Disabled vs. Non-Standard: Rethinking What Labels Are For

Editorial note: I originally wrote this article in 2023, when “Non-Standard Human” was still a relatively new way for me to think about disability, neurodivergence, and my own relationship with both. I don't agree with everything I wrote then anymore. Rather than quietly replacing the old argument with a new one, I want to leave enough of it visible to show how my perspective changed. Sometimes that happens because I learn something new. Sometimes I just think about something again.

What I Thought Then

When I originally wrote this article, I was wrestling with the word disabled. It felt loaded. It still does.

At the time, I wondered whether non-standard might be a better way to describe people whose bodies or brains function differently from what society treats as typical. I liked that it described deviation without automatically assigning value to that deviation. Standard. Non-standard. Different specifications, without the implied hierarchy I heard in abled and disabled.

I wrote, “What if we started referring to this as ‘non-standard’ instead?”

Three years later, I think I was trying to solve the wrong problem with the right word. I don't think non-standard should replace disabled anymore, and more importantly, I don't think it needs to.

I Inherited a Complicated Relationship With Disability

Disabled was never a neutral word in my life. My mother spent much of hers fighting with what it meant. Depending on the era, her outlook, her attitude that week, or possibly the outfit she was wearing that day, she might insist that she wasn't disabled or insist that her disabilities didn't diminish her.

I grew up watching that negotiation without realizing I was having one of my own. Many of the things I struggled with as a child were not recognized as disability. I didn't know that they were disabilities, and I certainly didn't know that they weren't character flaws. The executive dysfunction and inattention I now recognize as part of my ADHD were interpreted as laziness. I was belittled for those shortcomings instead of being taught strategies for managing them.

I've had my ADHD diagnosis for more than a decade now, and I still grieve for that little girl. Not simply because nobody diagnosed her, but because there was another possible interpretation of her all along. She wasn't lazy. She was having difficulty doing things other people expected her to be able to do, and the explanation available to everyone around her was character.

That distinction matters enormously.

Labels Are Words, Not Containers

I've become much less interested in finding the perfect box for myself, but that doesn't mean I think labels are useless. Quite the opposite. A label is just a word that helps us understand something.

Think about angry, mad, furious, enraged, and fuming. They overlap, but each gives us slightly different information about an internal experience. The word doesn't create the feeling. It gives us vocabulary for describing it.

Diagnostic language can work that way too. My ADHD diagnosis gave me language for experiences I had previously interpreted very differently. It connected me with information, strategies, and other people whose brains sometimes do things remarkably similar to mine. The formal diagnosis also gave me something I could not give myself: access to medication. That's an appropriate place for a medical gate. Medication changes the chemical environment of my brain and body in ways that make focus and executive function more accessible to me, and there are legitimate reasons for involving a qualified medical professional in that process.

But a coping strategy? I don't need a prescription for that.

If I find something in an ADHD toolkit that makes my life easier, I can use it. If an autistic person describes a strategy for managing sensory input and it works for me, I can use it whether or not I ever pursue the formal autism evaluation I've considered. If a PTSD coping strategy helps me manage a particular response, the usefulness of that strategy doesn't depend upon whether PTSD ultimately owns the behavior.

The label is a road sign. It tells me that people who experience things like this have found useful stuff over here. I can follow the sign without proving that I'm a permanent resident of the town.

Falling Below a Diagnostic Threshold Doesn't Make the Problem Disappear

About twenty years ago, when I was first learning about some of my non-standard humanity through a clinical lens, I told a therapist that I thought I might have obsessive-compulsive tendencies. We talked through the diagnostic criteria.

I have a fixation on the number two. She ultimately told me that I didn't meet the criteria for OCD because, as I remember her explaining it, my “number wasn't high enough.” I wasn't opening a cabinet seven times or checking a lock fifteen times, so apparently what I was describing wasn't severe enough to qualify.

Fair enough. I'm not trying to retroactively diagnose myself with OCD, and I can't establish today whether she applied the diagnostic criteria correctly twenty years ago. But the conclusion still missed something important.

I've spent money buying two of things I didn't need two of. When my household consisted of two adults, two children, two cats, and one dog, the imbalance bothered me enough that I insisted we needed another dog. Even now, I sometimes have to consciously talk myself out of buying two, or a multiple of two, of things at the grocery store. We don't need two gallons of milk. We don't even have room for two gallons of milk.

Whatever the behavior is called, it exists.

Research into psychiatric diagnosis has increasingly recognized the limitations of treating psychological phenomena as purely categorical. People can experience meaningful symptoms or impairment without crossing the threshold required for a particular diagnosis, which is one reason dimensional approaches have become more important in psychiatric classification.

My therapist may have been completely correct that I didn't have OCD. But you don't have OCD and therefore we don't need to help you understand this behavior that's affecting your spending, relationships, decisions, and mental effort are two entirely different conclusions.

I needed help with the thing. The thing did not disappear because it failed to qualify for the label.

Diagnosis and Permission Are Not the Same Thing

I keep finding versions of this distinction everywhere. What am I experiencing? What might explain it? What helps? What am I officially diagnosed with? What am I allowed to access? Those questions overlap, but they aren't interchangeable.

Sometimes formal diagnosis matters enormously. Medication, medical treatment, insurance, disability benefits, legal protections, educational services, and other institutional resources can legitimately require different levels of documentation. But not every useful intervention needs the same gate.

