How I want to Change the World – One Life at a Time

My dream is to live in a world where people are

More appreciatiative and embracing of diversity in all forms - racial, gender, sexual preference, and neurological. Tolerance is just not good enough. Tolerance still implies disdain and judgement – it implies that you are “putting up” with someone rather than supporting and respecting their right to be different.
More tolerant and respectful of Neurodiverse Personality Traits - Those of us who do not conform to conventional ways of functioning, think out of the box, are highly sensitive, creative, intelligent, challenging, or high functioning ADHD, Aspergers, PTSD, Bipolar, OCD or otherwise “different” from the norm.
Less rewarding of profit, greed and competition in our schools, workplaces, healthcare, financial and social recreational institutions.
More rewarding of values like sharing and seeking to ensure everyone has enough for before accumulating more you really nee. More emphasis on cooperatively profitable living than on profit alone in business.
Not so quick to medicalize personality differences and call people “mentally ill.” We most stop thinking of people as either functional or dysfunctional, healthy or unhealthy, normal or disordered. There is a lot of gray area where it is insulting to treat us like we have to be “fixed” – as if we were machines. Even if medication does help us cope with living in an unnatural society like ours, that doesn’t me there is something “wrong” with us. It just means our values and natural way of being are not “dominant” in our culture.
Have neutral words like “neurodiverse” for understanding exceptional people in the gray area - the outliers between normal and mentally ill. People for whom mainstream advice does NOT work and neither does therapy and medication along. In this gray area of mental health you may not be normal, but you are not disordered or “ill” either. Being constantly treated as though you are “too much” or “not enough” is in and of itself traumatizing. Just being different, and having your needs criticized and invalidated, often leads to secondary trauma and with that comes chronic, subclinical or borderline problems like depression, anxiety, addictive relationships with things, food, people, etc. Neutral words and more respectful ways of talking to people and not assuming that “what is easy for you is easy for everyone” would be a BIG step toward bridging the culture divide that makes “outcasts” of highly functional, yet different, people in our society today.
Encouraged to understand and embrace their differences and taught to negotiate differences peacefully rather than use pressure tactics, violence or coercion to get others to conform to their expectations. The rampant multiple diagnosing and misdiagnosing of highly functional exceptionally intelligent, creative, technical children and adults just because they are not easy to control and don’t fit the social ”norms” as defined by the DSM is truly a tragedy. Over 20% of the prison population in this country qualifies as “gifted.” The number of ADHD is even sadder. Diagnosing the normal grieving and trauma of growing up different in a culture that constantly invalidates, judges and criticizes using a narrow definition of normal leads to feeling like you are disordered, defective, damaged, and not good enough or worthy of living even though you have much to offer. That often leads to antisocial behavior. It’s not the ADD that causes it, and it’s NOT self-sabotage – it’s the punishment and disrespect we get for being different that leads to the self-loathing and the antisocial or maladaptive behaviors that come with self-loathing.
Understand that Existential Crises are a normal part of growing up in a world that relentlessly degrades, minimizes, outcasts, rejects and discounts you as being too much or not enough of everything.
Recognize that if your quality of life is impaired by just being yourself in the world, it may not be because there is something wrong with you, it may be that you need a different skill set to make the most of who you are. What you have to offer the world is often directly BECAUSE of your differences. Most neurodiverse traits can be cultivated to be extreme strengths in an environment that “fits” and appreciates and needs what they have to offer.
Promote the idea that there is nothing wrong with you just because you are not easy to control.

For many neurodiverse, the path to a meaningful, satisfying life consists of:

EDUCATION

Learning skills that mainstream people have naturally – like

Reading social cues
Reading between the lines of what people really mean when they say things that are confusing to us
How to translate what people say literally into what they really mean but leave unsaid because it’s “implied”
Emotional intelligence and emotional processing skills.

LIFE DESIGN SKILLS

Talented, gifted and uncommon people ARE higher maintenance – just the way a plane requires more sophisticated maintenance and skills than a car does. So, it requires more skill to design our lives and environments to fit us. Life Design skills are immensely empowering as they help us adapt and design systems that fit our unique ways of functioning.

AGILE MINDSET

Adaptive living requires understanding how to improvise and make the best of what you have, develop systems iteratively, and also helps us redefine “ideal” in a way expands our comfort zone of what is the “right” way to do things.

BOUNDARIES and SELF-ADVOCACY

Learning to stand up for your needs and negotiate with neurotypicals without being overly agressive or apologetic.

NEUTRALIZING LANGUAGE

Acquiring a neutral language for understanding ourselves and dialoguing with ourselves to get results our way rather than trying to conform to narrowly or unconsciously defined expectations.

We, the neurodiverse need a kind of multicultural survival guide for living among mainstream people who don’t understand the way we think, feel or function and for us to better understand how they think, feel and function so that we can “translate” better.

Living in a culture that is completely different from everything you are means having to become sort of “bilingual”.

The languages we must learn are nonverbal – the language of emotions, body language, and “between the lines” languages – the unwritten, unspoken rules that some people learn easily. We need to learn these rules explicitly and translate in our heads cuz saying them out loud makes conventional people feel very uncomfortable – like we are challenging them.

For example, I had to be explicitly convinced that even though your boss says he wants you to do high quality work, that does not always mean you really should do YOUR best work. I was literally secretly told to stop doing such good work because it intimidated others and raised the bar. I was advised to leave typos in my work because it made the boss and clients “feel more like they were part of the development.” People want first drafts to be messy.

Who knew!??

Who else has had to work at lowering the quality of their work just to make others feel better? It’s not easy, but there are times you simply must do exactly that.

Learning the unspoken rules such as these changed my life and I share them with my clients every day. I help them make peace with the weirdness and duplicity of it all. It changes their lives too.

NEUTRALIZING OUR ATTITUDES TOWARD OUR EMOTION

There are no positive or negative emotions – all emotions are meaningful messages that we can use to navigate our lives.

You don’t have to believe all your thoughts. Use your challenging nature to challenge your own beliefs and tweak them to align with what you really want.