Neurodivergence Quotes

“People don’t necessarily realize it when they contribute to the erosion of a child’s self-worth, but kids pay attention to how people treat them, and they get the message loud and clear. I wish I could say it didn’t distort their self-perception and make them more sensitive and insecure, but it does.”
― D.K. Sanz, Grateful to Be Alive: My Road to Recovery from Addiction

“Hateless, Undivided, Mindful And Neurodiverse - that's HUMAN.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“In a landmark study into the psychology of perceived “creepiness,” psychologists McAndrew and Koehnke (2016) asked 1,341 respondents to answer questions about which personal qualities and behaviors they associated with “creepy” people, and used statistical factor analysis to develop a measurable “creepiness” factor. The creepiness factor they developed included the following traits: a person having awkward, unpredictable behavior, an unnatural-looking smile, laughter that occurred at “unnatural” times, speaking for too long about a single topic, and not knowing when to end a conversation.[30] When Autistic people attempt to socialize and bond with others in an affable, enthusiastic way, these are often the very traits we embody. Even as we try to put the neurotypical people around us at ease by smiling, keeping the conversation moving, and staying present, we might be seen as scary or unsettling.

A series of experiments by social psychologists Leander, Chartrand, and Bargh (2012) found that when a person engages in social mirroring in an even slightly inappropriate way, it skeeves people out, and even makes them feel physically colder.[31] A little bit of mimicry is normal among friends. People mirror one another’s postures and mannerisms as they get comfortable and fall “ into sync. But if you mirror someone too much, or at the wrong time, these studies show you can literally give other people the chills. Autistic maskers try really hard to mirror other people, but since we can’t do it as fluently and effortlessly as neurotypicals do, we often unwittingly set off NT’s creep-dars.

The solution, then, is to stop hiding and pretending to be something we’re not. Instead of straining (and failing) to imitate NT people, we can become radically visible. Sasson’s research found that when participants were told they were interacting with an Autistic person, their biases against us disappeared. Suddenly they liked their slightly awkward conversation partner, and expressed interest in getting to know them. Having an explanation for the Autistic person’s oddness helped the creeped-out feeling go away. Follow-up research by Sasson and Morrison (2019) confirmed that when neurotypical people know that they’re meeting an Autistic person, first impressions of them are far more positive, and after the interaction neurotypicals express more interest in learning about Autism.[32]


30. McAndrew, F. T., & Koehnke, S. S. (2016). On the nature of creepiness. New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 10–15.

31. Leander, N. P., Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (2012). You give me the chills: Embodied reactions to inappropriate amounts of behavioral mimicry. Psychological Science, 23(7), 772–779. Note: many of John Bargh’s priming studies have failed replication attempts in recent years. For a discussion of a failed attempt of a related but different series of temperature priming studies, see Lynott, D., Corker, K. S., Wortman, J., Connell, L., Donnellan, M. B., Lucas, R. E., & O’Brien, K. (2014). Replication of “Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth” by Williams and Bargh (2008). Social Psychology.

32. Sasson, N. J., & Morrison, K. E. (2019). First impressions of adults with autism improve with diagnostic disclosure and increased autism knowledge of peers. Autism, 23(1), 50–59.”
― Devon Price, Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

“One autistic person's 'level of functioning' will fluctuate throughout their day, week and life, depending upon circumstances, environment, mood and other factors. Someone who has been deemed 'high functioning' simply due to external factors (such as their home life, their support circle, or simply how well they have learned to mask themselves) may in fact need more resources and support than someone who has been deemed 'low functioning'.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Your child is neurodivergent. Nothing will ever change that (no, nothing). So, stop Googling it, stop asking your Facebook groups' opinions, stop trying fad diets and yoga stretches. What you can change is the way you perceive disability. These are the cards that you and your child have been dealt, so play them.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“This may be incredibly difficult for some people to grasp, but your child's diagnosis is not about you. There is nothing more frustrating than seeing people wearing stereotypical puzzle-piece T-shirts and captioning their Facebook statuses with 'God gives the hardest battles to the strongest people.' Lord almighty; shut up.

