When I moved back to California after six years of reporting from Asia, my daughter, who was two and a half years old at the time, cried, “Mom, you’re just running around and around and around!” “Oh my gosh,” I thought, “she sees me; I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, and now she’s found it out.” That same year, the National Institutes of Health announced $10.1 million in grants to counteract gender bias in research. I wish I had known at the time, because I would have volunteered myself as a subject. I was depressed, confused, anxious, tired, and plagued with a persistent feeling of inadequacy and the feeling that somehow I wasn’t myself. I would drop my daughter off at her new preschool and feel as though I was wearing a mask around all the other parents, for fear that they would discover how inept I was. Meanwhile, increasing tensions at home with my husband made it even harder to manage the mess of feelings—and the literal mess of dishes and laundry.
I was stumped—here I was, a graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health and UC Berkeley, with reporting for CNN, Fast Company, Healthline, and elsewhere under my belt, and yet I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make and stick to a decent schedule, stay on top of household duties, or hold logistical conversations with my husband.
Meanwhile, between 2013 and 2016 a slew of articles were published in major news outlets about how adult women were being overlooked in research about “attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD) and autism. Writer and ADHD activist Maria Yagoda published a story in The Atlantic about being a student at Yale who struggled with a broad range of executive functioning, from cleaning to losing items and money, to tracking what time to be where. People didn’t believe she could have ADHD because she was “so smart.” Spectrum published a similar story about girls and women with autism; a young woman named Maya was profiled who was thought to struggle with severe anxiety and other challenges until she was finally recognized as being autistic.
I think Facebook was listening to my conversations with family members and therapists because suddenly articles and books started popping up in my news feed about women with ADHD and Asperger “syndrome” and about the highly sensitive person (HSP). I started seeing new research coming out about the mental health challenges of “high-achieving” women, and I was transfixed. Captivated. Utterly glued to what I was reading.
Because it turned out that I wasn’t alone. Study after study indicated high rates of depression and anxiety among “successful” women, but other traits, like ADHD and autism, were beginning to surface as well. I had never thought of these before, but I couldn’t deny that what I was reading was resonating with me. I was “sensitive,” I liked talking about only a few select topics (people, psychology, and inner life—my “special interests”), logistics might as well have been an alien language, and this word masking kept jumping out at me, as describing an experience that I didn’t realize or want to admit to.
So I begin this book by sharing a kind of confusion that plagued me at the time—a feeling of shock and dissonance but also of hope and relief. Could I be on some kind of sensory spectrum, like the autism spectrum? Or did I have ADHD? Both seemed likely. But I didn’t seek out assessment, diagnosis, confirmation, or anything of the like. Instead, I turned to research, studies, news articles, and countless interviews and stories with women who sounded a lot like me.
Masking
Masking refers to an unconscious or conscious effort to hide and cover one’s own self from the world, as an attempt to accommodate others and coexist. Research and anecdotal evidence show that an extensive amount of masking and “passing” is going on among women and girls, primarily because of the way women are socialized. Girls and women have been taught from an early age to “blend in,” according to researchers and the many women I interviewed for this book. Often, women hear the common refrain “Oh, she’s just sensitive. That’s how girls are.” This is a sloppy, but widespread, oversight in our culture.
Masking claims many lives—and I don’t necessarily mean that women literally commit suicide (although that can happen as well), but they may commit a kind of virtual suicide—leaving many women feeling empty, depressed, and anxious and robbing them of living according to their true selves. When society is not equipped to hold an accurate mirror up to you, you end up interpreting your reflection according to available lenses, structures, and terminology. But they’re often wrong and misleading, or, worse, harmful.
My depth of curiosity, sensitivity, persistent wondering, and questioning—my insatiable hunger to know and understand—is not mirrored in the wider culture, even in academia. I am deeply curious about the inner lives of others and understanding them—which often looks like asking a ton of questions (good thing I became a journalist), but this is not how people make friends. It took me a long time to figure that out. So instead of accepting myself as curious, passionate, and inquisitive, I felt different and isolated. Slowly, I allowed my mannerisms and gestures to match those I witnessed around me and the messages I was getting—namely, don’t ask too many personal questions, don’t talk too much, don’t deliver essay-length monologues on philosophical topics.
