Closeted neurodiversity
I just completed a 2-week virtual Behavioral Economics course (literally, 1/2 hour ago!), and my neurons are firing on all cylinders. I’ve been fond of behavioral economics / behavioral science for years. When I worked on wage-hour class actions, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Pinker, Dan Ariely, Freakonomics audiobooks while driving from drugstore to drugstore all over metro NYC interviewing and collecting documents. I can’t even remember how I got into it, though it’s certainly on brand for me. I was fascinated with other languages and cultures since childhood, majored in Linguistics, became a lawyer, and now specialize in diversity & inclusion. I am also pretty sure my own psychological pathologies and failed attempts to control (or even influence!) my own behavior have something to do with this interest.
An interesting, unexpected thing happened to me in class — after I posted a comment in the public chat asking whether “habit modification” might apply differently to people with conditions like ADHD, a classmate sent me a private chat: “Are you neurodiverse as well?” His presumption was correct, of course; though I hadn’t phrased it as such, I was asking the ADHD question about myself. And because I’d already mentioned ADHD, it was easy for me to say “yes!”
But “neurodiverse”? I was familiar with the term. Yet for all my lifelong existential woes about who I am, what I am, what conditions I have, where my conditions end and I begin, why I am always behaving not quite as I am supposed to behave… I had never thought to refer to myself that way.
I kind of liked it.
No one has any clue what it feels like to think with someone else’s brain. Even for neuroscientists, the best anyone can do is describe it using words and figures. How does anyone, let alone a child, internalize what we now refer to as “neurodiversity”?
By the time I was old enough to perceive the differences I perceived in myself and how others reacted to me, they registered as “inferiority.” And I couldn’t fathom a justification for my inferiority. I was quite smart, not particularly pretty but not ugly either, well-loved, and wanted for nothing. I knew these things (with the possible exception of the not ugly part).
I also functioned just fine for everyone else’s purposes. A major condition precedent to an ADHD diagnosis — even now, but certainly back then — is that a child’s issues interfere with their “functioning.” You think “ADHD in kids,” you think disruption, low academic performance. These did not apply to me. I never had any trouble with grades or caused problems in classrooms. Teachers gave my parents rave reviews. I had friendships. Hindsight and confirmation bias illuminate memories that might have hinted at it, but I don’t have enough of them to put little girl me into the CDC’s ADHD box.
Lacking “external” evidence, I ask myself what it was like to be in my brain as a child. What I remember is a constant struggle. I could not accept my inability to identify the source of my constant discomfort and inability to connect, my interactions with the universe struck me as either unusual or exhausting, and the universe reminded me many times a day that I did not belong in this plane of existence. That frightened me; I tried to push it away by putting all my energy into gaining approval from others, and having absolutely none left to regulate my emotions. This pattern was present as early as second grade. Again, knowing what I know now and colored by it, I can perceive myself legitimately as a “neurodiverse” child. But I cannot prove it, and I can think of a dozen counternarratives to contradict any articulation of it (such as simple anxiety, which I also have, though there is a chicken-egg aspect to this).
I have to accept it; I cannot go back in time and get the childhood ADHD diagnosis for which I yearn so that I can make sense of my life experiences.
To be continued. (I’ve decided that since no one reads this and I don’t intend to market it, I’d rather “publish” something incomplete than have 8 billion drafts in my “stories” list. Then maybe I’ll put it into a book someday.)
