Words have Power, He mana to te kupu.
Blog 4. 11.10.25
What is resistance for a ‘neurodivergent human’?
I can only truly speak to my own experience here are some examples. However, it is important for me to recognize, it is merely a dip into a very privileged space of access to medical care and mental health care and education and awareness of it at all.
But, still, my own understanding of resistance began for me when I was born AuDHD in a non-neuroaffirming world. Even if it’s taken me half of my potential life to understand this.
And at 4, I was already othered by toxic social norms.
And measured by age 5 in a grade book, by adult strangers who ruled over my life with toxic social norms, reinforced by my childhood classroom peers, in the only other environment I could be outside of home, alone.
And then, every time I failed to replicate this, I have been humiliated or ostracized or marked down, or left outside, or punished or made to sit somewhere else, or have lunch in detention, or got caught smoking a cigarette, or couldn’t go to a pizza party or received a library fine or had to stand in the hallway or lost my pen or was late to class or had to wag school or walked a certain way home to avoid other kids or never said anything in retaliation or never defended myself with force or stayed quiet out of fear and was left to figure all of this out on my own as an undiagnosed child. It still didn’t make me conform entirely. Part of what people don’t like about me is I question this all out loud because the rules didn’t make sense and held no logic for me, making it harder to want to try to learn what now just feels like ways to just use me up, and my own neurology was resisting it.
Why do we have to live like this?
Why are things this way?
Why don’t we just stop?
Just like every human, in our quiet ways, our bodies and mind resist by becoming tired, needing rest and joy, and it is thirsty, and it is hungry. It tells us exactly what we need when we burn out from work. But I know, I say this, it is still with privilege and without the levels of violence I am still naive about.
My great personal quest now has become to find out who I am in this world I was conditioned to see a certain way about others and myself. Who could I become with this knowledge of fully realised self in the human collective. And in a world that is truly neuroaffirming and what even actually is that when we finally get to have that conversation together?
That grew great awareness of the ableist system I’m supposed to be expected to uphold? And it grew great criticism of it for me. Especially now. I’m highly critical of any reinforcement of the status quo at this time and maybe forever now. We have great ideas, but they can’t be truly realized as neuroaffirming in a world of so much oppression.
And in the same way, I realized what it means that to have any neuroaffirming self-realisations becomes resistance.
This is why they attack anyone, marginalizing anyone who voices these oppressive flaws. It’s why Trans and Black and Indigenous lives are resistance. It’s why neurodivergency is also resistance. Disability is resistance. If there is a barrier or oppression, the resistance is in your very existence. Especially when it is systemic.
And any fight against you is to attack your very existence. Systemic violence is violence.
We must have solidarity with the oppressed to truly realize a world of equity. That journey of resistance is everyone’s responsibility.
But most importantly, neurodivergent existence is resistance.
Know thyself.
Love yourself.
And resist ✊🏽
All the power to the people.
Jenn has ADHD 