Over time, I changed; some of the change was likely because of natural maturation, but certainly some of it felt painful and necessary in order to adapt. I had to “stuff” a lot of my curiosity, and I turned to reading and to other independent ways to explore the expanse of the mind—meaning I spent less time interacting with other people and more time alone. Again, these are not bad things in and of themselves, but at the time, I was operating in a binary of “abnormal” and “normal” and thought those were my only options in order to coexist with the world. I had no knowledge yet of the wide diversity of ways that the brain is made up and ways that people interact. So without anything telling me otherwise, without any mirrors reflecting who I was, I masked and suppressed.
This is happening for women across the globe. In the past we were labeled “hysterical,” but now we’re “anxious.” What many women don’t know—and this includes the doctors and therapists with whom we interact—is that other mirrors are available to us that reflect previously hidden parts of ourselves.
It is said that the senses can be gateways to the soul, and I take that quite literally. Sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell correspond to either our mental health or our mental distress, depending on our sensitivities. Think of an onion, with its many layers: at the core of our being are our genes, biology, and childhood experiences but also our sensory makeup—that is, how our nervous system responds to and interacts with our sensory world, what delights us and what repels us. Over time, throughout our lives, all of these components interact, producing layers of emotions and resulting behaviors. When some of us end up in a therapist’s or doctor’s office with anxiety, depression, or autoimmune health challenges, our options are limited to talk therapy or medication because only these outer layers of emotion and behavior are probed. We have been going about our lives and professions thinking we know the full list of possible diagnostic criteria, but the senses have been left out; and thus a very core component of what makes people who they are goes completely untended.
Many people think of outdated, stereotyped images when they consider autism and ADHD, and it’s important to remember that there is a spectrum of experiences. It’s likely that these labels could apply to people in your own life—perhaps your boss, neighbor, friend, or family member, or even you. What I see as fundamentally missing from the conversation is a rallying point around diversity in how individuals process sensory input—and specifically, recognizing a broad occurrence of heightened sensitivity.
Some people may be fine with leaving this discussion at what has already been expertly explored by Elaine Aron in her 1996 book The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You. But I’m not—I want psychology and psychiatry to take sensitivity concerns further, because of how they affect people’s work, family life, education, economic opportunities, intimacy, and parenting. The public and professionals need to understand that people with sensory differences—such as autism and ADHD and a few other “neurodivergent” traits we will learn about in this book, such as sensory processing disorder (SPD), HSP, and synesthesia—experience heightened sensitivity across the board, and these differences affect nearly every aspect of their lives.
Many such neurodivergent women are suffering, as many times these traits occur along with anxiety and depression, especially if the underlying sensory differences go undiagnosed. The full scope of such differences—which often merit a diagnosis—is often unknown not only to friends and family but also to the women themselves. One woman I interviewed graduated from Columbia University but wasn’t “diagnosed” until the age of twenty-eight. Likewise, a mom in California didn’t realize her own autistic and ADHD traits until she was in her forties and her son was diagnosed; she recognized that his symptoms were ones that she had been dealing with her whole life. I realized my own neurodivergences at the age of thirty-two only because I started digging into the latest research.
An entire demographic of women is now being referred to as a “lost generation,” because an extensive amount of depression and anxiety surface as a result of internal experiences that don’t match up with what the world expects or how the world views such women—since they appear to function “normally” on the outside. This lack of awareness and understanding is largely due to neglect on the part of researchers because study samples often rely on streamlined populations of men; therefore, doctors, therapists, teachers, and police officers just don’t know what a woman with ADHD, Asperger’s, synesthesia, SPD, or high sensitivity might “look like” or how she might act. As a result, thousands of women have no name for their life experiences and feelings.
When I began encountering questions myself, I started digging deeper, fueled by wanting to have a name, a label, for my experience in the world—how I “show up,” how my mind and body react to certain situations, and most of all why I have felt so bad about myself.
Neurodiversity: The Game Changer
One day on a flight from South Korea to Nepal, I started imagining that there may be more people out there like me—and what if there were other ways of “being” in the world that didn’t have names or labels yet, especially for women? I created the phrase temperament rights to capture this idea of one’s temperament or neurological makeup being respected in the same way that we respect other core aspects of people, such as gender, sexuality, or ethnic identity. I started to imagine a world in which the richness of the human interior—what we call one’s “inner life”—is acknowledged and respected with the same awareness of diversity that we see in terms of outer categories of identification such as race, culture, sexuality expression, and gender.
If courageous leaders and activists before me had rallied around the importance of recognizing these outer categories, couldn’t we do the same for internal categories of identification? Don’t our inner lives deserve just as much attention as our outer lives? Having an inner life and an internal emotional world is universal; it’s something all of us possess. And something like ADHD or high sensitivity can show up in anyone—women and men, white folks and people of color, trans folks and cis folks.
Being the person I am, I rushed to my laptop and started searching around to see whether others were talking about this. It didn’t take me long to find the term neurodiversity, which means recognizing and celebrating the diversity of brain makeups instead of pathologizing some as “normal” and others as “abnormal.”
What happened next is one of those moments in life that haunt me—in the best of ways. I had been noticing a striking man walking my street early in the morning each day, with his daughter beside him. I sensed a joy within him, a freedom, a walk that signaled openness and calm and groundedness. His ever-present smile was notable. I passed him almost every day while walking my own daughter to her school. And when I was at my computer months later in Asia and discovered neurodiversity for the first time, this same man’s face popped up on the screen! It turns out that he, Nick Walker, is a notable neurodiversity author and scholar—and he lived just a few blocks away from me. At the same time, and thanks to Twitter’s algorithms, I found the tweets of author and neurodiversity expert Steve Silberman and started to delve into what would come to define the next few years of my life—an exploration and investigation of neurodiversity.
Sensitivity
Silberman’s 2015 book NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity is a historical account that focuses largely on boys and men with the neurodivergence of autism, but I found myself leaning into the research about adult women and several neurodivergences that have high sensitivity in common. From my research, I discovered that the trait of sensitivity seems almost synonymous with developmental neurodivergences in adult women.
Sensitivity implies a certain heightened reaction to external stimuli—experiences, noise, chatter, others’ emotional expression, sound, light, or other environmental changes. Sensitivity and high empathy are common experiences for many women, but some experience these qualities to more severe degrees, and they remain unaware that they can be hallmarks of Asperger’s, ADHD, HSP, and other traits. (Note: I use the words woman and female interchangeably in this book because of their usage in academic research, but the experience of sensitivity and a woman’s experience generally is clearly genderless, nonbinary, and equally applicable to trans women and cis women.)
Elaine Aron’s use of the term high sensitivity in her book The Highly Sensitive Person refers to a person with a characteristic depth of processing of external information—a person with sensory processing sensitivity (SPS), which is the scientific term for HSP. For someone with Asperger’s, sensitivity might imply a sense of being overwhelmed when overstimulated. And for someone with ADHD, a common but unknown feature is a sensitivity to one’s own emotions and the regulation of them. For the person with SPD certain smells or textures heighten their reactions. And for the person with synesthesia (a synesthete), the presence of suffering or strong emotions in others can overwhelm them, an aspect of synesthesia called “mirror touch.” It is interesting to note that all five of these neurodivergences—HSP, ADHD, autism, SPD, and synesthesia—often imply some version of “melting down” emotionally—adult tantrums, quick-appearing migraines, outbursts of anger—because of sensory overload.
Once we understand sensitivity, and its connection to neurodiversity, sensitive women no longer have to walk around with a hidden secret about what they know they feel and experience every day—taking in vast amounts of information about one’s environment, including the people in it, and somatically processing all of that input. The science has finally caught up with our real, lived experience, and we no longer need to hide in a closet for fear of being deemed “crazy,” overemotional, or not academic enough.
