"We don’t talk enough about how stressful Halloween costumes are for the ADHD community,” said a highly controversial tweet. One user responded with the phrase that has now become a viral meme about the neurodivergence movement: “Omg you people can’t do anything.”

“This tweet has done irreparable damage for any mentally disabled person with higher support needs I'm so serious,” said another in response to the second one.

“Omg you people can’t do anything,” went the response to that.

So when my therapist tentatively suggested that I might have ADHD, I simply rolled my eyes. She proceeded to explain executive dysfunction – “Yup, I know what that is,” I said, swatting the term away like a fly. She presumed I had done the research. No, I said, the research was done at me. Mostly on Twitter or on TikToks repurposed as Instagram reels, even in my own friend groups when it crept into conversations as neurodivergence “therapyspeak.”

Okay, she reasoned. Let’s not call it anything. Let’s just say you’re somewhere under the big umbrella that is neurodivergence. That felt worse to me. All this time I had secretly been making fun of the neurodivergence industrial complex. Like most people, I was reacting to a brand of neurodivergence advocacy on the Internet that pretty much exempted them (us) from most human obligations. I made an exception for loved ones but, on the whole, privately mocked the way autism and ADHD -- but mostly the latter -- had started to become (like anxiety and depression) weaponized via therapyspeak to evade accountability. More than that, neurodivergence had turned into an apolitical category – one that seemed, to me, to exist entirely outside the messy realities of real life under late stage capitalism. And yet, my therapist’s ADHD hypothesis implicitly made sense to me.

I had to thus confront some questions: could I accept having ADHD (maybe even being mildly autistic as I’ve long suspected) without calling myself neurodivergent? Could I have a legitimate problem without making it my identity? What if I didn’t want the brain and rainbow emojis in my social media bios, but still wanted life to change – without having to use the language of “accomodations”?

I had begun thinking about neurodivergence a lot after a fraught workplace relationship with openly neurodivergent people -- who talked about it a lot, made me do all the work, and had me questioning if I was ableist all the time. After I inevitably burnt out from dealing with them, ADHD was the special target of my private ire -- until it came for me.

Swallowing my pride, I spent some time trawling through every Reddit thread, blog and essay on ADHD and neurodivergence. What I found sealed it for me: I didn't want in. The whole thing looked to me like an exercise in being self-important instead of politically radicalized. For a movement that began as an offshoot of the civil rights movement, a whole lot of us who are neurodivergent don’t do much other than accuse people of being ableist on the Internet. In other words, we're quicker to call ourselves disabled and others ableist than we are to learn about what actually makes workplaces structurally ableist.

Am I a traitor to the cause for wanting to just treat my ADHD symptoms and move on, continuing my 9-5 smoothly? If I am, it’s not just me. The neurodivergence movement’s refusal to allow explanations, debates, or the C word (cures), prompted Twilah Hiari, a writer whose Asperger’s turned into low-functioning autism at age 38, to accuse the movement of “tyrannical groupthink.” Hiari is one of many critics of the neurodivergence movement who, despite their own neurodivergence, get cancelled for ableism.

Sure, every movement is susceptible to this kind of weaponization of identity. But with neurodivergence (or even mental illness), despite what the movement has historically advocated for, I’d disagree that it’s an identity at all.

People vocal in the neurodivergent community pitch themselves as different, not deficient. But in my experience -- especially in India -- it’s the people with the slickest vocabulary, the capital to acquire a formal piece of paper, and the bargaining power, who are usually able to access this claim the most. They then proceed to turn it into a cloyingly morally superior positioning (“my ADHD is my superpower”). On the Internet, I saw ADHD neurodivergence advocacy turning into a grating main-character-of-the-universe complex for very sheltered, (mostly) very privileged people.

