When European settlers arrived on continents they had never seen, among peoples who had lived there for tens of thousands of years, they brought with them a conviction that didn't ask for self-examination. They had a framework in which their way of being human was the fully developed version, and everyone else's one "earlier in the process:" primitive, childlike, waiting for improvement. The fact that the peoples they started displacing possessed superior ecological knowledge, sophisticated social structures, and a holistically spiritual way of life, went pretty much over most settlers' heads. Not over all, however, as history has shown — not only in the deliberate eradication through infected blankets and other 'poisonous gifts,' but also from a structural fear, perhaps of how advanced they subconsciously perceived them to be. A fear that thought it necessary to attack their culture and confidence through humiliation and 're-education' suggests they did feel intimidated, as perceived superiority often does.1
Something structurally similar has been happening to neurodivergent people — those with ADHD, giftedness, autism, dyslexia, and related neurotypes — for as long as neurotypical society has had the diagnostic vocabulary to name them. The neurotypical world built the schools. It built the offices. It built the criteria for what counts as intelligent, functional, normal, productive. And then it looked at the people who could not or would not conform to those criteria, and said: something is wrong with you. Not with the school. Not with the office. Not with the criteria. With you. Adaptation is mandatory; through re-education or medication. No-one seemed to take notice of the side effects: discarding innate talents like creativity, pattern recognition and out-of-the-box thinking, along with self-worth and authenticity.
The Hunters Were Here First
But here is what that story also omits: who was there first? Who were perfectly functional before a new order was presented to rule? Before the factory, before the office, before the school bell and the quarterly report and the forty-hour work week, the neurotypical profile was not the default. It was not even the majority. For the vast majority of human history — the hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture tied people to fixed plots of land — the minds that thrived were restless, associative, hyperfocused in bursts, sensitive to pattern and threat, comfortable with risk, and driven by novelty. They were the hunters. The scouts. The discoverers.
The ADHD mind — hyperfocus, impulsivity, high sensation-seeking, and difficulty with repetitive tasks — fits perfectly with the demands of nomadic hunter life. Fully in the present with restless readiness. Eat. Rest. Move. Repeat. Hyperfocus intensity followed by well-deserved recovery. It is a rhythm in sync with survival. What it is not, and never was, is compatible with sitting still for six hours while someone explains the company process structures in subsequent separate steps.
The gifted mind — intensely curious, pattern-aware, morally sensitive, prone to overexcitability — was the mind that looked at the night sky and wanted to know what secrets it held; not only to satisfy their own curiosity, but also to help the community. The people who noticed the life-saving relationship between the animals and herbs they ate. That felt, unequivocally, when the group was making a decision that would end badly. These were not eccentric outsiders tolerated by their communities. In many cases they were the reason their communities survived; the respected wise elders.
The neurotypical profile — rule-following, comfortable with repetition, responsive to social hierarchy, capable of performing the same task reliably for hours — is not the ancient human default. It is the profile needed for agriculture to work. The profile for industrial factory work. The village needed people who would tend the same field without wandering off after something more interesting, and the factories needed people to clock hours of repetitive work. The school, designed to produce factory workers, educated people to sit still quietly. And gradually, through peer pressure, the villager became the template. The hunter became the uncontrollable inconvenience; perceived as no longer necessary and 'divergent.'
So when the hunter's child could not sit still, the system did not ask whether sitting still was in its nature. It reached for a fitting solution: a diagnosis. If medication quieted the 'ineffective' behaviour, mostly inconvenient to the classroom, the school could report improvement. What else had been quieted along with it was not a question that was asked. Similarly, no questions about whether the diagnosis was establishing an 'error' in the child, or a mismatch between their instinctive mind and a modern cage. Because curiosity like that didn't fit the system: the child's curiosity was inconvenient, and from the other side, curiosity was non-existent. The newcomers — the neurotypicals — built a world in their image and called it progress, without thinking about other ways.
