The pendulum is swinging back, but we are still here

There is a strange feeling when you spend years watching the world slowly open a door, only to then hear the hinges creak as people start pushing it shut again.

That is how neurodivergent acceptance feels to me at the moment. Not gone. Not destroyed. Not hopeless. But unsteady. Like a pendulum that had finally started moving towards awareness, disclosure, support and integration, only for fear, politics and public noise to pull it back the other way.

I see it in the messages I receive. People reaching out because they feel lost. People who disclosed when the language was warmer and the networks were stronger, now wondering whether they misread the room. People who finally started to understand themselves, only to open a news site and find another article about overdiagnosis, another documentary framing neurodivergence as a social contagion, another opinion piece dragging old stereotypes out of the cupboard and pretending they are fresh insight.

Apparently, we are all either overdiagnosed, attention-seeking, system-abusing, socially trendy or part of some modern epidemic. Which is fascinating, really, given how many of us spent decades trying very hard not to be noticed at all.

I am not naïve about this. There are bandwagon posts. There is lazy content. There are people who turn complex lived experience into something shallow because social media rewards certainty, outrage and performance. That exists. Of course it does. The internet has a remarkable ability to take anything meaningful and cover it in glitter, hashtags and bad advice.

But that is not the whole story.

There are also trained voices, experienced practitioners, strong advocates, exhausted parents, thoughtful leaders, late-diagnosed adults, young people finally finding language, and neurodivergent professionals who are fighting very hard against a return to “seen and not heard”. Against “know your place”. Against the quiet expectation that we should be grateful for tolerance as long as we remain useful, polite and not too inconvenient.

Then came the DEI shift. It started loudly in one place and spread quietly through fear into others. Suddenly, after years of trying to find the right balance between disclosure and support, some networks became less politically comfortable. Some leaders, who had been happy to drive the vehicle forward when the road looked safe, began quietly putting it in reverse.

Not always openly. That would at least be honest. More often it happens through silence, funding drying up, language softening, meetings disappearing, visible champions becoming nervous and the people who relied on those spaces feeling the ground move beneath them.

I know what silence feels like.

My own journey was mired in it. For thirty-six years I existed, achieved and often excelled for reasons that never fully made sense to me. From the outside, I was the “weirdo” who still managed to do well. The one who did not really go out. The one who could be socially odd, intense, direct, obsessive and still somehow get through promotion boards in a world where connection, familiarity and who you were seen with could matter more than people liked to admit.

When I finally spoke about my diagnosis, I did not do it with the confidence people may assume now. I did it in an environment where I genuinely believed it might stain my career. I expected to be removed from firearms. I had already heard enough views about “people like that” to know the risk was not imaginary. One comment that stayed with me was about putting guns in the hands of the wrong people. Charming, obviously. Very inclusive. Might need some work before putting it on a values poster.

The only reason that first disclosure did not become the disaster I expected was because I had a rare boss at the time who saw the person and the evidence before the label.

But that protection did not last forever.

Over time, my disclosure was weaponised by a small number of people. Not by everyone. I will keep saying that because it matters. I worked with excellent people and I will not let the worst examples own the whole story. But it happened enough for me to understand that the box I had kept myself in for years no longer fitted, and once I had outgrown it, I could not climb back inside and pretend it was comfort.

That is the difficulty with self-acceptance. It sounds gentle until it starts costing you things.

I wrote NeuroEdge when the world felt more forward-facing. There was energy around understanding, nurturing and supporting neurodivergent minds. There was a growing recognition that different wiring could bring value, not as a slogan, not as magic, but as something real when the right conditions existed around it.

Then the wind changed.

So NeuroEdge became quieter than I expected. Not dead. Not irrelevant. Just sitting there, almost like a companion waiting for the right person at the right time. And perhaps that is not a failure. Perhaps that is exactly what some work is meant to do. Not shout over the noise, but remain steady for the people who need it when the world around them starts doubting them again.

Because despite the noise, diversity of thought still matters. Different wiring still matters. People who do not fit generic moulds still bring immense value in the right environments. The problem is not that neurodivergent people have suddenly stopped being valuable. The problem is that public opinion has a habit of enjoying simple stories more than complicated truth.

I have been told directly that I am a scrounger who has clearly never had a real job. Another personal favourite accused me of being a benefits cheat and “thick as f**k”. Clearly, the public CV of more than twenty years in policing, the fiction catalogue, the talks, the production company and the general evidence of having done a few things did not quite fit the stereotype. But stereotypes are lazy. That is their entire operating model.

The message was deleted, obviously. I had no need to keep it as a souvenir. But it also reminded me why this work still matters.

This is not about demanding that everyone agrees with every diagnosis, every advocate, every post or every initiative. Challenge is healthy. Scrutiny matters. Substance over lip service matters. I have no interest in a world where neurodivergence becomes immune from question or wrapped in such fragile language that nobody can speak honestly.

But honest scrutiny is not the same as sensationalised dismissal. It is not the same as dragging people backwards because acceptance became politically inconvenient. It is not the same as telling people who have spent decades hiding that their emergence is proof of a trend rather than evidence that silence is finally breaking.

The supposed spike in diagnosis is not simply a problem to be mocked. It is also a sign that people are becoming self-aware, that language is reaching those who never had it, that children are being noticed earlier, and that adults who spent years surviving through masks are finally looking back and asking better questions.

That does not frighten me.

What frightens me is the eagerness to push those people back into hiding.

So this is the statement of intent, and I know I am not alone in it. There are people around the world doing this work with more training, more experience, more patience and probably far fewer sarcastic comments than me. Some of them outshine me ten-fold, and good. We need them.

But I am here too. We are here to stay.

Not as a trend. Not as a content niche. Not as a fashionable inconvenience waiting to be tidied away when the political weather changes. We are colleagues, leaders, parents, officers, creatives, professionals, thinkers, pattern-spotters, question-askers and problem-solvers. We are also tired, overloaded, blunt, awkward, brilliant, messy, funny, exhausted and still very much here.

The answer is not to retreat. It is not to scream into the void either, tempting though that can be on a bad day with a strong coffee and an open comment section.

The answer is substance. Know your story. Understand your needs. Choose disclosure carefully and on your terms. Build evidence around what helps you work, lead, create and recover. Challenge appropriately when the room drifts back towards lazy thinking. Support the people doing the work, because goodwill alone is not a strategy. And if you lead others, do not wait for another awareness week before asking whether your environment actually allows different minds to thrive.

The pendulum may be swinging.

Let it.

Pendulums move.

So do we.