neurodivergent

The Mammoth Hunter

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How Making Sense of My Child’s Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation

Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet?

My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace or a grid-based schedule. They often miss appointments due to oversleeping, and sometimes sleep for periods that don’t align with respectable industrial grid time.

They are highly engaged in any task at hand, but have difficulty playing the long game of connecting with a regular schedule. They pick up new skills very quickly, but express little interest in developing any of those skills into something that, in a modern context, looks like a career.

The environments they express the most affection for are highly cooperative: soccer is a big one; skateboarding in community, where peers are moving together, both in synchronous and asynchronous formations; making public art in strategically complex spaces, that require collaboration to envision, coordination to plan, and cooperation to execute. They are the epitome of the team player, as long as the team has a clear plan that serves the collective need for transparent and direct expression of experience in a creative and innovative way.

Making Sense of the Early Adult Drive for Autonomy and Relevance

My child’s challenges have moved them toward strategies to mitigate those challenges, and cannabis has been a recurring strategy that serves some need.

As an engaged parent, who is trying to nurture their adult child’s independence, while managing my alarm when witnessing behaviors that appear problematic, or as leading toward future failure to integrate into the workplace, I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’m seeing: a young person who is fiercely dedicated to their friends; who takes pride in a complex task well-executed; who resists being pigeonholed into existing categories of social, ideological, economic, or aesthetic legibility; and who sincerely wants to play a meaningful role in their community, despite repeated experiences of mismatch with established academic and occupational cultures.

Considering all of this, I’ve been unsatisfied with the ‘just say no’ or ‘avoid this substance because of the potential dangers involved’ frameworks of personal discipline, relative to what I see as cannabis use as substance-scaffolding.

I ask instead, “How is this scaffold serving their needs,” and “what is this person seeking to satisfy, according to the tendencies of their nervous system?”

Asking these questions, and exploring the range of possible resolutions, has caused me to rethink everything I know about individual competence, self-medication, and utility-within-community.

Here’s the story that unfolds in my brain, starting with trying to understand my child’s use of cannabis.

Understanding Cannabis as a Regulation Support

Question: A subset of neurodivergent people find cannabis to be highly regulating. Using current diagnostic frameworks, would we be able to reverse engineer this mechanism and suggest alternative supports for regulation?

Answer (from multiple channels): Diagnostic frameworks don’t code this directly—no DSM category for “cannabinoid-responsive regulation phenotype”—but the mechanistic literature gives us enough to reverse-engineer some plausible pathways, and each one maps to a non-cannabis lever.

The candidate mechanisms, each with its alt-support:

  • Excitation/inhibition imbalance (the leading cortical model in autism/ADHD research)—the nervous system runs with too much glutamatergic drive relative to GABAergic brake. CB1 agonism works presynaptically to turn down excess signal.
    Alt-support: deep pressure/proprioceptive input, rhythmic bilateral movement, anything that mechanically dampens throughput rather than trying to out-think it.
  • Low endocannabinoid tone—some autism research finds blunted anandamide signaling tied to social ease and anxiety regulation. If the system’s baseline ECS is running lean, exogenous cannabinoids are topping up a deficit rather than adding a foreign effect.
    Alt-support: sustained aerobic movement (the “runner’s high” is partly endocannabinoid-mediated), omega-3s as ECS precursors, consistent touch/massage.
  • Thalamic sensory gating failure—the filter that should mute irrelevant input doesn’t, so everything arrives undifferentiated and loud. Cannabinoids affect thalamic gating directly.
    Alt-support: environmental engineering, without pharmacological substitution: reduce raw input volume rather than trying to improve the filter (single-channel environments, structured monotropic focus, noise reduction).
  • Vagal/parasympathetic underactivation—anxiety compounding the sensory load, cannabis’s anxiolytic effect partly vagally mediated.
    Alt-support: direct vagal stimulation—humming, slow exhale-longer-than-inhale breathing, cold water on the face.
  • Dopaminergic under-stimulation (more ADHD-coded)—restlessness eased by mild dopaminergic modulation.
    Alt-support: novelty-structured tasks, high-engagement movement, body doubling.

Considering this data, relative to the questions that framed my inquiry, here’s how I connect the dots when I choose to view my child as perfectly-abled, rather than disabled, and here’s how I attempt to contextualize this for my community.

Greetings, esteemed community:

I compiled this explanation of how cannabis helps regulate the neurodivergent nervous system. This all maps very cleanly onto our child’s character, and shows why they miss soccer so much (missing as ‘longing for,’ and not ‘fails to show up for.’ I think you get my meaning, but it’s good be precise where language suggests multiple meanings).