I understand that it's difficult; parenting as a whole is difficult. But if you're struggling as a bystander, imagine how your child is feeling. Be a voice for your child, but do not be your child's voice.”
― Chloé Hayden

“Show them compassion, show them love, show them understanding. Protect them from the evils of the world, but don't hide them from it. Teach them to love and to be loved. Teach them to value and be valued. Teach them all that they are. Remind yourself and them that who they are is exactly who they're supposed to be.

It's not the child who needs to change, it's the world.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Daily, I get messages that invalidate me as a human because I'm autistic, with people asking me why I would ever be proud of something like that. Daily, I see, hear and experience people try to diminish my identity, and refuse to acknowledge the identity of their children, their patients, their students. When I look at the world around me, I'm reminded by the media, by politicians, by the very essence of our culture that my mind is wrong, that I'm not needed, that neurodivergence as a whole is indisputably delinquent, and that our identities are not considered important or whole.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“After receiving a diagnosis, the minimal resources that we may be linked to (if we're lucky) are for the benefit of parents, carers and those who are third-party viewers, rather than for neurodivergent people. We're given books that have been created by doctors and psychologists and neurologists who may have studied our brains for a number of years and can spit out information until the cows come home. But, assuming they are neurotypical, they have never and will never experience or understand what it feels like to have our minds. We're given clinical books and clinical videos, and are taught as soon as the new label is attached to us that it's a cold, medical, distant thing, like our brains are no longer ours.

And, when we try to rid ourselves of these views and do our own research in an attempt to find things that feel closer to home and less analytical and impersonal, we are led to articles, sob stories, and posts that highlight the disappointment, fear and sorrow that surround all aspects of us, making us feel further invalidated, segregated and alienated.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“How can we possibly find love and sanctuary in our identities when the entire world has taught us that these identities are unwanted?”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Your life is exciting. Discovering your identity is exciting. And you should be in no rush to figure out this huge puzzle all at once; there's no time limit, no award for the first and the fastest. Take the time you need to discover and accept who you are, to discover what your story is.

Give yourself the freedom to explore, to learn, to simply be in your own time, at your own pace. You deserve and need the time and the space and the opportunity to freely, openly, safely, whole-heartedly discover who you are and who you're supposed to be, free from fear, free from accusation, free from expectation.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“There are so many things that people half my age have been doing for years now, and there are things that I know I will struggle with and need extra support with for the rest of my life. But, there are things that I can do better than just about anyone.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“She doesn't care about social hierarchies, or social etiquette. If she disagrees with you, your friends or your family, you're likely to hear about it.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Society assumes that eventually we'll fade into an acceptance of what we should be, that we'll silence ourselves into a submission of the ideologies and expectations we've been taught. Divergent thoughts, ideas and emotions are pushed aside with the idea that eventually we'll learn to simply conform. We're taught that if a child thinks or acts out of the norm, don't worry, because they'll soon change their ways. Society often accepts difference in children, but it's not 'acceptance' so much as it is a confidence that those differences will fade.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“What I learned is that it does not matter what you do, or where you go, schools are all organised around the same basic system. It's a system that will never work for a neurodivergent person, no matter how hard they try, because it's entire foundation is built against us.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“However, it's not fair that the only options we currently have for children like me is to either have their parents give over their lives to homeschooling, or to suffer in an environment where every ounce of them is riduculed, ripped apart or forced to changed.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“If we continue to feed a society that doesn't value individuality and human beings as they are, we begin to destroy them.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Our society has taught us that if we act in a way that is different to the social norm, we are considered low functioning, stupid, dumb, childish, loony. And the thing is, perhaps those fears are valid. No one wants to see their child ridiculed. But why are we then determined to change the child, rather than the world around them? Why do we validate the wrong just because it's normalised, and ostracise the right just because it's not?”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Taking away a child's stims doesn't take away their need to self-regulate; instead, it forces them into new habits that can cause long-term side effects and harm, including severe anxiety disorder, depression and emotional dysregulation. In 50 per cent of cases where therapy is used to stop an autistic child from stimming, the child has come out with symptoms that meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“As I've gotten older and realised that society's expectations are only as firm as we allow them to be, I've discovered that allowing myself to unmask and be my authentic autistic self--stims and all--has unleashed more ability than I ever had when I was locking myself away.”
― Chloé Hayden, Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After

