This Space Belongs to Us Too: Neurodivergence, Lived Knowledge, and the Work of Belonging

I was taught that knowledge does not exist apart from relationship. We learn through our relationships with land, with one another, with those who came before us, and with those for whom we carry responsibility. Knowledge is therefore not simply something we acquire, possess, or apply. It carries obligations. It asks something of us in return.

In the beginning, Mother Earth gifted us and all living and nonliving beings, and with those gifts came responsibility. We were taught to treat those gifts with respect, to pay attention to the rhythms around us, and to understand our relationship with the land as reciprocal. We listened and learned from her. We cared for what had been entrusted to us, and the land provided physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental nourishment in return. Knowledge emerged through relationship: through listening, observing, participating, remembering, and carrying teachings forward.

I have been returning to this understanding while thinking about what we now call neurodiversity-affirming practice.  The language of neurodiversity has changed considerably. Across clinical practice, healthcare, research, education, and workplaces, there has been an important movement away from understanding neurodivergent people primarily through deficit, dysfunction, and pathology. Autism, ADHD, and other forms of neurodivergence are increasingly discussed through language that recognizes difference, strengths, sensory experience, masking, communication, executive functioning, burnout, and the environments in which people live.

This shift matters.

Yet I increasingly wonder whether affirmation is enough.  Affirmation can change how we treat neurodivergent people without necessarily changing the relationships through which neurodivergent people are understood. There is a difference between creating a space that welcomes neurodivergent people and creating a space that has been shaped by neurodivergent people. There is a difference between learning about neurodivergence and living within a neurodivergent body and mind. There is also a difference between being invited into someone else's space and knowing, without having to ask, that the space belongs to you too.

This distinction matters because many neurodivergent people become remarkably skilled at navigating spaces that were not built with us in mind. We learn to observe and adjust. We learn when we have spoken too much, been too direct, asked too many questions, moved too much, needed too much clarification, or felt too intensely. We learn to monitor our faces, bodies, voices, and emotions. Some of us learn these things so early and so thoroughly that adaptation eventually becomes difficult to distinguish from personality.

People see competence. They do not necessarily see what that competence costs.

I am writing this because I have been reminded that appearing strong does not mean being unaffected. Even within spaces committed to understanding difference, words can still land as small injuries to another person's humanity. Beneath our increasingly sophisticated conversations about neurodiversity, diagnosis, accommodation, inclusion, and clinical practice is something much more fundamental.

Our humanity should not need to be argued. Yet sometimes it still seems to require defending.

Neurodivergent people experience rejection, embarrassment, grief, shame, anger, love, tenderness, pride, connection, and belonging. We can be professionally accomplished and still feel wounded. We can understand intellectually that someone did not intend harm and still experience the impact of their words. We can be resilient without being invulnerable. Strength and vulnerability are not opposites.

Words matter within this context. Sometimes the injury is obvious. More often, it is contained within something smaller: a joke, a dismissal, an assumption about competence, a comment about communication, a questioning of credibility, or a subtle suggestion that our perception of an experience is somehow less trustworthy than somebody else's.

A slight against someone's neurodivergence is not always experienced simply as a disagreement about behaviour or communication. When the characteristics through which a person thinks, communicates, regulates, or understands the world are repeatedly positioned as less credible, less appropriate, less professional, or less valid, the injury can reach something more fundamental. It can become a slight against personhood itself.

And these moments do not occur without history.  Neurodivergent people bring classrooms where we learned we were too much or not enough, friendships where we never completely understood what went wrong, workplaces where our communication was interpreted differently, and experiences where sensory distress was understood as difficult behaviour, executive dysfunction as laziness, directness as disrespect, or emotional overwhelm as overreaction. Some of us spent years knowing we were different without understanding why.

The present is rarely experienced entirely apart from what came before it.  Sometimes, when something hurts, we say nothing. Silence should not be mistaken for the absence of feeling. Naming an interpersonal injury can create another layer of risk. We may wonder whether we will be considered too sensitive, whether we misunderstood, or whether our emotional response will become the problem rather than what occurred. Sometimes we find ourselves reassuring the person who hurt us that we understand their intentions before we have even been permitted to say that something hurt.

When you have spent years learning that the space belongs to somebody else, silence can become another form of adaptation.  This is particularly easy to overlook when neurodivergent people appear strong. We can be clinicians, physicians, researchers, academics, leaders, educators, parents, artists, advocates, and entrepreneurs. We can build organizations, complete advanced degrees, publish research, support others, and become highly skilled at navigating systems that were never created with us in mind. None of this makes us emotionally impermeable. Sometimes strength simply means we have had considerable practice carrying what others cannot see.

This is where I return to relationship.

For generations, natural materials were gathered and reshaped with loving hands. Stones, wood, shells, bone, and other materials became beads, threaded together to carry stories of people, places, movement, culture, family, ancestors, and home. A bead viewed alone may appear to be a small object. In relationship with the beads beside it, the hands that shaped it, the land from which its materials came, and the story it carries, it becomes something more.

