There is this tactic for either NTs or self-hating NDs to complain about people “romanticizing mental illness/neurodivergence.”

To frame what I think about this kind of talking point, it has very “wedge issue” energy. It reminds me of people who say things like “I’m not transphobic; we just need to protect children and not have them undergo harmful medical procedures!”. To your average person who doesn’t think much about these kinds of issues, that kind of speech doesn’t sound very divisive or harmful, but to people who are trans, we’ve come to realize that this is just a sleazy way of making one’s bigotry sound “rational” and even “good faith.”

It’s not!

Similarly to the example of what people say about trans people, people who complain about people who are ND or going through mental illnesses “romanticizing” their experiences will literally use this remark at any autistic person that’s not beating themselves up over being autistic. An autistic woman on Instagram posted a reel about her reclaiming the term “romanticizing” and owning up to it as a response to this garbage, saying something along the lines of “Yeah, I romanticize my autism, and I’m not ashamed of it,” and someone, I shit you not, commented saying “That would be like romanticizing cancer!”

This is awful. This term “romanticizing” is a huge red flag for me in these kinds of discussions. I’ve felt shame for my autism my whole life, having to feel like I’m deeply broken, and although I’ve gone through internalized bigotry for other aspects of my identity such as race, gender, and sexuality, my internalized ableism was so damn hard to shake because it seems like I’m even less understood in being neurodivergent than I am in being black, trans, and queer!

There is a gross, performative tendency for people to say they oppose ableism, but they will still be highly critical the moment an ND person displays common tendencies of being autistic for instance. In the process of shitting on this ND person, however, they will not make any direct references to them being ND, thereby making their bigotry just seem like a socially acceptable manifestation of being rude to someone simply for “having bad traits.”

Once I realized that this is the kind of thinking that ableists operate under, it made me feel a bit more at ease with being neurodivergent, but this shit doesn’t stop being frustrating. When these people talk about “romanticizing” these conditions, they claim to say it out of concern that it makes neurodivergence and mental illness look like a joke or “sunshine and rainbows” when there’s just so much suffering involved, but every person who is ND and/or mentally ill fucking knows that it’s not just sunshine and rainbows. We have suffered, and we continue to do so as a result of society seeming like it’s not made for us. That’s why not shaming us every 5 seconds for being the way we are and struggling with the symptoms we struggle with is so damn crucial.

We are living in a world that tells us, both implicitly and explicitly, to feel inferior over these things, and the moment we say “No thanks.” to that? Well, we can’t do that because it’s inconsiderate of those who feel inferior over these things, which is why this desire to reject this shame exists in the fucking first place!

My whole damn life I wasn’t able to go through without feeling like my neurodivergence makes me subhuman. At my current age, which feels so deep into me feeling tarnished by the excessive bigotry I’ve faced in my life, just let me have this fucking moment to not think I’m some kind of demon who needs to hate myself every single second to have an “appropriate” thought process and reaction to me being this way.

I’ve devoted so much time to internalized ableism that I’d rather move on from it, and I’m sure many other ND people want to as well. If this means we’re “romanticizing” our conditions in the process, then maybe that’s just how it needs to be so we can fucking get on with our lives.