This text was written by a winner of the 2024 call for feminist essays.
Neurodiversity has become a popular word in the last year for sure — in most cases, society uses this word to refer to any neuropsychiatric condition that changes a person’s perception of the world around them. Neurodivergent people perceive the usual life differently — more vividly, more horrifyingly, more intensely. In normal setting. And what about the war?
I was officially diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (or ADHD) along with borderline personality disorder this year, although I had been suspecting for a long time before that. Both disorders are incurable, have always been with me and always will be, but in the past I simply had no name for them. Both disorders are considered to be part of the “neurodiversity” group. I see the world differently from “neurotypical” people, who make up the majority of the global population. Scientific works and articles on adult neurodivergent people — even now, at the peak of scientific interest — will always be less common than other essays on psychology, and even rarer when it comes to topics related to war, special stress and the perception of neurodivergence.
There is no blame for the unawareness of Ukrainian society regarding the existence of such a dreaded word as “neurodivergent” — it was coined only recently, although we, people with such traits, have existed all along. Everything that is “different” seems wrong and scary, so it is ignored and shoved somewhere in the basement with dusty cans and old stereotypes. You have to accept that “atypical” people will never think, live and breathe like you — and it is neither bad nor good. It is just the way it is, always has been and always will be.
Sometimes, you just need to be aware and notice it, so that you do not judge them based on stereotypical thinking.
The school I had been attending until I graduated was bombed while I was teaching an online class. The school was located a two-minute walk from my house — my windows were smashed, the door was open at the entrance, and someone screamed. My student was more frightened than I was. He asked if everything was okay and if we had to continue the lesson. At that moment it was absolutely normal for me to say, “Yes, everything is fine, we can continue.” The illusion of controlling the situation, on the verge of constant derealization, would not have allowed me to feel the necessary emotions at that time, to go to a safe place, or at least ensure my own safety. At that moment, my brain considered it more necessary to preserve the safety of conditional emotional regulation. I physically needed to maintain the same pose, the same emotions in front of the camera and continue conducting the lesson, otherwise, I would have cracked.
My difficulty with concentration was not prepared for the fact that my active action would be stopped. I would have been just as unhappy with a neighbor walking into the frame as I was with the explosion outside the window. The missile strike next to me, which should have knocked me out of focus, only strengthened my desire to ignore it. How dare it interrupt my concentration, I struggled so hard to maintain? If I do not pay attention to the explosion, it does not exist. If I concentrate on the lesson, I will forget about the explosion — literally.
Of course, this was completely inappropriate behavior in the early months of the war. And this is the flaw in the way my brain works. For a neurodivergent person, their little rituals, including work, will be far more important than all the events around them — even deadly ones, as in this case. The habits that are ingrained in the brain, neural system, and blood of people like me would seem to be the only important ones because if we do these things, we exist. If we stop doing them, the nervous system will start a process that will be difficult to stop. We will start to feel everything excessively — the dust on the furniture, the bright street lights at night, our own skin stretching over our bones against our will. Can you imagine such a condition in a situation when explosions are heard every day in the streets of Kharkiv? A state where you have to control your breathing, so you do not forget about it because your body refuses to do it on its own — and you see something flying over you. Your own subconsciousness and consciousness are trying to cling to at least something conditionally valid that you are used to doing, but your neurons do not work the way they are supposed to. They grab onto the wrong connections, run with the wrong hormones, and give me “bad” signals. Instead of properly recognizing the danger, I perceive the explosion not as an explosion, but as an interruption of my focus. That is all. The only thing I wanted to do at that moment was not to hide, but to continue, because only gods know how hard it was for me to tune in! I ignore the explosion because, in my mind, it does not exist — and all the chemical processes in my brain happily support this idea, because derealization and depersonalization go hand in hand in both of my disorders.
A “typical” person would stop working and seek shelter because they understand the risk a missile explosion poses to their well-being and its danger. I, an “atypical” person, chose to continue working, ignoring the sounds and broken windows, because my brain automatically considers the disruption of the “ritual” and concentration required for the work process more dangerous to my nervous system and body than ballistics. I have no control over this. I feel this way automatically and unconsciously. And this is a disadvantage of my condition in a broader perspective.
Over time, I taught myself to go to a safe place in extremely dangerous situations and stop working, just like ordinary people have taught themselves to cope with the stress of explosions. The cause of the stress is exactly the same — the war — but the layers of emotional reactions and root causes are transmitted differently by our neurons. We can be the strongest people after years of therapy, but our reactions are not something that can be intentionally controlled.
It is the body, the brain, and the nervous system. They work the way the body needs to in order to survive.
Of course, this does not mean that I or other neurodivergent people will be completely helpless or irresponsible in the face of active hostilities. Contrary to the scenario above, my drifting sense of deconcentration has very often helped me and the others around me to keep our heads together. There is a myth that people with ADHD cannot concentrate at all, but it is a little different, because we focus on everything at once. It sounds like hell, and sometimes it is, but it helps greatly when logical thinking is a priority.