Divergent Mind explores specifics about five neurodivergences that have sensitivity at their core—HSP, ADHD, SPD, autism/Asperger’s, and synesthesia—and how new understandings and insights can be applied to daily life and society as a whole. We will dive into the worlds of women who have spent their lives masking—without knowing it. Because of the way women are socialized to “fit in” and pick up on social cues, underlying traits of autism or ADHD or other neurological makeups essentially get missed.
So again, enter neurodiversity—the understanding whereby mental differences are viewed simply as they are and not judged as better or worse, normal or abnormal. As a society, we need a shift in thought that applies to all neurological makeups—including more well-known ones such as bipolar “disorder” and schizophrenia—but this book focuses specifically on five “sensory processing differences,” with sensitivity at their core, that would typically be classified as being related to “developmental” differences (with the exception of HSP). Neurodiversity is a paradigm shift that empowers women to come forward, be seen, better understand themselves, and proudly claim their identities.
Divergent Mind also highlights the pressing need for our definitions of “mental health,” “disorder,” and “mental illness” to evolve. For example, is ADHD a “disorder,” or is it simply one form the human brain takes in our species as part of a natural array of human brain diversity—much as biodiversity implies a variety of plants, colors, and fauna in an ecosystem? Other questions we explore include How do we make space for the variety of human brains and sensory makeups we see? What happens when we stop pathologizing difference? We’ll see that creativity, innovation, and human flourishing often result. By adopting neurodiversity thinking, we can begin to see brain difference and sensory difference as any other difference we acknowledge and celebrate.
Furthermore, how does knowing that neurodivergent people make up at least 20 percent of the population begin to shift our concept of “normal,” “disordered,” or “mentally ill”? Perhaps we are really talking about humanity as a whole rather than a set of “neurotypical” versus neurodivergent individuals. Given that so many neurodivergent people go undiagnosed, we may be looking at an entirely different concept of what it means to be human.
Such a shift in understanding could help thousands of women around the world living with undiagnosed or misdiagnosed neurodivergences avoid years of unnecessary comorbidities such as depression, anxiety, shame, guilt, low self-esteem, and distorted self-image. Neurodiversity, when embraced, can dramatically improve all aspects of life.
The Conversation
What is considered pathology is largely a construct and product of the times. Mental health specialists spend their careers carving out the precise parameters around certain “diagnoses,” and when two or more diagnoses start to overlap or run up against each other, people get territorial and defensive and protective. This may sound shocking or ridiculous, but it is true. So it is imperative that the language and vocabulary of neurodiversity—the understanding that there is a natural array of human brain makeups—begin to seep not only into the medical and psychiatric canon, but also into the everyday colloquial language of the public.
We must ask, Why does the way you pay attention determine your work prospects and life satisfaction? If you, like me, pay attention either in spurts or overwhelmingly on one thing (called “hyperfocusing”), then your teachers or bosses may start to view you as if you don’t align with the “norm.” Thus, you unknowingly begin to edit and adapt—to mask—for survival. This begins a repeating cycle of censoring, attempting to fit in, and overall altering your performance of your “self” in the world, leading to depression, anxiety, burnout, or worse. (The correlation between neurodivergence and having suicidal thoughts is staggering.) You’re also more likely to be fired from jobs than people who are neurotypical, and thus you may struggle financially. All the while, however, you also know you’ve been able to perform well in particular areas, especially in unconventional working environments. This all paints a confusing picture, and you may get to the point of asking yourself, like I did, “What the hell is going on?” Your confidence and self-esteem plummet, and you begin to question many of your oldest experiences and frames for understanding yourself—and society.
At a gathering hosted by Krista Tippett of the public radio show On Being, a group of women and I were sharing our stories, and one woman sitting across from me began to cry because she had lost her daughter to suicide a few years before and the intimate discussions were helping her embrace her vulnerable feelings. As she started to describe her daughter, I told her some of what I had been learning about sensory differences, and she cried, “I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” For her daughter and for many other women, what looks like “bad” or “failing” behavior is sometimes a response to overwhelming sensory input, but the only thing that is noticed is the outer behavior. It is crucial that we question anxious, depressed, or “inappropriate” behavior through these new understandings and research about sensory-related mental health challenges.
