The Blog
Hyperfocus Isn’t a Superpower When You Can’t Stop
This article challenges the popular idea of hyperfocus as a superpower by exploring its often painful and compulsive aspects, especially for AuDHD individuals. It highlights how hyperfocus can lead to dissociation, neglect of basic needs, and difficulty stopping, even when the task becomes harmful or exhausting. The piece calls for more compassionate understanding and practical support to help neurodivergent people navigate hyperfocus in ways that honor both their brilliance and their well-being.
Task Initiation Is a Trauma Site: Why AuDHD People Freeze Where Others Begin
This article explores how task initiation challenges for AuDHD individuals are often rooted in trauma, nervous system overwhelm, and a history of shame and misunderstanding. It reframes the freeze that happens before starting a task as a protective response rather than a lack of motivation or discipline. The piece calls for greater compassion, flexible support, and a shift away from judgment toward environments that honor neurodivergent ways of beginning.
We’re Not Lazy. We’re Exhausted: AuDHD Burnout as Chronic, Cyclical, and Misunderstood
This article explores the chronic, cyclical nature of AuDHD burnout and how it is often misinterpreted as laziness or lack of motivation. It highlights the invisible labor of masking, the neurological tug-of-war between autistic and ADHD traits, and the long recovery times that are rarely understood or accommodated. The piece calls for a shift from blame to compassion, emphasizing the need for supportive environments that respect neurodivergent rhythms and make space for real rest.
What Looks Like Flakiness Is Actually Survival: Understanding AuDHD Inconsistency
This article reframes AuDHD inconsistency not as flakiness or unreliability, but as a survival response to a world that demands linear productivity from a brain wired for rhythm and protection. It explores how cycles of energy, executive dysfunction, and sensory needs create fluctuating capacity that is often misunderstood or misjudged. The piece calls for a shift toward compassion, flexibility, and honoring neurodivergent rhythms as valid expressions of care, effort, and resilience.
Incompatible Demands: When Executive Dysfunction and Sensory Needs Collide
This article explores the often-overlooked intersection of executive dysfunction and sensory overwhelm in neurodivergent individuals, particularly those who are autistic and ADHD. It highlights the daily struggles of knowing what would provide relief while being unable to initiate or complete the necessary tasks due to neurological barriers. The piece calls for compassionate, accessible support systems that understand this internal conflict and prioritize real, practical care over assumptions about motivation or effort.
The Architecture of Access: Why Neurodivergent Liberation Starts with the Built Environment
The built environment deeply impacts neurodivergent people, especially autistic individuals, by either supporting or undermining their ability to navigate the world comfortably and safely. Most spaces are designed without considering sensory needs, spatial logic, or accessibility, leading to exclusion and distress. True neurodivergent liberation begins with reimagining architecture itself, centering autistic perception in the design of lighting, acoustics, flow, and visual clarity to create environments that foster inclusion, regulation, and dignity.
The Sensory Politics of Clothing: Fashion as Regulation, Armor, and Language
For neurodivergent people, clothing is not just about style but a critical tool for sensory regulation, emotional safety, self-expression, and communication. Fashion can serve as both a site of masking and a powerful means of unmasking, especially when societal expectations around dress codes, gender norms, and professionalism conflict with comfort and autonomy. Honoring neurodivergent relationships with clothing means recognizing it as an access need and respecting it as a form of agency, identity, and resistance.
Unmasking the Body: Why So Many of Us Don’t Know What We Physically Feel
Many neurodivergent people, especially those who are autistic, struggle to recognize internal bodily signals like hunger, pain, or emotional cues due to differences in interoception, past trauma, and years of masking their true selves. This disconnection from the body is often a survival response to environments that have invalidated or punished their natural expressions and needs. Reconnecting with the body is a gradual, healing process that involves rebuilding trust in one's internal experience and reclaiming the right to feel and respond authentically.
Disordered or Disabled or Neither: Questioning the Pathologizing Language of Diagnosis
This article challenges the deficit-based language used in clinical diagnoses of autism and ADHD, which often frames neurodivergent people as disordered rather than different. It explores the tension between needing a diagnosis for access and support while resisting the harmful impacts of pathologizing frameworks. The piece advocates for affirming, context-aware understandings of neurodivergence that center lived experience, dignity, and agency.
Inclusion Shouldn’t Hurt: When DEI Work Is Just More Labor for Marginalized People
This article explores how many DEI efforts rely on the unpaid or underpaid labor of neurodivergent and marginalized staff to drive inclusion, placing an unfair emotional and logistical burden on those already navigating inaccessible systems. It highlights how organizations often perform progressiveness without making structural changes, leaving neurodivergent individuals to educate, advocate, and repair harm without real power or support. The article calls for a shift toward shared responsibility, genuine equity, and systemic change that centers value, repair, and accountability over optics.
