More interestingly, why do some people—seemingly independent of specific life events, personal histories, or even "personality"—appear to lack a capacity for self‑awareness altogether? And what do we actually mean when we say that someone is or is not self‑aware? Is an inclination toward the existential a permanent mode of being, or merely a heightened frequency of exploring questions about meaning, identity, and purpose?
These questions are not simply abstract ruminations for me.
As a child, I was diagnosed as “gifted.” People often said that I was bright, advanced, and “special.” And yet, I was equally unruly, emotionally disregulated, and generally unhappy. As early as elementary school, I could sense that I was different from my peers, whether through direct experience or the constant reinforcement of adults who framed my differences as exceptional.
Over time, this awareness produced a lot if internal struggle: conflict with others, difficulty fitting into expected social roles, and persistent emotional distress were all issues that I couldn't even fully identify. What I did have, however, was an early and intensive/exhaustive awareness of myself; one that often felt less like a gift and more like a burden.
Asynchronous Development
In the late 1990s, “Gifted” or “Gifted and Talented” was a common diagnosis for a particular kind of neurodivergent child. One influential concept to emerge from this literature was asynchronous development, first articulated in Giftedness: The View Within by Michael Morelock published in 1992.
Asynchronous development refers to the uneven rate at which different domains of a child’s development progress. Intellectual, emotional, social, and physical capacities may advance at radically different speeds, producing a child who is, in a very real sense, “many ages at once.” This unevenness often demands significant adjustment from parents, teachers, and counselors—and, perhaps most acutely, from the child themselves.
Many gifted children of the 1990s were particularly advanced intellectually. This emphasis makes sense in historical context: intelligence, IQ, academic performance, and scientific aptitude were highly prized. But as mental‑health awareness has increased, so too has recognition of twice‑exceptionality (2e)—individuals who are both gifted and neurodivergent in other ways, such as ADHD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, or learning disabilities.
The frequency of gifted children also diagnosed with ADHD has become especially notable, prompting research into correlations between intelligence, attention regulation, and executive function. In my case, my own struggles with focus and behavior at school led to an early ADHD diagnosis. My mother, in a loving but misguided attempt at positivity, framed this not as a defect but as an extension of my “gift”. Ironically, this led her to treat is as something to be managed through patience, skill‑building, and self‑acceptance rather than suppression, which had a positive effect in the end regardless of the intent.
Today, similar patterns are described through terms like AuDHD, reflecting the overlapping signals of autism and ADHD. These overlaps raise an important question: what exactly are the signals of giftedness, ADHD, etc. and why do they so often coincide with other forms of neurodivergence?
Giftedness, twice‑exceptionality, and even the romanticized idea of “genius” all sit at the intersection of potential and realization. High cognitive capacity alone does not produce meaningful outcomes; it must coexist with motivation, regulation, resilience, and opportunity. Asynchrony can just as easily impede flourishing as enable it.
Regardless of how we label these categories, their very existence points toward a broader truth: neurodivergence is not an exception to humanity but an expression of its diversity.
Neurodiversity and Existential Sensitivity
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| source: tendingpaths |
The image above depicts a simplified but interesting model of (only a subset of) common neurodiversity traits, with overlapping characteristics among ADHD, autism, and giftedness. In the model, one detail caught my eye under giftedness: early concern for (and ongoing need to explore) existential issues. At first glance, this seems odd. Why should existential questioning be associated with giftedness at all? And why is it exclusive to giftedness in the model?
Many gifted children exhibit intense emotional responses and early preoccupations with death, morality, justice, and meaning. In psychology, these traits are often described as overexcitabilities, a concept drawn from Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. Dąbrowski proposed that significant personality development arises not from stability, but from inner conflict—periods of psychological “disintegration” that allow an individual to move from a primitive, self‑centered existence toward a more autonomous, ethical, and altruistic self.
In this framework, anxiety, depression, and existential distress are not merely pathologies to be eliminated. They are catalysts—painful but potentially necessary stages in the development of a fully integrated person. For individuals with heightened sensitivity and awareness, these stages may arrive earlier, last longer, or cut more deeply.
As an adult, this perspective reinforced my belief that giftedness is best understood as a specific form of neurodiversity; it is simply a difference in how certain minds make perceptions, process, and the intensity of emotional responses. This aligns with the broader modern psychological movement to understand giftedness not as superiority but rather as a cognitive and emotional difference.
