I have spent my entire life being weird. I am well aware of what it brings socially.
I was a spelling geek, a voracious reader of anything written (including shampoo bottles and ingredient labels because they had long, interesting words I hadn’t seen before), and a bottomless pit constantly needing mental stimulation. Puzzles and books and ideas and music and more books. I spent two years on a Little League team where not only did I never once catch a baseball in practice or a game, but my claim to fame was getting hit with the ball while at the plate because it never occurred to me to move. It’s a running joke in my house that my brain is the only athletic thing about me.
Even though I was home-schooled, I had to attend Driver’s Ed at the local public school, and I am embarrassed to think of how desperately I wanted the approval of my peers back then. I wanted nothing more than to be seen as one of them. I didn’t lack social skills; I come from a large family, and believe me when I say I had ample opportunities for “socialization.” Back then, I was even an extrovert. But I was weird, and so I was a pariah who was only visible when they needed someone to mock or bully. It taught me that in order to be accepted, you cannot be yourself.
I spent the next several decades putting a lot of work into hiding my weirdness and trying to be just like everyone else while questioning why I couldn’t seem to pull it off. Eventually, it became obvious to anyone I attempted to befriend that I had some serious deviations from the “norm,” and my compulsive need to hide my true self led to a lot of dishonesty.
One of my defining characteristics is that my thinking and conversational style is sometimes like a mole. You might be talking about subject X, and my brain digs down into the ground of it, travels along various related paths, makes a few new trails, and pops up 50 feet away with a comment that doesn’t even remotely fit into the conversation, unless of course you also traveled those underground passages. Which you didn’t, so now you’re staring at me, wondering why I just said that completely odd thing that is sticking out of the conversation flow like a piece of wood redirecting the flow of a creek onto the bank and flooding everything. What’s even better is that I am often making a joke that relies on all of that underground context to be amusing, so now you’re also wondering why I’m laughing to myself like some kind of…weirdo.
My parents were told that I was “gifted” when I was 3. All I knew about the label growing up was that it came with much higher expectations even compared to my siblings, and in my case, meeting them was a condition of approval. Getting an “A” wasn’t cause for celebration because it was the minimum expectation. Winning a piano contest was the default state; when I didn’t win, it was proof of my failure and the “wasted” entry fee. You’re not living up to your potential. To whom much is given, much is expected.
Had I been told during my childhood or teenage years that I was “neurodivergent,” I would have glommed onto that with all of my being. It would have explained everything, and more importantly, it would have given me an identity that was something other than “the weird kid.” It would have told me that I mattered, that my weirdness was somehow special and brave instead of a constant reminder that I wasn’t like everyone else and therefore not good enough.
What if someone had just normalized who I was, without a label? It would have saved me a lot of work that had to be undertaken later as an adult, in the wreckage of failed relationships and stupid decisions made while trying to figure out where I fit in.
I say all of this to illustrate that I understand the seduction of explanatory identity, probably better than many. It’s because of that understanding, and the visceral pull toward these identities, that I think we should question where it leads.
***
In the wake of my jointly authored essay with Michael Woudenberg titled True Neurodivergence, several things have emerged.
Excellent discussion with intelligent, thoughtful people who engaged us both with their lived experience and the willingness to explore the questions, even if they disagreed. Their disagreement and the ensuing discussion helped all of us clarify our thinking a bit. I value that tremendously; it is absolutely necessary—and so is the public forum in which it occurred.
Not-so-excellent discussion with people who saw the piece as an existential threat to their identity and value as a human.
One went so far as to characterize Michael’s comments to her as “subtle violence.” She was so upset that she posted an entire essay on it. The comments on her piece were as you’d expect: people lauding her response, questioning why Michael didn’t disagree in private instead of commenting publicly, talking about safety, trauma activation, etc. Not a single person saw the real question underneath it all, and that’s what I’m going to dig into today.
I’m not going to link her essay because my goal here is not to rally people to go roast her in the comments. She’s still a human being deserving of respect, and this piece isn’t going to flame her or anyone else. I value her perspective, even though I disagree.
Today, though, I’ll ask, “Why can we not question the neurodivergent culture?” Maybe the better question isn’t about neurodivergence at all. In fact, let’s make the question more operational:
Why are we not allowed to question explanatory identities?
What does it mean for a group if you can’t?
Someone might argue that you CAN, in fact, question it; her essay even says that critique is legitimate. The problem is that she spends the rest of the essay describing the interaction as:
“subtle violence,”
“epistemic injustice,”
“having another person continually reposition themselves as the more reliable interpreter of your own experience,”
“deeply destabilising,”
“nervous-system aggression,”
“social reenactment of relational wounds,”
“tone policing,”
“coalition pressure,”
“self-sealing interpretive dominance.”
Her language morally and psychologically charges the interaction and reframes it as a threat. When emotional discomfort becomes the primary measure of whether an idea or question is permissible, the ability to critically evaluate frameworks becomes increasingly constrained.
In addition, this reframing attaches social credit to the questions. By defining critique as psychologically dangerous for the person doing it, you’ve created an incentive structure. People will recognize that, and depending on their own identity, choose not to engage because they view it as socially dangerous. It’s a self-perpetuating loop, and then you’re back to the things Michael and I describe in the original essay.
The Backbone of Questioning the Narrative
There is a difference between saying “your experience is not real,” and saying, “Your interpretation of the experience may not be the only valid one.” They’re not equivalent claims.
Our essay on neurodivergence never once said that people’s experiences don’t matter. In fact, Michael clarified repeatedly in the comments that these experiences do exist, that sometimes accommodations and even medication are necessary, and that we aren’t arguing that.
I’m not even saying that harmful language doesn’t exist. Certainly, abusive, manipulative, and coercive language does exist. But has the threshold for “harm” expanded so far that the conceptual challenge itself is being seen as somehow abusive? I argue that it has, and the sharp point of it is identity.
It’s one thing to say, “Constraints exist in my life, and they must be managed thusly.” It’s entirely another to say, “I am defined by these constraints, and if you question them, you are calling my character, integrity, and even human value into question.”
Those are not even remotely the same thing, and asking why someone has melded them all together is a worthy query. What makes that so attractive? I can answer it, at least from my own experience, because I know what it’s like to struggle as an Other.
Yes, people can be flattened by reductionistic frameworks. But they can also become over-attached to explanatory identities that begin organizing every difficulty into a single lens. What’s more, it’s not cruel or dismissive to question that.
Conceptual clarity is important, and asking questions or broaching alternative explanations isn’t an existential threat on its own. If someone chooses to see it that way, that also doesn’t make it so. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t dictate reality; we merely choose whether we see it clearly or not.
The Constraint Objection
The objection at this point is usually that “We all have our own realities.” Do we? I would argue that reality exists in and of itself, regardless of whether we like it or want to see it. We tend to shy away from the uncomfortable aspects of our reality, but it doesn’t change that it exists. We might have constraints that others don’t know about, but those don’t change reality either.
Example: I am 30 pounds overweight, and it is both causing and exacerbating other health issues I have. That is a reality. The various medical constraints I have make changing that very difficult, but my constraints don’t change the reality; in fact, they’re part of it. Could I work within those constraints to still get the job done? Yes. Am I doing it to the best of my ability? Nope.
Is it uncomfortable to say that? In the immortal vernacular of my home state of Wisconsin, yah, you betcha.
If someone comes along and says, “Hey, you’re overweight, and you can change that,” I have options; this list isn’t even all of them.
I can ignore them.
I can choose to acknowledge the reality and explore changing it.
I can use my constraints as a shield and even an excuse.
I can disagree and say that I am absolutely perfect the way I am and need to change absolutely nothing. What’s more, I can see the comment as an attack on my worth as a human being and lash out.
If I choose the last option, what has happened? The comment itself has now been reframed as invalidation, epistemic harm, rhetorical domination, and nervous-system aggression. Once that happens, ordinary conceptual disagreement becomes morally loaded in a way that makes productive dialogue almost impossible. If I choose that last option, I am unable to hear that my view of reality does not match what is real.
There is an underlying critical point that I need to say here: My being overweight does not change my value. I am still worthy of love, I am still a real human being who should be treated with kindness. And yet kindness involves truth, not just comfort.
I said in my podcast episode with Sam Alaimo that I want friends who care enough to wound me in the pursuit of my growth. That’s one of the reasons why I value Kyle Shepard so much, because he is that kind of friend. He doesn’t say, “Oh, it’s okay, Kit, you have constraints.” He says in essence, “Okay, let’s look at the constraints and figure out how to work within them and still get the work done because not doing the work at all is not helping you.” Hiding behind constraints does not help me, and it doesn’t help anyone else.
That doesn’t mean the constraints don’t exist; they absolutely do. We all have them; some of us more than others. But are we throwing our hands up and saying, “Sorry, I can’t do XYZ?” Or are we saying, “Okay, here’s a constraint. How much is it worth to me to find a way within/around/over it?” And each person must make those choices in their own agency:
What is the goal?
What is that goal worth to me?
What are the constraints?
What options do I have, and are there options I haven’t considered because I don’t like them or they are difficult?
Why don’t I like them?
I purposely chose the overweight topic because it’s absolutely morally charged, but it applies to so many different arenas, including trauma, and yes, even actual pathology to some extent.
What’s in a Label?
While discussing this whole neurodivergence topic with Michael for the essay we wrote, I happened to mention that I got the “neurodivergent/autistic” diagnosis a few years ago, and he essentially asked me, “What if you’re not actually neurodivergent but just part of the normal variance of human personality?” What if you’re just eccentric, and why does it need a label?
Why didn’t I bristle at this? Why didn’t I assume he was attacking me, or engaging in “subtle violence?” Why did I instead think, “That’s a fascinating take; we should explore that”?
I didn’t see his question through the lens of harm, because I have learned that my identity and value remains stable regardless of what label is attached to it. Weird, autistic, divergent, strange, eccentric, normal: What does it matter? I am still who I am, a wild and wonderful piece of the intricate fabric that makes up humanity’s variance. I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
That stability means, however, that I can ask questions that others might find…well, violent, apparently.
At what point are people allowed to ask the difficult questions? Is it only if it assumes that the narrative is unchallengeable? I’ve been told that. I can ask questions as long as I don’t question someone else’s reality. Or their self-concept. And what they’re really saying, at least sometimes, is, “Don’t make people uncomfortable.” And CERTAINLY don’t do it in a public forum.
Is the goal not sharper thinking for all? Public debate is a critical part of the human experience and has been for thousands of years; iron sharpens iron, and these disagreements and questions are how we all get better.
I value people’s perspectives even if we disagree. What is the privacy aspect protecting? Neither of us determines the other’s value, so who cares if we disagree? If anything, public debate allows others to also join in and share their perspectives that both of us might be missing. If my goal is clarity, then I want public debate. If my goal is protecting how I feel about myself, then yeah, I guess I would want people to disagree privately. Don’t embarrass me on my own Substack, right? NO. By all means, do so. Disagree, vehemently if you want to. Let’s have the discussion, because I might be wrong.
Being wrong isn’t a bad thing. How else do we refine ourselves and our thinking? I would argue that protecting identity or emotional narrative helps no one, including us. When we start claiming that questions themselves are somehow unsafe, we are ditching our own ability to define emotional safety in a constructive way, and choose to engage it.
