"They're out of order! The whole trial is out of order!"

Intuitive writing, neurodivergence, and my professional direction.

I’m not even sure what I showed up to write about this morning. One of the ways I figure that out is to try to remember the chain of events that brought me here.

Recently, YouTube suggested a video by David William Plummer, author of Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire. In the video, Plummer talked about his diagnosis journey, and mentioned his book. Well, the video stuck with me, so I looked up the book, and came upon a second book he’d written called The Nonvisible Part of the Autism Spectrum : Could You be a "Little Bit Autistic?" I read a little of that yesterday morning, before life took over the day.

I woke up thinking, again, about neurodiversity and intuition. More and more, I feel like understanding neurodivergent individuals, and helping them understand themselves and their creative processes, is going to be the biggest part of my professional path.

Aside: As if to confirm this, I’m having an email conversation with a client I see a few times a year. She wanted to let me know her latest book is releasing (and she’s sending me a copy, yay!), and to thank me for helping her past a rough patch on the way to getting it done. Love those emails. The reply I read this morning contained, paraphrased:

I came to you thinking you would tell me to [do the common “wisdom” thing for that situation], but you told me something different, and [here’s how it’s totally worked for me].

I mean, this is the beauty of the work we do at Becca Syme’s Better-Faster Academy, this highly individualized, personality-based approach to coaching. And within that, I feel my place, the bulk of the clients who choose me, are looking for me to understand them as intuitive and/or neurodiverse writers.

Each month, through Becca’s Patreon, I run a group Zoom called “The Intuitive Writer Support Call.” When I started that, I had no idea what it would be, I just knew that intuitive writers needed a safe space to talk about process without judgment or correction. And I also know that I can’t be the expert on intuitive writing in the sense of being the person who has all the answers. It’s too nuanced, too individualized. So while I often do start the call with things I’ve noticed and learned during the past month, it’s not me lecturing to an audience. It’s a lot more like a sharing circle (even though sometimes the circle has forty people in it), like group therapy sessions or 12-step meetings on TV.

One month I asked how many of the people there suspected or considered themselves neurodivergent. And it was pretty much everyone on the call.

What?

And yet, it makes sense. When I look up things about neurodiversity, the language that often pops up first is about neurodivergent people being those who perceive, learn, and interact with the world differently. They allegedly represent about 15-20% of the population.

That’s a figure that sticks out for me as something I remember from first reading The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron in the late 90s. I still get pissed because I feel like, if 20% of the population are supertasters (and a quick Google suggest it’s now considered more like 25%), why are restaurants always rendering my food inedible with pepper? You can always add spice, but you can’t take it back. Is 1/5th of the population not significant enough for you? And I’m not even going to get started on how loud music is played in public spaces.

But I digress.
Or do I?

I mean, we’ve been living in a world where majority so often rules, and where those who fall outside of that are considered wrong, picky, too sensitive, intentionally and obstinately weird, or simply inferior.

And yet, in my world, with my neurodivergent child, parent, clients, and self, it feels like these individualized sensitivities and differences are the norm, made more difficult by a conformist culture that is as unreasonable as it is downright baffling.

I guess, to me, as a person high in the CliftonStrengths trait of Individualization, the whole concept of neurodivergence is a bit fraught. I mean, because everyone is so unique, how can there really be a normal or neurotypical that’s supposed to apply to most people? And dude, if the definition of “most” by which we make the rules disregards one or two billion people, that shit is just broken.

Back to writing, intuitive writers, and neurodivergence. A client who is also a therapist smacked me between the eyes one day by reminding me that “giftedness” is considered a neurodivergence. Since then, I’ve been so aware of how many of our clients were identified as gifted children, and how much that piece of identity and their childhood experience continues to impact their lives as writers.

This morning I did a quick search on gifted vs. high IQ. It seems that while high IQ is an indicator of giftedness, many consider gifted children to also possess other traits like empathy, environmental sensitivity, and creativity/creative thinking.

Another thing rolling around in my brain is that neurodiversity isn’t a diagnosis, by which I mean that neurodiversity itself isn’t a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) thing. There are some neurodivergent conditions which can reach states of impairment (or, I would prefer to say, levels requiring accommodation in overly rigid environments) like ADHD and ASD, but simply being neurodivergent, in the many ways there are to be not-neurotypical, is not considered a disorder.

So why are we acting like every square peg that doesn’t make itself fit in the round hole is disordered and wrong? Why are we still making square pegs feel like they should be trying to scrape off parts of themselves in order to fit something that is, I’m sorrynotsorry, not even an ideal?

Why are creative and empathetic gifted children a delight, but neurodivergent teens who can’t focus on busywork are lazy and not working up to their potential, adults with a different path to results are wrong, and those who are more affected by their circumstances than others “must not want it enough”?

“On one hand, these traits and these qualities were seen as really positive and a boon, and something that people were frothing at the mouth to exploit. And then, in the same breath, it was something that was sort of the bane of my existence and a challenge for people to deal with. And there was a great misperception of my approach to life as being too high maintenance, and too emotional. A lot of too much, too intense. So I spent most of my life thinking that how I was was a problem for people. Yet, at the same time, I was getting the message that what I was coming to, specifically because of my trait, they wanted that. They wanted the fruit of my trait, but they didn’t want my trait. So it was an interesting combination of being loved for it and being rejected for it.”

—Alanis Morrissette, “Sensitive: The Untold Story”

Yeah, so I think that’s where my professional focus is headed. Thanks for hanging with me while I worked some of that out of my system.

P.S. It may be worth noting that I had plenty of time this morning. I was going to work out my thoughts in writing, and then have some breakfast, take a shower, and get to a doctor appointment at 11am. Then my phone pinged at me, which is does ten minutes before an appointment, which is usually find for work from home appointments where no one cares what I wear and dry shampoo + Zoom filter hide enough. I through on clothes and raced to the office, and was only ten minutes late, though very unkempt. Which is all to say that the hyperfocus struggle is real.