Neurodivergent Identity Is Not About Being Special

People often misunderstand what it means to recognise that you are neurodivergent or gifted. You may read a description of giftedness, ADHD, or high sensitivity and feel a jolt of recognition so strong it is visceral, a sense of finally seeing your own experience named on a page. And yet something stops you from claiming it. You may think: Am I trying to say I am special? Who am I to say I am gifted? Is this just me trying to feel better about myself? The pushback you get when you try to talk about it often comes from this misreading, from yourself as much as from others.

Reclaiming your identity as a neurodivergent person is not about being special. The differences are real, and they matter a great deal. It is, at its core, a psychological and even spiritual journey toward congruence, toward learning to live in alignment with who you actually are. This is something every human being needs to do if they are to flourish rather than merely survive.

A fish thrives when it lives in water. A nocturnal animal fails only when it is denied the dark. Every living thing has conditions under which it comes alive and conditions under which it slowly diminishes, and the difference between the two has nothing to do with merit or rank and everything to do with fit.

If your nervous system processes sensory and emotional information at a depth and intensity that falls outside the statistical norm, as research on sensory processing sensitivity and overexcitability suggests it does for some part of the population, then you have spent your life in environments that were designed for a different kind of nervous system. The classroom, the open-plan office, the dinner party with its unspoken rules and social conventions… these are environments suited for a particular range of processing, and if your range falls outside it, you will be depleted by things others barely notice.

The response, for most neurodivergent people, is masking: the sustained suppression of one's natural cognitive and emotional responses in order to appear typical. A growing body of research has documented the psychological cost of this suppression of the true self. A 2024 systematic review integrating quantitative and qualitative studies found that social camouflaging in autistic adults and youth may put individuals at risk for poor mental health outcomes, and is associated with interpersonal difficulties and identity disruption, with self-protection and the desire for social connection identified as motivations for masking (Klein et al., 2025). Camouflaging has been found to be associated with greater symptoms of generalised anxiety, depression, and social anxiety in autistic adults, regardless of gender (Hull et al., 2021). Autistic adults report that the longer they spend camouflaging, the worse the damage: exhaustion, isolation, poor mental and physical health, loss of identity and self-acceptance, and delayed diagnosis. The main reason they give for needing to camouflage so much is society's lack of awareness and acceptance of autism (Bradley et al., 2021).

Living against your own nature is psychologically costly. Occupational psychology has long recognised this through the concept of person-environment fit, the principle that wellbeing depends not on the characteristics of the person alone, nor on the characteristics of the environment alone, but on the degree of congruence between them. When there is a sustained mismatch, the result is chronic strain. But for many neurodivergent people, that mismatch is not confined to the workplace, but is pervasive and often lifelong.

The ugly duckling story, which many people read as a parable about discovering that one is superior to the ducks, is not about superiority at all. It is a story about the relief of finally recognising what one is, and no longer trying to be something else. The swan did not change and had not suddenly become superior. It came alive the moment it stopped measuring itself against creatures it was never meant to be, and in doing so, the suffering that had defined its entire life up to that point quietly fell away. The swan finally realised it had not been too much, too sensitive, too intense, too weird.

There is a concept in classical Chinese philosophy, xing 性, that refers to your inherent nature, the kind of creature you actually are. The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, writing in the fourth century BCE, returned to this idea throughout his work. In one passage, he observes that a duck's neck may be short, but lengthening it would cause it pain, and a swan's neck may be long, but cutting it short would cause it grief (Chapter 8, "Webbed Toes"). In another, he describes how wild horses once lived freely, chomping grass and drinking from streams, until a trainer arrived and began branding, bridling, and breaking them through starvation and forced labour, destroying their nature so thoroughly that over half of them died (Chapter 9, "Horse's Hooves"). The problem in each case was never that the creature was deficient. The problem was that it was living under conditions designed for a different kind of being, and the effort of conforming to those conditions was slowly destroying what it already was.

If you have spent decades forcing yourself into cognitive and emotional shapes that do not fit, suppressing the speed of your thinking because it unsettles people, dampening the intensity of your feeling because you have been told it is too much, you have been performing a version of normality that costs you everything and never quite convinces anyone, least of all yourself. The exhaustion you carry is the exhaustion of sustained incongruence, of spending your energy on the labour of masking and trying to fit in.

When you understand how your mind actually works, how you process emotion, how you take in sensory information, how your thinking moves and at what speed, and what conditions allow you to function rather than merely survive, you can begin to build a life that fits the creature you actually are.

The shift is not from ordinary to special, and anyone who frames it that way has misunderstood what this is about. The shift is from misalignment to alignment, from masking to congruence.