The World Should Adapt to Neurodivergent People
If I Force Myself to Adapt Any More, It Will Kill Me
The world can’t seem to handle me being happy.
I have learned this the hard way.
When I’m happy, other women emerge from the shadows to try to destroy me. They emerge from nowhere and everywhere. They attack my hairstyle, my body type, my intelligence. My neurodivergence.
I was diagnosed as autistic at 7 years old. The diagnosis made me angry for years after, because in truth I was extremely traumatized and the diagnosis was used to defer attention to something that could not be changed. I spent years on medication for “depression” and “OCD” instead of being treated for the things that were really wrong — the fact my parents were abusing me.
Many years later, that diagnosis emerged to haunt me. I began to realize that autism does not mean what I grew up thinking it means. The kids forced to remain in the “disabled” class in school, diagnosed with a series of mental and behavioral issues, were not autistic. The wholistically mentally disabled kids I knew growing up, kids always on the margins of our lives, were also not autistic. “Autism” was not a catchall for a state of mental disability.
