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What Is Neurotypical
Something we, and a lot of people, struggle with is feeling fake. We've been thinking about it a lot, and what contributes to it, and these are some of the things that we have come up with that have worsened our black and white thinking when it comes to neurodivergence and also bpd specifically.
At least one of the issues I've identified is the kind of posts I see on tumblr and twitter that are something like "*has a good day* guess I'm neurotypical now!" or things like people saying "anybody neurotypical enough to help me with _____?" (something we have seen people say btw, these aren't hypotheticals).
Neither of these posts are Bad with a capital B or anything. But what we've been noticing is how much the sentiment behind them, and Tumblr's (as if Tumblr is a monolith lol) attitude toward neurodivergence has affected our insecurity, which was certainly there before we ever used Tumblr. Maybe Tumblr is just magnifying everyone's insecurities, and turning them into funny/relatable posts, we're never sure how we feel about that aspect of it.
We're terrified whenever we have a good day, or heaven forbid a good few days, or a good week, that we've become neurotypical, we're totally cured and now all our friends will leave us when they realize how good we have it. We see it often where someone will say "I'm having a bad mental health day-- not that I ever have good mental health days" and it upsets us that people, ourselves included, feel the need to justify things like this. Having a bad mental health day shouldn't make anyone worry that people will assume that their other days are just peachy, nor should it be a bad thing if their days actually are peachy usually. I know for us it comes from a fear of being misunderstood, we hate to think that anyone will make assumptions about us, but we're working on not justifying the things we say or do that don't need justifying.
The line between neurotypical and neurodivergent is not black and white, sometimes it's political, sometimes it's sexist or racialized, and in the end, much of it is just arbitrary in the sense that we draw a line where things are often blurry and not nearly so cut and dry as the lines make them seem (say, in the case of personality disorders, which are also often used in ways by doctors that aremisogynistic and racialized). I guess the point I'm making is that I don't like the way we talk about neurodivergent vs neurotypical as if it's a clear cut line, that either you Are, or you Aren't.
Logically we know that us having a good day, or at least, us having had almost a year of relatively stable moods does not undo the years of instability, nor does it override the dissociation and other symptoms we still experience, but we think that the kind of flippant posts we see and the environment we're in on Tumblr/Twitter does contribute to our literally constant worrying and beating ourselves up over whether or not we're neurodivergent/neurodivergent Enough.
Sometimes it feels like, though surely not intentionally, Tumblr (or at least the specific Tumblr community/circles we're in) does create an environment in which it feels like you have to suffer performatively to prove that you are neurodivergent enough. You have to be at "peak suffering" lest your neurodivergent card be taken from you.
Then again, this could be us just being borderline and not actually seeing things clearly due to the way we tend to look at the world. We're never sure. Are we even borderline? I'm trying not to think about it too hard to stop myself from freaking out about it.
Congrats you got to the end of my long post! :) I'd appreciate comments/thoughts on this, even (maybe especially) if you disagree!
- Misty
At least one of the issues I've identified is the kind of posts I see on tumblr and twitter that are something like "*has a good day* guess I'm neurotypical now!" or things like people saying "anybody neurotypical enough to help me with _____?" (something we have seen people say btw, these aren't hypotheticals).
Neither of these posts are Bad with a capital B or anything. But what we've been noticing is how much the sentiment behind them, and Tumblr's (as if Tumblr is a monolith lol) attitude toward neurodivergence has affected our insecurity, which was certainly there before we ever used Tumblr. Maybe Tumblr is just magnifying everyone's insecurities, and turning them into funny/relatable posts, we're never sure how we feel about that aspect of it.
We're terrified whenever we have a good day, or heaven forbid a good few days, or a good week, that we've become neurotypical, we're totally cured and now all our friends will leave us when they realize how good we have it. We see it often where someone will say "I'm having a bad mental health day-- not that I ever have good mental health days" and it upsets us that people, ourselves included, feel the need to justify things like this. Having a bad mental health day shouldn't make anyone worry that people will assume that their other days are just peachy, nor should it be a bad thing if their days actually are peachy usually. I know for us it comes from a fear of being misunderstood, we hate to think that anyone will make assumptions about us, but we're working on not justifying the things we say or do that don't need justifying.