Bilingual in a Monolingual World
Here is the tragic part: the neurodivergent person understands the neurotypical world in a way that does not reciprocate. The hunters were forced to live in the village. They learned the rules, the rhythms, the unspoken structure. They adapted to 'the normal': to pretend other things mattered more than the thing happening right now that actually mattered. The hunter learned the ways of the village in order to survive, while the villager not only never had to learn to hunt — they hadn't even been along on a hunt.
From the first day of school — and probably before — the neurodivergent child was immersed in a world built on neurotypical structures: neurotypical timelines for attention and sitting still, neurotypical social constructs, and neurotypical definitions of intelligence. These children had to learn to read that world, decode it, mask inside it, translate themselves into it. They became, out of necessity, experienced observers of a culture that was not theirs, while corroding their own in the process. As their own authentic thinking and values had already been established as faulty, they focused on how neurotypical people think, what they value, and how they organise time and hierarchy and conversation. They adapted, while still not fitting in.
The neurotypical person, meanwhile, spent their entire life inside a world built to their specifications. They have never been required to understand a different cognitive style in order to function. They have never had to mask. They have never sat in a room where every single structure — the lighting, the noise, the movements, the agendas, the social expectation — was standardised for someone else's nervous system and simply endured it, because there was no other option. They have therefore learned nothing about what it is like to be neurodivergent — and feel, in most cases, no particular need to find out.
Neurodivergent people are bilingual, yet they have neglected, rejected or forgotten their 'mother tongue' as they have been trying to fit into the fluency of the neurotypical language. The neurotypical person is monolingual, usually without knowing it — and without even being aware there are other languages to be learned.
Remaining Invisible
The settlers could not see the nature or value of what they were destroying, because the framework that made them feel superior did not make the destroyed thing visible. This is how hierarchical systems work: the party in charge does not merely dominate; it is also blinded to different perspectives. The neurotypical, for the same reason, cannot see what they have crushed. They don't speak the other language and are, in many cases, quite unaware of its substance.
An essential aspect that the neurotypical developmental path tries to train out of a neurodivergent person is emotional honesty. Neurodivergents often cannot moderate emotional expression to the approved register, which results in a 'diagnosis' of dysregulation. The fact that they have more intense nervous systems, perfectly aligned with more intense emotions — as well as higher empathy and a deeper understanding of the whole within a situation — isn't registered. What they experience is a feeling in-the-now, rather than a measured dosage of the socially acceptable version of it. The neurotypical adult has been so thoroughly trained in emotional management that they sometimes aren't aware of what they actually feel beneath the managed version. They therefore cannot understand the experience, and call people who express more intense emotions 'overly sensitive' or 'exaggerated.' The result is to be expected: most neurodivergents learn to hide what they feel from others, while continuing to experience it internally and dealing with their feelings alone. The performance of being calm becomes their survival.
Discomfort of the Unseen
Non-linear thinking: the ADHD, autistic, or gifted mind is highly associative and moves between apparent irrelevancies. Paradoxically, while linear thinking is the dominant cognitive currency of institutions, it is the non-linear thinkers who produce most of the ideas that develop and change those institutions. Non-linear thinkers are consistently undervalued by the people who benefit from them, because they cannot trace the route it took to arrive. The routes are invisible to them — just as the routes the hunter reads across an unmarked landscape are invisible to the villager who has never had to leave. This invisibility makes the linear thinker uncomfortable: what cannot be traced feels untrustworthy1 — and so the response, more often than not, is: invalid.
Radical transparency: many neurodivergent people cannot — and innately don't want to — perform in the neurotypical social system of strategic self-presentation, of saying less than you mean, of calculating and managing impressions. They have been punished for their honesty their entire lives, mostly because what neurotypicals call social grace, neurodivergent people recognise as insincerity. What they have instead is directness: meaning exactly what they say. The autistic person who concludes — accurately — that the two-hour meeting could have been an email, and says so, is not being rude. They are being precise. That precision is unwelcome because it makes visible what everyone else agreed not to mention. Paradoxically, honesty is a virtue that is promoted but never truly appreciated. Like non-linear thinking, it is crucial if you want to change and improve, but fatal if you want to remain in the status quo while claiming the opposite.
