Introduction
In late 2024, I coined the term nüroDEFIANCE to name what I felt but couldn’t yet fully language: my resistance to the forced-choice identity buffet of modern neuro-discourse. I reject both the internalized pathology model and the watered-down empowerment narrative.
I’m not neurodivergent.
I’m not neurotypical.
I’m nürodefiant & I refuse to let the language of diagnosis do the thinking for me.
My resentment wasn’t personal at first. It was observational, a pattern emerging everywhere. The same tired complex of identity crisis → diagnosis → external validation loops, all repackaged as liberation. But it isn’t.
I’ve always had a natural resistance to groupthink, and I sought to understand that resistance instead of smother it with a label. Seeking a diagnosis, which assumes the flaws are within me, never sat right. Especially when no one’s getting their actual neurology studied, just running through checklists of socially constructed behaviors. You’re expected to fail at those norms and then explain your failure in the exact social language you’re supposedly disabled in.
Does that sound healing to you?
For those of you who found relief in a diagnosis, if having an answer was enough for you, Congratulations.
But for those of us still vibrating on a different frequency:
Let’s talk about nüroDEFIANCE.
(“Neurodefiance” in lowercase is for normies who want to dabble in rebellion without learning the framework.)
Why NüroDEFIANCE?
Let’s set the table:
“Neurodivergent” and “neurotypical” are terms born in the 1990s, not ancient truths. I was a nearly sentient child when they began circulating, and I watched as these terms evolved from sociological descriptors into full-fledged identity cultures. Somewhere along the way, what was supposed to be a critique of norms turned into a performance for those very norms.
Instead of breaking free, many have collapsed into externally validated identities:
“Here’s who I am because someone outside of me confirmed it.”
Wasn’t the whole point of neurodivergence to escape the pathology trap?
The original intent,especially from folks like Judy Singer, was to resist deficit-based language. But instead of metabolizing that resistance into something new, we’ve buried the same helplessness deeper into the phonemes of the words and fashioned new ego-badges out of them.
Not everyone’s doing this, of course. But too many are.
Being around “ND” spaces often feels like a reversed AA meeting where we show up to talk about surviving systemic alcoholism, but they’re still serving shots at the refreshment table. Compliance disguised as community.
And maybe that’s inevitable when words designed for social understanding get absorbed by identity markets. But it leaves people like me, who feel differently different, isolated. Not because we don’t belong, but because we refuse to pretend belonging is the same as knowing ourselves.
I thought most neurodivergent people would resist this behavior, this collapse into the external, because that’s a core neurotypical trait. But I’ve watched it repeat again and again: people trading one social mask for another, one diagnostic lanyard for another form of legibility.
I understand that impulse.
&
I’ve transmuted that impulse
Into:
nüroDEFIANCE.
What Is NüroDEFIANCE?
The stylized form ,with the umlaut, is for my people. The ones who want to learn how I came to this. The ones willing to undo the social conditioning, engage in conscious resistance, and embody an internal framework rather than performing another identity script.
The ones who know that liberation doesn’t arrive via diagnostic paperwork.
You want to casually play with “neurodefiance”? Cool. But you don’t get the umlaut until you come sit at my table and commit to the deeper work.
This isn’t a scientific term, neither is neurodivergence, and neurotypical certainly isn’t. Hell, I’d love to get my actual neurology scanned one day. Until then, all these terms are metaphor machines and it matters who’s operating them.
A proper neurological study would involve actual tissue-level analysis, receptor mapping, developmental context, psychological integration. But we don’t get that. We get forms, screeners, symptom language.
Why would our society build real tools for understanding us?
It never has before. Why start now?
Inner Alignment > External Approval
This is the axis of nürodefiance. The core differentiator between divergent and defiant.
The defiant homos (as in homo sapiens or my remix, homo sapi&) are not just socially misaligned.
They’re internally sovereign.
We are a strain of human that has retained contact with inner knowing to stay in alignment with whatever soul means to you.
Not intuition™.
Not vibes.
Not pattern recognition as performance.
Inner knowing as an undeletable signal system.
Typically, this knowing is buried beneath centuries of externally imposed ego structures, built layer upon layer on top of our soul’s aperture; the place where inner and outer meet. Most never find it. But the defiant?
We never lost contact.
Even if we were shamed, broken, silenced.
We never broke the line.
That doesn’t mean we always act right.
It doesn’t mean we never spiral.
It doesn’t mean we perform palatably for a society bent on its own destruction.
It just means we are still in contact even when everyone around us is living in the echo of a disconnected signal.
This society has spent centuries trying to kill that contact. It’s not a metaphor, it’s a documented behavioral pattern of homo sapiens sapiens. The species seems to love eradicating anything that reflects it too clearly.
& still
we are told we are the problem.
Not the society.
