this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Potentially unpopular opinion - the term "autism" and "ASD" have expanded way beyond their original clinical meaning. It doesn't help that even the official definition is so broad as to be useless. Add to that the cooption by the Tiktok culture to describe any "quirky" behavior, and you get the current situation where it's hard to find a person that doesn't exhibit at least some "autistic" traits
The term "neurodiverse" (or as a friend calls it "neurospicy") came about because of this. It turns out that ASD blurs into a lot of other "conditions". They also tend to blur into each other.
Rather than deal with explaining the details of how your weird, neurodiverse is used to indicate your weird, but not broken. E.g. high functioning autism isn't naturally a disorder. Instead it makes you better at some things, but worse at others. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be social skills.
Neurodiverse people tend to have a lot more in common than average. It's both from social conditioning, and commonality of interests. We also often find "normal" to be uninteresting, if not boring. We seem to naturally gather and seek out like minded people. It also runs in families. This makes it seem that it's disproportionately common. We're not actually that common, we just tend to just concentrate into a few areas.
ASD etc have there uses, but as clinical terms, for problem management. It's annoying when it's overused in media, as a catch all term.
I mean we ARE a lot more common than uneducated people think. They have the "autism = unable to speak or walk normally" mentality instead of that one kid who likes to draw and listen to music.
We are more common than many thing. However, we also tend to self select our groupings. We are a lot less common than WE feel we are.
Basically, about 50% of my local makerspace are ND. That is way higher than the general populous. However, even within family, work, or random friend groups, I still see an abnormally high percentage. I basically self select for weird people and have done all my life. This seems to be common for many of us.
People often accuse me of being Autistic and it infuriates me to no end. I don't care if I am or not I don't give a shit about knowing. I'm perfectly fine without the label and I'll keep being fine.
I hate that so often we are encouraged to label ourselves in society and that just as often people seek these labels to fit in, gain community or otherwise make themselves more interesting by incorporating some quirky or less than common fact about themselves as a whole personality trait.
I am finding more and more that neruodivergent labels are becoming the new version of houses in basic bitch Astrology.
It's not wanting a label, it's struggling to fit in and being tired of it. Finding people like yourself is how you fit in, and if you fit with some people and they have a label, you checkup on it yourself and find an explanation of why you didn't fit in in the first place.
If you feel you fit in without knowing who you might fit in with, that is great, and you don't need to have a label. But some people find it easier to find like minded people if they match labeles.
So it's a social crutch they can lean on to find community? I'm pretty sure I mentioned something like that in my comment.