I Want To Be An Ally

Hello, and thank you for visiting this site. There are a ton of resources here that were created by neurodivergent folks like me to help people like you better understand how to relate to us.

Please note: you are guests here, and the content on this site will not center your perspective. That may be challenging or even upsetting for some of you, but please understand that this is a space for neurodivergent people first and foremost. If you want to be an ally, the first prerequisite is learning to decenter yourself.

With that out of the way, I want to thank you for taking the time to learn more about us from us. My dream is for this website to be the place people go to get answers to questions they didn’t know they had.

Right now the content on this site skews very heavily towards autism, ADHD and trauma because those are the primary flavors of neurodiversity that impact my life. A principle of this site is that nobody should be speaking for conditions they don’t personally experience, so I’m in the process of identifying people to pay to help me flesh out all of the content.

That said, if you want to learn to be a better ally to neurodivergent people, here’s a syllabus.

Read

How To Talk About Autism Respectfully⁠

and ask yourself how it makes you feel. If you have Autistic people in your life, is this essay in keeping with your experiences? If not, where does it diverge? Now share this essay with the Autistic people in your life and ask them the same questions.

Read

Humanizing the DSM's Definition of Autism⁠

and ask yourself if your understanding of what autism is has changed after these two readings.

If you are in any kind of leadership role at work — or even if you are someone with enough privilege that your opinions are heard — please take a moment to read about

Creating an Autistic-Friendly Workplace⁠

and

Managing Disabled Reports: A Q&A⁠

. We need more people in leadership roles to be literate about these topics.

You have to understand the cycle of

Neurodiversity and Trauma⁠

. Many of us get trapped in trauma loops that we can’t escape, and live our entire lives from meltdown to meltdown. Understanding this cycle is the key to breaking it.

Pay attention to what we mean when we talk about Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), it’s real and we experience it to a degree you can’t imagine. It’s excruciating.

On Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria⁠

To get a sense of how to think about neurodiversity at large, I recommend reading

Unnamed Constellations: Neurotypes, Traits and the Future of Neurodiversity⁠

. This is an ambitious framing of the whole field, but a powerful metaphor when getting into the details of any individual’s needs.

Read everything in

Guest Essays⁠

. These are by neurodivergent people who are taking some time to tell you a little bit about what their lives are like. Notably many of these authors are multiply-marginalized, meaning that this site is trying to surface intersectional experiences of neurodiversity.

Understand that we really, really do fundamentally experience the world differently than you do. Our perspective isn’t wrong because it’s different. We observe different things in the same scene, we draw different conclusions from the same evidence. We fundamentally construct reality differently than you do. Your neurotype tends to value consensus-based verification of facts, and so it can be really jarring to you when we don’t arrive at the consensus opinion. We ask that you overcome the urge to police us and instead learn to value the difference that our perspective generates.

We ask that you grant us the same interpretive generosity that we give you.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.