[Editor’s Note: This anthology was published by Girl God Books (2022).]
“Neurodiversity Holds Keys to Unlock Patriarchal Prisons” by Trinity Shea Thomas
Great news! Neurodiversity (ND) holds keys to unlock patriarchal prisons. What has been used against us can be turned inside out to set us free.
ND codes safely unzipping in our neurology escort us from apologies to superpowers.
The challenge for me in writing about this was to talk myself off the ledge of entirely earned outrage and stay firmly in the increasingly familiar realm of celebration, where all the many Truths retain their capitals and we are securely positioned to win the race of human. I will be taking full advantage of neurodivergent license, a step or twirl beyond poetic license.
I didn’t have a word for how I am designed for a long time. I knew I was different, definitely one of those who was not like the others. I lived my life as an apology.
The word neurodiversity was created in 1996 to describe diagnosed deficits in learning and thinking processes on the autism spectrum. I prefer Harvard Health’s recent definition:
“Neurodiversity describes the idea that people experience and interact with the world around them in many different ways; there is no one ‘right’ way…”
This ‘no one right way’ business is the patriarchy’s worst nightmare, as it should be. The neurodiverse are uncontrollable by design. It’s our superpower. But I’m getting a bit ahead of my tale.
My Own Neurodiverse Design
My brand of neurodiversity is the extra-sensory sort. I was born with enhanced senses, as if I had less filters or had a blowhole open in the top of my head that let more in. I saw, heard, felt, and knew things that no one around me could verify. And these abnormal sensings were the favorite parts of my life. I found real companionship and truth there. I still do.
Tragedy struck when I realized I could not share them. This confused me! Why would I see, hear, feel, and know all of these marvelous things if they were not to be shared with my family and friends? Was I just simply flawed? ‘Twas a mystery that required discovery.
I was convinced, over the first dozen years of my life, to keep quiet about everything outside the reality most people lived in. I apologized continuously for all that I saw, heard, felt, and knew. For all that I was. I was shamed into silence.
My life became about exploring how to move from shrinking from my differences to putting them to work in service. I began to look for the others who did not fit in. I found that my ND, before I ever heard the word, was neither a deficit nor a disorder, but rather a power of a higher order. Occasionally it even saved a life.
Eventually, I stopped hiding and apologizing and got to work. Now I know there are many of us. And we hold crucial keys.
I must admit I was relieved when Malcolm Gladwell published his book, “Blink,” in 2007 about how we often ‘know without knowing.’ He provided a case study of an expensive museum statue that turned out to be fake. The many experts hired to assess it did not agree about whether it was or was not. The ones who ‘knew’ it was fake could not say how they knew. They just did. And they were correct! My people!
Extreme sensitivities often accompany our higher order powers. As a child it was nearly impossible, for example, for me to cut roses for the dinner table. I heard their cries. No one could convince me it didn’t hurt them.
I learned to mask my reactions to pass for normal. Usually.
Particularly in women, masking leads to a loss of sense, of self, with an increased vulnerability to patriarchal control. We accept the stigma and gaslight ourselves, incrementally dismantling our truth in exchange for acceptance, sanctuary, and belonging. It’s a survival strategy and a recoverable error.
As my accumulated life experience and research yielded success, I felt most at home in the arms of nature and the rainbow goddess, the self-sustaining natural wells of love and truth.
When I found myself at my wit’s end, I would wrap myself around a tree until I was better. It always works.
I found myself regularly at odds with the dominant paradigm. One of its names is Patriarchy.
Patriarchal Prisons – Misogyny and Anecdotal Evidence
I don’t have enough pages to catalogue the abuses of the patriarchal system. And I’m committed to staying out of the Outrage Zone. I’m focusing on my top two.
Misogyny and the invalidation of individual truth are patriarchal plot lines designed to enforce powerful prisons. They target agency.
A famous example of this was the women who knew too much and bowed too little – being burned as witches, among other things. And even more astonishing, a successful campaign through history to make us fear the witches rather than their murderers.
This became a tried-and-true Formula:
Step One: Label something to create fear or discredit it.
Step Two: Ostracize or destroy it.
Step Three: Absolve or even glorify the perpetrators.
Misogyny
The assault on the feminine, misogyny, is not new. It’s thousands of years overdue for a rewrite.
Ironically, ancient patriarchal cultures conspired to deprive women, the natural heiresses to goddess culture, of the right to any religious leadership. The Council of Nicea, a Council of Christian Bishops in Turkey in 325 AD, removed women from the priesthood despite women being equally honored as the original apostles of Christ. In about 400 AD, the Oracles of Delphi closed their well of inspiration and walked away after more than a thousand years when the Priests of Apollo began telling them what to say based on who would pay the most to fill their coffers.
Until recently, the patriarchy successfully conspired to deny woman all sorts of everyday rights. Women were not allowed to own property, including themselves, or have the right to vote as a citizen. Even now there are gaps in the right to financial benefits equal to men, including equal pay. And even the right to be sovereign over their own bodies, which is a virulent dispute in my country on this very day.
Why did the patriarchy go to war with women?
They fear our authority and our voices.
Because human life is born through us, exclusively. Because the Rainbow Goddess lives in us. Because a woman’s corpus callosum, the bridge between the sides of the brain, contains more nerve fibers than a male’s. This gives us greater access to the quantum right brain where we are fully present in the moment and know oneness; where the only real authority lives.
Our voices confront their artificial power. And the jig, as they say, is up.
