What It’s Like Living in a Neurodiverse Family
By Nicholas Ivins, with his brothers Jake and Sean
Living in a Neurodiverse Family
Hello, my name is Nicholas and I live in a family of five neurodiverse people. This is weird because not everyone is like us (as you could guess from the word ‘neurodiverse’). Now for those of you who don’t know what neurodiverse means, it refers to any condition that makes your brain operate in a different way than a typical brain would. As for me, I have ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety and it has affected my life in many ways: some positive, some negative, but all different.
For those of you who aren’t aware of what each of those words I said above mean I will explain. ADHD is really complicated, and I don’t have all day to talk about everything but to sum up: ADHD is a chemical imbalance in the brain that makes it more difficult to focus on specific things. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder leading to behavioral differences compared to “neurotypical” people. Anxiety is also caused by a chemical imbalance, causing you to be more anxious about things than a “normal” person would be. These are all the things affecting me, but my family has other neurodiversities, including dyslexia (which makes your mind reverse or misplace words or letters in reading or writing), dyscalculia (the same thing as dyslexia but with numbers instead), depression (which is a chemical imbalance in the brain that causes less dopamine and other “happy chemicals” to be released and causes your mood to be low all the time), and bipolar (which causes you to have incredibly large mood swings).
Strengths of Neurodiversity
These disorders probably sound pretty annoying to all of you who don’t have neurodiversities and in some cases they are, but sometimes they serve very useful applications. For instance, ADHD allows you to focus on a task a lot better than others through hyperfocusing, and it’s quite helpful at getting a specific task done or being really good at something (because you focus on it a lot). However, sometimes you can’t focus on stuff, and that is where body doubling comes in. Body doubling is a phenomenon that occurs in a lot of different neurological disorders, but in particular ADHD, where if you are working in a group of people you do whatever you are doing better (usually) and with more focus. This is especially helpful in people with ADHD who have problems focusing on a task, and especially in one that they don’t want to do (like cleaning for example). There are also more benefits of having neurodivergencies that I don’t have the time to list here, and you could probably find in other articles on this website or from other organizations that support neurodiversity.
Our neurodiversities help us in some ways like this but that’s true of everyone. There are specific things that being in a family of people with neurodivergencies helps with. For example, we all understand each other better. We all act atypical compared to most others but we know that about ourselves, so if something happens like one of us forgets to do something, like a chore or leaves something somewhere, we understand that it is probably not their fault specifically, rather it’s our neurodivergences that caused the issue. We also all have similar interests which aids the previously mentioned understanding and also allows us to have more fun together as a group. (Another benefit is that they also help me with things that I’m having trouble with, like writing this article.)
This also helps us understand other people outside our family who are atypical in any way. We have a lot of experience dealing with others that are atypical so we know how to deal with different people and also have a considerably higher amount of patience for others. For those who don’t have a group of people that understand them (especially in their own family) finding another “family” is helpful and that is what the internet can be used for. It allows people who don’t have very accepting families to interact with like-minded people online and be in a community similar to them so they feel accepted.
In Conclusion
Overall, living in a family, being adopted into a family, finding yourself in a family, or what-have-you that includes neurodiverse members and is accepting of who you are as a person, is incredibly important to allowing yourself to have the best chance at life possible. We hope that the person reading this, whoever you are, got something out of this, whether it be information, help, happiness, acceptance, or other knowledge, hope that you have a good day, and we hope if you do not currently have a neurodiverse family, you search out a community online. Finding out you are not alone in the world can make living with the issues that come with being atypical much, much easier.
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My name is Nicholas Ivins and I wrote this article with my twin brother Sean and my younger brother Jake. We are neurodivergent teens with Autism, ADHD, and anxiety. We play “too much” video games, love hanging out, and playing board games. And we are bad at writing bios but we had to write anyway.
Nicholas Ivins describes himself as: “A pretty cool person who likes video games and is neurodivergent. Definitely has social anxiety. Plays a lot of board games and watches Dragon Ball Z occasionally. Sometimes an artist, sometimes a challenge gamer, sometimes playing in tournaments, all the time tired.”
