Seeking neurodivergent women's stories
I want to hear from you!
Hi everyone,
It’s a sweet Sunday afternoon and I am beginning to shed my covid skin — earlier I caught a whiff of my Mrs. Meyers basil-scented dish soap after several days of smelling nothing whatsoever, and let me tell you, smelling dish soap has never felt so grand. A few minutes later, I leaned toward my grapefruit half, nose tentative, and was thrilled to catch its muffled aroma, as if at a distance, under several layers of cheesecloth.
Huzzah!
Olfactory updates aside, I’m writing today because there’s a type of women’s story that I’ve become increasingly passionate about amplifying, and I would love to have your help. The group in question: neurodivergent women, i.e. women with ADHD, autism, dyslexia and other neurological differences, including women who are twice exceptional (oversimplified explanation: cognitively advanced/high IQ *and* neurological difference).
Girls with these neurological differences are chronically under-diagnosed because the picture we and the medical establishment hold in our minds of what ADHD or autism looks like is a picture informed by how these differences express themselves in boys. As a result, women are often diagnosed as adults, if at all, leaving them suffering needlessly for years, thinking something is wrong with them (there is a book about ADHD called, You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?).
I have a number of close friends and clients who didn’t realize they were neurodivergent until they were adults, often because they went through a painful journey of realizing their child’s neurodivergence. I say “painful” not to suggest that neurodiversity itself is painful, rather, that to experience it in a world (school, work, etc) designed for neurotypical people (and poorly, at that) is painful. And to expect certain “age-appropriate” things of your child and realize that they are not capable of those things because of how they’re wired, is painful, in large part because it too often keeps you from focusing on their profound gifts. (As author Steve Silberman writes in his book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, “Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs”; or, as Temple Grandin, an academic and animal behaviorist who is autistic, put it, “I am different, not less.” Just imagine the world without Greta Thunberg.)
My friends’ years of needless suffering, of thinking something was “wrong” with them, not only breaks my heart, but also it infuriates me as yet another example of women suffering because the male experience of something is accepted as “the” experience. (I’m reminded of an article I edited for Evoke.org about the dangers of gender bias by design — an informative read that I highly recommend if this idea is new to you.
More recommended reading: Child Mind Institute: How Girls With ADHD Are Different and Scientific American: Autism — It’s Different in Girls.
If you are a neurodivergent woman willing to share your story, I would love to hear from you. Together, we canamplify awareness and compassion, and help women who are suffering find their way to the understanding and support they deserve.
In her book, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, author Katherine May shares the moment that a piece of media helped her realize she was autistic. She’s in her late 30s, driving along, listening to the radio, when she hears someone describe their experience of being autistic, and she feels a shock of recognition; per May’s website, “it leads to a re-evaluation of her life so far - a kinder one, which finally allows her to be different rather than simply awkward, arrogant or unfeeling.”
This subject is personal for me, not only because of how many close friends I have who are going on this late-in-life journey, but also because my daughter is twice exceptional. I’m not, technically, but I’d say I’m twice-exceptional-adjacent: I have a high IQ, though not as high as hers; and while I don’t think I’m autistic, I strongly identify with autistic people’s first-person narratives about the experience of sensory overload. I’ve always been a highly sensitive person, in a way that’s made it hard for me to “just suck it up” in a number of life’s contexts; and in fact, reading the book, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine Aron, when I was in my 20s, gave me a shock of recognition like the one May describes experiencing.
I want to amplify stories of neurodivergent women for the same reason I want to amplify all women’s stories: Because they matter, first and foremost, and because seeing someone like you represented authentically in any form of media can be life-changing. It’s something everyone deserves.
What’s more, unlocking one person’s understanding of themselves or their child as neurodivergent so often unlocks an entire family’s understanding of each other, and their ability to form strong relationships, celebrate each other’s strengths, and thrive.
When she was a guest on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things, Katherine May shared,
I always felt, right from the start, that I was very different to everyone else. It was this sense of being alien. I can remember being 9 or 10 and fantasizing that I could take off my skin and reveal the person I was supposed to be underneath. I felt like I wasn’t what I should be. Nobody had a story for that at the time because girls didn’t get diagnosed with autism at that time. There was no possibility of me forming a positive narrative.
I believe it was in this same interview that May expressed how reading ABOUT autism, she never saw herself in the description; but reading personal narratives of other people’s individual experiences of being autistic, resonated deeply. This is part of what galvanized me to be part of gathering these first-person narratives.
Ok. I think that’s it, for now. Please, help me with this project by spreading the word far and wide. And if you are neurodivergent and have favorite blogs, books, podcasts, etc that you feel do a good job of sharing first-person experiences of neurodivergent women, I would absolutely love to know; I can round them up on a page of recommended resources.
Thank you!
YOU ARE A MIGHTY FORCE!
Amanda