Queering the Neuroqueer

Maybe Liberation Is a Spiral

The Uncomfortable Realization

I’ve been circling around this for weeks: I don’t fit in the word neurodivergent anymore.
(It’s not that I’ve stopped being neurodivergent — my brain hasn’t suddenly installed the latest patch for normalcy — it’s that the word itself feels smaller than it used to.)

When I first found it, neurodivergent felt like home. A soft, defiant “me too” for those of us who always lived slightly out of rhythm with the rest of the room. It was the first label that didn’t ask me to apologize for my circuitry. It said, You don’t have to become less to belong.

But lately, the edges of that belonging have started to itch. Somewhere along the way, I was told that the term is only sociopolitical — that it’s about systems and rights, not interior liberation; that using it to describe a process of becoming or healing or transcending is “misuse.”

Apparently, neurodivergent is meant for policy, not poetry.
(Which is fine, except that I don’t know how to live without the poetry part.)

I understand the need for precision. Movements need language that can hold lawsuits and legislation. But what about the rest of us — the ones who experience our minds not as diagnoses but as ecosystems? The ones who are trying to live liberation, not just legislate it?

For me, words have always been more than definitions; they’re portals. I walk through them, and they change me. So when someone says this word isn’t for that kind of freedom, I find myself standing at the threshold, thinking — then maybe I need a new word.

I’m not angry about it anymore. (Okay, I was. Briefly. Then I wrote a few pages and cried on my keyboard — classic processing technique.) Now I’m mostly curious about what happens after belonging. What happens when the language that once rescued you starts to hem you in?

Maybe that’s the point of liberation work — to keep outgrowing our own safe houses. To realize that even the words built for freedom can start to feel like closed doors.

And so, here I am again — standing in the hallway between definitions, palms against the wall, feeling for the next opening.