Pattern recognition: the autistic person who notices that the accounting system and the ecosystem have the same structural flaw. The ADHD mind that connects a problem in music theory to a problem in urban planning. The dyslexic thinker who processes spatially and sees the shape of an argument before its content. These are not quirks. They are the crucial skills the hunter needed to survive: reading the whole terrain, not just the path. The neurotypical education system spends twelve years training children to think what the system thinks — and then the same businesses that funded those schools pay consultants enormous sums to teach their employees something called "creative thinking."
The neurotypical is not the default human. They are the industrially optimised human — and they built a world in their image and called it progress.
Superior in the Ways That Could Not Be Measured
The indigenous peoples displaced by settlers were not primitive. They were sophisticated in ways the settlers did not have instruments to measure. The neurodivergents are not disordered. They are differently ordered — in ways that the neurotypical framework does not support, cannot measure, and thus will not recognise as order. The neurotypical system, which presents itself as the pinnacle of human social organisation, is in many ways its downfall. It chose compliance and called it civilisation. It opted for emotional suppression and called it professionalism. It picked a tolerance of meaningless repetition and called it discipline.
The pain of spending a life in a world built for someone else is real and serious, but it is not caused by the neurodivergence. It is caused by the mismatch — and the mismatch was not inevitable. It was built by people who assumed they were the standard, who never had to question that assumption, and who have, in most cases, never truly asked what they lost in the process of becoming so thoroughly, efficiently, unreachably normal.
Are they to blame? Yes and no. The neurotypicals are also part of the system; they play their part. They are partially — or fully — unaware of their havoc. Just because the system fits them better doesn't mean it has been kind to them. It has made them predictable, obedient, and fearful of change. Villagers who have never experienced multiple perspectives also feel, somewhere, that this is not all there is — even when they don't know any better. Something or someone put them into the structure to hold it up, but if they knew the real price, they would also want to escape it. Like the people in Plato's cave,3 they just aren't able to see the full picture. Functioning in a system that hurts others is not good for the whole. To move past the feeling of injury, it is important for neurodivergents to see that neurotypicals are also part of a larger system2 — one that functions most effectively when the majority believes the cage is simply the shape of the world. But Plato also knew this: most people, when shown the exit, choose the familiar dark.
What Is Owed
The settlers rarely admitted what they had done, because admission would have required them to revise the story they told about themselves.
The neurotypical world is in the early stages of a similar assessment. Words like neurodiversity and recognition have entered conversations and institutions. In a way, this is progress. It is also, often, a way of feeling better without examining one's role. Recognition offered from a position of unchallenged power is not reckoning. We accept you. We include you. We make accommodations. The structure that required accommodation in the first place stays unaffected.
What is actually owed is the recognition that normal was never a description of the human. It was a description of the people in power who made their particular cognitive profile into the template for everyone else — and then named every deviation from that template a disorder. It is the acknowledgment that the losses involved in becoming neurotypically oriented were real, were not unavoidable, and were paid for disproportionately by people who were not included in designing the system.
The neurodivergent people looked out at that world — the world built without them in mind, that named them defective and mistook them for less — and they adapted anyway. They mapped it, translated it, and survived in it. And in many cases, despite everything, they made things inside that world a little better.
That is not a disorder. That is a remarkable mind; flexible and still wired for survival.
The neurotypical world should sit with the discomfort that comes with this realisation. Not rush to signal understanding that is not really there, not immediately offer solutions on how to make things better. Just sit with what was built in the name of normal, and what was demolished in the process — by people who could not see what they destroyed. Not because these things were truly invisible, but because making an effort to see them would have required admitting that the standard was never the summit.