“If the primary language of the society in which you were born is well-suited to the purpose of describing your sensory experiences, your needs, and your thought processes, you may have neurotypical privilege.” — Dr. Nick Walker
What is privilege?
Elements of privilege are the unearned benefits and advantages one enjoys on the basis of their membership in a dominant group.
Picture this
Imagine you’re a passenger in a friend’s car. You aren’t feeling well: You have a fever and a headache. Your friend has the heat cranked up and the music on full blast. You might say “I’m not feeling well, could you please turn down the heat and the volume?”
Now imagine this same scenario, but the language you speak doesn’t have words for the concepts of “hot” or “loud”. You don’t know how to work the controls on your friend’s car and when you try to communicate with them, they’re not understanding what it is you want.
Have you ever had experiences that you didn’t quite understand, until one day someone described them so eloquently, putting words and names to something you have always wondered about and struggled with?
I certainly have, many times, and it is both validating and a relief to finally have words to express what are experiencing. A profound quote from Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm sums this up very well:
“Owning the words that describe my own experiences… allowed a more complete and meaningful experience to emerge.”— Jackson-Perry et al.
Language matters
Having precise language to conceptualize and communicate our experiences helps us first to process them internally, and then describe them so others may better understand.
When you’re neurotypical, the dominant society and culture have developed around your experiences and your needs, so these words and ideas are much more readily available. The majority of others usually understand your experience because they have similar experiences.
“Neurotypicals live, act, and experience the world in a way that consistently falls within the boundaries of neuronormativity.” — Dr. Nick Walker
When your neurology diverges from the majority, you’re part of the neurominority. It becomes much more difficult to convey to others what you experience because they don’t have a frame of reference, nor the vocabulary to form a mental image of what you are trying to explain.
This often results in people dismissing, minimizing, and invalidating our experiences, because if “most people” haven’t had them, then they’re probably not real.
Many neurodivergent people have even internalized these ableist ideas, minimizing their own experiences, and sometimes invalidating those of their fellow neurodivergents.
“People are trained and pressured from earliest childhood into the performance of neuronormativity — the performance of the local dominant culture’s current prevailing images of how a so-called “normal” person with a so-called ‘normal’ mind thinks and looks and behaves.” — Dr. Nick Walker
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