Emotional safety doesn’t mean lack of discomfort; I am uncomfortable all the time; in fact, I am uncomfortable writing this essay. I am also, however, still safe because who I am is not dictated by whether I am wrong. Good thing, because I’m often wrong, too—I could be totally wrong about all of this. That is the POINT. I cannot be corrected or refined if I am never wrong. I cannot evolve my thinking if every time someone asks me a difficult question, I scream that they’re engaging in “subtle violence.”
And as long as I’m on that subject, let me point this out as well. Violence traditionally referred to coercion, physical force, threats, destruction, domination, or violation. But increasingly, ordinary interpretive disagreement is being pulled into adjacent moral language: harm, erasure, aggression, invalidation, unsafe dynamics, epistemic violence, nervous-system injury, and on and on. We have a hundred terms for it.
Expanding the language of violence too broadly collapses the distinction between coercion and disagreement. The effect of this is that conceptual disagreement now is morally contaminated. If disagreement begins occupying the same emotional category as threat, coercion, or violence, then the space for honest inquiry collapses. Self-understanding is useful, even critical. Identity-protective reasoning, however, becomes dangerous when disagreement itself is framed as aggression.
Part of that, I think, comes from the tendency that humans have to seek categorization of each other. Everyone must fit into a box. People who are “weird” don’t fit, and therefore they are uncomfortable, so we made our own box because the word “weird” has negative connotations.
What if it didn’t? What if weird simply means complex? Interesting? What if we were to stop needing labels and pathology for everything, and just said, “You are a human being with variance, and I want to get to know your particular variations.”
What if we leaned into agency, and stopped using our variations and constraints as blocks to living a full, real, transparent, authentic life where we own our constraints, but also our choices and their consequences? And what if we brought all of that wildness to the table and discussed it openly, without fear of someone else “harming” us?
Conceptual friction is something we NEED as a society, openly and in public. If we can’t have it without moral escalation, we cannot collaborate, we cannot reason together, and we aren’t going to get anywhere.
Now let’s talk about how this translates operationally to a group or team setting.
Identity-Protective Systems
When you have a team or group where:
Identity stability is dependent on a narrative
Critique is emotionally moralized
Discomfort is evidence of harm
Social penalties regulate conceptual challenge
…you now have a system that cannot self-correct, because the system itself is built to defend against the questions that would drive that self-correction. This is literally the core of how systems move away from healthy embarrassment and genuine feedback to incentivized compliance.
Once a system begins prioritizing emotional stabilization over reality calibration, it slowly loses the ability to distinguish disagreement from attack, correction from domination, and truth from emotional consensus. At that point, the group may still appear morally cohesive, but it is no longer adaptive.
This evolutionary pressure creates an identity-protective system, where emotional stability is dependent on preserving certain narratives. That means disagreement will be framed as harm, because it has to be. Critique is morally loaded, and social pressure will regulate how people respond. The group’s orientation has drifted so far that course correction cannot happen without completely dismantling the system itself.
This distorts feedback systems and impairs collective calibration.
Tying It All Together
The issue isn’t neurodivergence at all, or weight, or value. All of these are surface manifestations of the deeper issue: identity fusion.
Anytime an explanatory framework gets fused to identity strongly enough that questioning the framework is experienced as a threat to the person, the system stops being loyal to truth and starts being loyal to people or even ideology. The group will stop selecting for honesty and instead select for emotional compliance and reputation. The people within your group who ask the hard questions will eventually get pushed out or leave, because they’ve become liabilities instead of some of the most valuable assets you have.
It all comes down to orientation. If your system cannot survive scrutiny, you can’t even recognize reality, let alone navigate it effectively.
It's always interesting to see how people respond to tightly held ideals. It's taken me a while to recognize the power of picking the right ones while also remaining loosely coupled. I guess that falls under the larger umbrella of Antifragility, this time of my sense of self.
My hats off to you Kit, that may be the most personally open, bravest missal I’ve ever read. I could no more write something like you did for public consumption than I could cut my leg off(or do a burpee;).
You’re amazing.