As I interviewed women for this book, I heard over and over how life-changing it has been for them to discover simple tools and techniques to help themselves regulate emotions and resulting behaviors. In this book you will learn about not only such tools, but also what is happening in the world of architecture, design, virtual reality, and more so that women like us can breathe and walk around feeling peace and a sense of place and happiness. We are creating a brand-new ecosystem so that we can thrive. Creative, entrepreneurial projects and collaborations are popping up across the globe. Women like us are defining new identities, new cultures, new ways of communicating and interacting—ways that suit our temperaments.
And guess what? It’s not just for us. As we innovate, our ways begin to spill over into the general population. The way we see, describe, interpret, design, educate, or collaborate will begin to be viewed as more than just “different” and slowly but surely will become more of a norm whereby the world that previously felt foreign and isolating to us finally begins to feel like home—a skin we are finally comfortable in. So Divergent Mind is for neurodivergent folks, but also for the friends, educators, parents, doctors, partners, and work colleagues of those folks.
A Note on Language
Social awkwardness is a term that has enjoyed some buzz recently, but I think some caution is needed here. If we call attention to neurodivergence as a form of social awkwardness, then we are further enforcing the idea of “normal” and “abnormal” and the dominance of the neurotypical status quo. If we wish to move to a language and framework of friendly neurodiversity, the term “socially awkward” must be removed. We are all different flavors of human. There is no one “correct,” “right,” or “standard” way to be. There are tendencies, yes, and for that we have the label “neurotypical,” but as research increases on the individual variations of our brains and temperaments, I believe each particular strand of brain makeup will be viewed simply as that—the same way each color is viewed for what it is, with none deemed more “normal” than the next.
That said, it is important to understand some of the basic terms used in this book. The term neurodiversity was first put forth in the late 1990s by the Australian sociologist Judy Singer to capture the array of brain makeups found in the human species. The need to pathologize some brains over others would be less necessary under such an umbrella term, and the inherent diversity would simply acknowledge natural differences. Steve Silberman popularized the term in his groundbreaking book NeuroTribes, which focuses on the history of autism and the potential future of thinking within, and acting on, a neurodiversity paradigm. Autistic scholar and educator Nick Walker proved to be a close ally of and source of support to Silberman and other proponents of neurodiversity. Walker’s popular blog Neurocosmopolitanism is a definitive source for vocabulary and definitions for these and other terms.
If neurodiversity is the umbrella term—a fact of the human species—then neurodivergent is the term to be applied to individuals. If a person has been labeled or identifies as ADHD, autistic, bipolar, dyslexic, or another “diagnosis,” that person is said to be neurodivergent. Within a neurodiversity framework, any person possessing or identifying with a “mental illness” or “developmental disorder” may be considered neurodivergent. (Often, people have no label or diagnosis but strongly sense there is something different about them.)
A neurodivergent person possesses what is called a neurodivergence—the cluster of behaviors or signs that led to that person’s label or diagnosis. For example, you may identify as HSP or as a synesthete, so you would refer to those as your neurodivergences. This shift in language and narrative is empowering and less pathologizing.
A person who does not have any neurodivergence is neurotypical. Neurodivergent people often use this term as a way of differentiating styles of communication, expectations, and work that come up in their relationships with such people.
The organizing and advocacy that has evolved to support a neurodiversity framework and how that might be applied at school, work, and home within families is known as the neurodiversity movement. Many compare this movement to the kinds of changes and understandings accomplished by the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement. They share a common language, though admittedly the context and conditions vary.
The arrival of a neurodiversity framework, situated within the history of psychology and psychiatry, thus poses critical questions. With the increasing “rise” of modern neurodivergences such as ADHD and autism, for example, how do we choose to respond? How do we frame such neurodivergence to begin with? Do we learn from history and take a wider perspective that incorporates a societal and contextual lens, or do we focus on individuals? Are these terms simply the latest historical expressions of where the individual’s natural orientation rubs up against the expectations of society? And what do such rising rates signal to us about how society exists now?
