Another important thing to understand about being neurodivergent is this – the group of neurodivergent people is made up of all sorts of different people that don’t necessarily match each other.
Neurotypical = a group of people that see the world mostly the same way and think and use their brains mostly the same way to each other
Neurodivergent = a smaller group of people that see the world in all sorts of different ways
Here is another way to explain this. Each of these coloured dots represents a brain. The brains in the first circle are neurotypical. They are not all exactly the same, but they are all pretty similar. The brains in the second circle are neurodivergent. There are less of them and they aren’t very similar to each other. In fact the only thing they all have in common is that they don’t match the neurotypical brains. None of them match the neurotypical group, but they also don’t all match each other.
This is one of the reasons it can be hard to make sense of what autism means – it will be different for different people. So we can’t just describe one autistic person and say ‘if you’re like them, you’re autistic, if you aren’t like them you aren’t autistic’. This is a long and complicated way of saying that not every autistic person is the same as Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.