Notes on Neurodivergence: A Love Letter
The trope goes, “how do you know if someone is neurodivergent? They’ll tell you.” Yet, if we ever met IRL, there’s only a 0.6% chance that I would have told you I’m autistic because for the remaining 99.4% of my life, I just didn’t know. As it turns out, I’ve been trying to make sense of the world around me with physiology not suited to the majority of it.
Disclaimer of Sorts
I wanted to write this post because I’ve struggled at navigating life without the right diagnosis and want to share a bit of context on how I got here and why it’s important. This is a love letter to myself and to anyone who might chance upon it and find something helpful in these words. I share all this from a place of personal observation and from where I can (finally) add some legitimacy to the way I present my ideas. For this, I am indebted to the miracle of pharmaceutical science, advancements in the field of psychology, and some remarkable people I’ve met over the years.
I also share this with the humility that comes from knowing that I’m still young in my journey of self-discovery and reorientation of my relationship with the neurotypical world. Which means I cannot guarantee that this post makes use of the perfect syntax (although I have made the best effort to) and that everything said here will stand the test of time (although I will call myself out when I learn more, that’s a given).
Context for Comprehensibility
The lack of timely diagnosis for my variation of autism left me burnt out. Not the kind where you take a vacation and feel better. The kind where you’re bedridden and catatonic because everything went wrong all at once and the mental gymnastics of not being able to make sense of it left nothing in the tank. I was misunderstood by the people around me, isolated in rooms full of people who thought they knew me, losing interest in my career, struggling with responsibility, and not showing up in sync with the values I stand by. A complicated upbringing compounded all of it, and the lack of awareness and access to research in the space, even by mental health professionals, made day-to-day functioning a crippling difficulty to say the least.
Perchance, a well-intentioned relative mused that I could not seem to catch a break lately and that is what got me thinking. In response to their prompt, I asked myself if I wanted any of this and the answer was a resounding no. So then I asked myself why I kept making the choices I did and that thread ended up leading me to where we are today. It was no easy task and consumed a good two plus years of my life during which the world carried on as it did, troubles due to misunderstanding and miscommunication in all aspects of life had compounded, and it was basically now or never.
The Choices We Are Given
At an inflection point like this, we are given two choices in life. Be real and face the truth, as ugly as it gets, with the noble intention of understanding reality as it is. Or build walls and find perverse ways to cope. I had done the latter for over 99% of my life so the obvious rational choice I made was to try the approach of getting radically real. And even then, for too many reasons to name, I couldn’t find an answer immediately. What made the difference though, is the will to obsessively search for one. In hindsight, this was an autistic trait as plainly as it could present itself.
So on I went down the uncomfortable path. After a few hundred hours of self-authoring in journal entries, a few hundred more hours of therapy, and another few hundred hours of my life spent going and being sent down the wrong tracks (mostly inadvertently), I came to a place of understanding. This prompted me to take the reins of my mental health treatment and direct my providers to apply their academic training to an area of focus that I had narrowed down based on reading and research, primarily the DSM-5 criteria and related material that’s right there if one cares enough to look.
The Choices We Must Make
Post-diagnosis, treatment, and supporting counseling, I’ve realized that autists need to be aware of their condition because the present-day industrial complex doesn’t have accessible language for us to help others relate to us. On the flip side, we go about our entire lives converting relatability into the equivalent of code and then run this in our brains day in and day out so that we may understand those who don’t understand us. And then this becomes automatic like muscle memory except the cognitive load of pretending while simultaneously existing is real. If you’ve found success in the neurotypical world operating like this, then you know what white-knuckling through life can do to you.
Some days I look back and wonder how I even made it out alive to see this day (and I now pat myself on the back without a care in the world for what others may think about my self-congratulatory behavior).
But I digress. The choice we make once we know, as lifelong autists of the masking type, is how radically do we present our real self to the world. On the one extreme we can drop all filters altogether and on the other we can make more selective choices. I belong to the latter school of thought for a couple of reasons and I don’t expect everyone to be agreeable to my perspective. Again, this is not advice but just a personal story, so treat it accordingly.
First, I actually enjoy the problems of and puzzle-like nature that the neurotypical world is to me and the rewards that solving it brings. I get to drive a nice car, live in a nice apartment, and travel the world. All of these luxuries help me thrive within the limitations of my condition, feeding my penchant for curiosities and interests that are fractal like in nature. Both deep and broad at the same time.
Second, with my proclivity for pattern recognition, I can actually do a damned good job of the so-called puzzle solving. I now think that my temporary mid-life collapse was because I had the frameworks all wrong, having been raised in a neurotypical world, given neurotypical playbooks, and neurotypical treatment for something fundamentally at odds with that type of construct all the way in my bones.
An analogy I keep coming back to is this. As an autist, I was reverse engineering the code that I saw the neurotypical world run, loading it into my own environment, and then executing it. The problem? I was writing code that had incompatible environment parameters, missing library files, and lengthy inefficient loops that drained the finite RAM my hardware had. The solution was then to not reverse engineer neurotypicality for the neurodiverse self but to release neurodiverse software compatible with the neurotypical OS.
Frankly, this is a superpower the way I see it. Now, instead of pattern matching everything I see and chasing every novel thread I find, the awareness of my proclivities and the treatments for it allow me to laser focus on the most optimal paths in the real world. Basically like a premium app experience pushed to people and contexts that I think are worthwhile.
That said, I do want to be a bit more specific about the hidden cost of masking because the abstract version above doesn’t nearly do it justice. The mask I put on prevented vertical career growth past a point because the cognitive cost of maintaining it left nothing for the mental acumen to thrive on. I made choices in relationships that I didn’t need to make, choices that caused pain I could have avoided myself and spared for the unaware person on the other side of the equation. And underneath all of it, the internal trifecta of blame, shame, and guilt quietly eroded my self-worth and sense of identity until I couldn’t tell the difference between who I was and who I was performing.
