Neurodivergent Identity Arcs
From Immersion to Integration — and Why It Matters for Collective Care
Before we dive in, I want to offer a gentle heads-up. This newsletter names some of what’s been unfolding in the autism world recently — and I know many of us are already feeling stretched thin, holding a lot, or just trying to stay regulated in a dysregulating world.
So here’s your note to hop off if you need to. Truly. Take care of your system in whatever way feels right today. I’ll see you next time.
For those continuing — thank you for being here. It’s brave of you to push onward and continue to enter this activating conversation.
There’s a lot moving through the autism world right now: RFK Jr.’s recent comments. The murder of Victor Perez. The ongoing war against trans people. And more.
Like many of you, I’ve been feeling it — in my body, in my nervous system, in the ache of trying to make sense of it all. These are not isolated events. They are echoes in a larger pattern of who gets seen, who gets grieved, and who gets left behind in this conversation.
When I feel this overwhelm, I find myself searching for anchors — frameworks that help me make sense of what’s happening beneath the surface. And this week, I’ve been returning to identity development models.
Identity development models offer a way of understanding how we come to see ourselves — and how we integrate deeply held parts of our identity, especially when those parts have been marginalized, erased, or misunderstood. These models map out common stages in the process of moving from confusion or denial to clarity, pride, and integration.
So amidst all that chaos, let’s try to pull the camera back, and reach for frameworks that can help ground us, make sense of what’s going on, and show up with care. I’m offering a wider frame here — one that makes space for identity development, self-compassion, and the many different ways we move through moments like this.
Ideation context: I sat down with Kaligirwa (@blackspectrumscholar) for a 90-minute conversation this week. While the concept of ND identity development is something I’ve been exploring for years, much of today’s musings bloom from the garden of that exchange. You can listen to our conversation here and follow their work here. Kali’s bravery in naming things clearly gave me the courage to explore some hard truths in this piece. You can listen to the full conversation here.
Identity arcs (and why they matter right now)
Across many marginalized communities, identity development tends to follow similar arcs — even if they’re rarely neat or linear. For Black, queer, disabled, and neurodivergent folks, it often starts in a stage of pre-encounter — a time of blending in, confusion, or even disconnection from the identity itself. Then something shifts. A disruption. A moment of reckoning. A personal or public event that changes how we see ourselves.
From there, people often dive deep. This can look like intense reclaiming or immersion — sometimes marked by anger, grief, or fierce pride. Identity gets louder, sharper. Over time, and often through community, that identity might settle into something more grounded — less about proving and more about being. This echoes patterns found in models like Cross’s Nigrescence Theory, Cass’s work on queer identity, or even Helms’s identity models: phases of encounter, immersion, and eventually, a more integrated sense of self.1
But these aren’t strict paths. People loop back. Skip ahead. Stay in certain stages for years — or never reach what textbooks call "integration." And that’s okay. What matters is that having some language for these arcs helps us make sense of the shifts — especially in times when community feels fractured or out of sync.
So what might a neurodivergent identity development arc look like?
The model I’m sketching out here isn’t definitive, but it’s based on themes I’ve seen again and again — personally, clinically, and in community spaces with late-identified and self-recognizing neurodivergent adults. Like other models, it follows a rough sequence. But the journey is rarely linear. People loop back. Get stuck. Jump ahead. Or live in multiple stages at once.
This is not a ladder to climb, but a lens to help us understand ourselves and others with more compassion.
This identity arc most closely reflects the lived experiences of late-identified or self-recognizing neurodivergent adults — particularly those who have spent years masking or passing as neurotypical. It is not meant to speak for all Autistic people, especially those with higher support needs, those with co-occurring intellectual disabilities, or those whose ND identity is shaped by early diagnosis, institutionalization, or limited access to language.
That said, all neurodivergent people move through meaning-making processes — and while the stages may look different, the need for identity affirmation, support, and community remains universal.
