Radical Authenticity

Radical Authenticity

 

BY HUGO LA HEI

 

How to be ND and happy

The most radical move of self-acceptance for a neurodivergent person is to be autistic out loud and in public.

By being radically authentic and expressing your natural traits, you might push someone away, especially someone you like. 

Do it anyway.  

It is obviously easier said than done. It’s terrifying. It’s mortifying. It feels as if the world is ending when you get rejected for revealing all of who you are–but it’s the only way to be happy and content. It really is.

Our tendency is to hide and change ourselves for other people, since it’s what we have been doing our whole lives. Think of the amount of energy we put into masking and changing ourselves for the people around us, just so they can give us little shreds of acceptance.  At the end of the day, their acceptance isn’t even fulfilling because those shreds aren’t going to our real selves. It’s going to our front, the mask we put on for the audience.  

So you have to express your natural ND traits to be truly happy. Be autistic if you are autistic. Be ADHD if you are ADHD. It’s authenticity taken to the most extreme lengths–and those are the lengths we have to go to find self-acceptance. And find it we must. Because otherwise, we will run away for ourselves. 

To be happy, we have to be radically authentic. We have to let out the autistic traits, the ADHD traits, the dyslexic traits–and let the people who are alienated by it leave. Let them fuck off out of our lives and be replaced by people who actually like us for the different and unique neurodivergent individuals we are.

Those people do exist. But the only way to find them is to be radically authentic out in the world. If we’re all walking around hiding our true selves, we’ll never find each other.  

So here I am, unmasked and out loud. 

Come find me.

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