If you are ND do you have a superpower?

[AuADHD]

I fucking don’t. It’s one struggle after another despite ADHD meds. I don’t think I’ve ever had a superpower or even close. I’m a Jill of all trades: can turn my hand to everything I try and do it reasonably well but I never excel at anything. Nothing positive anyway.
My son is being assessed for autism and the psychiatrist said to me last week that all this talk of superpowers is great at focusing on strengths but it can downplay the struggles people have.
A friend says she loves the way I see the world, as in the details that others miss, but that’s hardly a superpower.
I’m not sure that talk of superpowers is good for children who don’t have any either. It could feel like yet another thing they are failing at as though they aren’t doing autism or ADHD to a good enough standard.

Do you or your child have a superpower? You don’t have to share what it is, I’m just interested to see if people do actually have them. Maybe it was something to try and make ND people seem less “weird” to others or feel better about themselves. Just musing.

Memory. My child has exceptional memory.

Absolutely NBU, I hate this narrative. I am not feeling at all super human about having life long struggles with ADHD and Autism. I do have a weird kind of spidey sense in life, it is a bit like picking up on a different frequency.

I absolutely do have superpowers.

However, I also have super flaws.

Whether or not I am better or worse than a NT person really depends on which of those traits matter to you. I'm both exceptionally brilliant and exceptionally terrible in the same breath.

For me, the inconsistency makes life hard. E.g. depending on which extreme you see, you won't believe the other, but it's true. I'm either desperately masking to protect an image, or struggling to be taken seriously.

My Autism superpower is retaining reams of utterly useless information, but never anything remotely useful 👍🏻

I can also detect other ND people, who are in the same room. It's like a Spidey Sense. I naturally gravitate towards them 😅

I'm fucking brilliant at not living up to my potential.

I'm dyslexic and I hate the Superpower trope. A could of years ago work organised a presentation from an external about working with dyslexia. It was all "it's a superpower!" And "Da Vinci and Jaimie Oliver were(possibly)/are dyslexic!". I can honestly say it made me feel worse about my dyslexia than I have done in years. It really sent me into quite a spiral about it. Probably a bit of an overreaction, but it came just as I'm hitting the classic "in my 40s with a small kid and now all my organisational failings are strained to breaking point" phase of life. It's fine to go on about all these amazingly different ways of seeing the world we all have, but at the end of the day the work needs to be done and my line manager is well within her rights to expect that from me, no matter how charmingly wacky inneffective my work process is.

I hate the super power talk, but I do have some that would probably be classed as that. I have ASD and ADHD, I have a great memory for certain things like remembering strings of information so I can ‘collect’ it, added to that my adhd traits of hyper focus and I’ll research and remember topics in a short space of time. I also remember numbers and patterns, can replay videos of conversations and events in my head so rarely have to write down meeting notes for example, and remember pretty much everything from childhood from a very early age (around 1 year old).

To counter that though I have an awful short term memory and lose my keys and phone multiple times a day.

My God, I thought it was just me. My parents second car’s numberplate is my password to everything.

I thought it was just me that did this. People always struggle to understand that I remember stuff I don't need to know but don't remember when to fill in forms for school or when the bins go out.

Well my lateral thinking
I can see a so many creative ways to solve a problem, and observe things no one else does.
bit on the flip side I never notice the obvious 🤷🏻‍♀️

My husband calls me a human lie detector. I agree.

But I hate the superpower trope. In my experience, used by neurotypicals in my life who are uncomfortable that I am neurodiverse and don’t want to accept the challenges that brings, so like to comfort me themselves with the superpower narrative.

It would be impossible to compare you to a totally NT person as they simply don't exist. This binary distinction is clearly nonsense. Lots of so called NT people can have extreme traits similar to ND people (for example those with BAP) so you could find that actually you are more similar to an 'NT' person that someone who has been diagnosed as ND. We are not separate, distinct species. The cut off is often largely arbitrary and many professionals disagree with the thresholds so they hardly universally accepted.

What is probably true though is generally people with an ND diagnosis tend to have more extreme traits, both good and bad. An extreme positive can be seen as a form of superpower even if it doesn't negate the extreme negative traits.