Pre-Encounter: Assimilation, Masking and Shame
In this early phase, a person may not yet know they’re neurodivergent — or may suspect, but actively resist the idea. Shaped by dominant ableist narratives, they’ve learned to pathologize or minimize their traits. They may internalize the belief that their differences are personal failings and work hard to “fix” themselves by performing neurotypicality.
Experience: Often unaware of — or resistant to — the possibility of being neurodivergent. Internalized ableism runs deep. There’s usually a strong drive to conform: masking, suppressing sensory needs, overachieving, and pushing beyond capacity. Support needs are often minimized or misinterpreted as personal flaws, leading to cycles of overcompensation and burnout. For some, this is reinforced by external invalidation — being told they are “too capable” to need help.
Common Behaviors: Overachieving, people-pleasing, burnout cycles, minimizing or denying struggles, shame around perceived “failings.”
Emotional Tone: Shame, confusion, loneliness, self-doubt.
Risks: Chronic stress, masking exhaustion, delayed diagnosis, identity confusion, perfectionism burnout.
This phase is often marked by hidden psychological distress — buried beneath high achievement or perfectionism. The emotional cost is high: alienation from self, disconnection, anxiety, and exhaustion.
Encounter: Disruption and Recognition
At some point, something disrupts the existing narrative. A diagnosis, a book, a meme thread, a friend’s story — something reframes their experience. Traits that once felt shameful begin to make sense. There’s often relief … and some disorientation.
Experience: A shift occurs. They begin connecting the dots — realizing past experiences may be part of a broader neurodivergent pattern.
Common Behaviors: Consuming ND content, recontextualizing life events, exploring new language, questioning internalized beliefs, seeking out diagnosis or self-identification.
Strengths: Self-awareness increases. There’s often relief, hope, and a growing sense of clarity.
Risks: Emotional overwhelm, destabilization, a simplified or idealized view of ND identity, and rejection of previous coping strategies.
This is a liminal, tender space. The old identity no longer fits, but the new one isn’t fully formed. They are between worlds.
Immersion: Reclaiming and Pride
Once the new narrative takes hold, many move into a phase of immersion. There’s often a hunger for information, validation, and community. Neurodivergent identity becomes vivid and central — sometimes a form of healing protest.
Experience: Deep engagement with ND identity — characterized by pride, clarity, grief, and anger at systems of oppression.
Common Behaviors: Unmasking, joining ND communities, passionate advocacy, rejecting neurotypical norms.
Strengths: Empowerment, liberation from shame, sense of belonging, clarity of self.
Risks:
Reverse Othering: Viewing neurotypicals only as oppressors.
Rigidity: Difficulty engaging with nuance or differing ND perspectives.
“Superpower” Rhetoric: Idealizing traits while minimizing legitimate challenges.
Victim Identity: Identifying solely through harm, limiting access to agency.
Support Needs Invisibility: In the early phases of reclaiming ND identity, there may be limited awareness of those in the community with higher support needs. Pride and empowerment can sometimes coexist with implicit bias — leading to idealized representations of Autistic identity that overlook or exclude those who require more visible or intensive support.
This phase can be vibrant and healing — but also precarious. Without space for nuance, it may become hard to access compassion for others or to hold the complexity of diverse neurodivergent experiences.
Integration: Rooted and Relational Identity
Over time, identity begins to settle. There’s less urgency to explain or prove, and more spaciousness to be. The ND identity is still central — but now held alongside other parts of self.
Experience: A more grounded, flexible narrative emerges. ND identity is deeply integrated, but not all-defining. There is space for contradiction — for joy and grief, connection and difference.
Common Behaviors: Relational growth, boundary work, self-compassion, system navigation, cross-neurotype collaboration, and increasing intersectional advocacy.
Strengths: Psychological resilience, relational maturity, greater authenticity, values clarity, commitment to collective liberation.
Risks: Systemic barriers persist; community fatigue; the challenge of staying grounded while still resisting injustice.
