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Neurodivergence Quotes

Browse 68 quotes about Neurodivergence.

Neurodivergence Quotes

“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 5 The Autistic’s Guide to Self-Discovery sprouted from the ground when George Washington chopped down a cherry tree to ratify the New Deal at Gettysburg, accom- panied 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.”

AutismAutisticAutism SpectrumNeurodiversityNeurodivergenceAutism AwarenessNeurodivergentAutistic AuthorAdult Autism
Book:The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
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“There are so many things that people half my age have been doing for years now, and there are things that I know I will struggle with and need extra support with for the rest of my life. But, there are things that I can do better than just about anyone.”

SupportDisabilityAutismNeurodivergenceAccepting Help
Book:Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
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“Mi ritroverò accerchiato da persone che si chiedono a vicenda perché me ne stia in un angolo senza rivolgere parola a nessuno. Io mi sto divertendo ad ascoltare musica, anche se non è la stessa che sento quando sono solo; non è male stare accanto a persone nuove, è solo stancante. Ma il mio viso non si piega per dimostrarlo e le persone non mi credono quando dico la verità.”

AutismLgbtqIntrovertIntroversionNeurodiversityNeurodivergenceIntrovert QuotesNeurodivergentAutismo
Book:La costellazione del cane
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“My alphabet hates itself. Like ... imagine someone says, ‘Think outside the box.’ My hyperactive mind creates a sphere and laughs at the box and researches for hours on end how much better spheres are. Then my Autism freaks out that I broke the rules without realising there were any, and wonders why we are supposed to think inside cardboard boxes in the first place. Surely being inside cardboard boxes isn’t comfortable.”

ThinkingYoung Adult FictionAutismAdhdNeurodiversityNeurodivergenceNeurodivergentAsd
Author:Anna Whateley
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“We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND [neurodivergence]. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.”

AbleismNeurodivergenceDisability JusticeDisability WritingDisabled LiteratureDisabled WritersDeaf CultureDisability StereotypesDeaf LiteratureDisabled History
Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“White genderqueer writer Meg Day wrote of meeting Laura Hershey at a Lambda Literary retreat and Laura asking Meg why she wasn't reading certain Deaf and disabled writers, saying, "these are your foremothers." I didn't know about Laura or her writing until after she died—she'd FB friend requested me but I didn't know who she was. Yet, as Laura Hershey wrote in her poem "Translating the Crip," here we are: "thriving and unwelcome, the irony of the only possible time and place." And we are writing and creating our own media whether or not the abled world can see hear read or witness us.”

AbleismNeurodivergenceDisability JusticeDisability WritingDisabled LiteratureDisabled WritersDeaf CultureDisability StereotypesDeaf LiteratureDisabled History
Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“When I think of disabled literature and writing, I can think of a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not. I think of Audre Lorde—Black Lesbian poet warrior mother, legally blind, living and dying with cancer, whose work shines with the knowledge she gained from living with bodily difference and fighting the medical industrial complex. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Latinx maestra who started her period at age three and lived with bodily and reprogenital differences, living and dying with diabetes. Some of my work as a disability justice writer has been to look at the legacies and work of those foundational second-wave queer and trans feminist writers and creators of color—Audre Lorde and June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Chrystos and Sapphire, to name a few—and to witness the disability all up in their work, even if they did not use that word because of any number of factors including the whiteness of the disability rights movement of the time. June's last decade of writing was all about her cancer. Gloria's writing had everything to do with her diabetes and neurodivergence and life-long bodily differences. Marsha and Sylvia were both neurodivergent Trans Black and Latinx activists and creators whose writing, performance, and art was at the center of their lives and activism. Chrystos and Sapphire's Indigenous and Black feminist incest survivor stories and poetry write from spaces of surviving extreme trauma, chronic pain from stripping and cleaning houses, CPTSD, grief, and psychiatrization. "I also think of the deep legacy of disabled writers (some dead, some still living but having done this for a while) who intentionally, politically identified as disabled. Laura Hershey. Leroy Moore. Qwo-Li Driskill. Aurora Levins Morales. Billie Rain. Dani Montgomery. Nomy Lamm. Cheryl Marie Wade. Emi Koyama. Pat Parker. Tatiana de la tierra. Raymond Luczak. Anne Finger. Leslie Feinberg, who died of Lyme disease. Peggy Munson. Beth Brant. Vickie Sears. Writers who are small press, micro-press, self-published, indie press, out of print. Writers I know and cherish, whose names I call when I talk about disabled writing. We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.”

AbleismNeurodivergenceDisability RightsDisability JusticeDisability WritingDisabled LiteratureDisabled WritersDeaf CultureDisability StereotypesDisability History
Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“No longer were tears and fear and uncertainty seen as just a child who was scared; now they were a pathetic excuse for an adult. No longer were my sensory issues seen as those of a little girl with extra support needs; now I was an adult who was noncompliant and a burden.”

AdulthoodNeurodivergenceAdultingEmotional Dysregulation
Book:Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
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“She doesn't care about social hierarchies, or social etiquette. If she disagrees with you, your friends or your family, you're likely to hear about it.”

ConflictAutismDisagreementNeurodivergenceSelf AdvocacySocial EtiquetteSocial Hierarchies
Book:Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
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“For many of us, our survivorhood and our neurodivergence are pretty damn intertwined. As disabled TJ workers, we know what it's like to inhabit secret bodymind stories that many turn away from, as "too much", and that knowledge helps us in our TJ work - people trust us with their survivor stories because they can tell we've seen some shit.”

