If you're neurodiverse, you've spent your whole life living through a time when that diversity and difference has been at best poorly understood, and at worst stigmatized and viewed as a deficit or disability.

Many people with neurodiversity deal with this by masking the parts of themselves. The problem is that masking all of the time is exhausting. And when you live so much of your life masking, the patterns can take over so much that you forget that you're creating them in the first place.

If this sounds familiar, you are not the problem. The world just isn't set up for neurodiversity (yet!) Your differences are not deficits. But when you're cut off from them, you can easily lose trust with yourself and lose touch with their gifts.

And that's a shame for everybody, because we're only just now beginning to recognize that neurodiverse people have been using their gifts to improve the world all along.

Let's get to work building up that relationship. The world needs you.