Comment by jimbokun
21 hours ago
He kind of goes from normal to super-normal, and has to deal with how to handle this outlier social competence responsibly.
21 hours ago
He kind of goes from normal to super-normal, and has to deal with how to handle this outlier social competence responsibly.
I'd characterize the entire journey as "neurodivergent"
but there's nothing wrong with that, and there are lots of other neurodivergent-ish people (regardless of whether you like that word for it, I just mean "outliers", the sort of people who have trouble with socializing in a way that most people seem to have an easy time with), and many of them could stand to benefit from figuring some of the same things out
I think slapping neurodivergent on everything kind of dilutes the word. I had some social challenges growing up, probably still a weird cookie at times, but def would not consider myself neurodivergent, it just feels like a different league of difference to the norm.
But that's the entire point of the term neurodivergence. Rather than categorizing people into specific pathologies, you acknowledge that every spectrum of human behavior is just that: a spectrum. And that means that some people will be outliers on any given axis.
For example, the author of this piece is clearly on the autism spectrum. Of course, everybody is on the autism spectrum, even people who show no symptoms (they are on the left hand side). This person is clearly functional, but far from what would be considered neurotypical.
The point of neurodivergence is to better understand the various spectra that make up human personality without judgement. And by understand people who are outside the norm, we can better understand humanity as a whole.
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i sorta agree but also that's basically just what the word has come to mean. agree that it's a catchall, but also, like, it's definitely not the case that everyone's social experiences are anything like the OPs'; theirs really is a slightly-autistic-coded category of experiences.