I’d be interested if other ND folk have also observed what looks like a higher than usual percentage of displaced people or people moving abroad or living in a multicultural background in their families?
It might have nothing to do with it, but I sometimes suspect that I chose to live abroad because other people’s expectations in social situations are more lenient, or because all culture is alien to me anyways? I also, just like my grandmother before me, proceeded to raise a child that isn’t really fully part of either culture of his parents - another overly self-aware alien.
But then it’s also such a common thing in so many people’s lives that I might be looking for connections where there are none.
Can only speak for my close environment; i once discovered a place where there were people of a kind that i had not known before, and they appealed to me. That place happened to be abroad, and almost all those people were also foreigners … then that place gave me the spiritual kick in the ass, and that’s why i kept returning in the beginning. Then it seems, i mainly went back there because nothing is really required to “function” and it’s kind of open space some way remote from the noise. Little did i know of neurodiversity when i started to enjoy solitude. Since the virus psychosis it seems ever more like a safe space, and actually i’m more stuck and alien there than anything. Flip side: nothing really functions, no supportive structures possible, and that is kind of everywhere, so feeling at home nowhere, at the moment. … Yes, i believe that many of the people who regularly go there do it because they can remain mostly unbothered by the local citizen’s cultural expectations (i.e. most have none toward a bunch of “dirty hippies”). Not all is ND but i do meet some.
Okay, the dirty hippy subset of ‘people living abroad’ is also sort of mine. A community back in my home country was the first place where I was just left alone and permitted to be as I was without need to function in a specific way. The term ‘neurodivergency’ probably didn’t even exist then, I just knew I was weird and didn’t fit in with most people, and that I was often so depressed that I wanted to give up on life - but once I was out of the city all the noise and pressure and mad vibes could drop off and I had time to settle into being myself. We were all somewhere neurodivergent and/or traumatised and had no idea what we were trying to do, but could create an imperfect but life-saving safe space for ourselves for a while.
Being among non-humans (animals, plants, fungi, …?) has always been a requirement for my well-being that I’ve only recently been able to put in words. And in this context, ‘non-functioning’ often means that a non-human gets their way instead of us. In city there is this permanent attempt to root out everything non-human not directly under our control. Tough to witness. Around my place beings are mostly just permitted to exist next to each other in their way. This interspecies parallel existence is a diverse ecosystem and a different sort of multiculture that defies monoculture and profits by participants all being different, and alien to each other.