Trend
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[00:00:00] hey friends. Welcome back to the Neuro Tribe. I am so grateful to have all of you here as we grow together and really lift up our community. Please do like, subscribe, and I'd love to hear comments from you. So please feel free to leave a comment in my podcast or YouTube, or if you've seen me on , LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or threads.
Shoot me a comment, let me know. What do you think? What do you wanna talk about? What do you wanna hear from me about?
Are you neurodivergent and you've always wanted to put your work out there, you've always wanted to show up on social media and you've, you want to be seen, be heard, and really help out the community, there's this large part of you that is afraid. You're afraid. What [00:01:00] if I put myself out there and I am misunderstood?
What if I put myself out there and people don't like it? What if I put myself out there and people come and just hate on me? I have actually some news for you. It can happen. Whether you put yourself out there or not, and the thing that I find is that if you don't put yourself out there, you can't help people in the way that you as an individual can help people.
I say this because I have been putting my work out there, and sometimes I get trolls and sometimes I get misunderstandings. I had my intern posting a bunch of stuff for me. Somehow something got lost in translation with my posts , it was written by somebody else.
And then I had thoughts about it. And what happened in the threads is. Only the words from someone else were [00:02:00] in that thread. And I thought, wait a minute. That doesn't make any sense. My words, my thoughts aren't there. . So the message said, and I'm not gonna say it perfectly 'cause I can't remember what the post was, and I'm not great with threads, so it takes me a lot to figure it out. Uh, but the thread said something about, um, gen Z and the trend of them being proud of who they are and wearing their neurodiversity like a badge.
So a lot of people were thinking that I was criticizing this, that I was saying this is a bad thing, or, I was criticizing the neurodivergent community in some way, which. It doesn't make sense because literally my life's work is to bring a positive impact for our community, and if I was criticizing Neurodiverse individuals, I would be criticizing myself [00:03:00] and my whole family.
So I didn't do that,
I want to explain what my thoughts about that were, because I think it's important.
Being. Neurodivergent and talking about neurodiversity is actually on an uptrend. It is a trend right now, but if you think about it, if you think about it really hard, we are actually witnessing in real time positive change for our community. How, I mean, this is. In the early 19 hundreds, people that were on the spectrum or had disabilities were put in mental institutions in their own kind of wing or ward or whatever it is called.
They also were taken out and they weren't allowed to have public education with the rest of the kids.
It wasn't until 1973 did [00:04:00] they figure out that they needed to create something like a 5 0 4 plan, the 5 0 4 plan was also designed to help the discrimination against students that had disabilities. It also was in place to help with students with disabilities or people with disabilities from getting federal funding, right? Because there wasn't any funding at that time to help out our community.
So that is also important to note. That's 1973, right? That's not that long ago.
In 1975, children with disabilities get a free and appropriate education. And integrate them into the public schools. That's 1975, y'all. That's not that long ago. So you're already seeing an upward trend starting in the seventies.
In 1990, the Neurodivergent community [00:05:00] finally got civil rights. It took that long. Yes. In 1990 isn't that far away either? If you really think about it. Think about how old maybe you are or your parents are. That's all within our lifetime right now.
It wasn't until 1991 that autism was recognized for the first time, 1991, y'all. So we have from 1991 until 2025. All of that time it took for people to be outwardly speaking about their disabilities and their experience in life. And when I was a kid, and I'll show you my age a little bit, right in the eighties and nineties when I was a kid.
Females didn't have autism. Females didn't have ADHD. It was [00:06:00] rare that females even were diagnosed with giftedness. Most of the time. There was a focus on what was. A challenge in school as far as learning disabilities, so dyslexia, right. Or some other type of a learning disability or vision. Disability.
Right. So it was also very much taught that we should be ashamed of ourselves and we should hide who we are and we should mask and we should morph ourself into something else to fit in. So it very much was hide. Hide that you don't know what that means. Hide that you don't know how to spell the thing. Hide that. You don't know how to read that word or say that word out loud.