If a strategy helps me remember something, regulate myself, organize a task, manage sensory input, or interrupt an unwanted behavior, I don't particularly care which diagnostic toolkit originally contained it. Start with the problem. Find things that help. Figure out which taxonomy owns it when ownership actually matters.

“Could I Walk From the Back of the Parking Lot? Sure.”

I still wrestle with calling myself disabled. The stigma didn't disappear just because my understanding of disability improved.

One place I notice this is accessible parking. I've considered asking my provider about qualifying for an accessible parking placard or plate, but I haven't done it. Most of my disabilities aren't immediately visible, and that creates an absurd amount of mental calculus around something as mundane as parking at the grocery store.

Could I walk from the back of the parking lot? Sure. But that's not actually the whole question.

I have a finite amount of energy available. If the parking lot is especially crowded, I sometimes sit and wait for a closer conventional space instead. I'm calculating how much energy the longer walk will cost, what I still need to accomplish inside the store, whether the energy deficit is worth more or less than five minutes of waiting, whether an accessible placard would eliminate enough of this calculation to justify asking my provider for it, and whether that is worth having to explain why I think I need one.

Then there's another layer: if I get the placard, is the benefit worth the possibility that some judgmental asshole will see me walking away from an accessible space without a mobility aid and decide I'm not “really disabled”?

Research on invisible disability suggests that this kind of calculation isn't unique to me. People with non-visible disabilities can face a conflict between accessing support and exposing themselves to disbelief, stigma, or demands that they demonstrate sufficient disability. Research has also documented legitimate accessible-parking users being confronted by strangers who assume that someone who doesn't look disabled must be abusing the system.

The stigma can start doing its work before anyone actually confronts you, because by then you've already started policing yourself.

Capability Has a Cost

My parking example has also changed the way I think about the word can. “Can you do this?” sounds like a straightforward question, but it can be a surprisingly incomplete measurement of function.

A better question might sometimes be: Can you do this sustainably, at an acceptable cost, while retaining enough capacity to do the other things your life requires?

Energy-management and pacing approaches used in rehabilitation recognize that completing an activity doesn't tell us what the activity cost. Physical, cognitive, and emotional demands can all compete for finite capacity. That means an accommodation doesn't always transform can't into can. Sometimes it makes can less expensive.

Walking across the parking lot may be physically possible while still consuming energy I would rather use buying groceries. Someone may be able to work in a distracting environment while spending enormous cognitive resources filtering it. Someone may successfully remember verbal instructions by devoting substantial working memory to rehearsing them when written instructions would make the same task nearly effortless.

The observable output can look identical while the internal balance sheet is completely different. That's something I wish the adults around me had understood when I was a child. Successful completion isn't necessarily evidence that there was never a problem. Sometimes it's evidence that you found a way through one.

So Was I Wrong About “Disabled”?

Yes and no.

I was wrong to think non-standard needed to replace it. Disabled and non-standard aren't competing terms because they aren't doing the same job.

Disability tells us something meaningful about impairment, function, barriers, participation, and the interaction between a person and the environment around them. Many disabled people deliberately prefer the word disabled and reject euphemisms that make disability sound like something too uncomfortable to name. I understand that much better now.

But the discomfort that led me to the original article wasn't imaginary either. Disabled is still loaded. I still wrestle with the stigma. I still encounter the moral assumptions attached to needing help, struggling with something other people find easy, or asking for an accommodation whose necessity isn't immediately visible.

Changing the vocabulary wouldn't have solved that.

Non-Standard Turned Out to Mean Something Else

The part I didn't understand in 2023 was that Non-Standard Human was much bigger than disability.

My disabilities are part of my non-standard humanity. So is my neurodivergence. But so are things that aren't remotely disabilities.

I'm weird. Halloween season is one of my primary home-decor shopping opportunities. My aesthetic could reasonably be described as toddler grandma. I'm a rainbow nerd, and vibrant color is an integral part of how I express myself. There are ways I structure relationships, build projects, solve problems, communicate, think, decorate, organize, care for other people, and move through the world that don't always line up neatly with the expected version.

The internet has also taught me that I'm not remotely unique. There are a lot of us weirdos out here.

That's the point.

Non-standard doesn't tell you why I'm different. It doesn't tell you whether the difference is disabling, whether there's a diagnosis, whether I want accommodation, whether I desperately wish I could change that particular thing about myself, or whether I look at the standard and think, No, actually. I like mine better.

Some differences fucking suck. Some are neutral. Some depend entirely on context. Some require treatment, some require accommodation, some require a clever workaround, and some require other people to leave you the hell alone.

And some standards are worth discarding.

You Don't Owe Me the Rest of the Sentence

That's where I've ended up after thinking about this again.

In 2023, I thought non-standard might be a better category. Now I think its usefulness comes partly from refusing to become one.

Maybe you're a non-standard human because you're disabled. Maybe you're autistic or have ADHD. Maybe you're queer. Maybe your relationships don't resemble the default. Maybe you have an inexplicable compulsion to buy groceries in multiples of two. Maybe you dress like a rainbow threw up on somebody's grandmother. Maybe you've never found a diagnostic word that explains why you've spent your entire life feeling slightly out of phase with everybody around you. Maybe you just always thought you were weird.

You can learn the rest of the sentence if doing so helps you understand yourself. Labels can be useful. Diagnoses can be useful. Research can be useful. Understanding why something happens can change a life. I know that firsthand.

But the explanation isn't the price of admission.

You're a non-standard human. You don't owe me the rest of the sentence.

And, because apparently this is how I live my life, I reserve the right to think about this again.

Extended Reading