#i say assuming you also read tags hahaha
Other people have probably written about this, but the intersections between neurodivergency and being aro/ace have been on my mind a lot since I found out I’m neurodivergent. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how the different types of discrimination I face play into each other.
I’ve been infantilised for pretty much my whole life because of my neurodivergency. The way I tend to act, and the things I tend to struggle with, mean I get treated like a weird excitable kid who doesn’t understand how the world works. The fact that I’m also aromantic and asexual is viewed just another facet of this “immaturity”. So the idea goes: of course Iwouldn’t be interested in romance and sex. How could I even understand such adult topics? I’m just a kid who gets distracted by butterflies and likes to infodump about history. Isn’t my innocence so endearing?
Instead of my orientation being taken seriously, it’s belittled and taken as a confirmation that I’m just childish and strange. This has led, on several occasions, to people assuming it’s just a symptom of my neurodivergency that needs to be medically addressed.** Aromantic and asexual people already face excessive questioning about our orientations and get told the cause must be [insert diagnosis or symptom of diagnosis here]; being neurodivergent makes this exponentially worse, because the underlying assumption is that I can’t have the agency or the self-knowledge to identify this way. After all, I’m just a weird kid, aren’t I? I need other (read: neurotypical and allo) people to explain everything, even my own experiences, to me.
This infantilisation made it particularly hard for me to come to terms with my orientation, because I didn’t want to prove everyone that they were right. For years, I pushed back against the way I’d been treated by seeking out the one thing that would make me an adult in others’ eyes - a romantic and sexual relationship. It hurt to realise I didn’t actually want that deep down. It felt like being told I really was that weird kid, tolerated but ultimately babied. It’s taken a lot of work to accept that the way I am doesn’t make me any less mature and deserving of respect.
There isn’t really a conclusion to this - mostly I wanted to post about my experiences as someone who is both neurodivergent and aroace, and the issues I’ve faced because of it. If any other aro/ace neurodivergent people would like to add to this or share their own perspective, I’d love to hear it.
**A lot of neurodivergent people do consider their experiences of attraction to be linked to their neurodivergency, and that’s obviously cool and valid. That’s not what I’m talking about here. My point is the systematic pathologisation of aromanticism and asexuality and the denial of my ability to define myself.
This is (perhaps unfortunately) a very relateable experience. It’s not something I really accepted personally until recently, but in hindsight, many of my interpersonal conflicts stem from others misreading my neurodivergence. My arospec and acespec experiences are furthermore dismissed because they are assumed to be part of my neurodivergence.
It’s definitely hurtful, especially because (for me) some of my beliefs about relationships maybe influenced by my neurodivergence. Parts of how I experience my identity are probably tied into my neurodivergence. And other parts of it seem entirely separate. I think those are both valid experiences, but both of them are belittled for different reasons.
Thank you for sharing this; I’m glad I came across it and had the spoons to add on. (Hopefully that’s all right - I can always make my own post.)
