Late-diagnosed neurodivergent culture is having been obsessed with personality typing and character archetyping systems your whole life because A: you were desperate for an explanation as to why you were different, and B: humans are terrifying and unpredictable and you wanted some way to fairly-reliably predict their behaviors and motivations.
And then, post-diagnosis, going back to those things and laughing when you realize how many blatant descriptions of neurodivergence are in them. And wondering how many of them are that way because their creators were scared, lonely, confused NDs just like you.
nd culture is using big archaic words because it's fun to be overdramatic in that sense. and because thee/thou/thy/thine/thyself is fun to say and be informal about
ND culture is not being able to tell the difference between a bunch of people laughing amongst themselves about whatever and a bunch of people laughing at you in particular
I love eating food “wrong” because it makes the experience about 10 times more enjoyable. It used to drive my parents crazy but that didn’t stop me!! I would pick the chocolate chips out of my cookies and eat them separately, split apart the frosting from cake, sort my M&Ms and eat them in a very specific way- (first, you sort them into different colors, then you eat them until you have the same amount of each color, and then you eat them alternately in least to most favorite color order).
I also had a phase where I used to buy a giant bag of smarties and label every wrapper with a number and eat from the highest number counting down, saving any of the white smarties in a bag until I’d eaten the rest of them. No clue why I did this but it made that mediocre candy extremely fun.
Doing stuff like that doesn’t hurt anyone and it’s fun so I don’t get why it gets pushback sometimes!
Neurodivergent writer culture is making new names for neurodivergent neurotypes that focus on the positive aspects of the type instead of the negative ones in your fantasy/scifi conlang.
ND culture is when your favorite color is minty teal-green but you also feel a little conflicted liking it because mint and anything with menthol in it is sensory torture for you to eat (except for some super sweet peppermint treats but that's kinda just because the sugar totally overpowers the mint, and that's associated with red for some reason).
"dont label yourself x neurodivergence. don't put yourself in a box"
When the people who say this the most, are working with outdated definitions of x neurodivergence.
They are annoyed by the black and white picture they remember seeing so long ago, when I'm talking about a brand new technicolor ultraviolet 3D movie that has more colors than they have names for.
Don't put myself in a box?
You only think this box is a prison bc you mistake the black and white lines for bars.
You don't see the secrets written in rainbow invisible ink teaching us how to love ourselves despite the rest of the world telling us all of the reasons we shouldn't.
You don't see the hidden trap door on the floor with a ladder soaked in blood from the excruciating climb, from yet another box, this one ACTUALLY black and white.
The box we were in before we found this beautiful mosaic cube of wonder.
The box we were in before this excruciating climb, labeled "broken"