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We Are More Than a Collection of Neurodivergent Traits
By telling our stories of diverse lived experience, we build an understanding of neurodivergence that it is more fully human
I bristle whenever I hear someone talk about autistic or ADHD traits. I know what’s coming: a neurotypical person’s potted version of me. I brace myself for yet another reminder of the chasm between my experience as a neurodivergent person and how the world understands it.
Even the tired if you’ve met one autistic person … (which I now hear far more from non-autistic than autistic people) tends to assume that we’re each put together from the same grab bag of identifiable traits.
A list of traits gives the broader community, workplaces and other organisations a shorthand to talk about neurodivergent people. Those who most closely match the stereotypes are more visible and therefore more acknowledged and represented. Those who don’t fit the checklist are doubted, dismissed and overlooked.
It reinforces a narrative that is reductive and inaccurate and fails to capture the diversity, complexity and nuance of real neurodivergent experience. Instead of a trait-based understanding of neurodivergence, society needs to move to one that is based on the lived experience of…
