OK, gonna preface this by asking you to read to th end before judging.

It's been more than a year now and initially my experience of diagnosis was very much, "I hate this thing and would love it to go away".

And to be fair, I still hate this thing and would love it to go away. But it isn't going to.

However, this did colour my views of the terms "neurodivergent" and "neurodiverse", because while I saw the former as simply descriptive, and largely value neutral: my neurology is an outlier, the latter seemed to normalise what I very definitely experience as pathology and sometimes even want to celebrate it.

And I don't want to celebrate the way my own nervous system torments me constantly, nor do I seek to regard that as "just another equally valid way of being that's no worse than any other", because it is objectively worse.

My nervous system torments me. That's not a good thing.

BUT:

I find my position evolving quite a lot more nuance. One of the things I've been doing for the last year is therapy. I had loads of therapy before but this time I had specific requirements.

I wanted a therapist who was: female, late diagnosed ADHD, LGBT positive, and on stimulant medication.

And there are reasons for all of these, but the ones that may not be immediately obvious are why she needed to be late diagnosed and on stimulants.

It's because I didn't want to have a recurring expense while I talked to someone weekly for an hour a time during which I spent large fractions of that hour having stuff pushed at me that I KNOW DOES NOT WORK, and having to argue the toss.

I needed commonality of reference.

Let me give you an example: mindfulness meditation. I can't. Don't reply to this saying that I just have to practice, or I haven't found my thing. I can't do it. Any form of metacognition while I'm in the unmedicated state results in setting off an ADHD thought chain that starts ruminating on metacognition, which ruminates on rumination on metacognition, which ruminates on ruminates on STACK OVERFLOW! CORE DUMPED!

Or in common parlance, "it gives me a right fucker of a migraine".

That's the unmedicated state (in case it's not clear, stimulant meds aren't like, say, antidepressants where you aim for a constant effect. What you get instead is two modes: medicated and unmedicated, and you will switch from one to the other sometimes as abruptly as under a minute. You can seem to be two different people). I can do mindfulness meditation in the medicated state.

There's just no point that I've discovered to doing that. Useless activity. "Find inner calm!" Um, got it. That's why I am able to count my breaths or some shit. So what?

"Well it's like exercising a muscle, and eventually you'll be able to do it unmedicated"

No I won't, because that MAKES MY SYNAPSES CRASH MY BRAIN, and if it didn't I wouldn't be in the unmedicated state, knobhead.

My therapist asked me, "can you meditate?"

"No"

"Ok, cool. Me neither. Let's do something else"

Easy. "Something else" was reparenting my inner child and it's been crazy effective.

And yesterday I watched this video: youtube.com/watch?v=zL_s6dKitH…

And it helped crystallise something I've been thinking more and more because YouTube has been increasingly pushing pop psychology videos at me and something most of them have in common is this: They present common neurodivergent behaviours as "trauma response", and never once mention neurodivergence.

And yeah, that's exactly why I'm starting to feel that "neurodiversity" is something that I can identify with. Yes, my neurology results in things that are objectively pathological and they never won't be.

But the fact that I'm playing with a Whacky Tracks fidget stim whilst typing this is not one of them. That's harmless, and it doesn't mean "I'm stressed", or that "mummy didn't love me". It just means that I enjoy having something in my hand to fiddle with.

The Fediverse to Bluesky crossposter is gonna have a field day with this one. I wish it the best of luck. If you want to see it unadulterated, try here: thegoatery.dyndns.org/profile/…