Finding Community in Neuroqueer Pride

Searching for community sometimes feels like playing Minesweeper. Initial navigation feels promising, you've cleared the communities where the fit is wrong, guided by gut instinct. Further progress comes through luck and intuition. You find a community and feel confident about the fit, then BOOM! You hit a mine and must start over.

I received a diagnosis of ADHD (attention hyperactivity deficit disorder) in 2020 and then ASD (autism spectrum disorder) in 2023. While medical approaches: prescriptions, therapy, and learning personal coping skills — have made a world of difference for me, I still feel worlds apart from my peers and society at large.

Finding other neurodivergents has been healing for me. Looking back at my best friends, I realize we were all neurodivergent, though most of us didn't understand that yet.

In college, most of my friends were queer, with the rest being strong allies. An auspicious confluence brought together my close inner circle—knowing looks while passing each other in the university arts complex, house parties, and connections through friends of friends.

I have found acceptance and love within both neurodivergent and queer communities. When I encountered the term "neuroqueer"—coined by Nick Walker, M. Remi Yergeau, and Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon—it clicked. I felt at home.

I'll borrow directly from Nick Walker's "Neuroqueer: An Introduction" to help define what it means to practice within a framework of neuroqueer:

1. Being both neurodivergent and queer, with some degree of conscious awareness and/or active exploration around how these two aspects of one's being entwine and interact (or are, perhaps, mutually constitutive and inseparable).
2. Embodying and expressing one's neurodivergence in ways that also queer one's performance of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and/or other aspects of one's identity.
3. Engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one's own cultural conditioning and one's ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance, with the aim of reclaiming one's capacity to give more full expression to one's uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.
4. Engaging in the queering of one's own neurocognitive processes (and one's outward embodiment and expression of those processes) by intentionally altering them in ways that create significant and lasting increase in one's divergence from prevailing cultural standards of neuronormativity and heteronormativity.
5. Approaching, embodying, and/or experiencing one's neurodivergence as a form of queerness (e.g., in ways that are inspired by, or similar to, the ways in which queerness is understood and approached in Queer Theory, Gender Studies, and/or queer activism).
6. Producing literature, art, scholarship, and/or other cultural artifacts that foreground neuroqueer experiences, perspectives, and voices.
7. Producing critical responses to literature and/or other cultural artifacts, focusing on intentional or unintentional characterizations of neuroqueerness and how those characterizations illuminate and/or are illuminated by actual neuroqueer lives and experiences.

From my understanding, "neuroqueering" is the process that subverts the pathologization of neurodivergence and the hegemonies of heteronormativity. It encourages us to engage in communication and communities that celebrate expressions of neurodivergence and queerness.

Working to transform social and cultural environments in order to create spaces and communities, and ultimately a society — in which engagement in any or all of the above practices is permitted, accepted, supported, and encouraged.

Queer signaling through clothing is one way to express community belonging. I want to acknowledge M. Remi Yergeau's appropriation of the rainbow infinity sign as a signifier of neuroqueer and offer my own interpretation of the symbol. The pink at the core of the infinity sign nods to the reclamation of pink as a self-identifying queer symbol, transforming its origins as a marker for homosexuals in World War II concentration camps.

I hope that this symbol will be part of my journey to find the communities that fit me best and share that with you, so that you too can have a beacon to find those who will best understand you.