The ADHD urge to write at length in the hopes of being understood exactly by anyone who happens to see what we say or write. This is a highly relatable article.

I understand very clearly that the way I use language doesn’t make sense out of context to the majority of others because my mind works differently from the majority of others. This is not to indicate superiority or inferiority (we need to get away from this assumption as a species in my opinion), but to indicate that most people do not have an adhd/asd type mind. My very sense-making approach is fundamentally different in some ways to most people, but this is not to indicate that most people on or off the spectrum use the same sense-making approach. Although I more easily understand the logic used by my spectrum on average, I can definitively say that there are plently of neurotypical people who I can relate to more easily than some neurodivergent people. I have spoken to autistic and adhd Trumpists, for example.

I have come to expect my own short-hand to make sense only to myself and those who are familar to me. To all others, I understand that I must use very specific and clear language to impart what I mean by what I say. At the same time I understand that no matter how I use language, the possibility to be misunderstood exists based on the interpretation of whomever happens to see what I write. Communication is encoding and decoding. We don’t all mean the same things by the words we use. It doesn’t shock me when people don’t understand me at first because I expect that. My line is whether the person I’m speaking to has any interest in understanding or clarity as many do not. I am able to entertain a good faith conversation with anyone. However, when it becomes clear that the person I’m speaking to is arguing in bad faith or is using me as a sounding board to reflect their own baseless bullshit, that’s what upsets me.

The reason I’m not succinct is that I understand I can’t be in many cases because of the intellectual diversity of humans by nature and nurture.

Thats a lot of words.

(…let the untold subjective implications of anyone who reads this unfurl 🦹)

[phatic to attempt to convey that I appreciate and think I understand what the article is trying to say] Thanks for taking the time and effort to lay it all out in writing!

I particularly appreciated reading part/chapter 4; many of your statements resonate with my own lived/subjective experience.

[with the phatic niceties covered, here is the meat of my comment:]

There is a phrase that I am uncertain how exactly to interpret:

Even more so because English speakers appear to have a second brain to scrutinize language for microscopic signs of alignment.

Is this more of a throwaway joke, or a serious expression of something you notice? I wonder, notably, about how particular this is to English speakers (and I realize as I write this that I may just be re-enacting the behavior you deplore in your ice cream example). I am French/English bilingual and have lived in both the USA and France; in my experience, the determining factor in whether someone exhibits this “second brain” behavior/characteristic is their degree of preoccupation with politics (and to an extent, their familiarity with the history of politics and propaganda).

Something about seeing what arguments have been used to prepare, enact, and justify atrocities in the past makes those arguments very hard to take at face value the next times they are encountered. Consider the “states’ rights” rhetoric used to justify and rehabilitate the Confederacy’s succession after they lost the Civil War; that specific wording triggers immediate wariness in me today, and I’m willing to wager it also triggers it for most people that:

1. have learned a certain amount about that period and/or the “Lost Cause” movement, and
2. are ostensibly against slavery and racism (in principle, if not in practice).

Yet the term “states’ rights” did not have that effect on me the first time I encountered it - I developed that reaction as I learned more about who was using that term, where and when it came from, and what was effectively being said when that term got employed.

Similarly: McCarthyism, the red scare(s), and the apparent failure of self-proclaimed communist revolutions over the past century to effectively bring about “free and egalitarian societies”, have together trained many English speakers to deeply mistrust anything that could be the start of a “slippery slope” to communism - even when they readily agree that “something must be done” to reign in the damages of severe inequality. This seems to me to be a product of specific events in world history rather than anything intrinsic about the English language and/or the cultures that speak it.

On the other hand, English is (to my understanding) somewhat uniquely a mishmash of other languages’ grammars and vocabulary, with notably so many synonyms that can imply slight and subtle nuances. Perhaps it lends itself to a higher level of scrutinizing seemingly innocuous phrasings (to the point that a human brain develops mechanisms and habits for it) because there are more choices available for articulating an idea.

I wrote this autobiographical essay about some of my difficulties with sensitive online discussions.