A week after my conversation with my therapist, having given the neurodivergence thesis some thought, I was newly open to the possibility that I really just wanted an ADHD diagnosis without needing to call it neurodivergence – contrary to what she initially suggested. If it was just ADHD, I could treat it like an illness – like my depression – and move on. None of the identity-framing exercises of calling myself neurodivergent to anyone who could hear me. Meds – taken privately, quietly – felt like they would solve a lot of my problems. And so I became a willing collaborator in the medical machinery, putting myself through invasive questioning, testifying to my every feeling, personality quirk, and characteristic with unsettling clinical coldness. My tendency to procrastinate the smallest of chores was indeed “executive dysfunction.” My inability to reply to texts for months was some kind of “avoidance” (I don’t remember which.) I resentfully made a mental note of all the terms I'd heard parroted back at me in real, normal life, and I submitted to the dissection of my human fallibility for that piece of paper. At the end of this was the possibility of a prescription – and the label that would allow me to complain about Halloween costumes or Diwali parties.

In her essay in The Cut, Mary H.K. Choi, describing her autism diagnosis at 43, asked “Did I just, in some grotesque display of privilege, pay hundreds of dollars for a doctor’s note that would excuse me from the social mores by which humans in a functioning society were expected to abide?”

Eventually, I got my piece of paper, I got my prescription, and I got my meds, which did indeed solve a lot of my problems. With this first taste of clear cognition and free will, the first thing I almost did was open up my Instagram and type in my stories: “I am pleased to announce that I have received my neurodivergence certificate. I look forward to an exciting new chapter of executive functioning.” But I didn’t do that, and I didn’t tell people at work either. Despite the diagnosis, the prescription medication, three professionals who can attest to the validity of my condition, it just didn’t feel fair. It felt like I bought the thing that allowed me to one-up anyone else who also wanted a break from the grind, from burdensome obligations, from life itself – neurodivergent or not.

As Choi put it: “I refused to be an apex asshole of weaponized therapyspeak, a Coastal Elite victim of the self-care-industrial complex. And yet … And yet.”

Given that schedule-X stimulants helped me feel better, this was clearly pathological. If, as the neurodivergence movement suggests, this is worth mobilizing around, we might as well also be organizing ourselves as diabetics and hypertensionists. As lifestyle diseases wrought by post-industrial societies, they’re just as political as ADHD – no more, no less.

But even that isn’t a perfect analogy, so here’s my second gripe with the neurodivergence movement: how do you define what’s “typical”? Through my diagnosis process for instance, answering questions about my functionality at work, I wondered how they knew what a “typical” brain was like. It’s not bloodwork, like diabetes and hypertension. The question of “typicality” is one that the neurodivergence movement asks too – but paradoxically reinforces the notion of typicality by drawing a hard line between “us” and “them". As disability scholars like Katherine Runswick-Cole have argued, these distinctions are unhelpful in neoliberal times, when most people struggle to do a lot of things. In a professional context, the boundary implies that there is a templatized brain that can function well under capitalism and that there are those that can’t. This might empirically be true in some cases, but it isn’t a politically sound basis to advocate for change.

And yet, the neurodivergence movement advocates for change in the form of “accommodations.” Accommodations that affirm the capitalist model’s inevitability: like schedule management, boundary-setting, flexibility on timelines/deadlines, and wiggle room around the rules. This approach is assimilationist because it leaves the inherent class dynamic unchallenged: that timelines, deliverables, schedules and salaries aren’t optimized for a “typical” worker’s well-being, but for the capitalist’s profit, extracting the worker’s labour by maximizing their productivity (wage theft, as some call it). I get that the short-term goal is to survive first, organize later. But why are our demands so… tepid? At no discernable point has neurodivergence become an opportunity to recognize the emotional alienation of working long, monotonous, unpredictable hours to meet the boss’ bottom line – for everyone. At no point has the movement strongly emphasized unionizing, breaking corporate monopolies, advocating for worker cooperatives, or striking. We end up in a situation where neurodivergence is identifiable by the inability to function in a capitalist society – but the posited solution is to legitimize it as an identity and assimilate, rather than divest.

In other words, I now had the certification to walk into work everyday – in taxis driven by drivers working overtime, past security guards stationed to man the boundary to the building, to a space cleaned by an invisible domestic worker who left before everyone else arrived, seated by a window periodically cleaned by a contract labourer suspended six-storeys above-ground, eating meals delivered by a gig worker hurtling through deafening traffic – and have me be the one to ask for accommodations to protect my sensitivities.

