Before I accepted and embraced the label of “neurodivergent”, I was aware that I had friends and loved ones who considered me as such, and many more who openly commented on idiosyncrasies which might have been clues. At a certain point in our lives, some of us simply accept that we fall outside of what appears to be “normal experience” for the majority and we leave it at that. We carry on and find ourselves safe niches, congregate online or in basements and garages around game tables among the norm-ambivalent. We isolate, and perhaps at times sit, bitterly, on the margins and stew in our otherness. I’ve done my fair share of each of these throughout my life. I have always had private obsessions to retreat to alone—composing music, writing, playing video games, other such diversions.
These days, if you have the right kinds of friends, it is hard to avoid labels. Some of them feel profoundly useful and personally enlightening. Some of them feel silly and frivolous, but they’re so often loving and caring—ever seeking to shed light on those aspects, small and big components of our selves that might stay hidden for their strangeness. Nowadays, strangeness isn’t so strange. I do sometimes wonder about this cultural journey we’re making through the social-norm-enforcing looking glass, into a world in which niche acceptance is clearly preferable to conformity with the greater collective identities, norms, and mores.
I do worry about labels and their propensity to separate, differentiate, and marginalize even as they invite, welcome, and normalize. Who will be on the outside now? What lengths might they go to, how might they contort themselves, to gain acceptance within a new paradigm? I cringe just a little inside when people use the term “neurotypical”. A small part of me remains unconvinced there ever was such a thing…
I will of course fight anyone who objects to the progress we’ve made in welcoming, celebrating, and accommodating the neurodivergent. The evidence, for me, is clearly in favor of identification and normalization of the vast spectrum of human experience. I have benefited enormously from such progress, and I have friends and family who benefit as well. I have met many whose lives turned a corner with the acceptance that their (often painful) experience was rooted in something fundamental about them—an unchangeable aspect worth accepting and accounting for.
I’m writing this now because Kelsey Monaghan-Bergson invited me to join her and Austin Wiggins for a panel at USAFA tomorrow about neurodiversity in the military, and as the variously attributed old quip goes: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”
I haven’t written explicitly about this all that much—about my experience, diagnoses, or how I identify; but I’ve been writing for most of my life I guess, to share what it feels like to be inside my head, and I occasionally use the term “neurodivergent” to hand-wave at vague concepts of cognitive difference which have emerged as consistent patterns in my experience. Putting my insides on the outside through writing consistently draws out testimony from others that I am not alone in my experience. This is part of why I worry about the specter of declared “normalcy”—we simply don’t know how many might, because they can, simply be forcing themselves into socialized norms in pursuit of being perceived as normal, because it brings with it the prospect of social capital, all the while denying themselves the exploration of an existence which surpasses mere survival, in which increased capacity and even thriving become possible. We can see that as the culture warms up to the idea that divergence is not only natural, but also a desirable axis of human diversity, and thus the social penalty for being classified as divergent is reduced, rates of diagnosis go up.
Another reality that I often confront is that many or most of my favorite authors, poets, and creators, who inspired me to be a writer and whatever else I am, for all their current acclaim, were in their time marginalized and alienated based on their difference, eccentricity, nonconformity, etc. Many found comfort, belonging, and safety only among other similarly nonstandard bohemians. History is littered with individuals, famous and obscure, who clearly diverged, sometimes to advantage and acclaim—lauded as “eccentric geniuses”—but most, most often, were simply shouldered out of polite society and marginalized.
I loved Andrea Wulf's recent book ‘Magnificent Rebels’, which describes a powerful convergence of great minds in the German town of Jena in the late 1700’s—philosophers, poets, playwrights, scientists, and others, who were together responsible for a massive philosophical shift in western culture, science, and politics. This book came to my attention because the Santa Fe Institute was highlighting how it explores principles of complexity and emergence in creative collaboration. The university at Jena plays a powerful role as a resourced node and attractor for certain types of people and behaviors, generating feedback loops which enable world-altering conceptual breakthroughs (Steven Johnsen did a nice job exploring this in his book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’). Wulf’s book reminded me how much I love being part of creative collectives, where honest self-expression is enabled, encouraged, and rewarded.
This enabling configuration of collectives runs in many ways perfectly counter to the values of the military, and in my view that's mostly a bad thing, especially as we desire to pursue a greater rate and integration of innovative ideas. One pattern I have consistently called out in my long-term exploration of what might enable greater innovative capacity within the DoD, is the fact that the types of people who I associate with greater levels of individual and collective creativity (heavy overlap here with the neurodivergent) are consistently pushed out by the cultural and systemic pressures of our institution, which rewards compliance and conformity over all else and actively suppresses social patterns which we might call “explorative” (innovative) versus “exploitative” (efficiency seeking). Even today, try and mention the value that insubordinate, divergent weirdos might bring to the force and our efforts and you’re likely to get an earful roughly to the tune of a quote I once heard come out of a Senior NCO’s mouth: “bad haircuts make airplanes fall out of the sky”.
I like to point to the fact that one of the most universally lauded military leaders in the modern era, Marine General and former SECDEF once said the following:
"Take the mavericks in your service, the ones that wear rumpled uniforms and look like a bag of mud but whose ideas are so offsetting that they actually upset the people in the bureaucracy. One of your primary jobs is to take the risk and protect these people, because if they are not nurtured in your service, the enemy will bring their contrary ideas to you."
I am still in the wake of a powerful personal trauma as I consider this subject, and it has me reflecting on the odd overlap between the cognitive effects of grief and trauma and the daily lived experience of some with ADHD or autism. Is trauma-induced autism a thing? Do you find yourself struggling with noise or smells or social distance or unable to sit still or focus in the wake of a traumatic event? I think that there are inroads here to a point which I consider key to the discussion of neurodivergence in the military, which is that neurodivergence is ubiquitous. These are experiences that we all have at some point, in big and small ways. For some people it's all the time, and others just catch glimpses on occasions, like when they've experienced a terrible loss, or perhaps when they’re short of sleep. Furthermore, far more people experience aspects of Autism Spectrum Disorder or ADHD than are compelled to go get diagnosed, and many are going to be downright opposed to accepting such a label. There are probably thousands on thousands of people who are white knuckling it through life while looking down on and even bad-mouthing those of us who have found relief through medication and accommodation. I'm going to make the radical suggestion that even those assholes deserve some relief, deserve to thrive, and our institutions would be better for it.
I've lived with depression and anxiety my whole life. I have in recent years wondered many times if I might be on the autism spectrum, but for what I think are pretty obvious reasons I never pursued a diagnosis. Many years ago, I started taking meds for ADHD, which I started and stopped a number of times entirely based on the kind of of work I was doing and just how accommodating the work environment was… Oh and also just how much I felt my career was threatened by whatever psychiatrist I was forced to see. One psych helped me make sure I could get my meds while I deployed to Afghanistan. A couple years later I stopped taking them because a psychiatrist at Defense Language Institute suggested to me that taking them could be grounds for discharge. I don't take ADHD meds now because they don't feel too necessary; my current job is very accommodating. I don't take antidepressants currently, not because I don’t feel like they’d be helpful, but because my provider made me feel like continuing to search for one that worked was gonna threaten my career.
A few months back, I shared the following reflection on LinkedIn:
My career has thus far been a series of jobs that I was either good at or bad at. When the job fit, I felt good about myself, and those around me heaped me with praise and support. When I sucked at the job, I felt worthless. My mental health suffered both in and out of work, I was steeped in negative reinforcement, and at the same time support felt further away.
When the job fit, I felt lucky to have been granted such an opportunity. Success felt natural, like it had less to do with effort and more to do with coherence and affinity. This is kinda silly because I actually end up working harder on things that aren't emotionally crushing for me.
When I sucked at a job, I felt like I was never trying hard enough. Surely, I thought, if I only pushed myself more in the right way, I would be experiencing success. My constant urge was to flee work and find comfort in personal projects (which also demanded effort, but of a kind that didn't swish me emotionally), and that made me feel like I must just be lacking "work ethic".
This morning I was thinking about "Daniel being bad at a job" and its inverse: "a job being bad at Daniel". I ended up in the right jobs because of leaders who saw things through the second lens. Those who saw things through the former only contributed to my turmoil.
Human beings ought not be brute-forced, by themselves or others, into producing for some larger social machine. Health within a social system (individual and systemic) arises from mutualistic relationality between the larger system and those who occupy and contribute to it. If the body didn't care for its organs and demanded they serve a function they were not actually suited for, the organs would dysfunction and the health of the body would suffer.
Coherence is not something that can be imposed in a top-down manner.
This is similar to reflections I have shared many times before, about the role that leaders have played throughout my career in helping to find niches which fit the peculiarities of my mind, my skills, and affinities. When I thrived, where there was coherence in the complex interaction of me, my needs, my conditions, traits, circumstances, and the tasks and modes of work before me, I excelled. I was an undeniable asset. When coherence between these aspects was lacking, due to neurodivergence, perpetual or conditional/situational, I struggled mightily, and the work and institution certainly felt the effects of that, and often in response punished/suppressed me in ways that didn’t help to produce better outcomes.
I am lucky to have had leaders many times in my career who engaged directly with these considerations of contextual coherence in relation to my performance. They deserve perhaps more credit than I for the successes I have had. As we explore the questions of not just what might enable the thriving of individuals (for all their difference and divergence) but what might enable our institutions to level-up their capacity for radical innovation and peak performance (accept that these two things are inextricably entangled), this mode of leadership—a departure from the standard, socialized and even explicitly trained approach—feels like the most important factor.