Season 2 of Autistic Identity With NeuroHub opens with an idea that Helen Edgar and I have been growing together for a while: existential diversity. Most autistic people spend their lives on the receiving end of one question; what is wrong with this person? It puts the problem inside a body-mind and produces a diagnosis, a correction, a plan to modify someone. Schools, CAMHS, assessment services, wards and benefits assessors are almost all built to ask it, usually without realising they are asking anything at all. The question that almost never gets asked is the second one; what is wrong with the world around them? To ask it properly, we need a different picture of what a person is. If a person is a sealed box (a skin with a brain inside it), the problem can only ever be inside the box. Existential diversity is our attempt to draw a picture in which the person was never a sealed box in the first place.
In this episode
A thread to take awayPick one thing outside your body that is part of how you think, feel safe or know who you are; an object, a place, a person, a phrase someone once wrote. Notice it. That is a part of you. And if you are a practitioner, here is the smallest useful version of all this: when an autistic person makes a connection you don’t understand, ask what route they took to get there. Treat the route as meaningful rather than recording it as missing. You are not contained. You are multiple, and you are connected. Pre-order After NormalAfter Normal: Autistic Essays on a Broken Society and the Ecosystems We Grow Instead is the fifth anniversary edition of The New Normal, revised and expanded with eight new chapters. It brings together autism and neurodivergence, philosophy, neurodiversity studies, mad studies and ecological thinking, and many of the threads in this episode run right through it. Publishing 7 April 2027 in paperback and ebook. Find out more
Stay weird, and I’ll see you next time. David Gray-Hammond You're currently a free subscriber to NeuroHub Community Journal | Newsletter | Announcements. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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