Season 2 of Autistic Identity With NeuroHub opens with an idea that Helen Edgar and I have been growing together for a while: existential diversity.
Most autistic people spend their lives on the receiving end of one question; what is wrong with this person? It puts the problem inside a body-mind and produces a diagnosis, a correction, a plan to modify someone. Schools, CAMHS, assessment services, wards and benefits assessors are almost all built to ask it, usually without realising they are asking anything at all.
The question that almost never gets asked is the second one; what is wrong with the world around them? To ask it properly, we need a different picture of what a person is. If a person is a sealed box (a skin with a brain inside it), the problem can only ever be inside the box. Existential diversity is our attempt to draw a picture in which the person was never a sealed box in the first place.
Existential diversity is the diversity of how lives connect with and impact the reality and the world around them, unconfined by the physical boundaries of the body-mind or by the limits of a mortal existence.
In this episode
Why the second question is so seldom asked, and how it builds on the ecosystemic model of distress developed with Tanya Adkin and Helen; distress as information about an environment, not a symptom of a person
The four ways we reach past our skin; materially, functionally, causally and semiotically
Why your existence begins before you arrive and carries on long after you have gone, and why that is a source of real hope
Four things existential diversity does for autistic people; it moves identity out of the diagnostic box, explains why hostile environments wound us so deeply, widens the welcome to madness and psychosis, and makes joy visible
Community as an ecology rather than a container; belonging isn’t granted, it’s built
A thread to take away
Pick one thing outside your body that is part of how you think, feel safe or know who you are; an object, a place, a person, a phrase someone once wrote. Notice it. That is a part of you.
And if you are a practitioner, here is the smallest useful version of all this: when an autistic person makes a connection you don’t understand, ask what route they took to get there. Treat the route as meaningful rather than recording it as missing.
You are not contained. You are multiple, and you are connected.
Pre-order After Normal
After Normal: Autistic Essays on a Broken Society and the Ecosystems We Grow Instead is the fifth anniversary edition of The New Normal, revised and expanded with eight new chapters. It brings together autism and neurodivergence, philosophy, neurodiversity studies, mad studies and ecological thinking, and many of the threads in this episode run right through it. Publishing 7 April 2027 in paperback and ebook.
Find out more
The Wider Existence; where Helen and I write in more depth on existential diversity, symphrenia and the connected body-mind, with a premium podcast for paid subscribers
NeuroHub Connect; our online community and part of the ecology described in this episode, with regular connect sessions, support groups and more. Come and join us
NeuroHub Horizons; our Horizons Project, run in partnership with Autistic Realms
Re-Storying Autism; the framework and book Helen and I co-wrote for Autistic people, carers and supporting practitioners
NeuroHub Zine; a free-to-access library of neurodivergent knowledge and experience, open to community submissions
Neurodivergent News; NeuroHub’s own news publication
NeuroHub Community; the home of our training, consultancy and community work
Stay weird, and I’ll see you next time.
David Gray-Hammond