This all points to running (‘rhythmic bilateral movement,’ ‘sustained aerobic movement’), with intense interest-based focus (‘structured monotropic focus,’ ‘high-engagement movement’) and cooperative participation (‘high-engagement movement,’ ‘body doubling’) as being the the regulation supports they are reaching for, or the activities that they are predisposed to seek in making their character meaningful in a human community engaged in dialogue with a natural environment.

Basically, our child shows the collection of ecological adaptations that would enable ice-age hunter-gatherers to hunt and bring down a wooly mammoth, as a source of food and raw materials for clothing, shelter, and tools. Mammoths were herd animals, much larger than humans, with thick skins and wooly coats that were very difficult to pierce with the projectiles of the time—wood or bone projectiles that were either sharpened or had separate affixed bone or stone tips specialized for cutting/piercing.

Bringing down a mammoth would require a high degree of coordination and sustained movement by a group of humans—to first isolate an animal from the herd; bombard it with a number of projectiles, none of which would be able to kill the animal on its own, but only weaken it when applied in numbers; and then chase the animal until it was weak enough to be able to approach directly, to apply severing cuts with stone knives at strategic points, to bring on death. Then, the animal had to be processed fairly quickly, before bacteria, insects, and scavengers moved in to take their share.

The Mental Health Day

This coordinated activity would involve great risk-taking, and sublimation of fear-response. In other words, badass individuals engaged in a life-or-death struggle to meet the needs of their community.

Engaging in this way would have resulted in a huge output of energy in a specific time period, that would likely extend beyond one cycle of dawn-to-dusk; which could not be segmented into work hours that resemble modern industrial time cycles of work and rest; by an individual who could literally measure their life by their proximity to such a resource as a mammoth herd. The individuals involved in this project would have needed extended periods of rest to recover from the endeavor, perhaps spanning multiple day-night cycles; and the community would have been happy to oblige, considering the benefit of their energy expenditure to the community.

Where Do We Go From Here?

in the context of domesticated society, none of our child’s particular traits make sense. but our period of domestication has been a tiny blip in the overall arc of the human project. human evolution, and adaptation to changing environments, is a very long and slow process, relative to our understanding of adapting to environmental changes within our lifetimes.

Considering those changes, i hope we can find ways to recognize our child’s unique gifts as adaptations that are valuable to the community; to recognize the range of skills required to make the human project work; and to rediscover how a person with these natural predispositions is a valuable contributor to their community — because of, and not in spite of, their characteristic rhythms and sensibilities.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and thank you for your cooperation in this project of nurturing a unique person to be their best self in the rapidly-shifting priorities of life in modern industrial society.

big loves,

parent of a mammoth hunter

?

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my tendency is to laugh at my first impressions.
something in my history casts a sinister spell
that even the simplest question disperses.
delightful surprises arise when i go
beyond the first brush of my eyes.
followup questions are the love language
in my dialogue with life.

complementary adaptation: toward a kinder view of neurodiversity and disability

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Two people in a boat. One can row, but cannot navigate. The other can navigate, but cannot row. If we view each as a whole, each has both an asset and a liability—each is both abled and disabled. If we view the relationship as a whole, we can describe things differently.

If participation and cooperation are both given, and both needs and abilities are transparent, we can say, for the sake of argument, that we have a balanced system. Ability and disability are actually complementary parts of a balanced system.

For the system to remain balanced, the requirement is that we do not judge one by the standards of the other. Both are necessary for the system to be balanced. It is only in separating the ability and disability within the system—through creation of a standard that applies to each equally—that disability as a permanent status arises (or ability, as a permanent status, for that matter).

Humans are a social animal, and no human can be said to exist in isolation. The work of survival as a cohesive community is complex. If we view human evolution as a community project, rather than a process of creating ideal and identical individuals, perhaps it’s fairer to say that humans are more like the two people in the boat that opened this narrative than like individuals striving toward undifferentiated perfection.

I believe that as our understanding of neurodiversity deepens, we will begin to see the complementary nature of different sensory, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, somatic, and relational expressions within a community of people engaged in the work of surviving within an ecosystem, and start to recognize the unique socio-ecological niche that each is adapted to.

That being said, humans have created systems that separate us from the ecology we evolved over millions of years to function within—capitalism being the most recent and totalizing form this separation has taken. Any framework, whatever its organizing logic, that substitutes an abstracted, portable standard for embedded relationship will distort our ability to view each type of expression fairly, in context. In the deepest sense, it is these imposed frameworks—not one’s specific neuropsychobiology—that create the permanent state of ability or disability.

Is this an argument that disability does not exist, or should not be accommodated? Absolutely not. Does the human organism itself demand that we recognize the various socio-ecological niches for which each individual may be uniquely adapted? Also no—evolution continues, and each part of any ecosystem is changed by interaction with the others—just as we were once single-celled life forms adapted to an underwater ecosystem that no longer exists, we will adapt to whatever conditions our survivors find themselves within (if there are survivors—evolution is a slow process, and the changes we have made to our ecosystem have arguably outpaced it).

What, then, is the good of understanding or accepting a principle like complementary adaptation, if we are eventually going to change anyway? From a human sociological perspective, it allows us to be both kinder and more accommodating of difference. In recognizing the many ways that variations in human adaptive expression contribute to the well-being of a complex social organism within an ecosystem, we can move people toward societal roles for which they may already be well adapted, rather than forcing them to adapt to environments where their permanent disability status is the only option. It changes the framework for our application of care—to use our earlier analogy, to match rowers with navigators, those who thrive as nurturers with those who thrive with care, across a broad spectrum of socio-ecological niches.

What this requires of us, as those who study human variation, is to recognize the many ways that current conditions game the system for the comfort of some, at the expense of basic human dignity for others, and to recognize the gatekeepers who enforce the conditions we find ourselves in, be they actual humans, economic systems, or simply cognitive frameworks. It would be naive to think that we can simply abandon every framework we’ve inherited outright, but making the shift to recognizing human variation as a relationship affords us a direction for a new field of study—and nudges us toward a kinder, more integrated relationship with our world and with one another.

to a young person questioning themselves

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I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.

I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.

I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.

I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.

With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.

But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).

Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.

The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.

I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.

Happy pride!

Parts Is Parts: When Common Sense Misses the Mark

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A Mechanic’s Case for Equity in Education

I was recently trying to explain equity in education to someone who experiences language around equity as “mumbo jumbo,” (in their words). My mind makes analogies, and tries to find common ground. As we (me and my debate partner) are both Californians, my mind latched onto car culture—Americans love their cars, and California has a specific stake in the dissemination of car culture. Also, there is a deep relationship between car culture, social structure, and education culture, and, for reasons that will become clear, the Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, is a major player in this landscape, and works elegantly as a character in my story.

Thanks for bearing with my complex sentences. Neurodivergents love sentences with bonus content.

Recognizing that this metaphor might be helpful for others, I submit to you: the difference between equality and equity in education.

You have a central auto shop system, implemented around the country, set up by the Ford Motor Corporation when they were the dominant maker in the marketplace. You advertise that you will work on any make and model of car. That being said, when the shop is set up, the shop only receives shop manuals for the Ford Taurus. So for a while, any car that comes through the shop gets spark gaps, valve clearances, and timing settings for the Ford Taurus.

At some point, the vehicle owners, the shop managers, and the mechanics notice that all of the Tauruses that leave the shop are running great, but the Focuses, the Transits, the Broncos and Mustangs, along with Chevys, Dodges, Jeeps, Subarus, Kias, Volvos and Land Rovers are not running their best.

A shop manager from Ford comes in to investigate. “I see your problem right here: All of these cars are being tuned to Taurus specs. Where are your shop manuals for the other models?” They order the manuals for the Focus, Transit, Bronco and Mustang, and lo and behold, every Ford that leaves the shop runs at its best.

The other makes still have timing issues, are not firing on all cylinders, and experience electrical problems. The Ford Motor Corporation claims that this is evidence that the other makes are just deficient.

At some point, a team of independent investigators, with an understanding of the wider market, looks into how the shop is servicing its vehicles. They see right away that no shop manuals or supply chains are being made available for non-Ford vehicles. They submit their recommendations: that manuals, parts, and training specific to non-Ford makes and models be provided immediately, and that this will result in a) all vehicles being tuned to the proper specs; and b) all vehicles receiving appropriate parts, without the need for modifying inappropriate parts or fudging adjustments.

There are many Ford-only communities working on the same shop model, and all of their vehicles appear to be doing fine. The Ford Motor Corporation, having set up the shop model in the first place, with significant influence and a vested interest in their vehicles appearing to be the most reliable, moves decisively to thwart these findings and advocate for the Ford-only model to be enforced throughout the country.

A few communities that service a wide variety of makes and models adopt the independent investigators’ findings: they provide manuals and supply chains that ensure that all vehicles leaving the shop are running at their best.

