The Art of Making People Uncomfortable
I’ve been making people uncomfortable my whole life.
And for a long time, I thought that meant something was wrong with me.
I now know better.
It’s not me.
It’s the world that’s deeply conditioned to reject what it doesn’t understand.
I was diagnosed with AuDHD—Autism and ADHD—as an adult.
The ADHD part? No shock there. I’ve long joked that I must’ve been patient zero.
All three of my children have ADHD. It runs loud and proud through our house like a bassline.
But the Autism diagnosis? That one caught me off guard.
Until it didn’t.
Because once I sat with it, everything began to make sense.
My directness. My discomfort in small talk.
The fact that people often think I’m mad when I’m just… there.
Existing.
Breathing.
I’ve been called intense, intimidating, too much, unapproachable.
Not in the rooms where people really know me, but in the ones where I didn’t mask well enough to pass.
And now I understand:
My neurodivergence didn’t make me broken. It made me legible to myself for the first time.
Our Communication Makes You Uncomfortable Because It’s Honest
Being neurodivergent in this cultural moment—where everyone is allegedly “raising awareness” but few are actually willing to accommodate difference—is a trip.
We’re praised for “thinking differently” until we do it out loud.
We’re celebrated for “telling it like it is” until it doesn’t sound nice.
Our truth-telling, our logic, our blunt compassion gets mislabeled as rudeness or aggression—when really, it’s just clarity without fluff.
Neurotypical communication thrives on subtext and tone.
Ours thrives on precision and purpose.
It’s not better or worse—it’s just different. But in a world obsessed with conformity, “different” feels threatening.
People say they want inclusion, but what they really want is assimilation.
What they really want is for us to make them comfortable.
But the truth is: nothing transformative happens in comfort.
Comfort preserves the status quo.
Discomfort? That’s the first sign that something is shifting.
Unmasking Isn’t Just a Buzzword—It’s a Rebellion
I spent a lifetime masking, trying to fit into rooms that were not built for me.
Rooms that asked me to dilute my truth, perform friendliness, cushion every sentence with a smile.
I don’t do that anymore.
Unmasking, for me, isn’t just personal.
It’s political.
It’s ancestral.
It’s a refusal to contort myself to appease systems that never saw my full humanity to begin with.
Because my voice—our voices—are not inconvenient.
They are necessary.
We Need All Kinds of Minds at the Table
The world is burning, and you want to silence the ones holding the fire extinguisher because they don’t smile while doing it?
Make it make sense.
Neurodivergent people offer more than “awareness month” representation.
We offer solutions. Innovation. Pattern disruption. Fierce truth-telling.
We see what others miss because we have to.
And our way of being might just be the difference between collapse and repair.
So yes—I will continue to make you uncomfortable.
And maybe, if you let yourself sit in that discomfort long enough,
you’ll come out the other side
not offended,
but expanded.
Unapologetically,
Jennifer