I like this approach. “funny meme” aside, I think it is a good way of showing how much a certain language can affect how other people think and feel about a subject. Just read it THAT way and “being neurotypical” suddenly sounds like a disorder that isn’t fully compatible with the public, doesn’t it?

We live in a world that isn’t exactly kind to people on the spectrum. It is loud, flashy, hectic, overwhelming, unrewarding but you’re still expected to work like a cog in a machine, despite having fewer and fewer places where you’d actually “fit in” without grinding gears, and whenever there is some sort of public talk about that topic, it always, always sounds like the affected person is the problem and personally responsible for fixing themselves, when a no small part of “not fitting in” is due to society itself. Maybe a change in language is due to remove that stigma.

  • dangblingus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    9 months ago

    What people on the spectrum may not understand is that language is more than just the exchanging of raw information. It’s culture, it’s artistic, and it’s a way to communicate intangible feelings and emotions.

        • Kedly@lemm.eeEnglish
          41·
          9 months ago

          Theres a difference between understanding the concept and understanding what the fuck your boss wants you to do when you have been given a conflicting set of orders and because of liability and politics you will never get an answer on how they want you to thread the line between the two

          edit: and because you are autistic and your boss is not, how YOU would prioritize which rules to follow at the expense of ignoring the others is almost CERTAINLY going to be the wrong prioritization

    • carbon_based@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      41·
      9 months ago

      Like other commenters, I also think that most neurodivergent people understand this very well. Their problem arises where they understand it even much further, like seeing the implications of such normalities. For example, that this must be one of the sources of so many misunderstandings between different cultures (and subcultures!). I can not just assume that everyone I meet speaks the same social language that I grew up in.

      And is it not rude to assume that everyone’s mind works in the same way … or that others would camouflage in a die-cut way as someone they are not truely; is it not kind of intellectually flat to assume self-similarity, given that this is so obviously not the case – I mean divergent or not, everyone is just so engraved by their past experience that we have no true idea what mental process is going on inside another person unless we get to know them more closely.

      e: or put in different words, what to do if the intangible feelings and emotions communicated by someone just don’t match their verbal message? Or worse, what to do when we cearly see someones cognitive dissonance but we are expected to somehow follow that (it’s an illness and following through would be self-denial)?

      May read: The Double Empathy Problem;
      more on affective vs. cognitive empathy: Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence (part 1); (part 2)