The Ford Motor Corporation sees this as a threat to their ascendancy in the marketplace, and they advocate strongly that only Ford manuals and supply chains be standard, and that other accommodations are simply designed to steal market share from a native maker and transfer it to makers who are encroaching and have no claim to a place in the market.

They never point out that serving each vehicle to its unique specifications does not make Fords run worse—it simply ensures that each vehicle runs at its best. No one is asking that Chevys be supercharged, or that Subarus get special fuel injectors, or that Dodges get enhanced suspension. It’s just about servicing each vehicle with the appropriate parts and adjustments.

Equality is treating each car like a Ford Taurus. A move toward equity without actually achieving equity is treating each car as some model of Ford. Equity is providing the proper parts and tuning for every make and model that comes through the shop.

Equality is treating each vehicle the same. Equity is treating each vehicle like itself.

Someone who says, “but children are not as different as different makes of cars” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the trajectories that different children travel before they enter the education system. Some people have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance that every child has had access to the same resources and comes from backgrounds with the same cultural expectations. This is similar to maintaining the appearance that all cars are Fords. Only the Ford ecosystem benefits from this. By treating all cars equally (as if they were Fords) we are not treating them equitably (by giving them the parts and adjustments specific to their needs).

The Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, provides a good analogy for the foundation of our education system. Like Henry Ford, (the parent of the factory model of human organization), the people who designed the sorting system that is expressed in standardized testing in education were racists, eugenicists, capitalists, and anti-unionists. They designed a sorting mechanism that recognized the need for low-paid workers, middle managers, and highly paid executives, and devised a shop system that was predicated on labeling these social tiers early, and making sure everyone stayed in their lane.

Providing shop manuals that resulted in every child achieving at their best ability was directly disruptive to their factory model. (Sound spicy? Check the recipe: The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing, Born of Eugenics: Can Standardized Testing Escape Its Past?, The Racist Origins of Standardized Testing Still Matter)

Being a diverse and unevenly distributed nation, we have what are essentially Ford-only communities—communities that are predominantly white and culturally homogeneous—alongside mixed-make communities—communities that include a vast variety of different cultural and relational realities, as different as different makes of cars.

The culture wars around education are really an expression of different priorities regarding a variety of specific needs, and a breakdown in the translation layer between understanding the diverse needs of different models of vehicle and a variety of makes of vehicles—between communities loyal to the Ford ecosystem and open-market communities.

Since single-make communities exist, distributed throughout the country, there is a significant voice within the national conversation that advocates for the Ford-only model. Consider a variety of predominantly white Anglo communities throughout the US:

  • Provo, Utah
  • Bismarck, North Dakota
  • Owensboro, Kentucky
  • Eau Claire, Wisconsin
  • Rutland, Vermont
  • Southlake, Texas
  • Findlay, Ohio
  • Florence, Alabama
  • Altoona, Pennsylvania
  • Medford, Oregon

Alongside this homogeneous cultural distribution, just as widely represented and on the ascendancy, are the open-market communities, where a variety of makes and models are part and parcel of everyday life:

  • Dearborn, Michigan
  • Flushing, Queens, New York
  • Lowell, Massachusetts
  • Anchorage, Alaska
  • Houston, Texas
  • Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota
  • Oakland, California
  • Clarkston, Georgia
  • Garden City, Kansas
  • Miami, Florida

Viewed in this way, the culture wars we are experiencing are not so much about a competition for resources, but simply a difference in scale of specific needs. For those acculturated to a monoculture, there is a cognitive load required to understand the needs of a more diverse community. And this cognitive load becomes weaponized by actors who have a stake in maintaining a monoculture.

This is the Ford Motor Corporation’s most effective move: not the shop design itself, but the management of the conversation about it. By framing equity as a threat to Ford drivers, they redirect the legitimate frustration of communities whose own Broncos and Transits are sitting in the remedial bay—tuned to Taurus settings, diagnosed as deficient—toward the communities asking for their own manuals. The Bronco in Altoona and the Kia in Oakland are being failed by the same structure. They have been positioned as opponents. The people who benefit from the Taurus-only model funded that positioning.

The Ford Motor Corporation’s original pitch was simple: bring us any make, any model. We’ll get it running. Equity doesn’t challenge that pitch—it holds the Ford Motor Corporation to it. The independent investigators found nothing that undermines Ford’s stated goals. They found only that those goals were never applied fairly. Serving the Kia to its own specifications doesn’t make the Taurus run worse. It makes the shop better. The players in the open market that Ford made possible are simply asking the Ford Motor Corporation to honor the contract it wrote.

Equity is not the subversion of the shop’s mission. It is, finally, its fulfillment. Aren’t we better, together, when each is at their best?