What Late-discovered neurodivergence teaches us about our sick society

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society," widely attributed to the philosopher J Krishnamurti.

We live in a cruel and corrupt culture, and being "normal" in such a toxic system requires compliance.

This can take many forms...silence, looking the other way, or joining in. But this doesn't mean normality is healthy. Conformity is not mental health, and looking the other way often requires a degree of numbing. At some point, there is a price to pay for acquiescence.

For those of us who feel alienated or distressed by injustice, it can be very heavy to carry.

Neurodivergence, especially ADHD and autism, is associated with a high degree of sensitivity. We feel deeply. We value kindness and justice. We experience the world as interconnected, as energetic forces on a living, breathing planet. We feel the cruelty and toxicity of the culture in every pore of our being.

And we pay the price for living this way.

We tried, repeatedly, to change who we are. To fit in. To dim ourselves in the hope we might somehow belong. We tried to find stability somewhere in the normal range; yet behind the shiny facade, we swung to the edges, trying to quiet an overactive mind and harden a soft heart. We numbed ourselves with addictive behaviours and hoped, somehow, that we might change.

But we were never built for this way of living.

At midlife, as we pass the midway point, hormonal flux surfaces what we've spent decades pushing away. Painful autoimmune flare-ups. Deep-seated rage for years of self-abandonment. Crushing grief for unlived lives. These shadowy times hand us a choice: to listen to our bodies and the untold stories within or to carry on, becoming a caricature of our younger self.

The conundrum

To step into our next chapter, we have to accept that we don't fit mainstream culture and find a way of living within capitalist, patriarchal systems that make so many of us sick.

We have to learn to live believing we already have enough. This is where comfort, privilege, and comparison get in our way. We want to escape the job, the relationship, the life that's making us ill, miserable, lonely but we don't want to give up our comfort. We want our cake, and to eat it too.

I've coached women who arrive with exactly this conundrum: wanting to keep the life they have, but free from everything about it that's costing them. Wanting to magically solve what are, more often than not, incompatible options.

What's more many of us share the same delusion, without even realising it.

Spiritual amnesia

For me, the missing piece of the jigsaw is this: we have spiritual amnesia. I don't mean the loss of religion though that, too, has left many of us hollow. Our amnesia runs deeper than dogma. It's a disconnect from source. From nature that once told us who we were and gave us our place in the universe.

Us neurodivergent women learn to tolerate an artificial light at any hour of any day. No dawn, or dusk. We eat strawberries grown in December and take medicine to treat allergies to the man-made soil coated in fertilisers. Our homes are centrally heated in winter and cooled in summer. We live in a world built to sever us from the weather gods.

We used to go barefoot on frost, or watch the sky turn from black to grey to gold to tell us the season. Our culture has quietly, systematically, destroyed access to the world of rhythm, energies, sun goddess or moontime. We were never meant to live disconnected from the land beneath us, the sky above us. Our materialistic values don't just distract us from this knowing they have replaced it. Achievement instead of belonging. Consumption instead of communion. Comfort instead of aliveness.

We witness the cost of this collectively on a massive scale. Endless wars, a small handful of billionaires holding more wealth than billions of people combined, a never-ending hunger to consume. Society itself is ill. And when we adopt its values as our own, so are we. We set individual boundaries and try to ensure we practice enough self care but this does not tackle the wider issue that as human beings we were not built for this level of experience. That true connection lies within our own hearts, animal bodies, and our belonging to the vastness. That we must reconsider some taken for granted assumptions of our culture if we are to remain spiritually healthy.

Enough 

Inherited scarcity, nervous system dysregulation is not rational. 'Enough' isn't a mindset to adopt, it's a felt sense. We cannot 'think' our way into having enough. Ancient wisdom teaches us that rather than a single permanent decision about what 'enough' looks like, it can change throughout the month, season, year and over our lifecycle. Enough is about truthfully and continually renegotiating with what the world has to offer. This removes the all-or-nothing trap that makes the conundrum feel unsolvable.

Refusal 

Full opt-out of society is rarely available. I tried it on a move to the Highlands of Scotland and discovered a culture of even greater toxicity with a more noticeable division between the haves and have-nots and the culture to keep it in place. I have learnt the only way through is to refuse to let your worth be measured by the big house, being seen in the right places, by the top of the range car...by output and performance.

Midlife is the leverage point 

Midlife is when we cross into hagitude time, that fierce, wise crone energy which Sharon Blackie describes when we have the self-knowledge and wisdom to renegotiate how we want to live within the systems, rather than just enduring them.

Community as the actual antidote to the individual bind 

The conundrum of wanting to escape but not give up comfort is much easier to solve as part of a small group or community that goes beyond a business offering.

Coming home to the edges

None of this makes the system less sick. It doesn't undo the wars, the hoarded wealth, the culture that asks us to dim ourselves to belong. But it does mean as neurodivergent women we're no longer seeking permission to fit in or be well. To be maladjusted to a profoundly sick society is perhaps a sign of health. We were never built for the middle, for the comfort, the bungalows, the luxury hotels either too hot or too cold, the extravagant food making us fat or the GLP1s we need to make us slim again. We were built for the edges, it's there, together, that we come alive.