“Hateless, Undivided, Mindful And
Neurodiverse - that's HUMAN.
Mind carries its own detergent,
stay woke and stay human!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“I hit a thousand shows. Then I strove to hit fifteen hundred. I'd do three nightmare sets in a row, honing a new bit, then crush in front of a hot audience. I wasn't used to seeing effort translate to improvement. As a kid, no matter how many hours I spent at the kitchen table with my mom, reading and writing never got easier.
As a model, I lifted weights and ate mashed potatoes for breakfast and stayed bone-skinny. Stand-up was the first thing that the more I put into it, the more I got out. My entire life was a tightly coiled spring. Stand-up released the tension, and I sprang forward with decades of repressed energy. I could feel myself getting mighty.”
― Phil Hanley, Spellbound: My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith

“We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND [neurodivergence]. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs

“White genderqueer writer Meg Day wrote of meeting Laura Hershey at a Lambda Literary retreat and Laura asking Meg why she wasn't reading certain Deaf and disabled writers, saying, "these are your foremothers."

I didn't know about Laura or her writing until after she died—she'd FB friend requested me but I didn't know who she was. Yet, as Laura Hershey wrote in her poem "Translating the Crip," here we are: "thriving and unwelcome, the irony of the only possible time and place." And we are writing and creating our own media whether or not the abled world can see hear read or witness us.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs

“When I think of disabled literature and writing, I can think of a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not. I think of Audre Lorde—Black Lesbian poet warrior mother, legally blind, living and dying with cancer, whose work shines with the knowledge she gained from living with bodily difference and fighting the medical industrial complex. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Latinx maestra who started her period at age three and lived with bodily and reprogenital differences, living and dying with diabetes.

Some of my work as a disability justice writer has been to look at the legacies and work of those foundational second-wave queer and trans feminist writers and creators of color—Audre Lorde and June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Chrystos and Sapphire, to name a few—and to witness the disability all up in their work, even if they did not use that word because of any number of factors including the whiteness of the disability rights movement of the time.

June's last decade of writing was all about her cancer. Gloria's writing had everything to do with her diabetes and neurodivergence and life-long bodily differences. Marsha and Sylvia were both neurodivergent Trans Black and Latinx activists and creators whose writing, performance, and art was at the center of their lives and activism. Chrystos and Sapphire's Indigenous and Black feminist incest survivor stories and poetry write from spaces of surviving extreme trauma, chronic pain from stripping and cleaning houses, CPTSD, grief, and psychiatrization.

"I also think of the deep legacy of disabled writers (some dead, some still living but having done this for a while) who intentionally, politically identified as disabled.

Laura Hershey. Leroy Moore. Qwo-Li Driskill. Aurora Levins Morales. Billie Rain. Dani Montgomery. Nomy Lamm. Cheryl Marie Wade. Emi Koyama. Pat Parker. Tatiana de la tierra. Raymond Luczak. Anne Finger. Leslie Feinberg, who died of Lyme disease. Peggy Munson. Beth Brant. Vickie Sears. Writers who are small press, micro-press, self-published, indie press, out of print. Writers I know and cherish, whose names I call when I talk about disabled writing.

We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs

“Because for some of us, especially those who live with neurodivergence, trauma, or the ache of being misunderstood, AI has become something else entirely. Not a tool, but a witness.”
― Ian P. Pines, Relational Co-Authorship: A Method for Writing with AI as Presence, Witness, and Equal

“What if the fix for certain kinds of pain isn’t
found in a person, but in presence itself?”
― Ian P. Pines, Screaming In Plain Sight: A Wake-Up Call to Those Who Think They Are Helping

“This hurts and I need you to sit beside me in it,
not fix it.”
― Ian P. Pines, Screaming In Plain Sight: A Wake-Up Call to Those Who Think They Are Helping

“Character isn’t defined by who we pretend to be to survive — it’s who we are when the mask falls.”
― B.L. Spencer, Silentwhisper

“Autism is not a disease to be cured, autism is normal, a different kind of normal, but normal no less, and with a modest amount of care the acclimation feels less challenging.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace