What if we're the normal ones?
Just saying, neurotypical folks are awfully smug about their lack of sensitivity
I’m still not completely confident telling people that I’m autistic and ADHD. I worry that people will immediately think that I’m less capable, take me less seriously… that they’ll think there’s something wrong with me.
And I know that’s, at least to a certain extent, because there’s still a part of me that believes there’s something wrong with being neurodivergent. After all, I’ve been raised in a society that doesn’t like difference. I’ve been conditioned to think it’s better to fit in. To be “normal”. But who got to say that being neurotypical was normal? What if being neurodivergent - and I hate that word - doesn’t represent a divergence from a supposed ideal at all? What if we got here first?
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So here’s my theory: being “neurodivergent” is more in line with how humans would originally have been, and the “neurotypical” ones are not so much the standard for humanity but the people who have adapted to the new paradigm. In which case being neurotypical is less about being “normal” and more about being who modern society wants us to be.
Let me explain.
In prehistoric cultures, having a group of people willing to engage in risky behaviour - like hunting wild boar while evading sabre-toothed tigers, for example - and make snap decisions to take decisive action in the moment on instinct - such as relocating a camp on a vague sense of danger in the air - would have been, not just an advantage, but entirely necessary. Your ADHD friends would have been saving your lives. You’re welcome.
Likewise, having members of the group who paid meticulous attention to detail (shifting weather patterns, signs of potential predators or prey, the types of plants that yielded edible berries, and so on), who were cautious of new foods and sensitive to the tiniest bit of sensory information the world around them offered would have meant the difference between life and death. Again, on behalf of the autistic community, you are welcome.
Admittedly, many of these traits are less useful in the 21st century. But nothing about the way we live today is natural. In fact, our modern society is designed to keep nature as far away as possible. We’ve paved over it, built around it and done our level best to replace it. We’re no longer living in an environment that we were designed for.
Of course we’re overstimulated in this era of electric light, constant artificially produced noises and ceaseless information broadcast from all angles. Of course we’re uncomfortable wrapped in man-made fabrics, thrust into crowds of strangers whilst being isolated from any sense of community, surrounded by concrete and completely out of sync with our circadian rhythms. Yet we hand out diagnoses to the humans whose systems reject this way of being.
Is it the sign of a pathology to find this unnatural lifestyle too much? Or is it, in fact, a sign that your senses have been dulled through over-exposure to find it all manageable?
“Without even realising it, we are over-stimulated and stressed by today’s man-made world, and that makes our bodies more susceptible to disease.”
Professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki
I mean no disrespect to neurotypical folks here. Ultimately, you’ve evolved for your new reality more effectively than we have. You’re ready for this phase of the human story, while we’ve not completely come to terms with the change. As Professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki explains in his book Walking in the Woods, humans have been evolving for more than 7 million years, and we’ve spent 99.99% of that time in a natural environment. It’s only in the last 200 - 300 years that we’ve lived in urban environments. “But,” Professor Miyazaki says, “genes cannot change over just a few hundred years, so we live in our modern society with bodies that are still adapted to the natural environment.”
This disconnect from nature, from our natural selves, is still making us sick. It’s just that neurotypical people are less aware of the impact it’s having. Their bodies and minds aren’t railing against it as loudly as ours. However, according to Miyazaki (and the numerous studies he cites in the book), their bodies and minds are still suffering.
But our capitalist society prefers it when we suffer more quietly.
, in her incredible book Enchantment, shares a theory put forward by psychologist Julian Jaynes, that it was once completely normal for humans to hear voices. Jaynes claims that, up until around 2,000 BCE, the human mind was bicameral, or two-chambered. This divide separated our thoughts from the awareness that processed them, meaning that we experienced our thoughts as a voice outside ourselves. All humans were hearing a “god” speak to them, which they then obeyed.Hearing voices, then, was not always considered the frightening illness that it is now. It was part of daily life.
This might go some way towards explaining why, according to many ancient texts, once upon a time almost everyone was hearing god speak to them, whereas nowadays he seems much more selective about who he chats to.
When hearing voices is depicted in modern media, it’s always a malevolent voice that urges the person to hurt themselves or others. This certainly does happen, but it’s nowhere near as common amongst voice-hearers as Hollywood would have us believe. The vast majority of people who hear voices experience them as benign and harmless. In fact, one in ten people will hear voices at some point and often they’ll cause no issues whatsoever. It’s not even automatically diagnostic of a mental health problem.
As a writer, that doesn’t really surprise me. Most writers are used to sharing brain space with beings that don’t exist - it’s how we operate. Characters are chattering away in our ears all day long. We’ve just managed to convince the world to label it legitimate work instead of psychosis. Alice Walker apparently began writing The Color Purple after she had been sitting quietly in a house and suddenly heard the characters talking to one another. Maybe the difference between a writer and a “normal” person is that, when we hear voices or see people who aren’t there, we don’t freak out and call a doctor, we just write it down.
So perhaps hearing voices is another neurodivergence that is actually built into our design, it’s just that at some point it became inconvenient and so we learned to overcome it. It still pops up from time to time, though, because it’s not a “flaw”, it’s our natural state. Just another part of nature that we no longer tolerate.
As neurodivergent people, we’ve been told over and again that we’re not “normal”. But an estimated one in five people are neurodivergent. That’s a hell of a lot of people to not be normal. And neurodivergent traits aren’t exclusive to neurodivergent people - many “neurotypical” people have these traits, they just don’t have enough (or enough in enough intensity) to be deemed worthy of a diagnosis. Or to feel the need to seek one in the first place. So actually, it’s far more than 20% of the population that has these experiences and behaviours to some extent, although the four (ish) in five can get through their days without having to experience the (entirely unnecessary) systemic barriers that society puts in the way of the hardcore full ND-ers.
Any group needs diversity - it supports growth, strengthens the population, and provides protection. Diversity in how our brains work is no different. We need a variety of perspectives and ways of thinking.
Conservationist and broadcaster Chris Packham said it best:
“Neurodiversity is an in-built, important part of our species. […] We need variation in any species, because if resources change, positions change, certain members of that species will prosper above others; it’s a survival mechanism. You can’t argue that neurodiverse people haven’t been shaping civilisation, I think we have been shaping civilisation. Perhaps it’s an important part of our function, perhaps that’s why we’re there. […] There’s the expression, ‘that person sees outside the box’ - I don’t see a box. In a time of crisis, whether it’s climate, biodiversity, cost of living, we need people who don’t see boxes.”
Chris Packham
I don’t believe that neurodivergence is an error. It’s necessary. It’s there for a reason. Maybe it’s how we were initially meant to be. Sure, times have moved on and it might not always be practical now, but we need to question why we place so much value of sameness and conformity, and whether that’s really helping anyone.
It seems strange, to me, that we consider a lack of sensitivity to the world around us and a lack of deep interest or close attention to be so much “better”. That we are all quite so eager to fit comfortably within the box and trundle on through life following an entirely unnatural and societally constructed way of being and doing.
I’m not saying that being neurodivergent is “better” or more desirable, and I’m certainly not suggesting that it doesn’t come with challenges (although many of those are, themselves, societally constructed and could be easily alleviated if we relaxed our obsession with “the way things are meant to be done”). But it also comes with advantages and I don’t think those are there by accident.
So maybe stop writing us off as freaks. We might be more normal than you think.
This is great and something I've been thinking about a LOT. Like, when I learned that there is a huge chunk of the population that has NO internal monologue, I didn't think that was a GOOD thing? I was also just completely blown away that was even a thing.
Totally agree. Have you read Dr. Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal book? Or his Scattered Minds book about ADHD (which he and his sons have)? One of his main points is that what’s normal in Western capitalist culture is toxic and neurodivergent people are more aware of and affected by that toxicity because of our heightened sensitivity.