{"id":386,"date":"2023-10-02T19:59:09","date_gmt":"2023-10-03T01:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/?p=386"},"modified":"2023-12-04T18:20:54","modified_gmt":"2023-12-05T00:20:54","slug":"why-its-important-to-explicitly-acknowledge-neurotypical-perspectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/2023\/10\/02\/why-its-important-to-explicitly-acknowledge-neurotypical-perspectives\/","title":{"rendered":"Why it’s Important to Explicitly Acknowledge Neurotypical Perspectives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I got involved in a comment discussion on this post by sildarmillion<\/a> this week about the lack of nuance in otherwise useful advice like \u201clisten to your body,\u201d and she said something that perfectly summarized a thought I\u2019ve had before: \u201cBut a simple acknowledgement that you understand what you\u2019re describing isn\u2019t universal goes a long way.\u201d  So it seemed like a good time to properly lay out one of my opinions on how to support the neurodivergent community as a neurotypical: simply acknowledging when you\u2019re speaking from a neurotypical perspective and\/or probably for a neurotypical audience is a lot more important than a lot of people probably realize, despite seeming to be a small thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, one of the underlying problems behind the failure(s) to accommodate neurodivergent needs is the assumption that everyone operates in certain ways.  If you\u2019re in a room with a bunch of people and a fairly standard level of lighting, if one person expresses that it\u2019s painfully bright in there, the knee-jerk reaction is to go \u201cWhat?  The light is perfectly normal, don\u2019t be dramatic.\u201d  If someone doesn\u2019t make eye contact, others may assume that they\u2019re lying or acting suspicious, because neurotypicals do tend to make eye contact.  Etc.  Most people don\u2019t have malicious intent at all I assume, but we\u2019re socially trained (explicitly and\/or implicitly) that people operate in certain ways, so when someone doesn\u2019t<\/em> operate in those ways, it\u2019s easy to not take it seriously if we don\u2019t know what it\u2019s like to be them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when we give advice or opinions on what people should do or how they ought to be operating, for example \u201calways trust your gut,\u201d as if what we say is universally applicable, we perpetuate this neuronormativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the example I used in the initial discussion: food.  In response to toxic diet culture and expectations, people may say that \u201cYou should just listen to what your own body is telling you it needs\u201d or something along those lines.  I think this is good advice that some people need to hear.  I find it a good principle for me – I have mild dysautonomia that causes multiple diet-related issues (eating enough, needing more sodium, etc.), and it seems like one of the most helpful things I\u2019ve done is stop caring about all the \u201chealthy eating rules\u201d and just eat whatever I\u2019m motivated\/able to, even if it means eating pasta every day of the week and never a salad (I make up the nutrients with a multi-vitamin).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUT by itself, it lacks necessary nuance.  Some people have hyperfocus.  Some people have poor interoception (receiving signals from your own body such as being hungry or thirsty or needing to pee).  Some people need to take meds with food at specific times whether or not they were interested in eating at that time.  And so on.  It\u2019s good advice in context, but to give it as if it\u2019s what everyone <\/em>should do doesn\u2019t work well because sometimes you DO need to follow \u201crules\u201d about what you should do that don\u2019t necessarily match what your body is telling you, and if people ignore that part it can cause its own problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kinds of people I\u2019m thinking of this applying to<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not saying you have to give a \u201cBTW I\u2019m neurotypical\u201d disclaimer before you say or post anything,<\/em> before people think this sounds excessive.  I\u2019m thinking more people who are in some kind of position where they may have slightly more influence over the social perception of what\u2019s universally experienced or not.  For (incomplete) examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Who: A conference presenter, podcaster, teacher, blogger, researcher writing an article.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. What: Productivity advice.  Advice on what your writing life or habits should look like.  Relationship or situation advice (for example, assuming \u201ctrusting your gut\u201d will be equally useful for everyone regardless of their trauma history or anxiety or amount of life experience).  Studies about the effectiveness of XYZ therapy type.  Instructions on what \u201cbeing focused in the classroom\u201d looks like behaviorally.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. To name the ones I can think of at the moment.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    What I\u2019m asking for<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But of course, target audiences are a thing.  