Supporting divergent lived experiences requires a skillset that isn’t very well practiced in modern times: decentralizing your own experience as the default.
There is a common misconception among humans, regardless of label or category, that once we account for the differences we already know how to recognize - disability, oppression, epistemic injustice - the underlying human experience is essentially the same for everyone.
We often still imagine a shared experiential baseline underneath those circumstances: that other bodies perceive, process, regulate, attend, interpret and respond more or less like ours unless there is some named reason they would not.
For many neurodivergent people, that assumption can turn struggle inward. Observations of other people become evidence in a self-litigated trial for self-worth and dignity.
Other people can tolerate this.
Other people don’t need this much recovery.
Other people aren’t overwhelmed by this.
Therefore the problem must be something about my effort, discipline, resilience, character or worth.
The energy spent trying to perform demonstrated expectations can rob us of, or prevent us from developing, the capacity to stop and investigate what that struggle actually means about how the biochemically complex, organic ecosystem we call a body attunes to the world around us.
The variability of human experience is a feature, not a bug.
Our goal is to help create a world safe enough for someone to stop and say, Wait - you don’t have this? This isn’t your normal? And for the result of that investigation to be better understanding and improved quality of life, rather than pathologization, shame or ostracization.