I have several disorders which are located inside of the brain (which obviously includes autism, hence me posting here). I dislike calling myself “neurodivergent” for many reasons. For one, people use this term as a replacement word for autism, and I have many conditions besides autism.
For example, I’ll see posts saying, “neurodivergent people sre more likely to do XYZ.” There are so many disorders which fall under the neurodivergent umbrella that it isn’t humanly possible for neurodivergent people to be more likely to say or do something than other folks; just say autistic in this context.
I also find that my personal experience gets watered down by calling myself neurodivergent; it feels like a modern version of being called special. I have several conditions which fall under different categories; psychiatric, neurological, and neurodevelopmental. To call all of that just neurodivergent is not very specific and doesn’t tell a person what my needs are (plus, they’ll just assume I’m autistic).
The thing is, our brain is the most complex thing of the human body.
People often prefer to use the “neurodivergent” word because you might have way more things than just autism, you might even have some undocumented disorders, it’s just hard to be specific when come to this.
It’s like trying to give a unique name to a mix of vegetables and etc… So people just came up with the world “salad”.
I personally prefer neurodivergent because I admit, not even myself, and maybe not even an specialist would be able to diagnose everything that happens in my brain. But we all know it must be something related to neurons.