Women are less often diagnosed with neurodiversity, often being in their 20’s or 30’s before they receive a diagnosis, which can be confusing and affect their sense of self. It is generally believed that this is because women naturally mask more to accommodate misogyny.
Neurodiverse women are an even greater thorn in the side of the patriarchy, for we are wired with enhanced senses and knowing, aware of the ‘powers’ that have our backs, and therefore less controllable. Becoming more so.
The Rainbow Goddess is rising, in all genders. I can see her smiling as she balances scales.
Anecdotal Evidence
Unlike misogyny, the patriarchy doesn’t play gender favorites with dispensing invalidation of lived experience and personal knowing.
Anecdotal evidence is defined as “a factual claim relying only on personal observation and experience, generally regarded as limited in value. It must be backed up by statistical evidence to be accepted as valid.” It is considered unreliable. ‘Only’ anecdotal. And the patriarchy is left securely in charge of reality.
As a practical matter, ‘anecdotal evidence’ actually means ‘your inner knowing and lived experiences just don’t count unless we say so.’ Dismissive rhetoric delivered with a side of invalidation. It can make us question ourselves. The worst.
The assignment of truth and reliability is reserved for governments, corporate boards and research facilities run primarily by an older generation of white men who are taught to value results that are duplicatable and therefore profitable. This is a patriarchal control and profit-based perspective, not a value or truth or solution-driven perspective.
The invalidation of anecdotal evidence is a core strategy of the patriarchy’s abuse of power. It’s the systemic translation of “You don’t know. In fact, you can’t know. But we do. And we will let you know!”
This scourge has infiltrated nearly every nuance of our society. I am amazed by the reliance on statistics. When I took college courses in statistics, and later used them in corporate settings, the running joke was, “You know, you can prove anything with statistics!” And so, they do.
It is past time to create our own statistics of the senses.
In Summary
We have been gaslighted and stigmatized. If we were the fairy Tinkerbell in the book “Peter Pan” by J.M. Barrie, our lights would be dim because we don’t believe in ourselves.
Only we can allow our lights to dim! No more apologies!
The real Truth is, there are many Truths, all with their capitals intact. Lived, embodied, personal experience meets a higher standard. It’s part of Higher Order Thinking that allows us to synthesize differently to create new facts and new realities. It’s a superpower. Rising ND is the antidote for the plague of anecdotal evidence.
Because our senses are different, we open new doors.
Keeping it Real
I’m not advocating that we demonize and discard all patriarchal qualities or accept all anecdotal evidence without vetting it within our own experience and communities. But we mustn’t mistake control over nature and other humans as any sort of real power. It’s only egoic manipulation and leads to disharmonies and drama. Our world needs real power to navigate these changing times. We need a new Call to Arms, not to weaponize our world, but to hold ourselves and each other in loving acceptance.
Real power comes from within and is collaborative. It’s matriarchal. And neurodiverse.
The Koan of Neurodiversity: Agency and Alchemy
Neurodiversity is a living, embodied koan, the Buddhist’s classic paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.
Logic is definitely not invited to this party. Provocation is in play. I can hear Enlightenments cackling in glee around the corner.
Patriarchal prisons are predicated on control with its hallmarks of domination, jurisdiction, and management. Neurodiversity establishes a control-free zone. Even in the areas deemed deficit, the neurodiverse are shielded from cultural conditioning as they fail to meet expectations. This is the box-free land of the neurodiverse! The Get Out of Jail Free Zone.
It’s past time for Jailbreak. We will use what we are, neurodiverse, to unlock patriarchal prisons.
Restoring Agency
- Refuse to accommodate misogynism. Start where you can.
- Reject the label of ‘anecdotal evidence.’ Embrace your unassailable, personal, lived, and embodied Truths.
- You are exempt from patriarchal assessment. They have no model or monitors capable of evaluating you.
- Remove your attention from the patriarchy. Neither absolve nor vilify them. Give them no power over you.
- Rest securely in your Sovereignty, cherishing your own Divine Design. This is Agency.
Alchemy
Alchemy is not a process; it’s a breakthrough, turning a current or longstanding condition into something of a higher order through unanticipated means. Magical realism is a colloidal state, with the rational view of reality combined with or contained within the supernatural. I‘m fairly certain that’s my address.
I recommend we indulge in magical realism until alchemy occurs. We neurodiverse explorers are perfectly outfitted for multi-sensory adventuring. The stretch and reach and holds involved expand our sense of possibility. Like mountain climbers finally reaching a summit and seeing an unimaginably vast ocean on the other side, we need new vistas to inspire us.
As Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve our problems by using the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Alchemy is the creation of something new by inciting change in its basic structure. Try tempting your brain to notice something new with this exercise. Synesthesia is a neurodiverse talent for blending of the senses so that, for example, colors can be heard, smelled, and tasted. This may seem unreasonable until you realize that blueberries do taste blue, and freshly cut grass smells green. Don’t they?
Our neurodivergent brains operate outside of all sorts of societal norms and built-in filters. Many of us have called a truce with our brains’ ingrained devotion to predicting the future based on past experience and their tendency to shield us from new potentials. Alchemy liberates. It is the patriarchy’s kryptonite.
We feel truth from our hearts and in our guts and vet it through our own neural networks. The ‘ring of truth’ is real for us. This is how we create a sanctuary within ourselves, free from patriarchal predators. We become a key in the lock of the patriarchal prisons.
WE are the patriarchy’s kryptonite.