The Beauty of Deviation

Editorial note: When I wrote this article in 2023, I wanted to celebrate human difference. I still do. What I've been thinking about since then is why I felt such a strong need to make difference beautiful before I could defend it. I don't think the positive things I wrote then were untrue. I think I was choosing which true things to lead with, and I've started to understand why.

I Was Trying to Make a Case for Difference

The original version of this article compared human difference to kaleidoscopes, tapestries, musical compositions, and symphonies. I wrote about ADHD as a “reservoir of creativity, innovation, and unique perspectives.” I wrote that anxiety had taught me resilience and empathy. I argued that we should view our differences “not as limitations, but as unique attributes that enrich our collective experience.”

I don't think I was wrong that difference can produce beautiful things. I think I was wrong about what that beauty needed to accomplish.

If I called the deviation beautiful, I got to hand you a reason before you asked for one. I got to walk into the room already holding the thing that would make you comfortable with me.

It wasn't dishonest, exactly. The rabbit holes really have produced beauty, real expertise, and real joy. But I was choosing which true thing to lead with, and I was choosing it for you, not for me. Beauty was the toll I paid so the deviation could cross the border into acceptable.

And it worked, mostly, which is the problem. It worked well enough that I never had to ask what I was doing it for. A justification you don't examine starts to feel like a fact instead of a strategy.

Sometimes the Rabbit Hole Really Is Beautiful

Animals have been a special interest of mine for as long as I can remember, with kittens and cat rescue occupying their own particularly deep corner of that interest. Recently, we had persistent gastrointestinal problems with some kittens in our rescue. We'd done medical testing. We'd treated what we could identify. We were still dealing with diarrhea.

My brain did what my brain does.

I started researching.

I became fascinated with feline gut health and probiotics, which is a sentence I don't think I ever anticipated writing about myself. I kept digging deeper into the available information, learning about different bacterial strains, prebiotics, the microbiome, and how various approaches might support kittens whose digestive systems were struggling. I am not a veterinarian or a researcher in this field, but I now know vastly more about feline probiotics than I ever imagined wanting to know. I've started making customized probiotic and prebiotic mixes for our rescue kittens, and in our experience, they've been remarkably useful.

I find this genuinely exciting. Other people's eyes glaze over when I start talking about it.

Their loss, frankly.

But there's another version of the same story. While I'm joyfully reading about the feline gastrointestinal microbiome, the laundry is piling up. There are dishes that need to be done. My paid job has a deadline in two days, and I haven't even started the project.

I know those things need my attention. I know I should stop. I may actively want to redirect myself because the consequences of not doing so are becoming increasingly stressful.

And I'm still reading about kitten poop.

So Is That a Strength or a Deficit?

That's the question I don't find particularly useful anymore.

Research into neurodiversity increasingly reflects the same complication. A neurodiversity approach isn't simply a strengths-based model where we take everything previously classified as a deficit and move it into a happier column. Researchers have cautioned against doing exactly that because neurodivergent people can experience genuine strengths and genuine difficulties, often arising from the same characteristics and changing according to context.

Research examining autistic people's own descriptions of their strengths has similarly identified context as an important part of the story. A characteristic can be useful in one situation and difficult in another. Some autistic adults have even expressed reluctance to call particular characteristics “strengths” because doing so can obscure the difficulties those same characteristics create.

ADHD research presents a similar problem. Creativity, energy, drive, and hyperfocus are sometimes described as ADHD-related strengths, but researchers have cautioned against allowing strengths-based narratives to minimize the very real impairments that can accompany ADHD.

My rabbit hole doesn't even have the courtesy to separate those things temporally. It's not a strength on Monday and a deficit on Thursday. The joy and the dysfunction can happen simultaneously.

I'm fascinated. I'm learning. I'm solving a real problem. I'm stressed. I'm behind. I can't make myself redirect.

All of those things are true.

This Isn't Just About Neurodivergence

Once I started thinking about traits this way, I realized I could find the same contradiction in parts of myself that I don't consider symptoms of anything.

I have a very strong sense of ethics. I like this about myself. I want to be someone whose values mean something even when adhering to them is inconvenient. But when someone in my social circle behaves in a way I consider genuinely wrong, I can have a very difficult time simply moving past it because everyone else would prefer the conflict to go away. If I'm unwilling to interact with that person until they've made things right, my ethical conviction can create social complications that other people don't know how to resolve. Maybe they don't feel as strongly about the violation as I do. Maybe their ethical lens is different enough that something I consider a deal breaker simply isn't one for them.

I'm also extremely independent. Give me a problem and my instinct is to figure it out myself. At work, that can make me resourceful and capable of moving projects forward without needing someone to spoon-feed me every step. It can also lead me to spend hours gathering information instead of asking the person who assigned the project a question they could have answered in five minutes. Sometimes the information I independently gather turns out to be incorrect, outdated, irrelevant, or simply not applicable to what they actually wanted. Now I've created significant rework because my desire not to slow down and ask for clarification ultimately slowed me down much more.

Generosity and patience create their own version of this. I tend to give people more chances and more grace than some of the people around me think they deserve. Sometimes that means someone receives patience at exactly the moment they need it. Sometimes it means the people watching me are wondering how many more fucking chances I intend to give someone who has already demonstrated a pattern.

Which version tells you whether I'm ethical, independent, generous, patient, stubborn, inefficient, naïve, or rigid?

Probably none of them by itself.

