I’m about to start working as a summer substitute in a ten-person supported living home where one staff member covers each shift, mornings or evenings. That means doing everything from medication rounds to witnessing genuine joy over a Tuesday afternoon snack. I’m not an expert yet. But I’ve spent enough time in this world during my studies to have stopped seeing it from the outside.
What Even Is “Normal”?
Nobody is neurotypical. The term was coined in the late 1990s within autistic online communities to describe everyone else, and even its creators admit it’s a dubious construct. There is no standard-issue human brain. There’s just a bell curve, and most of us are quietly sliding around on it without ever filing a formal complaint.
And yet, here we are, sorting people into boxes labeled functional and not quite, capable and needs support, normal and other. It turns out the boxes say more about the people doing the sorting than the people being sorted.
The Spectrum Is Wider Than You Think
Intellectual disability. Autism. ADHD. Dyslexia. Down syndrome. These words get thrown around as if they name a single, tidy thing. They don’t. Each is a vast landscape of individual variation. Autism alone ranges from someone who struggles to make eye contact at parties (relatable, frankly) to someone who needs full daily support but can identify any piece of music from a three-second clip. Lumping them together under one label is a bit like calling both a drizzle and a hurricane “weather.”
Asperger’s syndrome, which for decades had its own diagnostic passport, was quietly absorbed into the broader autism spectrum in 2013. Partly because the boundary was always somewhat imaginary, drawn more by cultural discomfort than neurological reality.
The umbrella of neurodiversity now covers an almost comedic range: autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, OCD, Tourette’s, and more. Which raises the question at what point does “divergent” just mean human?
On the Curious Concept of Normal
The uncomfortable truth about normality is that it has always been statistical, not moral. To be neurotypical is simply to be closer to the average, and averages, as any statistician will remind you, are not aspirational targets. They are mathematical summaries of a messy distribution.
Society, however, treats the average as the ideal. Everything is built for it: classrooms, offices, small talk, job interviews. The person who processes the world differently isn’t failing to meet a natural standard. They’re failing to meet an architectural one. Remove the stairs and the wheelchair user isn’t disabled anymore. Change the exam format and the dyslexic student aces it.
This is what the social model of disability argues, and it’s not particularly radical once you sit with it.
What They Have That We’ve Mostly Lost
Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into the inspirational Instagram posts, which is precisely why it’s worth saying.
Many people with intellectual disabilities approach creativity without the armour of self-consciousness that most adults haul around like emotional luggage. They paint, draw, and make things without first asking whether they’re good enough. Picasso spent his entire career trying to paint like a child again. Some of his neighbours in the neurological distribution got there without trying.
They’re also, on the whole, less racist. Less tribal. Less likely to greet difference with suspicion or hostility. Whether this is “naivety” or simply an absence of the learned prejudice that everyone else calls common sense is a question worth sitting with.
Meanwhile, the so-called normal population, the same one that builds group homes and then votes to stop them from opening in their own neighbourhood, congratulates itself on its rationality.
The Prejudice That Doesn’t Count
Ableism, the assumption that disabled people are inferior, broken, or need fixing, is so embedded in how we think that most people don’t notice they’re doing it. It lives in the language (wheelchair-bound), in architecture (stairs everywhere, ramps as afterthoughts), in medicine, and in the housing committees of otherwise progressive-seeming suburbs.
The NIMBY response to group homes has been documented across multiple countries. Citizens protest. Property values are invoked. Safety concerns are raised about people who, statistically, are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it.
One might call this ironic. One might call it something stronger.
A Closing Thought
The people we call disabled navigate a world that was not built for them, often with more grace than those of us who built it. Some of them have IQs that charts would consider poor and skills that no chart measures at all.
Maybe the question isn’t what’s wrong with them. Maybe the question is what exactly we think we’re measuring, and why we’re so confident it matters.
Sources:
- Intellectual Disability – Wikipedia
- What Is Intellectual Disability? – American Psychiatric Association
- Neurodiversity – Wikipedia
- What is Neurodiversity? – Harvard Health
- Neurodivergent: What It Is – Cleveland Clinic
- What Is Neurodiversity? – Child Mind Institute
- Autism and Neurodiversity – National Autistic Society
- Ableism 101 – Access Living
- What Is Ableism? – YWCA
- Neurodiversity Approaches – PMC / Karger
