Plot Twist: I’m Different On Purpose

For years I thought the goal was to become less weird.

More organized.

More disciplined.

More…whatever those people are called who somehow know what’s for dinner on Thursday while it’s still Monday.

And because the universe enjoys impeccable comedic timing, somewhere between diapers, divorce paperwork, a global pandemic, and a complete nervous system mutiny, I figured out I was neuroqueer.

I mean, technically I’d known pieces of it for decades.

I knew I had ADHD. My parents had me evaluated when I was in college after years of quietly collecting evidence that my brain had missed some very important orientation meeting everyone else seemed to have attended.

I also remember sitting across from my mom when I was nineteen saying, “I think I might be bisexual.”

Her response was immediate. “Well, you better be sure.”

Which, in hindsight, is an absolutely spectacular sentence to hand a kid with obsessive pattern-finding tendencies.

So I became sure about nothing. Or maybe I became sure about everything except myself.

I think I’ve spent most of my life living with a “better be sure” relationship to my sexuality, my gender, my brain, and honestly…my existence.

Every decision required another committee meeting. Another spreadsheet. Another twelve tabs open in my brain. Another round of cross-examination by the tiny internal attorney whose entire job description appears to be, “Have we considered that you’re making all of this up?”

Then I learned the word neuroqueer.

And it wasn’t like receiving new information. It was like someone handed me the missing page of the owner’s manual. Not because I suddenly became neuroqueer. I’d always been this person. My life didn’t change. The map did.

Suddenly the ADHD wasn’t over here and my queerness wasn’t over there and my love of metaphor wasn’t another unrelated personality quirk and my lifelong sense of being just slightly out of phase with everyone else wasn’t evidence that I was failing at being human.

It was one story. One nervous system. One way of moving through the world.

Everything that had spent forty years looking like unrelated plot holes rearranged itself into a narrative. And that’s when I stopped asking, “How do I become more normal?” And started asking a much more interesting question.

“What if the thing I’d been trying to overcome was actually the thing I’d been building my life around all along?”

Not because I became someone different. Because I finally stopped trying to become someone else.

The things I had spent decades apologizing for started looking suspiciously like clues.

The way I think in metaphors.

The way meaning arrives sideways.

The way community regulates me better than productivity apps ever have.

The way I don’t actually need to become more independent nearly as much as I need to become more interconnected.

That’s when Different On Purpose stopped feeling like a business idea and started feeling like a plot twist. Once I had the map, I started rewatching my life. Actually…I started rewatching everything. Books. Movies. Stories I’d loved for years.

It turns out when your brain reorganizes itself, your metaphors do too. And I might lose some of you here, but stay with me.

I kept coming back to Stranger Things. Not because of the monsters. Not even because of the Upside Down.

Because of Will.

For most of the series, everyone treats his connection to the mind flare as the problem. We find out in the final season that Will can actually feel the darkness when it arrives and intuitively knows where it’s heading, even before the darkness does. He experiences the world differently.

Everyone else’s first instinct is to help him get rid of it. Which is understandable. It hurts. It’s terrifying. It nearly destroys him. But then something shifts. The connection doesn’t disappear. Will changes his relationship to it. Instead of seeing himself only as the kid who got trapped, he becomes someone who can sense what no one else can.

The very thing that made him vulnerable becomes part of what makes him indispensable.

And I just sat there thinking…

Oh.

That’s Different On Purpose.

That’s neuroqueering.

Not erasing the connection—learning how to use it. Not pretending the sensitivity isn’t real—realizing it might also be information.

Maybe the goal was never becoming less weird. Maybe it was inviting enough weird people into the room that the thing we’d all been apologizing for started looking suspiciously like a collective superpower.

Different On Purpose isn’t me finally escaping the Upside Down. It’s me finding everyone else who’s been surviving there all along. It’s realizing that maybe the way we defeat monsters isn’t by becoming less strange. Maybe it’s by inviting more strange people to dinner.

Turns out queer people have been building chosen families forever. Neurodivergent people have been borrowing each other’s executive functioning forever. Artists have been making meaning out of impossible things—forever.

Maybe we’ve been carrying pieces of the answer the whole time. Maybe executive functioning really is a team sport.

Maybe the opposite of fear isn’t courage. Maybe it’s enough people standing beside you that your nervous system finally believes you don’t have to fight alone.

And if that’s true—then perhaps Different On Purpose isn’t the business I started. It’s the party I wish someone had invited me to years ago. The one where everyone brings whatever they have. Paint. Soup. Flashlights. A really good playlist.

Someone remembers the snacks. Someone notices you’re drowning before you do. Someone quietly takes your keys because you’ve had three hours of sleep.

And together…

we defeat the goblins of hatred.

Or capitalism.

Honestly, I’m flexible.

By Mandy Parida