I Think I Know Why I Needed the Difference to Be Beautiful

I think I know why I did it in 2023. If I called the deviation beautiful, I got to hand you a reason before you asked for one. I got to walk into the room already holding the thing that would make you comfortable with me. It wasn't dishonest, exactly. The rabbit holes really have produced beauty, real expertise, and real joy. But I was choosing which true thing to lead with, and I was choosing it for you, not for me. Beauty was the toll I paid so the deviation could cross the border into acceptable.

And it worked, mostly, which is the problem. It worked well enough that I never had to ask what I was doing it for. A justification you don't examine starts to feel like a fact instead of a strategy. I can look back now and see the strategy pretty clearly: if I couldn't guarantee that you would accept the difference, I could at least get to the story first. I could supply the redemptive frame before someone else supplied the punitive one. ADHD makes me creative. Anxiety makes me empathetic. Difference makes society richer. None of those things is necessarily untrue, but together they make a very convenient argument: See? It's okay that I'm like this. Look what you get in return.

That's not really persuasion aimed outward. It's armor aimed inward. I was pre-empting my own shame as much as I was managing yours.

Every Celebration Comes With a Receipt

There's an older, less personal reason for this too, and once I saw it I couldn't stop seeing it everywhere: the disabled athlete who's inspiring, the autistic kid who's a savant, the depressive who's a great artist because of it, not despite it. Every one of these stories looks like a celebration. Every one of them is also a receipt. The trait gets to stay in the room only because it was shown to produce something: a medal, a talent, a canvas, an invention, a successful company. Value first, personhood second.

That doesn't mean those stories aren't true. Disabled athletes really can be extraordinary athletes. Autistic people can have exceptional abilities. Mental illness has existed alongside extraordinary art, and people with ADHD can have characteristics that contribute to their success. The problem isn't celebrating those things. The problem is when celebration quietly becomes justification, and we start requiring the deviation to demonstrate its economic, artistic, inspirational, or social value before we're comfortable with it.

I had absorbed that trade so completely that I wrote it into my own article without noticing I'd agreed to its terms. I wasn't just saying that human differences sometimes produce beautiful things. I was offering their beauty as evidence for why we should accept them.

I Didn't Invent This Trade

The terms are old. Long before I was reframing my own dysfunction as depth, there was already a story on the shelf saying suffering makes art, saying the wound makes the bow sing, saying the deviation is the price of the gift. I didn't invent the move. I inherited a script that was already fluent, already persuasive, already sitting there waiting for someone like me to pick it up.

Of course I picked it up. For much of my life, the alternative explanation for the things I struggled with was that they reflected something wrong with my character. I was lazy. I wasn't trying hard enough. I was too much of one thing and not enough of another. When you've spent enough time absorbing those explanations, discovering a narrative that says actually, this difference might make you valuable feels incredibly liberating. It was the only available language for saying I am still worth something that I'd ever been handed.

And it was better than shame. I don't want to discount how important that intermediate step can be. Reframing something you've spent your life hating as something that might also have value can fundamentally change your relationship with yourself. I just don't think it has to be the final destination, because it still leaves the underlying transaction intact. The difference is acceptable because we've successfully demonstrated its value.

Difference Doesn't Have to Pay for Its Keep

Which is the actual answer, I think. We make deviation beautiful because we've been taught, by culture, by each other, and by the parts of ourselves that learned to survive being different, that difference has to pay for its keep. Beauty is just the currency we found lying around. And a legitimacy you have to keep earning back isn't legitimacy. It's probation with better lighting.

So no, the rabbit hole doesn't have to have been beautiful. It doesn't have to have produced anything I can hand you as proof. When it does produce expertise, fascination, discovery, or something genuinely useful, I get to enjoy those things without turning them into payment for the difficulties that came with them. The executive dysfunction doesn't cancel the joy, and the joy doesn't have to cancel the dysfunction. Neither one of them owes you a receipt.

The same is true of all those other traits that refuse to stay politely in the strengths or weaknesses column. My independence doesn't have to save enough time to compensate for every occasion when it wastes some. My generosity doesn't have to produce a redemption story every time I give someone another chance. My ethics don't become less meaningful because acting according to them sometimes makes a social situation considerably harder. These things can be useful, inconvenient, admirable, frustrating, or several of those things simultaneously without requiring me to settle the question of whether they are fundamentally “good” or “bad.”

The Beauty of Deviation

I still like the title I gave this article in 2023, but I don't mean the same thing by it anymore. Human variation is beautiful to me. I love the weirdness of people. I love finding out how somebody else's mind works and discovering that something I assumed was universal is actually just something my particular brain does. I love the internet for showing me how many wonderfully specific kinds of strange exist in the world and how rarely any of us are as uniquely weird as we once believed ourselves to be.

But I don't want beauty to be a requirement anymore. A deviation can be beautiful, useful, difficult, inconvenient, disabling, joyful, painful, productive, neutral, fascinating, or something I desperately wish I could change. It can move among those categories depending on where I am, what I'm doing, who I'm with, and what else my life requires from me that day. Sometimes, like my research rabbit holes, it can occupy several categories at exactly the same time.

I don't need to decide which column it belongs in before I'm allowed to understand it, and I don't need to find the compensating gift before I'm allowed to accept it. That's the part I couldn't quite articulate when I wrote this the first time.

The title gets to stay. But I want you to read it now the way I've come to read it myself, not as a claim that deviation is beautiful, but as a question I'm still not sure I like the answer to: why did beauty ever have to be the price of admission at all?

Extended Reading