Here’s where I see the neurodivergence movement as having transformed into a neoliberal psyop: a gigantic discursive distraction meant to turn us further inward, retreat into our own heads, making us develop obscure neologisms to protect our perceived individual frailties – many of which are really just things that are difficult for most people under capitalism, a crumbling economy, bad job security, rising costs of living, and a Big Tech-sponsored IV slow-drip of attention-killing juice by way of social media. Which is to say, of course work is hard for me.

It’s hard for everyone in one way or another – much harder for a vast majority of workers in our country, in fact. I’d wholeheartedly support everyone medicating their way through it (maybe then we'd actually have the energy to be political), without the need to justify themselves, without having to define or categorize ourselves differently, without their needing to seek accommodations under the presumption that others don’t need them. Because here’s my third contention with the movement: what about the undeclared neurodivergents?

Despite my aversion to the label, my spidey-sense clocked a lot of people as neurodivergent – people who had no vocabulary or even access to that claim, and were left out by all the linguistic gatekeeping in the movement. Such as a grandparent with a militant scheduling sense which, if disrupted, sent them into cataclysmic anger. Such as an aunt who cannot hold a conversation because she loses her train of thought every few minutes. A cousin back in my small town, who struggled to read and write at an advanced age. A neighbour, a young mother of two, with childlike mannerisms and speech. I’ve been lucky to have the privilege of language, discourse, money and privacy to get myself what I needed to get by – to accommodate myself, even. Not everyone is so fortunate, not even the people I share blood with, who were all forced to endure – and suffer – rigid systems and socialization norms that wouldn’t easily fit them. Me, with my fancy diagnosis and vocabulary, I felt like a cheat. As this piece by the pseudonymous writer June Thunderstorm noted, “Disability then turns into class power misrecognized. The rebranding of social and cultural capital via a class-encoded discourse of health.” The professional neurodivergent cohort, fluent in the terms and conditions for what qualifies as “ableist” or not, had nothing to do with the people I knew. Neurodivergence advocacy insists on a whole new dictionary to throw at neurotypical oppressors. The people who need the most empathy and support, who wouldn’t know that this dictionary exists, are forced to continue existing cooperatively in a society incompatible with their lives. Here’s how one neuroscientist characterised the movement: “A group of marginalised people are hyper-marginalising the very people they claim to be advocating for.”

And so, consumed with the bitter irony of my ability to assimilate when my own kin never could, I treated my newly “valid” claim to the neurodivergent identity like a bit. “Good news,” I told my therapist. “One more thing to add to my oppression resume.” It’s stacked now. Neurodivergent on top of being depressed, queer, and a woman? I’m putting it on my LinkedIn.

In the few months I’ve been on medication for ADHD, things have gotten better. I have had fewer and less severe depressive episodes. I work with focus and enthusiasm. I can actually bring an idea to life, instead of stewing in it until it rots. I’ve slowly started returning calls. I’m less forgetful and less likely to crash while I drive. My mind feels tidier. I’m skipping more therapy than usual because, like I told my therapist, I don’t know what to talk about now. A lot of it just sorted itself out. Have I become neurotypical, simply because I’ve now assimilated? Better not admit that – I’ll no longer have, as Thunderstorm put it, “the licence to stop working ‘when it hurts’ and to attribute shortcomings and mistakes to ‘health issues’ (as opposed to ‘personal failures’),” which, as they note, “has constituted class privilege for a very long time.”

In militantly insisting that they (we) simply be custom “accommodated” in a broken system, the neurodivergence movement is, paradoxically, guilty of considering the system faultless. Unlike the neurodivergence movement, I don’t believe in self-advocacy, but in collective resistance. That means living, sharing, and working with other people towards a common goal. Unlike my gender or caste, which are social, historical, and political, my ADHD is a part of me that needn’t become an axis of identity. Unlike gender or caste, ADHD is diagnosed by others, is alleviated through medication, and involves brain chemistry. It would be weird to claim an identity over something biologically determined. A slippery slope if there was one.

In short: ADHD is just ADHD. I'd like myself to get over it, and I wish we all did.