As much as I would love to be able to include every potential context and perspective (if you think I use a lot of parenthetical notes, you should see what I have before<\/em> going back and cutting the less necessary ones to keep people from getting too bogged down to finish reading XD), the nature of communication doesn\u2019t allow that.  I\u2019m not saying people should give equal airtime to every neurotype when writing a blog post of productivity advice, or teaching their favorite writing habits they think others would benefit from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    What I am<\/em> asking is that if you\u2019re in that kind of position, to be aware of and publicly acknowledge something like \u201cI\u2019m coming from a neurotypical perspective and thus this may not be equally applicable or useful to everyone.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Another specific example: if you\u2019re conducting a study, it seems standard to track race, sex, age, and socio-economic status and acknowledge limitations in the composition of your study population.  But in my research for class papers, I haven\u2019t really seen neurotype included in this list unless the article was specifically about, say, differences between allistic and autistic children or something.<\/em> I did my undergrad honors thesis on the importance of asexual and aromantic representation, and I was finding studies that were conducted via phone call only.  Phone calls are known to be something autistics may struggle with, but we\u2019re disproportionately likely to be asexual, meaning that to not provide alternate means of communication\/participation is to potentially exclude an entire portion of the community and their experience from the research.  But, and this is the real point of this example, I wasn\u2019t seeing this fact acknowledged in the limitations sections even though they acknowledged other demographics that were underrepresented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    WHY this is useful<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Consciously recognizing and clarifying when someone is primarily by\/for neurotypicals has two benefits that I can think of.  One, by explicitly identifying when something is relevant to neurotypicals instead of only<\/em> labeling when something is meant for \u201cthe people in this other group we aren\u2019t part of\u201d, it (hopefully) makes neurodiversity and neurodivergent needs less automatically invisible to people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And two, which is the one I can speak to more strongly because it\u2019s my own experience, it benefits your neurodivergent readers because if something doesn\u2019t seem to be working for them, they can more easily reocgnize they\u2019re just not the target audience and move on, rather than feeling like they just have to try harder or that there\u2019s something wrong with them personally if it apparently works for everyone but them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Final example: As a writer, I\u2019ve spent a lot of time in circles that tended to say you should do things in certain ways, and if it didn\u2019t seem to help, you just hadn\u2019t done it that way long enough to see the benefit, or something, and should keep trying harder.\u00a0 And I realized a year or two ago that that\u2019s part of the reason I had or have struggled to progress in some ways.\u00a0 Things from struggling to write character emotions \u201crealistically,\u201d to my anxiety around voluntarily putting myself out there in a new general-social-context – it\u2019s all related to autistic traits I have directly, or experiences I\u2019ve had as a result of being autistic.\u00a0 And while I don\u2019t expect any particular individual to speak to autistic writers if that\u2019s not their thing, it would have been nice if more of those people had acknowledged that their advice\/perspective\/instructions had limitations instead of acting like it should work overall for every random person on the receiving end.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t have spent as much time un-usefully fighting my natural inclinations instead of leaning into them and finding ways to make them work for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Little discussion question for the comments<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    How difficult is it to identify the limitations in your perspective to know when to clarify it?  I had a whole other now-deleted paragraph in the draft reiterating how what I\u2019m arguing is a useful act of allyship for minimal effort, and then I realized that I may be wrong about the minimal effort part.  I\u2019ve spent my whole life analyzing social stuff and how my own brain interfaces with it compared to others, and most of my friends are neurodivergent so I see other ways one can be different besides my own differences, so recognizing the applicability or lack thereof of things to just anyone may come easier to me now that it would someone who hasn\u2019t had to question their own brain because the social world is built in a way that works for their brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I got involved in a comment discussion on this post by sildarmillion this week about the lack of nuance in otherwise useful advice like \u201clisten to your body,\u201d and she said something that perfectly summarized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-autism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writingforlife.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}