The Handbook Everyone Else Apparently Received
Unwritten rules, and the strange confidence of people who never noticed them.
Diverse is the Default.
Human variation is ordinary. Most systems are still built for a standard user, worker, student, partner, or patient. This is a publication about what happens when actual people meet those assumptions.
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The work-and-cognition branch of the project, published on LinkedIn.
About Non-Standard Human
Non-Standard Human is an independent publication and a set of projects by Tabby Worthington. It looks at cognition, communication, work, relationships, identity, accessibility, technology, and the many ways people fail to match an assumed human default. Neurodivergence runs through a lot of it, because it runs through the author's life — but the phrase is deliberately wider than that.
Sometimes the mismatch is environmental. Sometimes a person needs a different tool. Sometimes a diagnosis explains a great deal. Sometimes the supposedly standard behavior is the part worth questioning. Sometimes nobody knows why a thing works. The writing starts from lived experience, then uses research to test and complicate it — no clinical authority claimed, no requirement that you explain why you're non-standard before you belong here.
Read the latest writingLatest Writing
View all postsEssays and observations on cognition, communication, work, relationships, identity, accessibility, diagnostic labels, coping strategies, cultural assumptions, and whatever the internet is currently arguing about — examined rather than celebrated.
A Small Font, A Big Barrier: The Invisible Labor of Accessibility
On the difference between technical access, usable access, and the invisible labor disabled people perform when environments refuse to bend.
The External Processor: What AI Changed About the Way I Think
On external processing, cognitive offloading, and why AI sometimes lowers the activation energy required for an idea to exist at all.
The Art of Non-Standard Conflict: Thinking About It Again
Revisiting a 2024 essay on conflict as framework rather than contest, and what happens when the people involved don't agree on what kind of conflict they're having.
You Shouldn't Have to Prove Something Is Hard Before You're Allowed to Make It Easier
Revisiting a 2023 essay on accommodations, trust, and why we ask people to justify the things that help them function.
Who Gets to Tell You Who You Are?
Revisiting a 2023 essay on self-acceptance, identity, and who gets the final word on who you are.
Breaking Free: The Default Isn't an Instruction
Revisiting a 2023 essay on authenticity, social defaults, and whether rejecting the standard is always the point.
The Beauty of Deviation
Revisiting a 2023 essay on human difference, rabbit holes, and why beauty became the price of admission for deviation.
Disabled vs. Non-Standard: Rethinking What Labels Are For
Revisiting a 2023 essay on labels, disability, diagnosis, permission, and what the label is actually for.
The Newsletter
Subscribe on LinkedInNon-Standard Human on LinkedIn
The professional branch of the project: neurodivergence and modern work, cognition, communication, productivity, AI, workplace expectations, accommodations, management, and professional identity. The site goes wider; the newsletter stays at work.
Other Things She's Building
Projects
Independent sites, publications, communities, and experiments — Tabby's Tiny Tabbies, Polyamorous Perspectives, POSH TX, and whatever comes next. Separate worlds, one stubbornly curious person.
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Shirts, stickers, mugs, notebooks, and prints built around Non-Standard Human and the phrases that come out of the writing. For people who recognize themselves in it and don't feel like explaining why.
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