About being irritating by design

Superpower, huh?

One of the wonderful things about being neurodivergent in the age of instant global communication is being able to share common experiences of neurodivergence. One of the worst things about being neurodivergent in the age of instant global communications is that oh my God we can be really annoying.

Here’s a list of traits that are really common in our world:

• oversharing

• overexplaining

• overexplaining’s cousin: I just need to be super accurate about this

• black-and-white thinking

• simply not being able to do things if they don’t make sense

• needing a shitload of context to make sure they do make sense

• super-quick pattern matching

• impatience with other people who are slow to catch on

• poor working memory

• a depthless capacity to be interested in the things we’re interested in

• very little capacity to be interested in anything else.

The right combination of these factors in the right context makes us amazing lawyers. And also right pains in the arse.

There are a couple in particular that can really aggravate me—both from other people and from myself. For example, I am one of those ones who’s proper obsessed with accuracy. I want things to be true, and I tend to prefer if they’re specific. But I also tend to think of things as ‘true for now’. Or ‘true to the best of our knowledge’. Or ‘true until I’m convinced otherwise’.

I’m less ‘1 + 1 = 2’ and more ‘two things can be true at once’. But there’s a natural clash there: how can things be simultaneously true, accurate, and incredibly fucking messy and moveable?

I dunno, but they are; it’s very tiring.

It also means I can be impatient and quite intolerant when people try to educate me on the facts (as they know them right now) if I didn’t ask. Which puts me on a direct collision course with some of my fellow NDs, who are natural educators.

There’s quite a lot of very earnest and honest content, particularly from autistic and auDHD creators, around how perplexing it is that people feel angry with them for sharing correct information. Like, why are people so upset by facts? Why are these NTs getting so freakin’ emotional about just being given new information? Information is good? Who wants to be uninformed?!

All of that is 100% fair. But man, sometimes I just wanna say my stupid thing unchallenged. And sometimes your information isn’t actually any more right than mine; it’s another perspective, but not necessarily objectively correct. Sometimes I did already know that but I wanted to cut to the chase by cutting out information and now you’re slowing me down again. Or—and I think this is probably the most common one—the situation in question is actually more about emotions than information.

See, in the neurotypical world, it’s often a bad trait to always need to be right. You hear it in relationship advice all the time: is it more important to be right or to hear each other? It’s usually couched as a very masculine, problem-solving trait, when really that poor woman just wants to vent. Which makes it especially tricky for ND women who are sitting there baffled as to why their colleague / friend / partner is so goddamn offended at being accidentally well-actually-ed.

So of course I feel super guilty as a fellow ND person when I also find it aggravating. Especially as I know I do it too.

Part of the challenge of coming to terms with one’s own neurodivergence is knowing when to lean into it. We spend our pre-diagnosis years gaslit into ignoring our gut because people’s behaviour and actions don’t line up. And then when we realise just how good we are at predicting certain outcomes, we might overcompensate by trusting our gut so hard that we don’t account for unexpected human complexity. If you’re like me and you’re totally honest: do you occasionally skirt a little close to treating people as if they’re LEGO characters in a rehearsed skit where you hold the only full copy of the script? If so, I think you can understand why they don’t love it.

That can also apply to the information we acquire. We tend to deep dive into interesting things, so we often do know just a little bit more than the average person about the thing they’re talking about. And the new element we’ve learned is exciting and makes things clearer so we need to tell you so you are as informed as we are and we’re all as right as we can be right now. Except that sometimes, at least from their perspective, they don’t need to know. Or they still want to do what they do the way they do it—even if it’s not the traditional method. We have to know when to nitpick, and when to let it the fuck go.

Because, to be honest: people sometimes just don’t care. We can judge them for not caring, but we can’t make them interested. And as long as they’re not in a position to spread harmful misinformation or harm another person—which are fair arguments for digging our heels in—then we might just have to choke down acceptance of them being a little more stupid than us about this one specific thing.

We need, essentially, a little humility. Or at the very least, if we’re gonna function in the majority’s world, the appearance of it.

Most of all, I think, we need to accept that we can and will be irritated by ourselves and by each other—and it doesn’t mean that our neurodivergence objectively is or isn’t a problem in that moment. Sometimes rejection of our traits is ableism; sometimes we’re just being a bit irksome. Sometimes it matters who’s right; sometimes it matters more how people feel. Sometimes it’s on the NT world to stand there in their wrongness, be wrong and get used to it; sometimes it’s on us to roll our eyes on the inside.

The hardest pill to swallow here is that there isn’t a hard and fast rule for any given situation; it’s trial and error and depends enormously on the real and relative risks and your own capacity to manage and mask.

Is it any wonder our most consistent universal experience is being really tired?