Skill Regression or the End of a Cult?
Late-realised neurodivergent folk are reporting widespread skill-regression. From cooking to sewing to attending social events, “basic things” are becoming not so basic. Scientists reported the phenomenon in Autistic kids back in 2015.
Although scientists and neurodivergent people are sharing their special insights, both perspectives are inside the culture. Like a fish asking why it’s wet, their answers are partial. When we take a step back, a different kind of answer emerges.
Lived Exper(t)ience
The new experts in neurodiversity have lived experience. They’ve been through similar terrors to you and me. And their insights run circles around the psychiatric gaze that preceded them. At first it was just a bunch of us with phones saying “I wonder why this happens” and others saying “me too! And I wonder why it’s not in the diagnostic criteria!”. Then, as these things tend to go, the market followed the crowd.
Tiktoks about free-drawing your neurodivergent life are now peppered with ads for supplements and Hubermaniacs preaching neurobiological scientism. “We know what ADHD IS”, they assert, while flashing new fMRI aggregation glowups (“it’s the dopamine in the basal ganglia!”) and selling subscriptions. It feels more democratic than the psych’s office, but it’s giving a similar grease; a medicopathic slick. If you want to know where it’s all going, then each time they say, “measuring dopamine”, try replacing it with, “measuring skulls”.
Humming along imperceptibly in the background, holding the oil together as it were, is an aging vehicle nobody wants to wreck.
Individualism
We desperately seek answers. “Why do I feel this way?” “How come I can’t do basic tasks any more?” and “Why am I treated like this?” And although the new answers are more satisfying, they are hitched to the same old idea; that your body and mind are sovereign states — self-governed, self-aware, self self self self self.
The clue is in the question
Listen to that back:
Why do I feel this way? How come I can’t do basic tasks? Why am I treated like this?
Do you hear it?
The individualism is so baked in, we feel there is something wrong with US, INDIVIDUALS, and not with the hive. I mean, this mistake is already on our radar — we know it’s a problem. And in some ways we’ve overcome it. For example, we’ve learned to attribute some of our success to the collective. It takes a village to raise a kid. Teamwork makes the dream work. I’d like to thank God. But when we are failing? When something’s not working? Suddenly we’re all alone again.
The Cult’s psycho-medical trick is individuation, isolation. We know that. Can we also notice non-medical versions of the same trick? A neurodivergent comrade with a tiktok account, or a workshop, or a coaching practice, who says, “I know what’s wrong with you” (and by you they mean an individual) is doing the same thing. Not with malice. But doing it nevertheless.
Logically enough, they’re doing it for the exact same reason.
The profit motive
You have to believe you’re alone, sovereign, sickself, or the pathologiser’s platform collapses. If you were a social organism instead, interconnected to other social organisms that love you unconditionally, of what use would sellers of knowledge and practice be? They might join the hive for a minute. They could certainly contribute. But they couldn’t have you alone, unsupported, hoping their kind wisdom will save you.
The old psychiatrists weren’t useless because they were old. Or even because they typically had no relevant lived experience. They were useless because their incentive was never to assist you. It was to earn a living first and foremost. They profit when we are unwell. Even your peer support worker, and your disability comrade on the app need dependent, childhood-frozen, sickos. It’s not a mental health industry. It’s a mental sickness industry.
Isn’t it’s amazing how Sisyphean puzzles dissolve when we notice we’re asking the wrong question? We’re bees in need of a hive, not sickos in need of a hospital. This is true for many kinds of “psychiatric conditions”:
Ok, the system’s rotten, and we need a hive but our questions remain (even if we need to rephrase them): Why has the cult created this feeling? How come the cult can’t enjoy my skills any more? Why is the cult treating its own this way?
In a sense, there is only one answer for all of the questions above. Awkwardly, it’s not visible from inside the broken vehicle. To see it, you have to step away.
First attempt
My first burn-out fizzed under fluorescent lights. It was 2001. I was in my mid-twenties. I lay flat on the floor of the now-empty kitchen at work, staring at the roof. I can’t say how long I was there but I was getting thirsty.
I phoned a professional. The psychiatrist was also my father (lucky for some). He looked at me with compassion, and diagnosed a depression, just like his. He said I needed a stultifying dose of SSRIs, just like him. The drugs anaesthetised me but they also tamed my spirit. I joined the capitalist corps. Career, mortgage. No kids.
Second attempt
Fourteen years later, A decade ago, I was cruising, sedated. I had a job and a place to live and friends who were kinda normal I guess. I went to dinner parties and pretended to be ok. Then, not all at once, I tapered off my meds. And the feeling returned. All of the feelings, in fact.