No. Nothing. Any exceptional skills of memory or attention to detail that I might have had once have wilted away like old veg in the salad drawer because work/parenting/existing has taken all my energy. I don't even have special interests anymore 😭

My child has an ear for music ('perfect pitch'). We discovered this when they played nursery rhymes on one of those little toddler toy xylophones.

I have no superpowers lol.

I do get what you're saying, but I have a very clearcut ND diagnosis - it wasn't a borderline one. So, I think any medical professional would agree.

I don't know, maybe the good things and bad things net out, but I find the extremes exhausting. When you're average at everything, I suspect the weight of other people's expectations is much lighter.

TBH, I think one of the hardest things about being ND is people not believing in the extremes. If I'm capable of X, then Y should be easy. No. I'm gifted in X, but I couldn't do Y to save my life.

I often find it hard to understand too. I suppose if I didn't live this myself, I wouldn't get it either. I'm also too embarrassed to admit that I can't do basic things that people take for granted when I can do some exceptional things that many people can't.

I also hate that neurodevelopmental disorders are dealt with by mental health teams - it gives us another stigma on top of the stigma that we already have. I'm not mentally unwell. It's also not a learning difficulty. I can accept my ND label, but I don't need other people's labels on top.

I suppose it is a superpower being able to disassociate from ones emotions so completely that I am a very good person to have around in a disaster. The downside is that I will then be quite unable to share that experience because I am sure that everyone hates me (ADHD RSD). And will then have persistent repetitive replaying of the horrific details of said disaster (ADHD PTSD).

Increased likelihood of suicide is not great.

But it's good to be able to turn your head to imaginative methods to break into the house when I've lost my keys again that day.

My daughter and son are nd and neither have super powers. They both have things they struggle with. They have strengths like everyone on the planet.

I have a very good long term memory, e.g. I can remember details of TV programmes I watched in 2002, arguments with DH in 2008 etc.

It's useful at work in terms of recalling previous correspondence etc.

It's not a super power though. It doesn't negate all the difficulties I have either. I struggle to fit in. My short term memory is terrible and my working memory isn't very good either.

I have autism, No super powers at all, only negatives for me

I do not enjoy any of the "generalisations" about ND / NT.

I do have "superpowers" (ASD). I am super super productive (when the stars are aligned) at work: I can get shit done (and done well, and done quickly) and can solve complex problems like no-one else I have ever met. I also burn out really frequently, and then can't do anything at all. So ... not a superpower because it is ENTIRELY unreliable. Also makes working in any normal sense nigh on impossible. (Show up every day for a fixed number of hours and have any predictability as to how much you may be able to accomplish in that time? Ahahahahahahahaha.)

I also memorise car numberplates entirely by accident, and then notice them again on the motorway / parked in Sainsbury's etc.

The problem with the superpowers narrative is that "powers" aren't "super" unless they can be channelled to individual, and ideally societal benefit. Superman who just lifts really big rocks over and over again for hours on end, rather than saving the world isn't a superhero: he's just a strong "weirdo". And some ND people can channel their strengths into areas that we recognise and rewards, and some can't.

My DH is relatively lucky that he can channel the attention to and incredibly memory for detail and ability to work for hours into something that is highly paid. His ability to "learn" social interactions has probably also stood him in good stead for predicting/analysing the decisions of others. I'm pretty sure he might overall be better at his job though to be more within typical bounds for those and without the crippling anxiety and exhaustion that comes from being autistic.

Resilience

I wouldn't call it a superpower but I have a high IQ. Never officially measured but in unofficial tests have got 160-180. But it did mean my ADHD was never picked up on in school or work because I could still get good enough grades/ get enough done even with poor attention and focus and difficulty with organisation and task initiation. I'm glad to have got a diagnosis much earlier for my daughter who also has a high IQ.

My DD has the power to turn any room she is in into absolute chaos within about an hour.

Nope, zero super powers here for me or my ND kids.
Just lots of pain, and frustration at not being able to do regular things like make a phone call, or leave the house on time.

Sounds bleak, and Monday - Friday it is, but when there's zilch expectation, we thrive, so we have so much joy and fun at weekends, and on our holidays.