NEURODIVBRIDGE
Plain Text: Neurodivbridge: *butterfly icon with rainbow spectrum coloured figure of eight loop around each
pair
of wings*
Valuing Neurodivergency around Cambridge
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Caption:
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Caption: Our fourth idea is to give out
Post 5 New Caption: Our fourth idea is to give out Neurodivergeny badges.
And also Neurodivergency Supportiveness plushies,
each of which comes wearing a Neurodivergency Supportiveness badge.
(Supportiveness badges being for supporters of a cause also.
Noting that for some causes, very few if any people wear "I am" or "Pride" badges.
So most to all badge visibility can then only be in forms like Supportiveness badges or Ally badges.)
Caption:
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Plaintext description: The Neurodivergency butterfly now has a Social Anxiety star on the front-left wing,
being labelled Saxbridge above and Supporting Social Anxiety around Cambridge below.
Post 7: plain text version.
This is the Social Anxiety Star: perhaps the world's first Social Anxiety symbol, dating back to 2016.
* This symbol is a yellow 4-pointed star with horizontal and vertical points,
on a white diamond on a truncated sky-blue diamond, completed to a square with medium-blue corners. *
Plaintext version of Post 8: * the aforementioned Social Anxiety Star now features as
a bottom left to top right diagonal on silver centre of the Butterfly's top-left wing. *
Caption: The idea then is that in Social Anxiety related posts, our Butterfly Mascot sports a Social Anxiety Star on
one wing.
Such posts may sometimes be labelled SAxbridge as well,
short for Social Anxiety bridge.
This pattern of placing flags or symbols in the wing interiors is intended for serial use.
It is another reason why the wing interiors in our first butterfly
are a uniform silver: a nice background for more stuff :)
Regarding the definition of neurodivergency, I take a relatively lax view (compared to some I have seen) as to who
is neurodivergent and who is not.
I consider neurodivergency to be a term referring to those whose neurotype (brain, way of thinking etc) is in some
way distinct from what society considers to be the norm.
Personally, as a neurodivergent person, this vague definition applies itself in a very clear manner to my
experience. I am not like everyone else - I do not think like the majority of people in our society, and I do not
connect with them in the way that they connect with one another.
(Note that this has nothing to do with me actually liking them - I have met at least one autistic person who I
clashed with due to our differing personalities, but I still connected to them in a way that I do not with even very
nice neurotypical people! Not to delve too far into it here, but I think that the distinction is quite difficult to
articulate because most people are used to feeling that connection; however it is very easy to feel.)
Obviously, there are also neurodivergent (or non-neurotypical) people who I do not have this connection with. I
don't consider neurodivergency to be a group of people with something in common as much as a group of people
connected by our lack of 'normalness', specifically as it relates to the way we think in some way. It's not for me
to say who feels disconnected from the way most people think, or who is sufficiently 'different' enough to be
neurodivergent. As long as we make sure to respect one another's differences (relative to both society and other
neurodivergent people), then there is no reason to exclude someone from neurodivergency simply because we - having
never experienced what they have - don't deem them 'different enough' to belong (in a kind of cruel irony that I
optimistically hope most neurodivergent people will stay away from).
(The whole argument reminds me somewhat of bits of the infighting in certain LGBTQ+ communities - pointlessly
damaging and deeply disappointing.)
Some people don't particularly like being referred to as non-neurotypical. Some people don't mind so much if it's
from pro-neurodivergent (or neurodivergent) people, but it invokes my teenage feelings of being 'other', rather than
more recent ideas of (some degree of) community and solidarity.
(I've never seen a truly standard definition of neurodivergency - there seem to be a great many out there, often
uninformed. I'm going to be controversial and argue that there is no true definition - although I suspect we are
using different definitions of true!)
[Custodians' comment: lets have a look for some of those definitions then!]
Some examples of Neurodivergency
2) ADHD
3) Synaesthesia
4) Bipolar
5) Schizophrenia
[This is a growing list; more will be added.]
Post 10: Our fifth idea is to make all our posts available in plain text as well, so as to be inclusive toward
people requiring screen readers.
This means that we will be re-issuing all posts so far in plain text copies as well, and that subsequent messages
shall be sent in box-and-plain text pairs