You’ve probably heard some version of it.
“Nobody’s saying you did anything wrong. It’s just the way you said it.”
Sit with that sentence for a second. Nobody’s saying you did anything wrong. The content was fine. The facts were right. The boundary was reasonable. And still, somehow, you failed.
You failed an audition you didn’t know you were in.
If you’re neurodivergent or neurocomplex (autistic, ADHD, both, layered with giftedness, trauma, chronic illness, or something with a longer name or no name at all yet), you’ve likely spent most of your life in that audition. You learned the script the hard way: the sudden chill in a room, the friend who went quiet, the review that praised your work and then spent three paragraphs on your “tone.”
This essay doesn’t argue that neurodivergent people can’t be nice. That claim would be false, and it would hand ammunition to the exact stereotype it claims to fight. Plenty of us are warm, funny, tender, and deeply considerate.
This is an argument about something narrower and more uncomfortable: the culturally approved performance of niceness isn’t natural, isn’t equally accessible, and should never be the price of being treated with respect.
What we actually mean when we say “nice”
Read more