withasmoothroundstone:

wheeliewifee:

princekilioferebor:

i guarantee there are a lot more neurodivergent ppl pretending to be neurotypical than the other way around 

YES. 1,000% fact.

Also there’s lots of neurodivergent people pretending to be different types of neurodivergent people.  And that is considered some kind of horrible pathology instead of a survival tactic.  I used that to survive situations where I would never have been able to pass for nondisabled, but where passing for various kinds of crazy or intellectually disabled, whether deliberately or accidentally, was necessary for survival reasons.  And I get treated as some kind of monster for having done that.  Whereas if I’d been able to go on feigning normality (which, if it can be said to have happened at all – which I have doubts about – would have lasted my 11th year (6th grade) and no more, not before, not since) that would have been praised.  There’s a double standard here:  Pretend to be other-type-of-neurodivergent and you must have some horrible disease that makes you pretend things for attention (um, no, it’s SURVIVAL, trust me).  Pretend to be neurotypical and you’re doing the world a wonderful favor.

Most autistic people I’ve met who were misdiagnosed or unofficially misidentified in various contexts as intellectually disabled or crazy, have at some point or another deliberately lived up to those expectations because it was the safest thing to do at the time.  (I actually ran a panel discussion on this for a conference once.  This is something that people admitted to doing whether they were considered “low functioning” or “high functioning” at the time they were doing it.   One guy said he even still used people’s expectations of him as incapable of understanding things, to get away with doing stuff he couldn’t otherwise do.  Which isn’t just a survival thing, it’s a person thing.)