Public Neurodiversity Support Center

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Public Neurodiversity Support Center

I'm Neurodivergent

Welcome! This site exists primarily as a place for us to talk about our experiences in ways that center our own voices. It’s amazing how few places like this exist given how many of us there are.

If you’re neurodivergent I have a commitment to you and a request of you.

The commitment is as follows: I will do my best to represent you when I represent us, but I won’t always be up to the task of doing that correctly. If and when I do fall short, please let me know — either via this site’s

feedback mechanisms⁠

or for an immediate response

on twitter⁠

— and I will do my best to integrate your feedback or let you know why I can’t or won’t.

The request is this: please let me pay you to tell your story. Reach out to me on

twitter⁠

to pitch me your intersectional story about neurodiversity. You must be neurodivergent and speaking about your own experiences, and I will pay you from $50-200 based on need. See

Guest Essays⁠

for examples.

⁠

Essays

There’s a lot of content in the

Essays⁠

page, both from me and from guest writers, but for a neurodivergent person visiting this site for the first time I recommend you take a look the

Advice⁠

section.

That’s where I’ve done my best to synthesize my hard-won lessons and hard-fought progress into actionable and intelligible pieces of advice that you won’t hear from any neurotypical therapist or wellness coach.

Some examples I’d like to direct your attention towards:

⁠

On Emotional Processing⁠

was written with the understanding that many ND people struggle with alexithymia, and as a result we never really learn how to process our emotions in a healthy way as children. So many neurodivergent people live in daily terror of our emotions because we don’t have a healthy relationship to them. This essay is a guide towards building that healthy relationship, framed in an autistic-friendly way.

Learning

Unmasking⁠

is really hard, and you may need advice

On Disclosing Autism⁠

to the people in your life if you choose to unmask. The assumption so many of us make, perhaps naively, is “Oh, is that what’s happening? It’s killing me, thank god I finally understand. Let me simply communicate this to the people in my life and then they’ll know how small adjustments in our interactions can make my life much better!” The reality is that oftentimes, neurotypical people really hate it when your outward personality changes. They take it personally, and it’s something that has to be navigated very carefully.

⁠

On Autistic Cognition⁠

isn’t in

Advice⁠

, it’s in

Concepts⁠

, but it’s still a worthwhile read if you feel that you just consume information differently than most people. This won’t apply to everyone — there are as many ways to be autistic as there are autistic people — but many autistic folks I’ve spoken to have said that this resonated strongly with them.

⁠

Resources

There’s a

Resource Center⁠

on this site. The most helpful pages for you are likely going to be the

Resources⁠

page and the

Social Media⁠

page. Both of these are fed by user suggestions, so if you feel like something or someone is missing, please add it and everyone will benefit.

The

Social Media⁠

page in particular is useful if you’re feeling particularly isolated in your neurodiversity — if you don’t have a lot of neurodivergent friends or people you can talk to in your life. THAT’S REALLY COMMON AND YOU SHOULD NOT FEEL BAD ABOUT IT! Instead, do like the rest of us do and join your people on the internet. We’re waiting for you.

⁠

Neurotype Information

This site keeps a list of

Neurotypes⁠

, and has a page dedicated to each. Unfortunately the quality of these pages varies wildly —

Epilepsy⁠

is barely filled in, for instance, while

Autism⁠

has a lot of content.

This is because I can only speak to my own experiences. If you’re here for support and you’re finding that I’m not able to represent your situation accurately, firstly I apologize and take accountability for that. This site is a work in progress and whole areas are still unfinished.

But secondly I’d like to ask you to help me. I’m willing to pay for neurodivergent people to help me flesh out this site in their own words. Your voice could be the one that fills this gap for other people. You could be the one that starts the conversation that gathers enough momentum to become a movement. That’s my vision for this site, and it’s ambitious but together we can do it!

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