You Aren’t Neurodiverse

Over on social I’d come across this by Liam Konemann for The Guardian about music clubs and gigs for neurodivergent people, which I read mostly through the lens of having just attended a concert as an autistic person.

I don’t really understand anything the article describes as the accommodations for neurodivergence, although I do appreciate the discussion of the idea that music can be an attention tunnel (they don’t use this term) that itself allows a neurodivergent person to sustain themselves through an overwhelming milieu. Anyway, none of that is why I’m posting about it.

It’s this bit:

Neurodiverse is the umbrella term for a range of diagnoses and experiences, including but not limited to autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, and which often occur together – it’s estimated that one in seven people in the UK are neurodivergent.

This is wrong.

Neurodiversity is everyone. Neurodivergent is being off the “norm”.

I wish people would stop making this mistake but it doesn’t help when neurodivergent people themselves, like one quoted here, say things like, “I’m neurodiverse.”

No, you aren’t. No one person is neurodiverse. No one person can be. Neurodiversity literally is a term meaning “the range of differences in brains across the entire human population”. You as an individual either are neurodivergent or neurotypical. You aren’t diverse any more than a single Black or queer individual is diverse.

It’s something I say most often when talking about whether or not audiobooks are reading, but: words mean things. Please, can we just agree to let them mean what they mean.