A prayer for seeking your neurodivergence

Sun rays break through a heavy clouded sky in the North Carolina mountains, which are wreathed in low-lying clouds that look like steam rising. Bright fall trees sit in the foreground.

Spirit of the living God,

fall afresh on me as I ask fresh questions of my life,

and seek out answers I’ve never sought before.

They say you made us by hand.

No machine or factory to mass produce humanity

which means you were there when my genes combined

when the alchemy of identity yielded one me,

in all eternity,

the first of my kind.

I’ve always felt different.

as though perhaps I came from a different planet

Dropped by accident

among a species so similar to me that no one can tell

from the outside

that I am not made of the same material.

Did you switch up the fabric for me somehow?

Did you choose a different shade of clay

without ever revealing your sleight of hand?

Now I ask questions like “Is there a name for people like me?”

And comb lists of criteria, assembled in intimidating order

in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, volume 5

a new holy text over which I pour my identity.

Will I settle into a patterned flow?

Do the drops of my story combine into rivulets, creeks, rivers,

flowing into enough evidence to achieve that holy grail,

diagnosis?

This book is filled with words that sting

“Abnormal”

“Fixated”

“Fails”

“Careless”

“Severe”

“Excessive”

These words worm into my secret places, sitting alongside the tender ones I hold close:

Beloved

Created

Desired

Redeemed

And yet I persist in my investigation, determined

desiring these labels to apply to me

because then I will know who I am

and who else in this great wide creation might be like me?

Is there a reason some things always feel so hard?

Is there a chance I’m not lazy, too little, too much, too broken, malformed, wrong?

My deepest longing is to know me as you know me,

so I beg you to guide my search with your eyes of grace

that I can see my inner terrain, filled with your fingerprints

marks of the artist’s hand.

And if there is an Other Side for me

where I emerge, labeled, named,

may it be a homecoming to myself, a blessed resolution to a lifetime of lostness

a new beginning

with a new tribe of fellow wanderers

who get what it is like

to be crafted from a different shade of cloth.