Integration doesn’t mean everything is resolved. It means being at home in yourself — even in a world that doesn’t always make space for that. And it often means widening your lens — recognizing that your liberation is intertwined with the liberation of others across lines of race, class, gender, disability, and support needs.
Notes on the Model
This arc is not linear. It bends, loops, and unfolds differently based on culture, class, race, gender, disability, and access to language or diagnosis. And “integration” isn’t a final form. It’s a deeper kind of self-trust — even when the world doesn’t reflect us back with kindness
Theoretical Touchstones
To be clear. This is me workshopping ideas, and I’m not suggesting this is “the ND identity development model.” It’s me putting one out there to start a conversation. And this proposed model draws inspiration from several identity frameworks:
Cross’s Nigrescence Model (1991), particularly the encounter and immersion-emersion stages
Cass’s Homosexual Identity Formation Model (1979), with attention to disruption and community
Gill’s Disability Identity Model (1997), centering internal and systemic dynamics
Sue & Sue’s R/CID Model (2012), especially the shifting relationships to dominant norms
But neurodivergent identity brings something unique. It blends the psychological with the sensory, the structural with the cognitive. It shapes perception, communication, regulation — and the stories we tell about what it means to be human.
But Megan Anna … Why Are We Talking About This?
Okay — this might feel like a few stones’ throw away from the news cycle. But here’s where I make the connection.
How we experience comments like RFK Jr.’s, how we respond to moments of harm or erasure — it’s deeply shaped by where we are in our identity development arc.
RFK Jr. recently made sweeping, dehumanizing comments about Autistic people. During a press event, he claimed that autism “destroys” families and went on to say:
“They’ll never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
Many of us felt the sting. The erasure. The ableism. The flattening of Autistic lives into deficit and despair.
But what hurt just as much were the responses from within our own community. People saying, “He wasn’t talking about me — I’m not that kind of Autistic,” or rushing to distance themselves from those with higher support needs.
And I want to offer this gently: that kind of reaction doesn’t mean someone is bad. It often means they’re in a different place on their identity development arc.
These would be views we might hear when one is in the immersion phase of neurodivergent identity development.
To be honest, I sometimes struggle to hold patience for those in the Immersion phase — even though I spent time there myself. It’s an important stage of development. But it can also be a charged one, especially when it intersects with whiteness and unexamined privilege.
When Immersion Becomes a Sticking Point
And here is where this connects to Victor Perez, to the broader community, and to the dynamics of racism and erasure.
I suspect it’s especially common for white Autistic people to get stuck in the immersion phase. And when that happens, it can cause real harm. Harm to Autistic people with higher support needs. Harm to racialized Autistic people. Harm to collective liberation.
Why?
Because immersion often centers a sense of “I’m good, and here’s why — I’m proud to be ND, I’m accomplished, I’m not like those other people…”
We’re more prone to white supremacist frameworks here — even unintentionally. In this phase, we’re often newly accessing our anger and grief (important developmental processes), but we may not yet see where we are enacting harm or failing to take responsibility.
And here’s something I want to say … something that feels uncomfortable, but true.
When I first realized I was Autistic, I felt relief — beyond the usual “finally, I understand myself” kind of liberation. There was another kind of relief, one that crept in from the shadows and felt harder to name.
It was the comfort of having a crystallized identity — one that gave me distance from my own privilege2
As a white person (with several other markers of privilege), I had long carried shame and guilt. And neurodivergence gave me an invitation — finally! — to identify with a marginalized group. I wanted to take that invitation and run. I wanted to shed my discomfort. To bypass the tension of my privilege by clinging to the one identity that felt “othered.”
But thankfully, I noticed that urge. I got curious. And I began to understand it as a kind of developmental bypass — a desire to escape discomfort, to find faux relief in being marginalized rather than doing the work of unlearning power.
And I think this might be one reason some white Autistic folks get stuck in the Immersion phase. There can be a deep desire to align with the oppressed rather than reckon with our role in systems of privilege. And without realizing it, we may start to use our ND identity as a shield — sidestepping accountability, nuance, or intersectional awareness.
And I want to name here: I’m speaking particularly to white Autistic folks — especially those of us who don’t hold other marginalized identities. Myself included.3
Parallel Arcs: ND Identity and Anti-Racism
There’s another arc here — one that moves from pre-awareness into deeper awareness around intersectionality, anti-racism, and ableism. And if we want to be Autistic allies to the rest of our community — especially those most marginalized — this developmental journey is just as vital.
But when we get stuck in Immersion, it can stall that growth. It can keep us in a kind of tunnel vision — focused on reclaiming our own identity, but missing the broader context of power, privilege, and interconnected oppression.
Here’s the thing, though: I’m not naming this to shame anyone. I’m naming it to normalize it.
This is all deeply human. These are the arcs so many of us walk. And we all have to start somewhere.
We were born into systems that fed us racism, ableism, and transphobia from the jump. If you're a few steps back on the arc of unlearning, it simply means… that’s where you are. Not where you’ll stay. And that’s okay.
As Kali said in our conversation:
“You actually have to have some compassion for yourself and understand that you’re on this developmental arc—and that that’s okay… People need to love themselves even when they’re flawed… You have to love yourself to think you’re capable of change. We don’t build communities on shame.”
That stayed with me.
Because shame doesn’t move us forward — compassion does.
And to be clear, I’m not speaking from some mountaintop — I’m still in it too. Still learning. Still unlearning. Still stepping in it, getting it wrong, and coming back with more humility.
And while these identity arcs can help us understand our own reactions and growth, they also point us toward something bigger: Whose experiences are centered — and whose are left out — when we talk about autism.
Because as we focus on our own developmental journeys, we also have to ask:
What happens when entire parts of our community are not even invited into the conversation?
And Then There’s the Grief of Being Unseen: Victor Perez
Victor Perez was a young Autistic Latino man with high support needs, killed by police last week. The pain of his death is staggering — and yet, in so many corners of the autism community, it passed with barely a whisper.
This week, I sat down with Kali (@BlackSpectrumScholar) to talk about how this moment is landing in their body and community. When I asked how they were holding it all, they named it simply, powerfully:
“Ain’t I autistic?”
It echoes Sojourner Truth’s historic words: “Ain’t I a woman?” And it pierces right to the heart of what so many racialized and high-support-needs Autistic people live with — being erased not just by the world, but within neurodivergent spaces, too.
As Kali put it: “We have to ask to be considered. Even to get the bare minimum.”
And that tells us everything about who gets centered when we talk about autism.
Identity Arcs as a Lens — for ND Identity and Anti-Racism
One of the threads I’ve been sitting with lately is how the arc of neurodivergent identity development often mirrors the process of becoming anti-racist.
Both require confronting painful truths.
Both ask us to unlearn dominant narratives.
Both move us toward a deeper, more embodied self-awareness.
But identity work isn’t linear — it’s recursive.
It bends and loops.
And it’s shaped by social location, trauma history, access to language, and cultural context.
That’s why self-compassion is so vital in this moment — a reminder Kali named so beautifully in our conversation.
If you’re feeling raw, activated, or ashamed by what’s unfolding —
You’re not broken.
If you’ve reacted in ways you regret—
That doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
If you’re unsure where you land —
You’re exactly where you are.
It simply means this is the part of the developmental arc you're on.
It doesn’t mean you're a bad person.
It doesn’t mean you need to sink into shame.
It just means: this is your spot on the development arc right now.
And if you can meet yourself with compassion here, it becomes so much easier to keep moving forward.
Growth Over Rigidity
There is one other thing Kali said that’s stayed with me all week:
“We’ve got to stay curious — or we let the cognitive inflexibility win.”
Curiosity is a form of resistance.
It keeps us from shutting down.
It creates space for change.
So when we say things that hurt others — or realize we’ve spoken from a reactive place — it doesn’t mean we’re bad. And we don’t need to collapse in shame.
In fact, that’s when we most need to stay.
To say, “Okay, this is where I am in my developmental arc. And instead of spiraling into shame, I’m going to offer myself compassion and get curious and what this means — so I can keep doing the work.”
That’s growth. That’s movement.
That’s how we become more of who we are.
With care, always
So wherever you are on your arc — newly diagnosed, long-time self-advocate, tired of explaining, or still finding your words — I hope you’ll meet yourself with softness this week.
And if you’re someone I’ve overlooked or hurt in the past — especially during the glory of my immersion days (or the moments I still slip into it) — I’m deeply sorry.
Thank you for sticking with me, for your patience, and for helping me unlearn. I’m still on the arc—still moving toward goodness.
May we all keep doing the slow, sacred work of building neurodivergent community that’s spacious enough to hold all of us.
With you,
Megan Anna
Support Links
If you found value in these thoughts or in my conversation with Kali and are in a space to comfortably give, can you do me a favor and buy my new friend Kali a coffee? 🖤 👉🏻 Buy Kali a Coffee ☕️
This is a good week to support the Black and Brown Autistic creators in our community who do so much underappreciated labor. 🙏🏽✨
Instead of asking them questions or relying on free labor, what if we asked — how can I support you this week?
And if you’re looking for another way to show support this week, please consider contributing to the family of Victor Perez:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-for-victor-perez
In moments of crisis, calling the police can escalate rather than de-escalate—especially for Black and Brown Autistic individuals.
Don't Call the Police is a directory of community-based alternatives. It’s a resource we all need to have bookmarked.
Identity Development Models Drawn From For Inspiration:
Cross, W.E. (1991). Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American Identity. Temple University Press.
Cass, V. C. (1979). Homosexual identity formation: A theoretical model. Journal of Homosexuality, 4(3), 219–235. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v04n03_01
Gill, C. J. (1997). Four types of integration in disability identity development. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, 9(1), 39–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1052-2263(97)00020-2
Sue, D. W., Sue, D., Neville, H. A., & Smith, L. (2022). Counseling the culturally diverse: Theory and practice. John Wiley & Sons.
Helms, J.E. (1995). An update of Helm’s White and People of Color racial identity models. In J.G. Ponterotto et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Multicultural Counseling.
While I do hold other marginalized identities, I also experience significant social buffering around them. I identify as queer, but came into that identity after claiming my Autistic identity—and I recognize the privilege of being in a cis-het marriage, which shields me from much of the systemic and social marginalization many queer folks face. I also live with chronic illness and medical disability, but those experiences unfolded alongside or after my autism discovery, and my other privileges—like holding a doctorate—afford me flexibility, access, and legitimacy that many disabled people are denied (for example, being able to work and write while lying on the couch).
See above footnote.
As a mother of two profoundly autistic children, I deeply appreciate the insights shared here. However, I feel compelled to highlight a facet of the autism spectrum that often remains underrepresented. While discussions around neurodivergent identity arcs are vital, they sometimes overlook the realities faced by families like mine.
In our daily lives, we’re navigating challenges that extend beyond identity formation—managing elopement risks, addressing severe sensory processing issues, and providing continuous care for basic needs. These experiences don’t negate the importance of embracing neurodivergent identities but underscore the need for a more inclusive dialogue that encompasses the full spectrum of autism.
I share this not to diminish any perspective but to advocate for a broader conversation that acknowledges and supports all experiences within the neurodivergent community.
Thank you for this. I’m noticing my own initial rejection around the immersion phase and I’m going to explore that a bit with curiosity.
I appreciate you naming this, and including conversations like the one with Kali and the one with Tiffany Hammond. It has helped me get to a more nuanced point of view more quickly on my journey.