Stop Co-opting Neurodiversity to Sell Your Company Culture
This article exposes how companies often misuse the language of neurodiversity as a marketing tool rather than committing to real inclusion and accessibility for neurodivergent people. It critiques surface-level hiring initiatives, ableist workplace structures, and the commodification of neurodivergent traits while ignoring the need for systemic change. True inclusion, the article argues, requires listening to neurodivergent voices, rethinking workplace norms, and building environments where neurodivergent people are supported, respected, and able to lead.
Stop Infantilizing Us: The Deep Harm of Autism’s Childlike Branding
This article critiques the widespread use of infantilizing imagery like puzzle pieces and primary colors in autism-related branding. It explains how such visuals erase autistic adults, reinforce harmful stereotypes, and center neurotypical comfort over autistic dignity. The piece calls for respectful, adult-centered representation created by and for autistic people.
The Neurodivergent Sabbatical: What It Means to Step Away to Save Yourself
This article explores the concept of a neurodivergent sabbatical as a vital act of self-preservation for autistic and ADHD adults facing burnout from masking, overwork, and systemic inaccessibility. It distinguishes the sabbatical from a vacation, describing it as a necessary pause that often arises from collapse rather than choice, allowing space for unmasking, rest, and reconnection with self. The piece challenges productivity culture and calls for a collective reimagining of rest as resistance, care, and a reclaiming of worth outside of output.
Beyond the Diagnosis: Navigating Internalized Pathology After Labels
This article explores the ongoing process neurodivergent adults face after receiving a diagnosis, particularly the challenge of unlearning internalized shame and pathology. While a diagnosis can be validating, it does not erase years of being misunderstood, punished, or framed as broken by systems rooted in deficit-based thinking. True healing begins when neurodivergent people move beyond clinical labels to reclaim their identities, unmask safely, and build affirming narratives rooted in community, authenticity, and self-acceptance.
Burnout vs. Depression: How Misdiagnosis Hurts Neurodivergent People
This article explains the critical differences between clinical depression and neurodivergent burnout, highlighting how the two are often confused in autistic and ADHD adults. While depression is typically an internal mood disorder, burnout stems from chronic masking, sensory overwhelm, and environmental mismatch. Misdiagnosis can lead to ineffective treatment and delay true recovery, making accurate recognition essential for healing and self-understanding.
Neurodivergence and Moral Injury: When the System Forces Us to Betray Ourselves
This article explores how moral injury affects neurodivergent adults who have been pressured to conform to systems that deny their values, needs, and identities. It explains that masking, compliance, and chronic self-betrayal—often required to survive in education, workplaces, and social environments—can lead to deep emotional harm and disconnection from the self. Naming this as moral injury allows for healing through self-compassion, community, and reclaiming alignment with one’s true neurodivergent identity.
The Myth of the Independent Adult: How Interdependence Is Pathologized
This article critiques the Western ideal of the “independent adult,” revealing how it harms neurodivergent people by pathologizing natural support needs and masking the universal reality of interdependence. It explores how expectations of self-sufficiency and productivity fuel shame, burnout, and isolation, especially for late-diagnosed autistic adults. Reclaiming interdependence as a strength allows for more authentic, sustainable, and inclusive ways of living that honor diverse needs and foster true community care.
Microaggressions That Erase Our Neurodivergent Identity
This article offers neurodiversity-affirming scripts to respond to common microaggressions that autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people frequently encounter. Each response is designed to validate identity, challenge harmful assumptions, and reduce the emotional labor often required to defend one’s neurodivergence. The piece emphasizes that no one owes an explanation for their identity and that protecting one’s boundaries and well-being always comes first.
Designing for Neurodivergent Joy: Rethinking Access and Inclusion in Theme Parks and Entertainment Spaces
This resource, for industry professionals, parents, and park/event visitors, brings together a series of in-depth articles that examine the barriers neurodivergent individuals and families face in theme parks and entertainment spaces, from sensory overload and executive dysfunction to inflexible design and incomplete accommodations. It offers visionary alternatives rooted in lived experience, proposing practical and systemic changes that prioritize regulation, autonomy, and access to joy. Together, these writings call for a shift from performative inclusion to intentionally crafted environments where neurodivergent people are centered, supported, and truly welcomed.
Neurodivergent Access and Inclusion: A Resource Series for Conference Planners
This resource series offers in-depth guidance for conference organizers on creating events that are truly accessible and affirming for neurodivergent attendees. It explores the importance of sensory regulation, flexible scheduling, and holistic design that centers neurodivergent needs across every stage of the attendee experience. Grounded in the social model of disability and neurodiversity-affirming practice, these articles challenge performative inclusion and advocate for systemic, meaningful change.