Me: It’s not a condition – it’s a predisposition.
Friend: What is?
My particular nervous system processes my experience through language. I have experiences, and some part of me chews and chews and chews and digests and then out comes a word (this didn’t start as a scatological reference, but here we are).
Much of the language around neurodiversity is pathologized. We “have” ADHD, like we “have” the flu. It’s a condition, like rheumatoid arthritis.
I believe that differences in our sensory processing are just that: differences. Like moods. Or characteristics.
So, being someone who cannot imagine visual imagery, and who has limited fine motor coordination, and who experiences frequent emotional dysregulation (has big feelings), and who is hyperaware of certain sensory environments and hypoaware of others (that all describes me), and in connecting with other people who have similar-but-different experiences, I’m highly dissatisfied with a lot of the language that’s out there to describe the traits of people like (yet unlike) me.
It’s Pride month, and on this day, the Supreme Court of the United States voted to allow parents to disenroll their children from classes that include language around LGBTIA+ identity. This is, in effect, re-pathologizing a predisposition (a predisposition is a tendency, a particular personal expression style: so-and-so is predisposed to snarkiness; that dude is predisposed to making puns; this person is predisposed to process their grief through artmaking).
If we don’t have safe language to describe people-as-they-are-predisposed-to-be, then people not only get left out, but they get isolated, shamed, and ‘othered.’ So my ever-chewing brain is always trying to poop out new words to celebrate difference – the collective variation that makes us such a successful species in the first place.
So no, I don’t have a condition, I have a predisposition.
Remember, it was only in 1973 that homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and only in 1987 that language around gender dysphoria was removed. So those are the dates that those predispositions were ‘officially depathologized.’ But those actions were not accompanied by a corresponding shift in the language around these predispositions, so they are still existing in the language as if they are ‘conditions,’ (subtly implying that they might eventually go away, like eczema). (Which also describes me, and which comes and goes).
The Supreme Court’s action today is akin to the Catholic Church making heresy of the discussion about heliocentrism in the 17th century. And as someone speaking from the future, I’m telling them: you are idiots who condemn your own people to eternal suffering with your stupid-ass amplification of old-ass outdated viewpoints. F**k y’all.
So yes, depathologize language around difference. Does that answer your question?
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.