The meaning is not located only in the bead.  The meaning exists in the relationships.

Colonial policies attempted to sever relationships between people, land, language, culture, family, knowledge, and ways of being. Extractive systems introduced a different relationship to the world: something could be removed from the relationships that gave it meaning, assigned value, possessed, and used. A handful of blue glass trading beads can therefore carry multiple histories at once: exchange and survival, beauty and adaptation, but also extraction, power, disrupted relationships, and loss.

I am not equating neurodivergent marginalization with colonial violence or Indigenous experiences of dispossession. I draw upon these teachings because they shape how I understand knowledge itself: as relational, situated, and accompanied by responsibility. They lead me to ask a different question: what happens to knowledge when we separate it from relationship and responsibility?

That question matters deeply in clinical practice and research.

We can collect observations, psychometric scores, diagnostic criteria, clinical histories, behavioural descriptions, and research findings and believe that because we have accumulated enough information about someone, we understand them. These forms of knowledge are important. They can identify patterns, guide assessment, support diagnosis, and contribute to evidence-based practice. But they also have limits.

An assessment may tell us that masking is present. Lived experience may tell us what masking costs. Observation can describe behaviour. Relationship may help us understand its meaning. Psychometrics can identify patterns across people; they cannot, by themselves, tell us what those patterns mean within a particular life.  Knowledge extracted from a person is not necessarily the same as knowledge created in relationship with them.  Something fundamental changes when we know about people without learning with them.

This is why lived experience matters to me. It is not simply another source of information to add to an existing professional framework. Lived experience can change the relationship through which knowledge itself is created. It asks who is doing the observing, whose interpretation is afforded authority, whose language defines the experience, and who ultimately gets to decide what that experience means.

Historically, much of the knowledge about neurodivergence was produced about neurodivergent people rather than with or by us. Professionals observed, categorized, diagnosed, and interpreted behaviour. Neurodivergent people were frequently positioned as subjects from whom knowledge was produced rather than as people capable of producing knowledge about our own lives.

We still see traces of this whenever an external interpretation of neurodivergent behaviour is automatically afforded greater authority than a person's account of their internal experience. We see it when observable functioning is privileged over the effort required to sustain it, when articulate communication is interpreted as evidence against disability, or when professional achievement is assumed to be incompatible with significant neurodevelopmental differences.

This does not mean lived experience should replace professional expertise. Being neurodivergent does not automatically make someone an expert on neurodivergence. There is no singular autistic, ADHD, or neurodivergent experience. Our lives are shaped by culture, gender, race, disability, socioeconomic position, language, family, trauma, geography, communication, and support needs.

Clinical knowledge can be rigorous and still incomplete. Lived knowledge can be profound and still partial. Neither becomes more trustworthy by pretending to be total.

Research matters. Professional training matters. Clinical experience matters. Scientific evidence matters.  Lived experience matters too.  There are things we know because we studied them, things we know because people trusted us with their stories, and things we know because we have lived them. These are different ways of knowing. They do not need to compete, but they do need to remain open to one another.

A person can study autistic masking, administer measures of social camouflaging, and understand the literature describing its consequences. There is also knowledge that comes from spending years monitoring facial expressions, rehearsing conversations, calculating eye contact, suppressing movement, and analyzing interactions after they happen. A clinician can understand executive dysfunction theoretically and neurologically, while lived knowledge may include desperately wanting to complete a task, understanding its importance, and nevertheless being unable to make one's brain initiate it.

Neither form of knowledge diminishes the other. Understanding becomes richer when each is permitted to inform, complicate, and sometimes challenge the other.

This is part of why we built a space shaped by neurodivergent people.

We did not build it because only neurodivergent people can understand neurodivergence, nor because neurodivergent people always understand one another. We do not. We disagree. We misunderstand one another. We make mistakes. We sometimes hurt each other.

We built it because we wanted somewhere we could belong too.

We wanted neurodivergent people not only to be clients, patients, research participants, or people being discussed, but also clinicians, researchers, educators, leaders, colleagues, decision-makers, and creators of knowledge. We wanted lived experience to inform professional practice rather than needing to be concealed to preserve professional credibility. We wanted people to bring education, research, clinical expertise, culture, history, and lived experience into the same room. Perhaps most simply, we wanted to be respected too.

Yet if we are serious about building spaces differently, belonging cannot mean that neurodivergent people are incapable of hurting one another, nor can affirmation become another behavioural standard requiring everyone to use perfect language, anticipate every interpretation, or remain constantly vigilant about making mistakes. A space organized around fear of getting something wrong can easily become another space in which people monitor themselves constantly and learn to mask.  Relationship does not require perfection.  It requires accountability.

I think about beadwork when I think about this. Threading beads together requires attention not only to the individual bead but to how it sits in relationship with everything around it. Tension matters. Placement matters. What came before matters. What follows matters. When the thread becomes strained or something breaks, sometimes we must stop, examine where the relationship was disrupted, and begin the careful work of repair.