DisabilityNeurodivergenceTransformative Justice
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“After receiving a diagnosis, the minimal resources that we may be linked to (if we're lucky) are for the benefit of parents, carers and those who are third-party viewers, rather than for neurodivergent people. We're given books that have been created by doctors and psychologists and neurologists who may have studied our brains for a number of years and can spit out information until the cows come home. But, assuming they are neurotypical, they have never and will never experience or understand what it feels like to have our minds. We're given clinical books and clinical videos, and are taught as soon as the new label is attached to us that it's a cold, medical, distant thing, like our brains are no longer ours. And, when we try to rid ourselves of these views and do our own research in an attempt to find things that feel closer to home and less analytical and impersonal, we are led to articles, sob stories, and posts that highlight the disappointment, fear and sorrow that surround all aspects of us, making us feel further invalidated, segregated and alienated.”

AutismNeurodivergenceOwn VoicesAutism Acceptance
Book:Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
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“Taking away a child's stims doesn't take away their need to self-regulate; instead, it forces them into new habits that can cause long-term side effects and harm, including severe anxiety disorder, depression and emotional dysregulation. In 50 per cent of cases where therapy is used to stop an autistic child from stimming, the child has come out with symptoms that meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.”

AutismNeurodivergenceBehaviorismAutism AcceptanceAbaStimming
Book:Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
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“The autism employment efforts of recent years have tapped into an enormous wellspring of energy and desire to work among adults with autism, family members, and advocates. The post pandemic efforts will similarly need this participation.”

EmploymentAutismNeurodivergenceAutism AcceptancePostpandemic
Book:The Autism Full Employment Act: The Next Stage of Jobs for Adults with Autism, ADHD, and Other Learning and Mental Health Differences
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“Identifying as neurodivergent isn't just another label; it's also an identity, it's a reclamation, it's a song. When we call ourselves neurodivergent, we are reclaiming our differences that society calls abnormal or wrong. When we call ourselves neurodivergent, we are challenging you to consider what 'normal' actually means and perhaps even realize that maybe our normal isn't your normal. When we call ourselves neurodivergent, we are rejecting the concept of disorders.”

NeurodiversityNeurodivergenceNeurodivergentNeurodivergencyNeurodiverse
Book:We're All Neurodiverse
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“In a landmark study into the psychology of perceived “creepiness,” psychologists McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) asked 1,341 respondents to answer questions about which personal qualities and behaviors they associated with “creepy” people, and used statistical factor analysis to develop a measurable “creepiness” factor. The creepiness factor they developed included the following traits: a person having awkward, unpredictable behavior, an unnatural-looking smile, laughter that occurred at “unnatural” times, speaking for too long about a single topic, and not knowing when to end a conversation.[30] When Autistic people attempt to socialize and bond with others in an affable, enthusiastic way, these are often the very traits we embody. Even as we try to put the neurotypical people around us at ease by smiling, keeping the conversation moving, and staying present, we might be seen as scary or unsettling. A series of experiments by social psychologists Leander, Chartrand, and Bargh (2012) found that when a person engages in social mirroring in an even slightly inappropriate way, it skeeves people out, and even makes them feel physically colder.[31] A little bit of mimicry is normal among friends. People mirror one another’s postures and mannerisms as they get comfortable and fall “ into sync. But if you mirror someone too much, or at the wrong time, these studies show you can literally give other people the chills. Autistic maskers try really hard to mirror other people, but since we can’t do it as fluently and effortlessly as neurotypicals do, we often unwittingly set off NT’s creep-dars. The solution, then, is to stop hiding and pretending to be something we’re not. Instead of straining (and failing) to imitate NT people, we can become radically visible. Sasson’s research found that when participants were told they were interacting with an Autistic person, their biases against us disappeared. Suddenly they liked their slightly awkward conversation partner, and expressed interest in getting to know them. Having an explanation for the Autistic person’s oddness helped the creeped-out feeling go away. Follow-up research by Sasson and Morrison (2019) confirmed that when neurotypical people know that they’re meeting an Autistic person, first impressions of them are far more positive, and after the interaction neurotypicals express more interest in learning about Autism.[32] 30. McAndrew, F. T., & Koehnke, S. S. (2016). On the nature of creepiness. New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 10–15. 31. Leander, N. P., Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (2012). You give me the chills: Embodied reactions to inappropriate amounts of behavioral mimicry. Psychological Science, 23(7), 772–779. Note: many of John Bargh’s priming studies have failed replication attempts in recent years. For a discussion of a failed attempt of a related but different series of temperature priming studies, see Lynott, D., Corker, K. S., Wortman, J., Connell, L., Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E., & O’Brien, K. (2014). Replication of “Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth” by Williams and Bargh (2008). Social Psychology. 32. Sasson, N. J., & Morrison, K. E. (2019). First impressions of adults with autism improve with diagnostic disclosure and increased autism knowledge of peers. Autism, 23(1), 50–59.”

SciencePsychologyAutismNeurodivergence
Book:Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
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“The other part of communication is communicating your feelings. Friendship is a two-way street; it's mutual. Be honest about your needs and your feelings at all times, with no exceptions. If you're not articulating your feelings, we're not going to pick up on it--we don't take hints, we don't pick up on invisible social cues, we're not going to understand radio silence. We need real communication or we're both going to get confused and upset.”

FriendshipHonestyCommunicationNeurodivergenceSocial Cues
Book:Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After
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