Hide the fact that you can. Here in visual, I visualize a word in your [00:07:00] head, but you can't get it out of your mouth. Hide the fact that you have social differences than other people. And so you were labeled as shy or sensitive, or that's just the weird one in the class, or moreover, bullied. And so if you see how things go and how they have evolved, I have a son who's 17, so I'm talking about only 17 years ago, and back then kids were still called Asperger, which we know now that that is not really a great word for our autism, right?
Some people go by that, some people don't. It's up to you. If you wanna call yourself Asperger, totally do it. I prefer not to call my kids that or myself that. So, but back then, [00:08:00] the programs and the funding and the support was far and few in between and. Even then, they were still segregating somewhat and they were calling it, you know, special needs class and maybe it's the Olympia class or whatever they call it.
Right. But it's still segregate, it's not inclusive. And that makes things harder to be able to grow and adapt for our own needs. Right. And not getting the correct support for us. And now we're going fast forward into kind of the now, right? So now we're asking for more rights. We're asking for inclusivity.
We are actively working with companies to add our neuro affirming de and I needs, right? [00:09:00] We are going into schools and we're saying, Hey, that was not right. There's been so many battles that parents have had
fight for their kids' rights, whether it's in an IEP meeting or it's with an advocate or. It is in and out of courts if it's standing up to another parent that made, maybe made a comment about their kid or the group that they were in. I've actually talked about this a lot in, , an ND group that I host locally about how there's so many unconscious social bias, uh, against the neurodivergent community and so many comments about, well, I would never raise my kids to do that.
Okay, great. But you have a neurotypical kid. It's just, it's just different. It's not the same. So you can't hold us up to the , same standards. Does that make sense? So for us to now be seeing this trend in our [00:10:00] younger generations where they are actively. Asking for neuro affirming care. They're actively asking for support in schools and summer camps, in nannies and whatever, wherever you are in life.
And also. Genuinely accepting ourselves. Whereas 15 years ago, 17 years ago, 20 years ago, it was all about shame. It was all about the parts of you that you had to hide. It was all about learning how to be normal, right? So to see this trend of people. Loving themselves, accepting themselves and owning who they are and being comfortable advocating for their rights.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a huge win. It gives me goosebumps on my arms and legs when I think about this [00:11:00] and when I think about the trend of our community throughout just this. And last century, right? It has changed so greatly just since the seventies, right? This is a good thing. The other thing that I genuinely think about is how far behind America is considered.
There are other countries out there that have a lot of other supports. There is so much more funding to help the neurodivergent community because generally speaking, this is my experience. I've seen this over and over and over again. Giving the neurodivergent person the right supports can really open the box and create us to be able to use our gifts and our strengths and our creativity in a way.
That can't be done [00:12:00] in a neurotypical person, and I'm not slamming neurotypical peoples. Please don't. Please don't misunderstand me, but neurodivergent people are just that. We think differently, and so there are ways that we can problem solve or create something or visualize something or see something differently.
Our brains work differently, so therefore we can create things that are different. If you think about history, talk about Emily Dickinson. Talk about Tesla. The The real Tesla. Talk about Einstein. Moreover, Einstein's wife, right? There are so many beautiful things that can come from a neurodivergent person, given we have the right supports, the right systems, and in some cases the right meds or the right vitamins and [00:13:00] supplements.
So this trend of people being proud of who they are and asking for help is the best trend we could possibly see ever. This is a good thing and to me it means that we are going to start getting more rights, more funding, more support. I love you all. Take care. Bye-bye.
Hey friends, thank you so much for joining me today. If you got an aha moment. I would absolutely love to hear from you. Please like, subscribe, comment, and share. If you want to be part of an amazing group of neurodivergent human beings and share some of the love and the magic in a community where you belong, that's safe and nonjudgmental, click the link below and join our neuro Tribe community today.
Love you all. Take care. [00:14:00] Bye.