Not the scripts.
Not the systems.
Sure.Okay.LETMESHOWYOUHOWMUCHOFAPROBLEMICANBETHEN.
The Depths of Nürodefiance
It’s not enough to feel resistant to the status quo.
We are here to learn how deep the corruption runs and begin removing the cancer that exists within our own species.
NDFs have a unique capacity to mature this process of inner knowing. Many of us already do, using our perception to metabolize centuries of shadow cast across the world by other homos.
The path of inner knowing aligns closely with those drawn to spiritual inquiry. This is also why religion, cults, and new-age grifts have always been so effective. When someone arrives at the gate of their deepest wisdom, they face a choice: open it and dive inward, or collapse into a socially constructed identity shaped to please others.
This tension between inner and outer self is the crucible of species-level pain. It infects every part of our being until it’s directly faced and metabolized.
NDFs want to face it.
Discuss it.
Process it.
Integrate it.
And teach a new way of connecting that doesn’t depend on how anyone else thinks, speaks, or performs.
We don’t calibrate our behavior for external reward or approval.
We gather around those doing the same.
We know the best support we can offer is not advice or validation, but support in deepening the relationship with your own inner world.
Your shadow.
Your unconscious.
Your soul.
Or whatever you currently call it.
We call it intergenerational shame.
The work I’m doing on shame is central to nürodefiance.
Shame is the dividing line. It’s the affective regulator that separates NT, ND, and NDF.
So far, I believe this to be true:
Shame is not just an emotion.
It’s a regulatory mechanism that shifts and modulates other affects.
It either collapses us into obedience, or it sharpens our ability to stay in contact with inner knowing.
You can either follow the shame scripts coded by society,
Or hear the quiet internal signal that says,
(pst… this person is full of shit)
If you’re able to act on that knowing instead of folding into the script, you’re already in the zone of defiance.
But let’s be honest: this is hard.
Even if you understand what I just said.
Even if it resonates.
You might still collapse into external scripts when you’re triggered, even by the environment.
That’s not failure.
That’s being human.
It’s the same struggle I’ve carried my entire life.
To feel so solid inside about who I am, what I want, and what I’m here to do, yet be unable to consistently move in alignment because the world outside runs on collapse.
Every interaction and space, every facade and social exchange, operates with the same logic.
Nothing around us was designed for wholeness.
Even the environments themselves prove it.
Boarded-up businesses.
Crumbling infrastructure.
Places that once prospered through domination now sit as visible reminders of what happens when a species turns against itself.
Mature shame is a JOYSTICK
We are not required to be like our ancestors.
We are not required to honor their stories of imagined triumph over imagined enemies.
We are not required to use their structures, their frameworks, or their logic about what is appropriate for us.
We are not required to learn their stories, carry their history, or uphold their impact on this planet.
We tune into the present moment and decide from there.
Every moment is the present moment.
We never leave it.
We just hallucinate that we do.
There’s something important in that loss.
When presence is gone, scripts rush in to take its place.
Social deformity increases.
Not in the individual, but in the species.
Social awkwardness.
Isolation.
Inability to connect.
These are not personal failings.
They are evidence of people harmed by dysfunctional environments.
When the senses overwhelm us with feeling, emotion, or mood, we create narratives.
We make stories to explain it all.
And we abandon the raw sensory truth in favor of the more socially approved explanation.
This becomes the logic behind our behavior.
Who we relate to.
How we perform.
What we allow ourselves to feel.
But NDFs know better.
This whole thing is a scam.
The scam is the sham.
The sham of shame is that it became a scam of a society instead of the cloak of our inner essence.
It was never supposed to govern this much of our existence.
Shame, as it’s currently taught and felt, is distorted.
NDFs recognize two& possibilities.
Either shame is a social distortion, forced into us by scripted conditioning to only perform scripts instead of present moment sensory awareness aligned action
Or &
This JOYSTICK ability is a deep feature that makes us what we are
Not divergent
Not broken
But something else entirely
A new kind of homo
Not sapiens
But sapi&
homo sentient; the humans who can see who they are against their species, environment, & inner knowing and self-correct us out of this bitch ass of a shitty [worldwide] corrupted society.
We are the branching path.
To still call myself sapiens is to betray everything I know about myself.
For us, shame is neutral.
It is a knock from the soul saying
(you already know this, so why are you pretending you don’t?)
This isn’t about self-esteem.
It’s not about earning confidence through achievement.
This is about using shame as a joystick
A directional signal
Not a punishment
Not a leash
But a lever you can learn to move with
My work and my framework are not complete, but as of June 2025, this is what I have to offer anyone else who wants to become nüroDEFIANT with me. Let’s figure out why our shame leads us within whereas in others, it launches them externally.
If you are interested in learning more, you can email me at ampersand @ joytobewild.com