My 43rd year has been quite a marker point. So much so that I haven’t really recognised this yet.
I haven’t processed or truly come to terms with recieving a diagnosis for AuDHD (ADHD and Autism combined). I haven’t figured out who I should and shouldn’t disclose this information to, what frame I should look at my life through, past, present and future, and how the diagnosis can best be utilised to make me feel a little more OK about myself.
So much already makes so much more sense. The life-long struggles with mental illness that were very often a result of learning to see myself as ‘wrong’ and problematic. The ability to excell at certain things, and throw my full arsenal at it, whilst being utterly shit at normal things, like being a ‘normal’ functional adult.
Yet the diagnosis will also never truly be without its frictions.
For a start, although I began to ask the questions that led to the pursuit of a diagnosis due to 6 years of experience working neurodiverse adults, I know I will never find my condition anywhere near as inhibiting in regards to leading a full and independent life as so many people I support will do. And I can fully understand why some adults with a long term diagnosis feel some sense of personal injustice when they hear of another well-known celebrity recieving a late diagnosis.
Equally, all diagnoses are constituted within an historical context and, despite the traits the define them existing irrespective of any particular zeitgiest, they become visible and understood through how they rub against the ‘normative’ expectations of that social moment.
The suffering and daily difficulties a condition presents to an individual remain undoubtably real, but the diagnosis itself may change or be more easy to be overlooked in a different time and place.
However, I believe that the binary between neurodiversity and neurotypical needs an extra layer in order to understand why so many people are clearly buckling in their attempt to keep up with normative expectations.
A percieved space of normative functioning is being slowly engulfed by what I’d call ‘supernormativity’.
My understanding of the ‘supernormal’ in a contemporary context is that it emerges out of the meritocratic mantras that dominate our neoliberal world. But could only really take root in an a moment where we are hyperconnected to social media platforms.
The philosopher Byun Chul Han calls our current society an ‘achievement society’, and says that we have all become ‘achievement subjects’, and at no time is this more evident than in an age where our daily posts about our lives are either rewarded with adoration or ignored.
Before the 2000s most human achievement was mediated from a top-down platform; we would see celebrities on billboards, beautiful people living beautiful and succesful lives on televisions. Since 2010, the meritocracy now mediates most aspects of everybody’s lives, and we primarily now see others (our friends, work colleagues, piers etc) through life highlights.
The shadow haunting the post 2010s achievement subject is an increasingly difficult and competitive work culture, where austerity strips back support networks and it feels like the only person we can rely on his ourselves. We must all learn to run faster, jump higher, look more beautiful and be more employable.
Supernormativity is the new standard. Normativity is being crushed by it. We look to our phones to self-sooth after a long day at work to see a stream of personal bests. We get up and go for a walk, only to find old car showrooms turned into gymnasiums, no longer showcasing perfect cars, but perfect bodies.
I don’t want to go into what supernormativity is too much, it kind of doesn’t exist in any one person, it’s more of a expectation that permeates us in age of crisis where being average no longer feels to be enough to grant us survival.
Conversatives (by which I now largely include those who a generation ago would’ve been called liberals) are reacting to the current explosion in Autism and ADHD diagnosis’s by seeing the individual’s suffering through the lens of moral failings (such as being work-shy, too soft to deal with to the daily suffering of life).
Their typical argument of ‘we just got on with it back in our day’ will continued to be reeled out no matter how physically or psychocologically difficult the times might be. It’s objective has always been to moralise, to blame individuals for their failings, when in truth the state just cannot keep up with what is happening to people in the 2020s, and is unable to percieve of how radical an economy we’d need to find a new collective steady state.
Without that hope, even the slightest hope that all of this is going to get easier sometime soon, people are crying out, not just for help, but for validation that its ‘not their fault’. Personally speaking, a large part of the reason I opted to get a diagnosis rather than just let it be was because of the immense shame I have carried through my adult life.
Returning to the individual level, this idea that we exist under the pressure supernormal expectations isn’t in opposition to the creeping revolution of neurodiversity. Quite the opposite, getting a diagnosis is a deeply useful support structure for many people like myself to both understand and come to peace with life long difficulties we have encountered in regards to socialising, emotional regulation, and ‘doing life properly’.
But we are also ‘canaries in the coal mine’ for the time we live in.
