I am tired of people who call themselves typical because they have never once had to imagine living any other goddamn way.
If you are neurodivergent, AuDHD or otherwise, you already know the deal nobody wrote down anywhere. You learn their language first. You study the shrugs, the inflections, the unspoken hierarchy of who gets to interrupt and who is supposed to wait. You build, from scratch, a working model of a mind that is not yours, because the world was built around that mind and not yours.
Neurotypical people rarely have to do this in return. Not because they are incapable of empathy, but because they have never been forced to develop the specific muscle that comes from being the strange one in the room. Curiosity about your own blind spots is not a survival skill when the world is already built to your specifications. So most people never build it. They call their own defaults “normal” and call your effort “extra,” and they almost never notice the asymmetry, because noticing it was never required of them.
Here is the part that actually breaks something in me. Even after you do the work, even after you’ve translated yourself into a shape they can metabolize, there is no guarantee of anything. Not care. Not effort. Not even basic acknowledgment that the work happened. You can hand someone a perfectly fluent version of yourself and they will still misread you, still get impatient, still decide you are “too much” or “not enough,” because understanding was never actually the goal. Comfort was the goal. Yours was never required.
So when I say this is tiring, I do not mean tired in the soft, forgivable sense. I mean the specific exhaustion of doing skilled, invisible labor for people who will not so much as ask what it cost you. That labor is real. It is constant, and it is owed nothing in return by anyone who has never had to do it themselves.
In this post, I am asking people to get curious about themselves before they decide the rest of us are the problem.
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