There is a version of inclusion that lives entirely in language. It shows up in company values decks and dinner party conversations, in the careful way people say “neurodivergent” now instead of whatever they used to say. It sounds right. It has learned the words.
What it has not learned is the silence afterward.
Neurotypical social reality runs on a script so deeply embedded that most people cannot see it as a script at all. It is just normal. The pacing of conversation, the hierarchy of eye contact, the unspoken rules about how long you are allowed to care about something before it becomes too much. These are not neutral. They are a dialect. And if you did not grow up speaking it, you spend your life being evaluated by people who assume their dialect is the only one that exists.
Here is what the inclusive ones do not always tell you: they are still grading you. They have simply added a grace period before they do.
I am not angry at the complexity of human beings. I am tired of the gap between what people believe about themselves and what they actually do. Most people who would describe themselves as open-minded have a remarkably narrow idea of what minds are allowed to look like. They will accommodate difference in theory. In practice, they find it exhausting, or a lot, or intense, and they say so in ways they do not recognise as judgment because judgment, in their understanding, is something other people do.
Neurodivergence is not a personality quirk you can make room for at the table while keeping all the table’s rules intact. It is a fundamentally different relationship with attention, with time, with sensation, with meaning. You do not include that by learning a new word for it. You include it by being willing to not understand something and staying anyway.
Most people are not willing to do that. They want inclusion to be comfortable. They want it to cost them nothing.
It costs us everything, every day. We have been fluent in your script for years. You have barely opened ours.
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