The Word Was Never “Broken”
Why reframing neurodivergence isn’t a word game – it’s a shift in power
The word was there on a clipboard. Disorder. Right there in the name of the thing, printed on the intake form, next to a box somebody had already checked. A pen on a chain. A copy of Psychology Today from four years ago on the table beside me.
I read the cover twice; glanced through the interior a few times before turning my attention to my own thoughts. The message underneath all that clinical language was short, and it was nothing I hadn’t already been saying to myself for years.
Something is wrong with you. It needs fixing.
Maybe you have your own version of it, in an office or in your own head at 2 a.m., after the third missed deadline or the friendship that went quiet and never came back. The verdict lands the same. You are the problem. You are the thing to fix.
I won’t tell you the struggle isn’t real. The missed deadlines were real. The avoided emails, the shame, the flat exhaustion of running a brain to which the world keeps handing the wrong instructions – all real. I’m not here to turn your hard days into a gift.
But “broken” was never the right word.
It’s the grinding that happens when one kind of brain meets a world that was quietly built for a different one. That is a design problem. Not a character flaw.
And knowing that gives the knower a certain kind of power over it.
Where the fix points
There are two ways to describe the exact same neurodivergent life, and they are far from the same.
The first is the medical model, and it sees a list of symptoms to treat, manage, or shrink. In that story the friction lives inside you, so the repair does too. You are the broken thing. Try harder, mask better, buy the planner, get easier for the room to hold.
The second is the social model, and it sees a mismatch instead. A brain meets a room that was quietly built for somebody else. In that story the friction lives in the gap between the two. And once you can see the gap, you get to ask a different question. Not what is wrong with me, but what is incompatible within the environment.
When a wheelchair user can’t get into a building, we don’t send the wheelchair back for a quick-fix. We look at the stairs. Nobody stands in the lobby wondering what’s wrong with the person for needing a ramp.
Most of our mismatches are harder to see than a flight of stairs. So we went on believing that we were broken wheelchairs.
We weren’t.
The open-plan office that makes focus impossible is a design choice. “Just send a quick email,” said like it’s one step and not eleven, is a design choice. The calendar, the form, the rule nobody wrote down – all of it was built for a brain that isn’t yours, then handed to you like the trouble was your fault.
Naming that is not a word game. It’s the moment you consider where to put the ramps in the room. This is what we talk about here. It is called The Cognitive Ramp for a reason, after all.
I want to return to the idea of the instruction manuals from a moment ago. I have often been handed the wrong instructions to life. But when I received my AuDHD diagnosis, I felt like I’d been handed the web address to my own personal instruction manual. All I needed to do then was decode it.
This issue’s prompt: two ways to say the same thing
It’s one thing to understand the difference between the medical model and social model. It’s another to feel it. Here’s how to start doing that.
Take one thing you’ve long considered one of your broken wheelchairs. The task you always avoid. The way you lose an hour. The thing you’re “bad at.” Then paste this into Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever AI assistant you use:
I want to describe one thing I struggle with, two different ways. Here’s what actually happens: [describe it plainly – what you’re trying to do, and where it breaks down]. First, describe it in medical-model language, as a symptom I need to manage. Then describe it again in social-model language, as a mismatch between how my brain works and how this task or environment is set up. Keep both short. Then tell me: which version points at something I could actually change?
Read them side by side. One will tell you to fix yourself. The other will show you where the ramp goes.
Here’s my own example:
I want to describe one thing I struggle with, two different ways. Here’s what actually happens: I repeatedly make bad financial decisions, such as buying a computer case to fit a second GPU when my motherboard doesn’t support one (a fact I overlooked at first). First, describe it in medical-model language, as a symptom I need to manage. Then describe it again in social-model language, as a mismatch between how my brain works and how this task or environment is set up. Keep both short. Then tell me: which version points at something I could actually change?
And here is Claude’s response:
Medical-model version (symptom to manage):
You have a pattern of impulsive, poorly-checked spending — a deficit in impulse control and planning. The buying gets ahead of the verifying. It’s a symptom of how your attention and executive function work, something to catch and suppress before it costs you money. The fix lives inside you: try harder to slow down, resist the urge, remember to double-check.Social-model version (mismatch):
Buying hardware requires holding several dependencies in mind at once (does the motherboard support a second GPU? does the case fit? does the PSU?) and checking them in a specific order before committing. The purchase flow doesn’t enforce that order — nothing stops you at checkout to confirm compatibility. Your brain runs ahead to the goal; the task assumes you’ll manually gate it. The gap between those two is where the money leaks out.Which one you can actually change:
The social-model version. The medical version tells you to be a different person — more restrained, more vigilant — which is roughly the thing that isn’t reliably available to you, so it mostly generates guilt. The social-model version points at the environment, and environments are editable: build the compatibility check before the buy button instead of relying on memory. A pre-purchase checklist for anything over $X. PCPartPicker, which refuses to let incompatible parts into the same build. A 24-hour hold on hardware orders. A rule that you paste the spec into a compatibility checker before paying.None of those require you to have better impulse control. They move the checking out of your head and into a system, so the ordering happens whether or not you remember to do it. That’s the difference the two framings expose: one asks you to fix your brain, the other asks you to fix the checkout.
The word was never broken. Neither were you. The room just needs a door where somebody assumed a wall.
If something loosened a little, subscribe – and forward this to one person who’s spent too long assuming they were the problem.
– Brian