Browse 63 quotes about Neurodivergent.
“People don’t say what they mean. They say what makes them likable, and expect you to guess the rest.”
Source: Where The Cicada Sleeps: A Diary-Style Portrait of Girlhood, Betrayal, and the Quiet Violence of Being Misunderstood
“Why are autistic people called abnormal… when we’re the only ones who speak the truth?”
Source: Where The Cicada Sleeps: A Diary-Style Portrait of Girlhood, Betrayal, and the Quiet Violence of Being Misunderstood
“I became the girl who made people uncomfortable just by asking them to be honest.”
Source: Where The Cicada Sleeps: A Diary-Style Portrait of Girlhood, Betrayal, and the Quiet Violence of Being Misunderstood
“I take things literally. Not because I’m stupid. Because I listen.”
Source: Where The Cicada Sleeps: A Diary-Style Portrait of Girlhood, Betrayal, and the Quiet Violence of Being Misunderstood
“To be fluent in a language you never wanted to learn is its own kind of grief.”
Source: Where The Cicada Sleeps: A Diary-Style Portrait of Girlhood, Betrayal, and the Quiet Violence of Being Misunderstood
“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
“Divergence is nature’s way to expansion.”
Source: The Divine Refugee
“I don't know how I ended up in a world this miserable. All this suffering just to die one day.”
Source: The Weight of Tender Things
“As an individual, as a person with the power to affect other people with your words, actions, and expressions every single day, you can give people who see the world differently the gift of accepting who and how they are.”
Source: Notes for Neuro Navigators: The Allies' Quick-Start Guide to Championing Neurodivergent Brains
“Neuro Navigator: A person who may not have a neurodivergent brain, but loves and empowers someone who does. See also: Unconditional love.”
Source: Notes for Neuro Navigators: The Allies' Quick-Start Guide to Championing Neurodivergent Brains
“I’ve known what it’s like to sit somewhere loud so you don’t have to hear yourself think.”
Source: Silentwhisper
“I might live in chaos, but love still anchors me.”
Source: Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia
“I fake being normal better than most normal people fake being sane.”
Source: Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia
“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
“Our brains are sending sparks in different directions and sometimes they end up in the wrong place, but sometimes they end up in incredible places.”
Source: How to Be Autistic
“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
“When feelings go on overload,
I pause and breathe
and all is . . . slowed.”
Source: Too Much!: An Overwhelming Day
“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
“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
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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.”
Source: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent Adult
“Apparently, letters mean you should change. I need to learn a lot of rules instead of going to the park. I like rules. I don't like talking about rules.”
Source: Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal
“A diagnosis is not a prediction. It doesn’t tell you what’s possible. It doesn’t change you, your colleague, your child, or your friend. It just opens up tricks and tools to thrive.”
Source: Notes for Neuro Navigators: The Allies' Quick-Start Guide to Championing Neurodivergent Brains
“But I find being around people so hard. Any people. There's all this noise and light and color and sensation, all the time, and I don't know how to read tone or emotions or jokes or sarcasm or flirting. It's like all the things that everyone else can do automatically, I have to do manually. And I get overwhelmed. Constantly. That's the face you're seeing. It's me, trying to process everything at once.”
Source: Cassandra in Reverse
“I'm on the spectrum," I say with a jolt. "Derek and Jack were right."
"They were not." Artemis scowls. "That's a euphemism. They don't want to say autistic because they think it's rude. It is not rude."
"It's not?" I say distantly, observing my brain shift again.
"Nope. People think autism is some kind of error, and it's not. You're not broken or 'disordered,' or whatever they say on their little bits of paper. That just means 'not exactly like me.' Which--" Artemis points at the folder "--I think you'll see is one of the many things Mum wrote in the margins, along with the words go to hell, highlighted in pink. Autism is just a different wiring. You're built in alternative neurological software, from the ground up. Every single part of you. And it's..."
"Colorful and loud?" I guess, and Artemis laughs.
"I was going to say brilliant," she says. "But, yeah, I'd imagine that too. Although I don't know why anyone is surprised at how the world treats you. This has never really been a planet that embraces difference.”
Source: Cassandra in Reverse
“This book does not represent autism, and neither I nor Cassie represent autistic people. We are simply individual voices in a choir of millions of amazing neurodivergent people, all with our own experiences, or own ways of seeing the world, our own ways of existing. I cannot speak for anyone but myself, and I would not want to try. So, whether you enjoyed this book or not, whether you see yourself represented in this story or not, I urge you to seek out other autistic voices.
We are beautiful, we are unique, and we are legion.”
Source: Cassandra in Reverse
“They often took a difficulty I had and turned it into an amusing little anecdote. They would take a deadly seriousness, my seriousness, and turn it into a great laugh that they would then let out into the room. What kind of people were they to do that? The amusing anecdote had sharp edges, flew into me and scratched my soul.”
Source: A Real Person: Life on the Outside
“But for the outcasts like me, the ones who don't fit the box, the only words that remind me I'm human are my own.”
Source: Queen of Hearts
“My imagination ignited once again. I kept staring at my reflection. My delusions of grandeur formed a shape, on their own, in my reflection—in my double reality.”
Source: Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia
“I want out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable… A blank. Unknown. Undefined.”
Source: Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia