I’m not broken. My neurology is not diverse or divergent. That’s complete bullshit! There is an entire industry I am going to piss off and I’m good with that. Be pissed off that I don’t want your medication or your labels. I know what the dark side of the moon looks like.
I was raised looking at depression through the doorframe as my mother lay in the dark staring at me without the energy to call to me or get out of the bed. I would come home to notes on how to reheat the food that she made while I was away because it was easier to cook in the dark for her than to even attempt to process a hug.
Michael Beasley said that his mother told him, “To tell you what depression feels like, I’m not allowed to show you what it looks like. That’s why if I cry a little, just act like you don’t notice.”
His mother is not mine. My mother showed me and I knew what that felt like. I saw how it broke my father while she numbly and impatiently hurried him with a look of disgusted pity because he was crying and saying “I’ll see you again soon” before kissing me on the cheek and sending me back to her. I knew how a cold tear and beard stubble felt and that was my understanding of depression.
I understood early in life that perception is reality and that each person sees life through their own eyes. I didn’t appreciate what depression was, or what mental health was until I was being educated about it during annual military training. I thought it was unfortunate my friend took his life. Annoying that some family members would be laughing one moment and physically attacking me the next. That was just so-and-so being crazy.
Prior to the late 90’s there was no classification of “neurodiverse.” You were either normal or special needs. I’ve written about being removed from what is now called the neurotypical students in Labelled.
When the Air Force taught me about mental health, that opened a locked realization. I was living within a family of people suffering from mental health issues but hadn’t identified it.
When the baseline is tainted you won’t know it until you have seen normal in so many other places you finally realize how abnormal your baseline is.
Moving was normal in the military, but it was planned. What I considered normal was the furthest thing from it. It was not normal to show up to the house and cheer because the car was full again. That for me was normal, and I liked moving because it meant I would be able to spend time with my mother. I’d meet new uncles and aunts too, and sooner or later my father would show up again.
My mother is “neurodiverse,” not me. My neurology is not a city-scape where parts of my psyche converged in a melting pot of personalities, or intellectual capabilities. There will never be a pill to help me with this like there is for my mother or anyone else living with chronic clinical depression. This is why I strongly dislike the label of neurodiverse. I’m not mentally diverse. I just sometimes write backwards.
I don’t accept my dyslexia as my identity. It’s also why I struggle to accept it as a reality. It’s not real to me until I hit “read aloud” and I hear myself. When I hear the pronunciation of a word that is wrong, or a thought that is incomplete I know it’s not a false label, just one that came too late for my generation to get the right help for.
I process non-linearly, but I am consistently me. I close my eyes to concentrate, or I’ll scroll social media to listen for important information when meetings veer off into nonsense only to be reprimanded for apparently not paying attention. My logic states that if we are in a meeting talking about tracking when an Agentic AI process starts to drift why should I care about your kid’s upcoming soccer match?
When I speak, I am also thinking. When you speak, I am solutioning. When I learn, I am memorizing, building, questioning, failing, restructuring, and breaking new words down into words I deeply understand. This is my perception of life. This is normal. I am neurotypical too.
When I learned that dyslexia influences verbal comprehension, emotional understanding, and at times is misdiagnosed as autism I almost accepted the excuse of “it’s my dyslexia” until I caught myself saying it seriously. Dyslexia has never been more than an extra hop in my learning path. It’s always been the strength that I had to learn things more deeply than my peers, never an excuse.
Having dyslexia is no different than Michael Jordan waking up before the sun to practice free throws hundreds of times a day, or a skateboarder trying a trick until they land it. The difference is the coolness factor. People admire and overlook intellectual weaknesses for people who are pretty or athletic. Disagree if you want.
My upbringing taught me that there is a solution for every problem, even when that solution is to not attempt to come up with one. I know what it feels like to be bullied as an adult. To have to deal with the high school cool kid who would crack jokes to avoid reading out loud and is now a Senior Vice President. Being of this mindset means that we don’t respond to them because a response would be devastatingly true.
This is why I hide behind the label of being dyslexic; to save you from being hurt from unfiltered words I would use to fight back. Telling you it’s my dyslexia is my way of saying you’re too dumb to understand and too lazy to learn how to. I’m not going to lower myself to your level, but I will show you the label that does that for me.
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