As I began to feel again, I began to speak. I was older, more sure. I blew the whistle. A little at first. Then more and more. Then all the time.
Avoidance
People didn’t like it. I get that now. But at the time it was unclear. I mean, how could I have known — they offered no feedback. Pearls were clutched but nothing was said. They just snuck away. Not once did someone say “I don’t like that you’ve told me this”, or anything to that effect. Without a single exception, they shuffled silently backwards and closed the door. They didn’t want to hear, to see, or to know, and they were unable or unwilling to say so. These were the people who loved my compliant persona.
Authenticity
Once they (and the SSRIs) were gone, everything changed. On SSRIs I had been living in audiobeige, unable to enjoy the music I loved. Off SSRIs I was bopping along once again**. I rediscovered dancing and writing. I made real friends. People who show up when it matters. My cup filled up.
Faces of full cups
Employability
At the same time, my tolerance for the cult had expired. It was at zero and that rendered me unemployable. When my colleague, an employee of 30 years, was yeeted from our team by a company rolling in profits, I couldn’t just go along. I spoke up and soon followed her. I felt everyone’s complicity at every moment. And that awareness was a lot. It overclocked my CPU. My operating system collapsed and all my skills with it.
Housing and unemployment
With no CPU, no operating system, and no job, I became homeless. I eventually bought a van and fixed it up to live in.***
I set about lapping the continent, promising I would stop for good when it felt right. Well I found a beautiful spot at the same time I ran out of energy. It’s on Noongar Country (in Western Australia). The council up the road was the first Australian council to end “Australia Day” celebrations and maybe this council will be the next. The house in which I landed sits on 1.5 hectares and has enough room to make my dream a reality — a place for homeless folk to build their accommodations; tinytiny houses, vans to live in, storage devices. And more importantly, a place they can create community while they do so, safe from harassment.
Everything is swimming along.
But it’s not. Not exactly.
Skill regression
When I left the matrix, I experienced something neurodivergent communities have come to know as skill-regression. In the words of one Autistic on Tiktok, “when we realise we’re Autistic we become even more Autistic.” Physical co-ordination, cognitive skills, cooking, speaking, driving, handwriting, all kinds of skills, from the mundane to the intricate, fall away while we give birth to a new self. For those of you who have been through this or who are going through it right now; I see you. It’s not possible to overstate the terror of this experience and nobody who hasn’t been through it will ever understand. Even a mental health professional.
To understand what’s really going on there, we need to ask the following question:
Where did the skills go?
Maybe they weren’t where we thought they were
Saturated in individualist claptrap since birth, we’re inclined to believe that we learned these skills in a gymnasium of personal achievement and they belong to us, individually and therefore they last as long as our body and brain lasts. But that’s not true at all. Neurodivergent skill regression proves it.
We are bees, not polar bears
We learned in a hive. We practiced in a hive. We performed in a hive. Take the hive away, and you take the skills away. No bee estranged from their hive will perform a waggle dance for you. Ever. It’s not that they won’t. They can’t. It takes all the stimuli of their watching mates in the stadium of their hive to perform that ritual. Plonk that bee into a new place, with new stimuli, and the skill doesn’t exist. Only the mirage of individualism says otherwise. “The skill lives in the bee” is Cult fiction. The skill very clearly lives in the hive.
And so it should not surprise us that leaving our hive means leaving our skills behind too. We’re about to learn an entirely new repertoire. Not from scratch, but from way back. Way, way back.. We’re prowling the woods now. We’re checking the vegetable garden. This is not a new recipe. This is a whole new kitchen. New techniques. New tools. Fighting against it is like trying to roast a potato in the sea. It’s a recipe for failure.
Instead, we can try something different.
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I’m building an outdoor kitchen here on the farm. It sits within a hexagonal gazebo; a hive, if you will. In the past, I’d never have thought to centre a community in a shared, semi-outdoor space, so brainwashed I was “that people must belong to private property,… to houses.” Being houseless taught me that the best community spaces are unowned ones — the commons. That’s where people share. That’s where we give freely to the collective. That’s where we learn from each other in play. That’s where we dance. That’s where we feast.
That’s what makes us a hive.
** I have skipped the medical horrors of tapering off SSRIs here. It is hell for most people who do it and for others it’s worse than hell. I have been left with permanent disability as a result of those medications but I’m still here, which is more than many can say after the same ordeal. ]
- ** trying to do that without housing, without a hive, was hellish. That’s where I resolved to create such a hive for other homeless people.
