Am I Neurodivergent?
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
"Am I neurodivergent?" a fellow stroke survivor asked me a few weeks ago.
We were comparing notes on how our strokes reshaped us and our brains.
The focus that scatters faster than it used to. The sensory load that used to be background noise and now drains us, physically and cognitively at a rate we never experienced before. "I'll last an hour," I told her, "then get me outta there so I can recover in a quiet space."
The inability to “push harder” for a week or two to get a project over the finish line, and the things that our brains used to be good at (great at, even) and now take multiple passes to fully complete. We both know the wall is coming before it arrives.
Neither of us used to be built this way. Something in each of our brains shifted, permanently, and no one else can see it. The work of explaining it falls to us.
Neurodivergent isn't a diagnosis. It's not something a neurologist, a psychiatrist, or an employer gets to confer or withhold.
This question of hers sat with me, for something that sounds potentially quite simple.
Neither of our neurologists ever used the word neurodivergent. They named the stroke, the affected region, the expected recovery resources and timeline.
Nobody handed either of us a label for what came after. We were left to name it ourselves, or not name it at all, because sometimes it’s easier to say "I'm just tired" than to explain the entire experience and risk not being believed because it’s invisible to others.
Neurodivergent represents a brain that processes, learns, and operates differently than what's considered “typical”.
That's the whole definition.
Nothing in it requires a birth date, a childhood assessment, or a specific diagnosis or cause.
I believe we're the experts of our own bodies. We get to identify based on our own lived experience, and that includes brains reshaped by something that happened to us.
Does that make me, a stroke survivor, the same as someone who's had ADHD since childhood? No.
Would that person and I overlap in how we process information, manage a loud room, or hit a wall by hour three of a meeting? Probably, some of the time.
Does the overlap mean we need identical support day to day? I bet you already know the answer to that one.
“Categories are efficient. People aren’t. Inclusion that only operates at the category level isn’t inclusion, it’s a sorting mechanism wearing inclusion’s clothes, and it asks nothing of the person doing the sorting except that they learned the right vocabulary.”
This is the pattern I keep running into in organizations, and it rarely looks like exclusion on purpose.
It looks like a workplace that has learned the word neurodivergent, built a policy around it, and stopped there.
An accommodations list drafted for neurodivergent employees as one undifferentiated group.
A manager who read a single article about autism and now assumes every direct report who's used the word processes the world the same way.
An ERG training that hands out generalized symptom lists instead of asking the person what a great day (or a hard day) actually looks like for them.
None of that is malicious. Most of it comes from genuinely wanting to get this right, and reaching for the fastest available version of "right." But when we lean on labels and generalized symptoms instead of the person in front of us, we're not supporting them. We're sorting them into a category and calling it inclusion.
Categories are efficient. People aren't.
Inclusion that only operates at the category level isn't inclusion, it's a sorting mechanism wearing inclusion's clothes, and it asks nothing of the person doing the sorting except that they learned the right vocabulary.
There's a second cost to this that is equally important. When the label becomes the gatekeeper, when someone has to prove they're "neurodivergent enough" before an organization will take their experience seriously, people with acquired conditions, late diagnoses, or no diagnosis at all learn to stay quiet.
They watch the conversation happen around a definition they're not sure they qualify for, and they opt out of asking for anything. That's not a hypothetical. That's my fellow stroke survivor, sitting with a question she's not sure she's allowed to answer for herself.
I encourage organizations to build the muscle of asking, rather than the muscle of assuming.
“What does a hard day look like for you?”
“What's actually shifted for you, not what the research says shifts for people like you?”
“What do you need this week that might be different from what you needed last week?”
Those questions take longer than a policy document to answer. They also happen to be the only ones that produce something a real person can use.
So, leaders reading this, ask yourself:
Where in your organization are people being sorted into a category instead of being asked what they actually need?
And what would change if the inclusion conversation started with a question instead of a checklist?
This is the work I do inside organizations: building the capability to ask better questions instead of defaulting to generalized labels, so neuroinclusion becomes a way leaders operate rather than a policy nobody accesses. If you're rethinking how neuroinclusion actually works in practice, reach out and let's talk about what that could look like for your team. Reach me here.
Gratefully,
Jacquelin