Ice-picks Can Kill

What if, instead of asking new people "What do you do?"

--which actually means, "How do you make your money?" and "Where do you rank on the status pole?" and boils down to a really bad way of trying to find out "What can you do for me?" and is a really inaccurate way of trying to find out "How much should I care about saying the wrong thing to you?"

--what if, instead, we asked new people "What are your interests?"

Frankly, finding out whether and how well someone can talk about what they care about, and what values we may have in common with them, seems like a *much* more useful and safer way to break the ice.

My friend Solomon calls this, "Asking people what they *love* to do."

Neuro-diversity Is...

Someone online asked for clarity about the term "Neuro-Diverse."  The truth is NeuroDiverse is still a new term, still finding its niche, and that as it finds its way into general usage it will come to mean what the most people want it to mean.  But I have a pretty heavy stake in what I need it to mean, and a very clear understanding of the identity-experience so many of us have needed a name for for so long.

---

What Neuro-Diversity is:

We suck at internalizing Culture.

We have rely on conscious observation and analysis to try to catch up with what is tacit second nature to those around us.

We end up with rigid rules where flexibility is needed or flexibility where it is "supposed to be" unthinkable.  

We are moving through a parallel universe in which everything is happening at different volumes, different textures, different speeds, and some things aren't happening at all.

Our body language, posture, expressions, the very lines on our faces are formed from hundreds of thousands of daily physical responses that those around us don't need.

Our train of thought is a wooden roller coaster submarine monorail trolley, it does not use the standard tracks.  We may have full comprehension and verbal skills and still be unable to follow a conventional explanation or provide an explanation others can follow.

The fact that we relate differently to these *three overlapping areas*-- 

social constructions, sensory environment, and cognitive navigation

IS our common ground.  

Not our wildly diverse symptoms, diagnoses, levels of functionality. attitudes, or coping tools, but the fact that we "don't fit."  We are "out of sync."  There's "something off" about us.  We don't "read right."  We come from the Uncanny Valley and the Neuro-typical (Neuro-normative, Neuro-privileged) frequently compare what is normal for us to the actions and attitudes of critters or robots.

And because of this, those of us neurodiverse from birth grew up as the natural targets of bullies of every kind, and age, and we *always* bear the additional complications of trauma and shame.

And those of us neurodiverse from brain injury *always* bear the additional complications of grief and humiliation. 

That is what it is to be Neurodiverse.

Haym Soloveitchik on Custom

"Custom is potent, but its true power is informal. It derives from the ability of habit to neutralize the implications of book knowledge. Anything learned from study that conflicts with accustomed practice cannot really be right, things simply can't be different than they are."

-- Haym Soloveitchik, "Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy" Tradition, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 1994)  Accessed from: http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm