Many discussions about friendships and belonging assume that everyone starts inside the room. The challenge, we are told, is building friendships, maintaining relationships, and staying connected.
But for many neurominorities, the experience begins earlier. The challenge, almost unbeknown to us, is getting through the door in the first place. This is not seen or recognised conciously by the neuromajority. They have generally not personally experienced the feeling of being outside of all social circles around them.
Neurominority people from around the world that we speak to at ION, describe a lifetime of exclusion that they did not understand.
Not necessarily dramatic rejection or obvious bullying but something just happening around us all the time.
A group forms, conversations happens, invitations never arrive and friendship circles develop around us without us noticing till later. Everyone else seems to understand something that was never explained and that we miss completely.
The painful part is often not the exclusion itself but the mystery of it all. Human beings are remarkably resilient when they understand why something happened. What is much harder is trying to make sense of experiences that never came with an explanation.
Over time, many of us begin to assume the explanation must be ourselves and we internalise that. But the reality is often more complicated. The issue is not social skills, it is more about navigating certain social rules that were never clearly stated.
People communicate in different styles and are simply different from each other in ways that humans do not immediately understand.
Belonging is often described as being invited into the room but perhaps belonging begins when we stop expecting everyone to enter through the same door in the same way.
Some people fear exclusion.
Others don’t realise they have been excluded before they even entered the room.
Those are very different experiences.
And that difference may explain why so many neurominorities grow up carrying a sense of confusion rather than a clear memory of rejection. The saying “I feel like an alien” is one we hear again and again.
Not:
“They told me I couldn’t come.”
But:
“One day I realised I had never really been invited.”
That is a subtle distinction, but it is one that many people will recognise immediately.