Learning through beadwork is hard work and heart work. It carries responsibility and accountability to our relations.  Building spaces shaped by neurodivergent people requires something similar. We are threading together lived experience and professional knowledge, clinical practice and humanity, research and community, strength and vulnerability, individual difference and collective responsibility. If we say we are creating spaces differently, then we must also be willing to examine how we treat one another within them.

We cannot advocate for neurodivergent dignity in the abstract while overlooking the dignity of the neurodivergent person standing beside us. We cannot tell people their voices matter while making it unsafe for someone to say, “That hurt me.” We cannot value lived experience only when it is comfortable, educational, affirming, or useful to us.

The question is not whether rupture will occur.  The question is what we do when it does.  A safe space is not a space without rupture. Such a space does not exist. Safety lies, at least in part, in knowing that rupture does not have to end relationship.  Safety is the possibility of repair.

Repair requires enough relationship to hear that our words have affected someone without immediately defending our intentions. It requires enough humility to become curious about another person's experience and enough trust to understand that intention and impact can coexist. It allows someone to say, “That hurt me,” without requiring those words to become an accusation or a verdict on another person's character.

Repair is not evidence that a relationship has failed. It can be evidence that the relationship matters enough to attend to.

Perhaps this is why the language of neurodiversity-affirming practice has begun to feel incomplete to me. Affirmation is important, but affirmation can preserve a particular relationship of power. Someone remains in the position of doing the affirming while somebody else remains the person being affirmed.

Belonging asks something different.  Belonging means the space changes because we are there.  It means neurodivergent people are not simply welcomed into systems whose assumptions have already been established. It means we participate in determining what those systems become. It means our experiences are not simply heard as testimony but recognized as knowledge capable of shaping research, clinical practice, policy, education, and community.

Neurodiversity-affirming practice asks an important question about how we treat neurodivergent people. A relational approach asks something further: how are we in relationship with neurodivergent people, and do neurodivergent people have meaningful authority to shape that relationship?

That distinction matters.

Belonging also means our humanity is not conditional upon how successfully we perform normality. Humanity is not something we prove through competence, productivity, professionalism, eye contact, emotional regulation, communication style, academic credentials, or our ability to make other people comfortable. It is not something another person grants us when we communicate correctly enough, succeed visibly enough, or make our differences easy enough to accommodate.

Our humanity is already ours.

When we encounter a neurodivergent person, we are therefore not encountering a diagnosis, a psychometric profile, a collection of traits, or a list of accommodations. We are encountering a human being carrying relationships and histories we may know very little about. We may be encountering someone who has spent decades becoming exceptionally skilled at appearing unaffected, someone whose strength developed partly because strength was required, or someone who understands completely that harm was not intended and nevertheless felt its impact.

We are also encountering someone who carries knowledge, creativity, humour, resistance, love, community, adaptation, and the capacity for healing.  Neurodivergence comes with history. Sometimes that history contains hurt. It also contains understanding and healing, relationships that have been broken and relationships that have been rebuilt, and ways of knowing ourselves that have endured despite other people telling us what our differences were supposed to mean.

Recognizing that humanity requires more than the correct language. It requires relationship, listening, humility, reciprocity, accountability, and, sometimes, repair.

Perhaps this is what beadwork continues to teach me.  No bead becomes meaningful because it stands alone. Meaning emerges through relationship: what came before it, what sits beside it, the hands that hold the thread, the tension that keeps the work together, and the responsibility to notice when something needs repair.

Maybe our spaces are not so different.  We do not need another language through which neurodivergent people can simply be welcomed into someone else's understanding of us. We need relationships in which professional knowledge and lived knowledge can change one another; where strength does not disqualify vulnerability; where rupture can be named and repaired; and where difference does not require anyone to surrender part of their humanity in exchange for belonging.

Welcome is not enough. Welcome still implies that someone else owns the house.  We have spent enough time standing at the edges of spaces built without us, learning their rules well enough to enter.

Now we are threading something different.  Not a space in which we are merely affirmed, but a space we help shape. A space for which we accept responsibility. A space in which knowledge carries accountability, relationships can withstand repair, and our differences do not make any of us less human.

The work is careful. It is hard work and heart work.  And it carries an obligation to one another.

Perhaps moving beyond neurodiversity-affirming practice is therefore not about finding another term. It is about changing our relationships: who is allowed to know, who is allowed to speak, whose interpretation is trusted, who has the authority to shape the space, and what we do when another human being tells us that something has caused hurt.

Because neurodivergent people are not asking simply to be affirmed.  We are asking to participate. To contribute. To be respected. To have our knowledge taken seriously. To be allowed both strength and vulnerability. To belong without having to surrender the parts of ourselves that made belonging difficult in the first place.  We are asking for something that should never have been conditional: to have our differences recognized without having our humanity diminished by them.

The work, then, is not simply to invite neurodivergent people into spaces that already exist. It is to continue threading relationship, knowledge, history, accountability, responsibility, and care together until none of us has to remain at the edge waiting to be invited in.

Until we can say, and know it to be true:

This space belongs to us too.