To mark Neurodiversity Celebration Week, the Minnesota Council on Disability is sharing two guest reflections by Council Chair Addyson Carpenter and Council member Abraham Tieman.
Their reflections have been lightly edited for clarity and style.
Celebrating Neurodivergent Strengths
A guest post by Council Chair Addyson Carpenter.
We at MCD are celebrating neurodiversity among our community this March 16-22 during Neurodiversity Celebration Week. This week is an opportunity to both recognize and celebrate the many different and amazing ways that the human mind works.
For me, being neurodivergent means experiencing the world in a way that is deeply observant, creative, and driven by curiosity and justice. Like many neurodivergent people, there were traits I once struggled to understand about myself, like the fact that I think differently, feel things intensely, and approach problems in ways that didn’t always fit the traditional expectations of the world we live in. But as I’ve grown, I’ve come to see and love that many of those same traits are truly strengths and make me the advocate, mom, and person I am today.
The way I process information, notice patterns, and connect ideas has helped me think creatively and advocate for meaningful change and justice for the causes I intensely care about. Neurodivergent minds often bring fresh perspectives, persistence, and innovation to the challenges we face in our communities and systems. What once felt like something I needed to mask or minimize has become something I value and have truly learned to embrace. It is now something that is a core part of what makes me me!
Neurodiversity Celebration Week is a reminder that different ways of thinking are not deficits. They are part of the rich diversity of human experience. When neurodivergent people are supported and empowered to be ourselves, no matter what that may look like, we bring unique perspectives, creative problem solving, and so much excitement and light to those around us.
This week, I celebrate the strengths, creativity, and resilience of neurodivergent individuals everywhere and the growing movement to build a world where every mind is valued and supported.
Discovering Myself
A guest post by Council member Abraham Tieman.
Living as an autistic person comes with its own distinct challenges. Because our ways of communicating and engaging with the world differ from the norm, neurotypical people often withdraw from us entirely. When autistic people struggle publicly with reciprocal communication and sensory overload, the response is frequently exclusion, outright bigotry, or plain indifference. The result is a lifetime of depression, anxiety, masking, and self-isolation, outcomes that are alarmingly common in the autistic community. Factor in race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and other disabilities, and these burdens compound dramatically.
My desire to fit in, to feel normal, to belong in a society obsessed with conformity, produced nothing but social friction and blocked paths. Part of me held onto my family’s warnings against seeking a diagnosis, while the residual conditioning of applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy filled in the rest. I believed that shrinking myself gave me a chance at belonging. I buried parts of who I was to meet society’s expectations. The cost was steep: living as a false version of myself left no room for genuine self-reflection, and that silence followed me for years.
It is possible to rack up significant milestones without a diagnosis or any real understanding of your own disability: passing multiple AP exams in a single semester without taking the classes, completing a six-year Army contract, and graduating from college with a 3.3 GPA. But behind each of those accomplishments was an internal war: a relentless effort to force integration by masking who I actually was. No matter how hard I pushed, the feeling of belonging never came. For more than 25 years, I was a stranger to myself and to everyone around me.
After reaching several professional goals and gaining greater financial independence, I began to slowly reckon with the identities I had long suppressed. A mix of forces, shifting political discourses, college coursework, personal curiosity, and access to Veterans Affairs (VA) health care, cracked something open. Piece by piece, I dismantled my cognitive dissonance, cleared the barriers that had defined me, and eventually arrived at something I hadn’t expected: genuine respect for myself as a full, complex, neurodivergent person.
Understanding the dissonance was only the beginning. The harder work is unlearning, reversing the damage of ABA therapy and the neoliberal myth that surviving without support is the same as thriving. It means confronting the reality that my family has caused harm and will not be part of my healing. It means showing up as myself, without masking, without apology. And ultimately, it means turning outward, helping others break free from the same rigid hierarchies that tried to erase us.