The line between neurotypical and neurodivergent is not black and white, sometimes it's political, sometimes it's sexist or racialized, and in the end, much of it is just arbitrary in the sense that we draw a line where things are often blurry and not nearly so cut and dry as the lines make them seem (say, in the case of personality disorders, which are also often used in ways by doctors that aremisogynistic and racialized). I guess the point I'm making is that I don't like the way we talk about neurodivergent vs neurotypical as if it's a clear cut line, that either you Are, or you Aren't.
Logically we know that us having a good day, or at least, us having had almost a year of relatively stable moods does not undo the years of instability, nor does it override the dissociation and other symptoms we still experience, but we think that the kind of flippant posts we see and the environment we're in on Tumblr/Twitter does contribute to our literally constant worrying and beating ourselves up over whether or not we're neurodivergent/neurodivergent Enough.
Sometimes it feels like, though surely not intentionally, Tumblr (or at least the specific Tumblr community/circles we're in) does create an environment in which it feels like you have to suffer performatively to prove that you are neurodivergent enough. You have to be at "peak suffering" lest your neurodivergent card be taken from you.
Then again, this could be us just being borderline and not actually seeing things clearly due to the way we tend to look at the world. We're never sure. Are we even borderline? I'm trying not to think about it too hard to stop myself from freaking out about it.
Congrats you got to the end of my long post! :) I'd appreciate comments/thoughts on this, even (maybe especially) if you disagree!
- Misty
no subject
i think in a lot of ways, instead of raising up the people who are most at odds with "neurotypicality" and thus face violence for it, we've created a culture of smushing down other people. to avoid getting smushed, we have to play up why we're allowed to speak.
it's a troubling cycle.
- aj
no subject
- Misty
no subject
generalising a bit here but i feel like that mentality takes ideas like "hey please don't be ableist and listen to people's experiences with neurodivergence"/"be proud of who you are even if you're not the kind of normal society says you should be" to an extreme of sorts, and turns them into that weird "you can't work towards feeling better or you're no longer allowed to speak about this" requirement.
which fucking sucks :/ and i'm glad we're starting to see some pushback against that bc yeah it's. kind of disheartening to see coping skills we've learned the hard way over the years be dismissed because "oh don't listen to neurotypical karen", when mostly what the ppl posting about Coping Skills And Recovery want is to help people in the same situation not feel so shitty all the time lol
i'd say it also contributes to making current tumblr a Very Shitty environment for safe questioning, because sometimes you know something's happening but you don't know what exactly, but talking safely about it to figure it out isn't an option since some people are going to jump on you for "appropriating mental illness" or whatever, when all you want is. to understand what's happening, maybe what you can do about it?
see also this weird emphasis of "Use The Correct Terms For Your Exact Identity Or You Are Appropriating" over "hey this is a shared/similar experience between different groups!! if you're not sure where you belong that's ok we've still got you on this!!" (which you also see in the syscourse but i'm not going to Open That Specific Can Of Worms rn lmao)
personal experience time: i know like tumblr was *essential* in us figuring out we're autistic, but we're glad that the Tumblr Mood (if u see what i mean?) was wildly different back when we started questioning around 2012-13, otherwise we'd be constantly doubting we're Getting It Right when that's. really not what matters. (not that we aren't getting that "hey you're actually just an Allistic Who Doesn't Try Hard Enough" feel sometimes, but we're generally a lot more secure in this interpretation of our experiences than we'd have been if we'd come into it right into the middle of the current shitstorm ig)
no subject
It's just things seem to have begun to shift in the direction that was originally "it's okay not to choose recovery"/"nobody is obligated to choose recovery" to "if you choose to go into recovery/healthy coping mechanisms you can't possibly understand what it's like to be ND and you're as bad as one of the NTs" or "your experience must fit into a certain label and you're appropriating if you say you might relate to/experience something under a diagnosis you don't have/say you have".
In the end it's not all bad, I'm sure there are still tons of people who wouldn't have figured out certain things, like I didn't, without the way Tumblr has about being open about neurodivergence, we're just realizing just how much the current attitudes have also negatively affected us personally. Though y'all are right, too, these days there's sooo much of "do not interact unless you have X" which can make questioning or overlap seem much more harmful than it actually is (although we don't universally dislike "don't interact if" type statements, but that's a whole other topic haha).
- Duke