On Being Unruly
For being multiply-neurodivergent, I am unruly—probably by default.
I live in cracks and for cracks and by the sacred code of cracks.
At least, it feels this way.
In school, when the teacher left the room, it was me against all the boys who bullied me. They shot paper wads at me with rubber bands. I returned fire. Only I folded my paper wads tightly and shot them fast—letting them go at just the right split second to inflict maximum effect. The bullies said, Ouch! That hurts. How did you do that? Then, they stopped ganging up on me.
Cut to now.
Give me a scrap of paper or an empty page in my phone’s Notes application and an idle moment and I’ll write a poem. I’ll roll the language tightly and let the magic that’s always waiting have a chance to fly.
While I disliked hurting the bully boys, I love, love, love delighting readers of poems.
And there’s more.
The philosopher Žižek integrates into his philosophy a line from Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: I would prefer not to.
Different to a simple No, this is the affirmation of a negation.
As Žižek observes, saying No—while appearing on the face to be resisting—is still an embrace of the illusion of choice. Saying I would prefer not to, however, has the potential to open a new space in a given situation.
And so, back to neurodivergence and neurodivergent creativity. While non-neurodivergent folks more often need to work toward settling into I would prefer not to, neurodivergent people—for having different nervous systems and different ways of processing—are more readily able to open up new spaces, if for no other reason than the innately-disruptive reality of our differences.
We can never seem to do things the ‘right’ way. As if we are unruly by default.
From this default position, we can work to improve our unruliness. To make it glorious in ways that leave others smitten.
Which reminds me of at least one of these memes:
