#i Do Not Get ppl who just float through life without fixations

[sheathandshear]

I’m glad that people are starting to move away from “wink wink nudge nudge he’s (always he) special but not ABNORMAL” depictions of autism/ADHD/SPD/what have you but sometimes I think people are being pressured to swing too far in the opposite direction, where if characters aren’t immediately recognizable as having this discrete diagnosis, that’s ableism and Bad Representation.

I think there’s value in writing characters who are clearly neuroatypical but in a way that’s hard to pin down, that doesn’t conform neatly to one DSM-V category or another. Neuroatypical diagnoses describe real experiences in a groupable way but they’re also not laws of nature, they’re culturally and temporally dependent. Even within the Western medical model, what’s considered absolutely “characteristic” of XYZ condition changes.

And the consequences of that often have to do with expanding those categories — understanding gendered presentation of female-socialized ADHD vs. male-socialized ADHD, for example, or racialized diagnosis of ODD vs. autism. Which is good! But I hope that we can also acknowledge that just... humans are diverse, “neuroatypical” and “neurotypical” are not neatly divided opposites, and there are a lot of people who live in cousin-y grey areas where their experience of embodiment/themselves/other people/the world overlaps but is not identical with people who meet more of the “characteristic” features of recognized defined conditions, and exploring those experiences in fiction enriches rather than detracts.

[schafpudel]

#neurodiversity #griping coming from personal experience lol #like. i personally Vibe better with ND people #especially those with special interests close to the things I’m passionate about #i Do Not Get ppl who just float through life without fixations a#nd I have sensory / emotional / executive functioning / Earthling-on-Mars social atypicality #that is very cousin-y at times #but i also have plenty of stuff that does NOT overlap #to the point where I don’t qualify (or think I should qualify) for xyz diagnosis #which is okay! i can make my home in the borderlands #and I do meet a lot of other ppl who are frankly Weird (affectionate) #who are clearly Not Average but would be diagnosed 6 different ways by 6 different people #or not diagnosed in a medicalized / pathologized way at all #which ya know. good or bad or both depending on if they’re getting support if they need it #but maybe we can and should make space for a scrum of human experience #rather than insisting that people *always* be sorted into Box A or Box B whether or not they want to be there #and that the refusal / disinterest / inability to get crammed into either box #does Harm to the ppl for whom those boxes give them clarity & a healthy happy home #definitely applies to real ppl but when applied to characters turns into Clown Time #put on ur red nose and big shoes to suicide bait a writer whose characters aren’t copy-pasted from the DSM-V

I’m glad that people are starting to move away from “wink wink nudge nudge he’s (always he) special but not ABNORMAL” depictions of autism/ADHD/SPD/what have you but sometimes I think people are being pressured to swing too far in the opposite direction, where if characters aren’t immediately recognizable as having this discrete diagnosis, that’s ableism and Bad Representation.

I think there’s value in writing characters who are clearly neuroatypical but in a way that’s hard to pin down, that doesn’t conform neatly to one DSM-V category or another. Neuroatypical diagnoses describe real experiences in a groupable way but they’re also not laws of nature, they’re culturally and temporally dependent. Even within the Western medical model, what’s considered absolutely “characteristic” of XYZ condition changes.

And the consequences of that often have to do with expanding those categories — understanding gendered presentation of female-socialized ADHD vs. male-socialized ADHD, for example, or racialized diagnosis of ODD vs. autism. Which is good! But I hope that we can also acknowledge that just... humans are diverse, “neuroatypical” and “neurotypical” are not neatly divided opposites, and there are a lot of people who live in cousin-y grey areas where their experience of embodiment/themselves/other people/the world overlaps but is not identical with people who meet more of the “characteristic” features of recognized defined conditions, and exploring those experiences in fiction enriches rather than detracts.