I want to beat the person who invented this saying with a rusty pole.
I’ll take responsibility for my neurodivergence (which apparently isn’t my fault but still enough of a supposed wrongdoing for me to take responsibility for) when neurotypicals take responsibility for the decades of unnecessary psychological, physical, medical and financial abuse they inflicted on me.
Or how about neurotypicals start by taking responsibility for the centuries of lobotomies, incarceration, torture and eugenics they inflicted on anyone born different.
Seriously fuck you, neurodivergent people owe you nothing and already have to forgive so much.
On one hand, yes I am genuinely unpleasant to be around and a complete asshole when going through the depression and anxiety. On the other, it wouldn’t really be a mental illness if it wasn’t, now would it? That phrase pisses me off because it’s like telling someone with a broken bone sticking out their ass to “take some personal responsibility.”
Yeah I mean it’s called disability because disrupts x ability. People are already exhausted as it is, and even less energy to care for their most valued people - NDs make NTs “extra work” and aren’t easy, so tension is inevitable.
preach
I take responsibility for pissing off NTs with my unfiltered presence as much as possible
I understand the frustration with this sentence, but I think it comes from conflating terms. I take “responsibility” to be distinctly different from “culpability,” or “fault,” which is what the sentence is distinguishing. It’s a kind of legalistic distinction being employed for moral purposes.
Fault means what we take it to mean, moral blameworthiness. Responsibility by contrast means something like “the party with formal control/expectation for handling of the entailing duties given their relation to the question at hand.” That sounds weird and I know it, and it’s not a law-book definition but my hastily typed out distinction…so let me try to explain it by way of example.
Let’s say a tree from your property (ha, how bourgeois) falls over and damages your neighbor’s fence or car or whatever. It may not be your fault, as in, you are not morally culpable for the fact a tree fell, however, with the rules, rights, and duties of a given society, it may still be your responsibility to account for unintended damages caused by your property. As the property holder, you are ultimately held responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of what happens on your property, and other people have a right to come to you for recompense if something from your property damages them or theirs.
Applying the analogy to ND (which I experience and cannot get medication for because of contraindications—hooray!), it is not our fault that we are the way we are, and people should not hold a moral judgement against us for that much. However, given the rights and duties of our society, we are the ones with control over our own actions, and still have to be granted the same rights and duties as others are across the board. We cannot start waving all duties for ND people, otherwise we turn them into moral patients instead of agents. Others have a right to certain things or ‘reasonable’ expectations for others, and it may be harder for us to comply with that, but we are ultimately still responsible for respecting those rights/entailing duties simply because we are the people who can do the respecting.
Accommodations can and should be made in the interest of accessibility, but we shouldn’t conflate our responsibility with moral judgement anymore than the people holding us responsible should. Accommodations come from a place of mutual recognition over that fact to begin with. We are not punished for failing to easily meet these duties, but instead should be worked with to meet them in a way that works best for all involved.
I hope you don’t take this as opposing your frustration or feeling. I just wanted to add clarity. Love and solidarity
It probably makes me seem unreasonable, but
Let’s say a tree from your property (ha, how bourgeois) falls over and damages your neighbor’s fence or car or whatever. It may not be your fault, as in, you are not morally culpable for the fact a tree fell, however, with the rules, rights, and duties of a given society, it may still be your responsibility to account for unintended damages caused by your property.
See that’s the thing, I am not causing damages, if anything others are constantly having their trees fall onto my property and forcing me to clean it up and then punishing me for taking me too long. I am constantly having to take more responsibility than others and it’s exhausting and extra insult to injury when it’s assumed I don’t
We are not punished for failing to easily meet these duties.
I believe we are.
I don’t want to discourage you though, it’s a good and thoughtful comment. I just feel differently about it. Maybe I’m just bitter, who knows. I’m also still probably not quite understanding it, like I kind of do, but I kind of don’t. Haha.
Language can be so unfortunate sometimes, especially with a divergent lens. I think “domain” is a better fit than “responsibility”, but that may have connotations for some too (I like math, so it’s clinical enough to me). For such a simple phrase, the concept is way more nuanced than it has any right to be.
I like to think of it like this: You are the only one who can possibly experience being you, so naturally it’s up to you to tease apart what that means. The good thing is we’re a social species, so there’s usually help. There shouldn’t be anything moral or “get your shit together” about it, but it’s so easy to misconstrue both by the speaker and listener.
I interpreted this sentence in “good faith” as that we neurodivergent people need to recognize that neurotypicals don’t understand our triggers/reactions/accommodations and we shouldn’t get mad when they don’t act as we need.