That erosion is the real cost. Not the burnout, not the career stalls, not even the relationship wreckage. It’s waking up one day and realizing you don’t know who you are without the mask because you’ve never been able to find out.
The Choices That Set Us Free
The irony of this whole journey is that the answer was never to become more normal. It was to stop trying entirely. The mask was the disease, not the autism. The frameworks I was running were incompatible with my hardware. The relationships that drained me were the ones where I was performing a version of myself that didn’t exist. The career burnout wasn’t from working too hard. It was from working too hard at being someone I’m not.
I’m still early in this. The diagnosis is fresh, the treatment is recent, and the unmasking is ongoing. Some days the clarity is exhilarating. Other days the weight of seeing several decades of life through a new lens is crushing. I don’t have a neat conclusion because there isn’t one. The code is still being rewritten. Some patches work. Some break things I thought were fixed. The compiler throws errors I didn’t expect and some mornings I’m not sure the program is going to run at all.
But for all its messiness, the code is mine now and for the first time, it’s running on compatible hardware. This is more than enough for me. One must imagine Sisyphus happy after all.
Practical Tips I Now Use
In the days since my diagnosis so far, these are some approaches I’ve developed that help me navigate the neurotypical world with my wiring intact. They’re personal, not prescriptive, and still evolving. I share these with you in case you find some utility in them too.
Self-Check
The single most useful habit I’ve built is a state check. Before any decision, reaction, or interpersonal judgment, I run through a quick inventory: have I eaten, hydrated, slept, taken my medication on time, moved my body, and am I currently masking? If any of those are compromised, I don’t trust the conclusion my brain is handing me. I fix the input first and revisit the decision later. This sounds obvious but for someone whose interoception (the ability to read internal body signals) is impaired, hunger, dehydration, and fatigue genuinely don’t register until they’ve already distorted my thinking. Externalizing the check removes the guesswork.
An additional insight that took me a while to land on is that if my state is clear and a feeling about a person or situation has been consistent across multiple instances over time, I trust it. Not everything requires a rigorous analysis. Sometimes “this drains me” or “this energizes me” is the whole answer. The challenge for the autistic brain is giving yourself permission to act on a feeling without first building a case for it.
Pattern Evaluation
Pattern recognition is one of my greatest strengths and one of my most dangerous liabilities. The autistic brain sees patterns everywhere and the temptation is to treat every pattern as signal. I’ve learned to pressure test the patterns I notice before acting on them. The questions I ask myself: can this be proven wrong? Can I explain how it works, not just that it correlates? Does it actually predict anything, or does it only make sense in hindsight? And most critically, do I want this to be true? That last one is the trap. The strength of my desire for a pattern to hold is often inversely correlated with its reliability. The patterns I want to be real deserve the most scrutiny, not the least.
The same applies to reading people. Rather than relying on gut instinct (which is unreliable when interoception is impaired and old wounds are in the mix), I evaluate behavior over time. Does the reality of my situation line up with what this person is telling me? Has their pattern over months and years actually been good for me? Is their perspective serving them at my expense? These aren’t cynical questions. They’re survival questions for someone whose trust calibration was broken early and needs external verification.
Executive Communication
The social firmware that calibrates delivery for neurotypical people runs in their background. Mine doesn’t. This shows up in two opposite ways. In everyday professional settings, autistic communication is direct, precise, and efficient. The neurotypical world often experiences this as blunt, cold, or arrogant. The fix: before any important interaction, I ask myself five questions. What do they want from this conversation? What do I want? What’s the emotional subtext? What should I say? And just as importantly, what should I not say?
Conversely, in high-stakes executive conversations, my instinct is to start with the complex branches, the nuances, the philosophical framing, when what the room needs is a position stated in two sentences followed by evidence. The fix: lead with the conclusion, support it with one specific story, tie it back to their context. Depth on request, not by default.
Energy Attunement
The simplest framework that I’ve adopted is energy-based decision making. After any interaction, I ask: do I feel energized or drained? If a person, activity, or environment consistently drains me across multiple encounters, I step back. If it energizes me, I step in. No further analysis needed.
This sounds reductive but for someone who spent decades overriding their own signals to meet neurotypical expectations, it’s revolutionary. The drain isn’t always about the other person being bad. Often it’s about a mismatch between the depth I bring and the depth the situation calls for. Calibrating my investment to the actual relationship, rather than the relationship I wish it were, has been one of the most freeing adjustments I’ve made.
Working Memory
The ADHD side of my wiring means working memory is often constrained. For years I compensated with elaborate to-do systems across multiple apps and notebooks, reviewed constantly, updated obsessively. The cognitive load of managing the anxiety about forgetting was consuming more working memory than the forgetting itself.
The fix was to simplify radically. One list, one place, checked once in the morning. If it matters this week, it goes on the list. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t exist yet. Minor tasks like taking out the trash don’t need a list. Environmental cues handle those. The urge to write everything down is the anxiety, not the ADHD.
However, with the right treatment plan in place, I can trust my brain to surface things when they’re relevant or reconstruct context when needed. Letting go of the panic of forgetting freed up the exact capacity I was panicking about not having. And this capacity relieving effect then improves other areas of life where executive function is needed to be effective.
Helpful Resources
If you’ve read this far, thank you. This wasn’t easy to write and I imagine it wasn’t always easy to read. If any of it resonated, the resources below are where a lot of my own understanding began. I hope they will help you as much as they have helped me.