I met February 24th, 2022, on a train from Mariupol to Kharkiv. Woken up in a cold train by my mother’s call at five in the morning, I heard, “Kharkiv is under rockets”. Mariupol is under rockets. All of us are.
The information about the full-scale invasion did not hit me as a panic, but rather as a quick realization of the inevitable. Thanks to my “built-in” ability to analyze several things at once, I understood my situation in three minutes: I could not call a taxi; I had to get my documents and my cats from the 16th floor in the city outskirts; the people I had been staying with before I left Mariupol had their phones turned off. I got home and packed everything without the slightest panic. I was not scared or nervous — my brain processed the information faster than others, so I was at the stage of accepting everything at a glance — and this is definitely a benefit of how my brain works.
I have never been “nervous” not because I do not care, but because my neurons work at a different speed and transmit different impulses to my head. I solve problems quickly after explosions and analyze the situation reasonably, not because I have any experience — the war was also a first for me at the age of 22 — but because I cannot do it otherwise. It is similar to not being able to stop sneezing.
Often due to the nature of their thinking people with ADHD and other atypical disorders are accused of having no emotional reaction, or of having the wrong reaction. This accusation of a “lack” of compassion or “wrong emotions” is heard often.
The set of events that can happen to a “typical” person within a month can cause them to experience a range of different feelings and emotions — and the same set of events for a neurodivergent person can completely change their character, make them verbally incapable, or completely adjust their “rituals” to an aggressive day-to-day routine. Imagine the brightness being turned up to full intensity and the music on the speakers playing right inside your head — this is the perception I live with. Imagine that the music is interrupted by an explosion — and you can feel it in your bones. And you hear it while something else is coming, it seems, right through your nervous system. This is a feeling that all neurodiverse people live with, including in Ukraine. The symptom of my disorder is to feel “too much”. Now that the war is becoming part of everyday life, you need to understand and accept the new habits of your friends who have been diagnosed or suspected of having a spectrum related disorder; they were at their “brighter colors” before the war already. In the new reality, we just do not want to go blind.
The more things progress, the more I realize how important it is to be sympathetic to people who cannot say a sentence in its entirety, to people who need to hold a specific fidget device or tune in to start a dialog several times. To stay safe, you need to be “grounded” — to feel connected to reality. And it is better for people to have this reality in a toy in their hands, despite judgmental comments like, “you are not a child anymore, why are you playing with a toy?” than to be insecure and seek grounding in the ignorance of danger, as I used to do. To see the world around you through this heightened sensitivity and volume — especially in a war zone — you need to feel free in your rituals and movements. It may not bother you much if a person sways from side to side while speaking, but for a person it will be as important as breathing.
My friend, who moved from Kharkiv, closes the curtains at the same time every evening and turns off the lights everywhere, even when she needs them. She is on the autism spectrum of the third group. She can work, speak and pretend to be typical, but the ritualism for the sake of calming down has remained throughout her life.
She used to feel calmer when she brewed tea with sugar at a specific time after work. Now she has a ritual of turning off the lights and locking the rooms one by one, because she has a habit of “light camouflage” from the first year of the war spent in Kharkiv. She understands that she is safe and she is not afraid, but she will be if she stops doing this. A pattern of behavior — even an illogical one — that is recorded by a neurodivergent brain as a way of regulation and safety, can appear under pressure, and seem confusing to absolutely everyone except the affected person.
Perhaps she will spend the rest of her life turning off all the lights in closed rooms after 5:30 pm. Perhaps my friends from Mariupol will hear whistling in their ears for the rest of their lives. Perhaps; but while we are here and now — no matter how many diagnosed patterns a person has and how specific they are — the only thing we can do is be attentive and empathetic to each other.
Compassion and acceptance are one of the few aspects that distinguish us from reptiles with less or no abstract and critical thinking at all, and therefore, we are humans. If we want to remain such individuals, we have to be attentive not only to people who walk like us, but also to people who fly, swim, do not move, and roll. In times of war, there may not be time for “I understand why you behave this way,” but there should definitely be time for “I accept that you do this,” because mutual understanding must be built within the walls of the country to bind it together again and again, when outside forces try to tear apart this emotional unity, chew it up and spit it out.
The fact that we are different should be an indication of the diversity of the nation as a community, not a reason for internal judgment out of ignorance.
If we do not care about and for each other, no one will. And if there are people within the population who have a particular structure of thinking, seeing and feeling, the least we can do is try to accept and recognize it. It is impossible to understand how birds fly and what they feel, but for some reason we are not surprised when a pigeon flies into the sky. This is a fact that we learned at school. And this essay is about facts of people around you that humankind learns in the process.
The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the position of the members of the organisation.