Self-Acceptance, Jane Eyre and Fizzy Feelings

Behaving yourself neurodivergently.

The Joy of Being Recognised

I’m realising that the absolute joy of being recognised at last can cause me to overlook a person or organisation’s lack of genuine neurodivergent-acceptance. It’s delicious, it’s delightful- it’s a dopamine rush and all the sparkling good feelings. It feels like a fizzy sweet antidote to the shame and disconnection caused by often not having been seen. I didn’t catch where the quote came from but it was joyous when the psychologist giving a talk about ADHD in women last night shared someone’s words about their “erratic flurry of energy” when meeting a deadline that turned back into “spaced-out plodding” when it was done. The murmur of amused recognition rippled through the audience. “That’s us! That’s what it FEELS like to be us!”. It’s visceral, embodied. We are fast, so fast. Then we are slow. So slow and treacly. And we don’t understand, and other people don’t really understand and they, and we, think we’re lazy or disobliging or chaotic.

The speaker was by no means purely stuck in the medical model and its deficit language. She wasn’t entirely pathologising or taking up the position of an “Expert Other”. She was a psychologist who located herself as “not quite” ADHD, with a definitely ADHD son and husband. She acknowledged that the words “deficit” and “disorder” in the acronym rankle with many people. She used memes from the ADHD online communities to illustrate her points, as well as links to scientific papers.

Everyday Judgments

But she used a lot of judgmental language unquestioningly; like saying ADHD women “over talk” and “over share” and are “hyper sensitive” or “hypo” (under) sensitive to certain things without enough (in my opinion) questioning of how subjective these concepts are. And how the world has really all sorts to say about how women are “Too much” and it has a lot to say about how neurodivergent people are “Not productive enough” and if you don’t make these biases explicit, then you run the risk of reinforcing the lack of acceptance that so many ND folk have experienced from others when they’re just being themselves - and the lack of self-acceptance and the shame spiral that ensues.

During the Q and A section, a woman asked whether it was okay to let her ADHD daughter “be herself” when she was being animated and talking a lot and dancing around and being excited while they had people visiting. She didn’t want to shut her daughter down, but on the other hand, she wondered whether she should be asking her to “behave”. The speaker said something about letting her be herself as long as she wasn’t “disturbing people”. Which feels reasonable, of course. Though is there something about people engaging with that joyous energy, instead of just letting it happen “over there”. I’d be the wrong person to ask anyway- I’m happily child-free, don’t much like unpredictable noise and once thought I might actually die of boredom and resentment when a child’s parents requested everyone watch their child count from one to a hundred at the dinner table. A hundred! Anyway. The point really was that she was asking as if the speaker might have a definitive answer- but the speaker’s position on how far neurodivergent person and world might accommodate each other, was also not neutral- and veered more I think to “ND person should accommodate world” than to the “Flippin heck, the world has a loooong way to go.

The Ones Who “Get It”

It’s not that other neurodivergent people are automatically accepting either. They may be dealing with a lot of internalised ableism as I was when I was first diagnosed, and still am. But I’ve done a lot of work on self-acceptance, helped along by other ND folk I now know who “get it”. But actually, I’ve been realising- there were always people who got it. Just- they were often fictional - or creating fictional characters. And part of knowing you’ve been understood comes in that fizzing recognition. “THIS is what it feels like to be me!”. One of the first examples of that for me was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte which I first read at the ridiculously young age of seven (a babysitter didn’t believe me and quizzed me on things like Mr Rochester’s dog’s name- Pilot). I thought I might have to search through the book to find illustrations. But actually - so much is there on the first page.

Being Jane Eyre

Sensory sensitivity - Jane relieved to get out of going out for a long walk which was especially horrible on cold days “Dreadful to me was the coming home in raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes”- YES! Oof.

“and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie the nurse”. I hear you Jane! You wouldn’t even have done anything wrong on purpose. Your ideal activity was sitting reading your illustrated bird book. But just going about your day seems to get you told off for reasons you often can’t fathom.

Her Aunt wanted her to be trying to “acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner-something lighter, franker, more natural”. Not so many questions or talking back. Jane’s Aunt is basically my Mum. Or anyone who wanted me, or anyone to be other than what they so accidentally, inevitably, not yet unapologetically were.

Some of the deep love for Jane Eyre, and for so many characters where there is a trope of bookish girls recognising bookish girls and being affirmed by them, is about something so much deeper and wider than that. It’s about a way of being in, and processing the world, being validated, accepted, affirmed, nay celebrated when so many voices around you will be doing the opposite. It’s about internalising and reinforcing a voice that says “No, this is who YOU are and how you feel and it isn’t wrong. You are not wrong”. Thank goodness for the writers who always saw and always knew - and whose words resonate and fizz and energise us still, and rescue us from shame spirals and spaced out plodding.