Onward
Neurodiversity thinking is taking a firm hold within organizations, schools, corporations, design agencies, therapy practices, individual families, top tech companies, architecture companies, and Ivy League universities. A variety of disciplines are beginning to cross-pollinate ideas, and often those people at the helm of such collaborations are themselves neurodivergent. Why? And why now?
As we begin to shift away from previously held conceptions about gender roles, identity, sexual expression, race, and ethnicity, we are also beginning to be free from definitions and expectations about how to think and act in the world. The ADHD person blends her or his variety of interests into a new academic research center at a top university. The autistic teacher encourages more movement in the classroom to allow for fuller expression of hand movements, or “stimming,” to help those with sensory sensitivities. The synesthete leverages the science of virtual reality to inform chord progression on a new song. The HSP architect designs new spaces conducive not only to sensitive people but to the overall mental health, calm, and well-being of the general public. The SPD fashion designer designs more comfortable clothing for kids and their parents.
It is essential, then, to understand how sensitivity—which is at the core of so many modern-day neurodivergences—operates and shows up and how to honor it, along with the neurodiversity framework, to generate widespread healing, especially for women. The sensory aspects that dominate the descriptions of so many labels today simply cannot be ignored and tell us important information about how well society is functioning and what is not working for a sizable chunk of the population.
This Book
My training as a journalist and my lived experience inform this book. As the founder of The Neurodiversity Project, a series of community gatherings and author events for progressive research in medicine, design, the arts, and psychology, I have learned much from integrating research, personal experience, and observing healing in community. At this point in time, we have extensive research on individual traits—we’ve all read about ADHD or autism in the news—but how does the picture look as a whole, for neurodiversity and especially for women? I believe that years of suffering could be avoided if women were better studied and the emerging research were more widely known.
I wrote this book primarily to empower women who have a deep sense that they are “different” from the “norm” but would never in a million years think they “have” ADHD, Asperger’s, or some other neurodivergent trait. How could they, since the research has barely focused on them, that is, on women? This book is for those soon-to-be-known-as neurodivergent women and their families, friends, colleagues, and all the other people surrounding them. Being able to finally give a name to an experience is incredibly healing and liberating. Once these women realize who they are, and once the world embraces what makes them unique, perhaps we’ll finally be able to utilize their strengths—because it’s not just about alleviating suffering, but the opportunity to improve our society as a whole.
We’ve heard from related books in sociology and neuroscience and the mental health and wellness categories. Susan Cain’s 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking empowered an introversion revolution, and Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes traced the history of autism and the potential of the neurodiversity framework. Brené Brown’s 2012 Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead and other books showed the transformative power of revealing our inner vulnerabilities, and Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person (1996) gave us a nonpathologizing language of sensitivity for the first time.
Divergent Mind takes up the task of exposing the hidden inner worlds of those with sensory differences and challenging the world at large to listen and shift course. It takes readers on a journey of imagining what the world would be like if neurodivergences of all kinds were accepted and embraced. Would the “crazy” aunt produce magnificent works of art for sale while living in the extra bedroom of her sister’s house? Would the ADHD woman at work finally be able to thrive if her gifts for flexibility and troubleshooting were embraced by managers and colleagues and she became the go-to person in times of crisis? Would the autistic woman be respected as an international public speaker because of her cutting-edge insights on her “special interest,” much as climate change student activist Greta Thunberg has demonstrated?
As a society we are crumbling by staying stuck in an outdated, factory-inspired mode of operating that simply does not work with the large demographic of people we call neurodivergent. This book finally unravels the reasons why so many women are dealing with shame, guilt, and poor self-image in the face of a neurotypical society that does not make space for them. Everything shifts when these unseen sensory differences are finally recognized and spoken aloud. Once women realize the truth, they can leap light-years ahead in their lives.