About a month and a half ago, I was scrolling Twitter and came across a tweet thread. The author said her bipolar disorder made her neurodivergent. I was shocked. I read everything she had to say, and of lot the replies, and figured, “guess we’re just calling everything a neurodivergence now.”
Honestly, I was a little insulted. I thought it diminished what the neurodivergent community goes through to put a mental illness that a person develops on the same level as a trait those individuals are born with. And I say that as a person with bipolar disorder who has struggled greatly with the illness.
I was so irritated by this tweet that I brought it up with my psychiatrist at the teaching hospital a couple of days later.
“Bipolar disorder isn’t a neurodivergence, right?” I asked. “That woman was out of line.”
“Well…” he said.
He explained that from the perspective of French psychiatry, bipolar disorder can develop as the result of an underlying “fragility”. When he used that word, I remembered that when I was diagnosed, it had also been used. It was the end of our session, so he told me to go home and google the childhood symptoms of ADHD and autism and see if anything sounded like me as a kid.
Not a damn thing did. Which wasn’t a surprise.
However.
I stumbled upon Sensory Processing Sensitivity. Which I hadn’t heard of before. Though I knew its other name very, very well: Highly Sensitive Person.
I have known that I am a Highly Sensitive Person for at least a decade, probably longer. It’s something I learned a little about, but then life got busy and I kind of forgot. From what I now understand, it is not yet formally recognized as a neurodivergence, but it ticks a lot of boxes.
Highly Sensitive People could be neurodivergent.
I am a Highly Sensitive Person. So I could be neurodivergent.
I cannot express the impact of that five-word sentence. I am sitting on four decades of life where I was told or believed that I was wrong for feeling the way I felt, or seeing the world the way I did, or not thinking about things like other people. Four decades of internalizing those messages and learning to hate myself. I remember being a child and being yelled at to stop wearing my heart on my sleeve. Years of unexplainable physical ailments, constant overwhelm by light and sound, inability to socialize like others, difficulty with planning or managing certain tasks. I could go on. And all of these I took to be proof of my innate failure as a human being.
I may not be a failure after all. I may just have a brain that works differently, that’s got its receptors turned up to 11 while everyone else is on five.
For one thing, I can walk into a room and feel immediately if there’s just been a high emotion like a fight. Sometimes it’s scary. I once freaked my husband out by telling him about the weird vibe in a certain place in a historical site where we lived, and it turned out to be the spot where they beheaded people. I, often to my personal detriment, will feel other people’s feelings. People tend to sense this and like to tell me their problems. Even strangers. My sense of smell is pointlessly good - though it did come in handy for that gas leak. I cannot be outside without sunglasses, even when it’s overcast.
I’m currently reading Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn’t Designed for You by Jenara Nerenberg. I’m having to stop and take breaks. I keep needing time to digest the idea that I’m not wrong, I’m not a failure. Because that’s been the narrative my entire life. That’s what I believed about myself. Even with years of positive self-talk, even with personal successes in different arenas, the baseline was failure, wrong, not doing it right. I saw my successes as aberrations. Those were exceptions to the rule.
I could be neurodivergent.
The amount of grace I can show myself… I don’t even know… it’s like seeing myself as a completely different person.
If this is the “fragility” and I spent my entire life trying to violently force myself into a neurotypical mold (plus some trauma), is it any wonder that a mental illness had a chance to develop?
I could be neurodivergent.