The Neurodivergent Love Language: Notes on Truth and the 'Village'

I’ve been thinking lately about the specific brand of exhaustion that comes with being an autistic girl in a world that insists on subtext. We are constantly accused of "gossiping" or being "catty" when, in reality, we are just exchanging data.

For many of us, social norms aren’t natural laws; they’re puzzles we’re trying to solve in real-time. When we share information about group dynamics, we aren't trying to tear someone down—we’re trying to build a map. We’re trying to understand the terrain so we don't trip. To us, information is morally neutral. It’s just the "what is."

But there’s a second layer to this: the neurodivergent sense of justice.

There is this internal, vibrating need to hold the people in our circle accountable—not because we’re "judgmental," but because we believe in the integrity of the village. While others might prioritize "keeping the peace" (which is often just code for "enabling the harm"), we prioritize the truth. We don't see "protecting a friend's reputation" as more important than "protecting the group from a friend's bad behavior."

It’s not drama. It’s a survival instinct wrapped in a high-definition moral compass.

It comes from a place of moral neutrality which is important to consider when taking the anthropology of the group chat, so to say, into account.

The concept of moral neutrality is hindered by binary thinking and it often starts with religious indoctrination. We’re taught to view everything as a strict "this or that", good or bad, medicine or poison, self-care or escapism. But the truth is, most things are just tools, and their morality is defined by the specifics of the situation.

Gossip is one of those tools. We’ve been conditioned to think that whispering in a corner is "catty," but if you look at the actual mechanics of it, it’s a sophisticated evolutionary mechanism. It’s social grooming. It’s how a community maintains its health via the exchange of information. We confirm who is safe and who isn't.

When men do it in a boardroom, it’s called "market intelligence." But the second a woman warns her friend about a predatory guy or a toxic boss, it’s dismissed as "idle drama." Calling it gossip is a tool of the patriarchy. It’s a way to keep women subjugated by suppressing our communication with each other. It’s not just "drama"; it’s the cultivation of community and familial bonds, which to this day is a skillset most men struggle with. It's the further stigmatization of what are natural instincts as being insignificant.

Which brings us to what I have come to call the "Village Celebrity Paradox" (although I'm sure there is someone smarter that has already coined a more official term) where we often struggle to deprogram ourselves from binary thinking when it comes to "influence." We are quick to say we shouldn't make statements on women’s bodies, and I agree, but silence is just as much of a statement as talking is, because there isn't automatically inherent neutrality in refraining and abstaining. The choice itself is still participation. We cling to moral superiority to disguise our cowardice.

And at the end of the day, it's about the paradox of tolerance. Whether it's feminism, right versus left wing politics, or the village celebrity paradox - people consistently fail to detect that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. If not having discourse over an issue that could affect the entire village is literally HURTING the village, the refrain from "gossip" becomes antithetical to the original intention. Much in the way choice feminism has forgotten that the point of feminism itself is to free women from the oppression of the patriarchy.

When we discuss the impact of a celebrity’s aesthetic or their choices, we aren’t necessarily sacrificing the villager, we’re prioritizing the village. This is especially true for the up-and-coming generation of teens being inundated with a societal return to an obsession with thinness, that was accurately and easily predictable in large part due to the predictability that "herd mind set" often encourages.

Being a celebrity is fundamentally unnatural, in the same way, that being a billionaire is unnatural and just because something is unnatural doesn't mean it's intrinsically immoral. When we say that a certain level of fame and money is unnatural we mean that it is an imbalance of power that the human mind was not designed to flourish in because the circumstances separate you from the human experience itself.

When someone makes millions off our focus and support, their influence is a public matter. Gossip is how adjustments in society actually happen. Part of being a celebrity is accepting that your influence will be discussed, not just praised. It doesn't matter if they are the nicest people in the world; they still have an impact.

And the hardest part, the people don't want to accept is that there will always be the possibility of "petty gossip." No ideology or system is perfect and clinging to that fact in order to justify tolerating harmful influence in the name of moral superiority is in fact hyper-individualistic and very anti-village in its inherent concept.

We have to move past the idea that talking about someone is always vindictive. We have to understand that being able to hold multiple truths is the groundwork for nuance. Sometimes, for those of us who see the world in high-contrast truths, it’s the only way to maintain the social fabric.