If you think neurodivergence is a bad thing? Stop.

Neurotypicality is probably a myth, anyway. I mean, how can people claim to know how a person 200 years ago would have gotten diagnosed as today, if that person were…

• born into a situation where they had no option but to work on the farm their whole life, and/or pump out babies?
• born into a richer family, but thought of as “the odd one”, so they get either sent off into some war to die, or thrown in a back office to just file papers and never say anything but “yes sir”?
• Made it out of either of the above situations by being creative in the arts or sciences, their eccentricities shrugged off as “genius”; if they’re remembered at all today, internet mind-blown types want to debate whether or not they were neurodivergent but serious biographers and doctors realize you can’t just do that about someone who isn’t there, etc.

It’s not like people throughout history had as many options as people today.

Behavior is influenced by literally millions of things — every sensory input, even the ones we’re not aware of… which then awaken (consciously or subconsciously) memories, which are recorded (again, millions of sensory inputs every second, which get recorded and how?) and accessed for reasons we don’y understand and can’t control…

And the emotions evoked by a memory you didn’t realize you were remembering, that comes up due to a smell you didn’t realize you were smelling, nudges your behavior slightly this or that way, for better or for worse, times a trillion.

It’s like a pool table, but with as many balls as, well… atoms in your body.

“Behavior issues” in the past few years, like more public fights and loudness and rudeness comes from the spread of the belief that if you have any standards whatsoever, you’re a snob and a bad person.

(Signed, someone who’s legitimately autistic/neurodiverse/whatever word you want to use, and moved to the other side of the planet to be where people don’t do that rubbish. So don’t blame neurodiversity for assholes.)