The Best Way You Can Treat Your Neurodivergent Friends Is Give Them Space To Rant About Their Special

The best way you can treat your neurodivergent friends is give them space to rant about their special interest/hyperfixation and ask genuine questions about it.

I've never had space to share my special interest. My friends either think I'm either being pretentious or they think "Oh that's smart people stuff. There's no way you know about that. If you really knew about that you'd be a tenured professor at Harvard." (And I'm not going to share what it is on here because I don't want to seem pretentious)

But my friend's younger sibling invited me to their discord server. And I'm like "how funny would it be if i made this your special interest?", and they were like "I made a channel for you to rant about your special interest" and I was joking but if they want to make room for me to rant? Imma take it.

And they're like genuinely interested. Asking questions. Telling me how cool it is. And how is this teenager able to give me more room to share my special interest and make me feel genuinely validated in my special interest more than any adult has?

If you love you neurodivergent friends. Simply give them space to share their special interest. Dude, it's not that hard and you might end up learning something cool. (Okay, to be fair when I get too excited about shit I have no volume control so I get aggressively loud which is impressive because I'm already ridiculously loud even when I'm not excited).

-fae