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.
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.