty Friday night sloshfest at a shitty pub playing shitty music, chatting nonsense that no-one with a single iota of sense gives a fuck about? Is that who you are so deeply invested in trying to impress? If so, then go for it, but don’t fool yourself for a fucking second into thinking that trying desperately to shave off your elemental peculiarities through self-diminishment is salvation, because it simply isn’t, honey, and it never will be.”
“Growing up in a world that wasn't created for even the most basic level of my existence meant that I grew up incredibly ostracised and ridiculed. I was taught from a young age that my mind wasn't valued, that my existence wasn't important, that I wasn't supposed to be here. How can a little girl ever find herself when every part of society is telling her that she can't be the only version of herself she has ever known?”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“Daily, I get messages that invalidate me as a human because I'm autistic, with people asking me why I would ever be proud of something like that. Daily, I see, hear and experience people try to diminish my identity, and refuse to acknowledge the identity of their children, their patients, their students. When I look at the world around me, I'm reminded by the media, by politicians, by the very essence of our culture that my mind is wrong, that I'm not needed, that neurodivergence as a whole is indisputably delinquent, and that our identities are not considered important or whole.”
Source: Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
“What happens when we stop pathologizing difference?”
Source: Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You
“The normal pipeline for an adult autistic is being overwhelmed, tired, then reaching burnout, depression, and guilt. But change is possible. These are systemic problems that we encounter, and the solutions we bring are going to be individual. Autistic people are wildly diverse, and what strengths you have won’t look like someone else’s.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Despite the fact that the world didn’t cater to its style, I saw advantages in my thinking.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Maybe the most surprising thing is that the proficiency of so many autism experts ends at diagnosis. Once that diagnosis is made, especially for adults, the expert’s job is over, and they have no idea how to guide you in handling that information.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“If coming out as autistic as an adult is hard, it’s only because of the resistance of those around you. It doesn’t change the actual challenges you have in your job, your relationships, or your perception. Which is just such a perfect fact because the challenges you’ve always faced haven’t been due to the autism either — not really. They’ve been due to the way the world has been structured based on neurotypical thinking and socialization. In most cases, autism is a social disability, not a medical one.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“We did our best to fit in, be typical, or control the narrative, and kept this ruse up for years and then decades, usually developing some really unhealthy coping skills to deal with the resulting anxiety. Expectations were always high, and we worked harder and harder to meet them, exhausting ourselves and deteriorating our quality of life.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“They’ll explain why you can’t be autistic by producing the very evidence you would use to prove that you are — how smart you are, how social you are, your expert and intense eye contact, your terrific grades and amazing knowledge about niche subjects, your charm during social events. All things that were hard-fought parts of your masked identity.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“After all, simply saying “We’re all on the spectrum” is a cognitive roadblock. It’s absolutely efficient, in an energy consumptive way. We see this method used all the time when people use thought-terminating clichés to end a problem-solving process and settle their thinking: It is what it is. Don’t rock the boat. That’s not how we do things here. It’s above your pay grade. Let’s agree to disagree. YOLO.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“We should also address this term neurotypical, as it is too often used as a substitute for the word normal, even though this was not the original intention. Simply stated, it refers to someone whose neurological structure developed in a way that is typical of the field of study.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“For how much autism is discussed, far too many people don’t have a good working definition of what it is.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Now in my forties, often I look around a room of adults and wonder how many others are faking it. If so, who are we playacting for? Who would be offended if we didn’t wear the right clothes? Which person sees themselves as an actual grown-up, would judge our handshake, comment sincerely on a wine, and expect a sense of achievement and pride to blossom within them for proving their adulthood? Who is motivated by power, believes that money is real, and insists the social structure is a meritocracy that sprouted from the ground when George Washington chopped down a cherry tree to ratify the New Deal at Gettysburg, accompanied by his Rough Riders? Which people are we trying to fit in for? In any given room, it could be everyone but me, or it could be no one.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“A game began so long ago that we forgot it was a game at all. We can only see the game and its rules. We can’t see the room where we are playing, nor can we stop playing. Everyone is born into it. We spend the first few years learning the rules, and we know that to win the game, we must become an amorphous, perfect person. If we just follow the right steps, read the right things, and behave in the right ways, we’re certain to become this person. We’ve built pipelines and institutions to encourage this, complete with pre- made goals, graded feedback, moral guidance, an armory of cosmetic solutions, and anything else you can imagine. We are all-in, dead-set on this belief that we can and will become the perfect person. Even though no one has done this before. Ever. It has never happened.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“for me and tens of thousands of others like me, a huge shock came when people started literally protesting because they wanted to “go back to normal.”
“I’ve learned to only express my opinion when I absolutely have to, and even then, it comes out so direct, frustrated, and self-righteous that I’ll have to apologize for it within a week or so.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“I want to make something clear: I’m autistic. I don’t have autism.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“autism is a description of who I am and who other autistics are and not at all an affliction that haunts us.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Again, you’re most likely to be diagnosed if you’re a white male, as your opinion of yourself will be taken more seriously by doctors. I wish I were joking.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“One of the most maddening things you’re going to hear is “Well, we’re all on the spectrum.” Usually, this will be someone close to you, and you’ll have just disclosed to them that you are autistic. Their reply takes this disclosure and — seemingly — integrates it into their worldview while actually dump- ing it in the garbage.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“As we move forward into different thinking styles, it’ll become more and more apparent why being understood and listened to is especially enticing to autistic people who are coming to an awareness of themselves.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“These other people have diverged from our expectations of neurological development, and from this we get the term neurodivergent. But this is a broad label that is not synonymous with autistic, the way that rectangle is descriptive of but not synonymous with square.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“People used to think the brain’s primary function was to take in the world around us and perceive stimuli. While that’s something it does, the brain spends a lot more energy filtering stimuli out, allowing us to discern the important ones from the unimportant ones.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“It’s a common quality of autistic thinking that we aren’t sure which details are considered necessary by others when making a point or telling a story. What’s funny about that — and we will dig into this later — is the certainty that the reader or listener has a better idea of what these details are than the person doing the explaining and that it just so happens that the correlation between the included details and the patience of the listener is one to one. This raises no red flags at all. It just “is what it is.” This makes sense because their attention has to be engaged — but it also seems unfair.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Autism is not a disease to be cured, autism is normal, a different kind of normal, but normal no less, and with a modest amount of care the acclimation feels less challenging.”
Source: Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
“Divergent Dynamite
(The Sonnet)
You only know my infinite radiance,
you got no clue to my innate hurricane.
Day in and day out I struggle autistic,
Genius is outcome of a mind broken.
There are cracks across my heart,
nothing can bar the pouring rays.
Light is but suffering harnessed,
Genius is brokenness harnessed.
There is no end to my exuberance,
limits of typicals don't apply to me.
I am but an enigma of unbending tenacity,
every breath is testament to impossibility.
Divergence is nature's way to expansion.
Divergent dynamite I, am living evolution.”
Source: The Divine Refugee
“Genius is outcome of a mind broken.”
Source: The Divine Refugee
“That curtain never came. The end credits should have run, but the days kept on happening, my alarm kept going off, and new challenges kept popping up. Furthermore, I had a sense that this “I finally did all the things, give me my American Dream award” moment wasn’t the final, dramatic crescendo of an orchestrated symphony. I knew this because I was a fake.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult