I have ADHD. I was diagnosed as a child and given a variety of medications for it. None of them went great. I currently take no medications for it. Things are… often difficult.

That’s not because this is a disability, per se — though, up until recently, I definitely thought of it in those terms. My life is difficult because I am forced to live in a society dominated by beings with bizarre neural architectures.

Let’s call them ‘neurotypicals’, or ‘NTs’, and me ‘neurodivergent’ or ‘ND’, for lack of better terms. However, I feel like these terms are part of the problem.

Why should I be seen as abnormal, and them normal?

I even wrote a fictional DMS-5 entry, from a universe in which the reverse of this was true — to illustrate how they could be seen as the freaks, and to aid in speculation on the specifics of their hypothetical suffering.

I’m done writing for neurotypical people. My writing will, from now on, be written from an unapologetically ADHD perspective, and unapologetically for an ADHD audience. If NT people end up being fans of me, that is fine — but I am not going to coddle them anymore. I am not going to break and twist my writing, to misrepresent my thought process as a neurotypical one.

In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber says:

Most of us are capable of getting a superficial sense of what others are thinking or feeling just by observing their tone of voice, or body language — it’s usually not hard to get a sense of people’s immediate intentions and motives, but going beyond that superficial often takes a great deal of work. Much of the everyday business of social life, in fact, consists in trying to decipher others’ motives and perceptions. Let us call this “interpretive labor.” One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, they do not… Most human relations — particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies — are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view… …rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of… patriarchal arrangements. It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom (“women’s intuition”) unavailable to men. And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mystically wise. Generations of women novelists — Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind (To the Lighthouse) — have documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant efforts women end up having to expend in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of oblivious and self-important men, involving the continual work of imaginative identification, or interpretive labor. This work carries over on every level. Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence. A popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Usually, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and are outraged at the suggestion that they should have to think about it…

[bolding my own]

In context, he’s talking about the effect that structural violence has on our imaginations — i.e., that the powerful tend to know much less about the powerless than the powerless do about the powerful.

This is partially adaptable to the ND experience — but, crucially, partially not. Note the bolded section — that is not true for ND people interacting with NT people.

There are clear differences between how we think and how NTs think, and there are differences between how NDs and NTs express themselves emotionally and rhetorically. We learn how to pretend to be NT, and how to interpret NT people — we have to. But, it is always a sustained and difficult act of empathy — it is never easy. And, it is never perfect — the neural chasm is always ultimately unbridgeable. I have grown so used to constantly doing this difficult interpretative labor that it is difficult at times for me to understand myself on my own terms — I have been trained to construct, in my head, a NT subject that I explain my own ADHD to. I have been trained to write like an NT, to an audience of NTs. Perhaps I still do. I am working on it — writing like this, with the cascading sectionlets, is part of that attempt.

Thus, the interpretive labor placed on NDs is two-fold — first, we must perform NT-ness, and communicate as such so that we might be understood by the NT monstrosity that we find ourselves faced with — second, we must attempt to discern what this NT person could possibly want with us.

Crucially, this is not a symmetrical interaction. We spend our entire lives learning to attempt to understand the cold outsideness of neurotypicality. The NTs we are forced to deal with do no such thing — they will never and can never be as good at understanding us as we are at understanding them. Just as there is a lopsided structure of the imagination between women and men, there is a lopsided structure of the imagination between NDs and NTs.