My view on neurodivergence is manifold: It can be severely disabling in our neurotypical world and comes with massive health risks, depending on your support network and needs. But it often also brings positive or quirky things.
Today I’m having a particular bad day and would like to help everyone who is in a not so great mood to focus on the good things for a moment. When life can seem harsh, we can decide to focus on the good things, just for a moment and deal with hardships later.
My personal superpower is building things. I have very strong spacial thinking and love to build things, be that computers, Minecraft stuff or machines. I get a lot of positive feedback for this and i consider this my greatest skill.
What is your superpower, your favorite skill, the thing that makes you unique or just different?
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My memory for general facts. My husband has ADHD that impacts his working memory, so he is constantly losing or forgetting things. Meanwhile my brain will remember where he put down his measuring tape three weeks ago and why he left it there. I also remember thing like song lyrics, history facts, fantasy/sci fi lore, and other stuff almost indefinitely. I do not have a perfect/eidetic memory, just a very good one, according to most people.
The downside of this is that it was cited as a main reason a psych, who agreed I met the criteria of being on the ASD spectrum, refused to give me an official diagnosis. He said that this meant I didn’t have a specific special interest, and therefore I couldn’t have autism. So now I have to find someone else who actually follows the criteria.
I can hold deeply complex logical structures in my working memory, which helps a lot with my job as a software engineer. In the design phase before any actual code has been written, I can “picture” even relatively obscure edge cases for a project based solely off the planned architecture. As a result, I’m able to avoid entire classes of issues that otherwise might crop up farther down the line.
More generally, I think this comes from my older talent of having an unusually useful imagination when it comes to playing out “what-if” scenarios in my head. Because of my natural accumulation of detailed information over time combined with (from what I gather is) an atypically logical imagination, I can sometimes “see” longer-term shifts in markets and politics well in advance.
This also contributes to some deeply depressing perspectives I hold.
One of my favorite skills is that I can memorize rare or rather unknown facts about songs or bands. Or that I can start singing a song within a second when someone gives me any word, the song including that word or centering around it.
My brain is hyperspatial – I literally sort all of my memories spatially. It means when I return to a location (or look at photos or just think of a location), I get a memory cascade. Useful when trying to recall some things, navigate, work with spatial tools, visualize higher order datasets, etc. When studying math (some at the grad school level), it means things like spatial transformations (like the Reimann sphere) are wholly intuitive.
It comes with the tradeoff that I have almost no temporal recall. I cannot remember the order in which events occurred – simple examples might be the order in which a conversation proceeded. I’ll remember all the details of the conversation, but it’s jumbled together. I feel like I’m one of the aliens in the movie Arrival, trying to have a conversation with someone linear. Conversely, this lack of temporal awareness drives some people around me nuts and I apologize all the time.
