WTF is neurodivergent media?

You may have seen the headlines:

“How to Spot Autism in Your Coworker.”

“This Girl With ADHD Started a Business and Now She’s a Millionaire.”

“Neurodivergent People Have Superpowers, According to Science.”

Cool stories, but these examples do not represent neurodivergent media. What these are, are neurodivergent topics published on mainstream media outlets.

Caves & Bears is neurodivergent media. We are here because ND people deserve media that sees and understands us — through informed content made by us and for us — that does not flatten us into stereotypes or side notes, or, worst of all; challenge the notion that neurodivergence even exists.

NB: In case you were wondering, yes, it does exist. Here are some sound medical experts speaking on this topic.

We’re here, every day, collecting and sharing ND stories every day, because neurodivergence is not a pair of painful shoes you take off at the end of a long work shift. Nope, it's literally inside your mind.

So let’s get into it.

First of All: Neurodivergent Media ≠ Media About Neurodivergence

A lot of content out there talks about us. Very little of it talks to us. Even less comes from us.

Neurodivergent media doesn’t mean coverage about autism, ADHD, or other forms of cognitive divergence — it means:

Media created through neurodivergent minds, with neurodivergent values, reflecting neurodivergent lives in full complexity.

It’s not just the subject matter that matters. It’s how we write, what we prioritise, how we structure our stories, what we refuse to gloss over, and who we trust to speak.

This isn't a genre. It's a perspective. And it’s long overdue.

Why It Matters

Because we’ve spent decades being observed, tested, pathologised, and poorly represented.

Because neurodivergent people are used to seeing our experiences filtered through a lens that edits out our agency, our humour, our rage, and our brilliance.

Because so many of us learned to doubt ourselves because we never saw our truth mirrored — only explained by people who didn’t live it.

Because the media still loves a neat narrative:🧩 “This autistic kid solved a Rubik’s cube at age 4!”😢 “This ADHD mum can’t do laundry without crying — let’s send her a planner!”✨ “Neurodivergence is a superpower… unless you’re poor, multiply disabled, or inconvenient.”

What Neurodivergent Media Actually Looks Like

• Long, meandering essays that find their own rhythm.

• Short, sharp bursts of clarity that don’t need citations to be true.

• Unmasking burnout not as a vibe, but as a crisis of survival.

• Naming ableism where it lives: in systems, schools, job descriptions, diagnoses.

• Jokes. Rage. Nuance. Meltdowns. Joy.

• The kind of storytelling that doesn’t need to explain itself — because if you know, you know.

• Expressing ourselves in neurodivergent-friendly styles - this means overuse of language partitioning (I'm looking at YOU, brackets and semi-colons!!), exactitudes (p*ss off, vagueness!!), and purple prose, 'coz it feels great to play with language (sorry literature novelists).

  
  

It looks like access first, not as an afterthought. It looks like editing that honours voice, not flattens it. It looks like calling out BS in research, in politics, in pop culture. It looks like people who stim, dissociate, hyperfocus, and loop — telling the stories that only we can tell.

Who’s It For?

In short: It's for us.

The underdiagnosed. The late-diagnosed. The self-diagnosed. The ones who always felt different but couldn’t say why. The ones who compared themselves to peers and felt Not Good Enough. The ones who could never finish a traditional article without rereading it five times. The ones who read every footnote before the opening paragraph. The ones who were told they were too much, too sensitive, too weird, too inconsistent — but somehow still here.

Allies are welcome, too, as long as you're here to listen, not lead.

So Yeah. That’s What We’re Doing Here.

Caves & Bears is neurodivergent media. That means we don't just cover the stories. We live them. We don’t need to be objective. We need to be honest. We don’t need to simplify. We need to expand. We don’t need permission. We’re already speaking.

Welcome to the table. The rules might not be obvious. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear the truth between the dice rolls.

What on Earth am I talking about? Please see our Origin Story for context.

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