A Simple Framework for Neurodiversity
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| source: mixam.co.uk |
The terms neurodivergence and neurodiversity carry subtly different connotations. Divergence suggests deviation i.e. movement away from a norm. Diversity emphasizes variation i.e. the expression of a system’s capacity to exist in many forms. Neither term is strictly correct, but each reveals how we frame meaning. It is often more useful to consider the individual as "divergent" to help understand their unique behaviors, but more useful to consider the larger community of individuals (i.e. humanity) by its neurodiversity.
To this effect, I find it helpful to imagine neurodiversity as a continuous spectrum, much like a color wheel. Specific labels (e.g. ADHD, autism, giftedness) function as marker of language boundaries, only roughly defining regions of shared characteristics. The intensity of a trait determines how strongly a signal is expressed, while proximity on the spectrum explains why certain traits overlap and elude clear categorization.
Neurotypical individuals are not off the spectrum; they simply do not express particular signals with enough frequency or intensity to merit labeling. Moreover, the boundaries between "categories" vary not only between diagnoses, but between individuals. The labels themselves are only approximations, and are only useful as diagnostic tools as opposed to definitive descriptions of a self.
In this sense, the emergence of "neurodivergence" is inherently humanistic. It reflects how we as humans naturally learn; we distinguish extremes before subtleties, circles from triangles before hexagons from octagons. Psychological categories have evolved in much the same way. Thus in our early characterization of these diversity phenomena, the disambiguation was more general but less accurate, and as we continue to research, question, and learn the boundaries become much less salient.
Yet many neurodivergent individuals experience a real and profound sense of difference that goes beyond preferences or personality. It feels almost ontological, as though what defines the self is fundamentally misaligned with what defines others. For me, this raised an unsettling question: if there is a meaningful difference in how we are (or have the capacity to come to be), then perhaps there is some implicit "standard" for what life is supposed to look like.
Philosopher Christine Korsgaard argues that humans possess what she calls species‑being; we see ourselves as members of a shared community, and we evaluate our lives by how they contribute to that whole. For Korsgaard, this means, in part, that “[w]e think of the members of our species as being members of a common community and, importantly, we think of our own lives as being, in various ways, contributions to the life of that larger community”. The consequence is that we see our own good as tied to the life of that larger group, in that “we think of our lives as meaningful or not depending on what sort of contribution to the life of the community they are” and we measure that by comparing our "performance" against others, who are represented (on average) by the concept of the "neurotypical" (and more-so when observed in media, culture, etc.).
Where, then, does this leave the gifted child? Or the boy with ADHD? Or the woman who earns a PhD in epidemiology only to later learn she is autistic? When difference alienates one from the very community that defines their sense of meaning, existential questions are no longer optional. They are unavoidable.
Exploring Neurodivergent Signals Through Existentialism
Robert Nozick posited that meaning in life requires self-transcendence. According to Nozick, “for a life to have meaning, it must connect with other things, with some things or values beyond itself.” This means that the very source of meaning that we identify takes us beyond our own narrow limits, binding us to people, projects, ideals, or causes that exceed the self.
For neurodivergent children, this movement beyond the self often begins early and under less forgiving conditions. Chronic misalignment with social expectations, sensory environments, or behavioral norms forces an early confrontation with personal limits: limits of control, of comprehension, of belonging. When the "self" repeatedly fails to achieve stability through conformity alone, it is compelled to search for alternative strategies that make assimilation within the world possible. In this way, self-transcendence does not begin as a philosophical aspiration but rather a practical necessity; coping mechanisms serve as adaptive responses to the discovery that one’s immediate way of being is insufficient for navigating the world as it is structured.
Neurodivergent individuals are often forced to develop coping strategies early in life. These strategies tend to take one of two forms. The first is suppression of signals, which is the more common for childhood. This includes masking behaviors, emotional inhibition, compliance, self-silencing, or the internalization of shame; this form focuses on reducing friction by minimizing observable differences. While suppression can provide short-term safety or acceptance, it often comes at the cost of authenticity, self-trust, and long-term psychological stability. As a result, therapy is often required later in life to "unlearn" these coping skills and identify a different approach.
The second strategy is reflection, abstraction, and meaning-making. This typically emerges only after repeated encounters with the limits of suppression, i.e. when it becomes clear, through trial and error, that hiding the self cannot fully resolve one's underlying dissonance. Reflection allows the individual to step back from immediate experience, to ask why the mismatch exists, and what it signifies about the self and the world. Abstraction enables patterns to be recognized across experiences. Meaning-making offers a way to integrate suffering into a coherent narrative rather than treating it as division, deficit, or failure.
In neurotypical development, these same capacities also emerge, but often later in life and in safer contexts, i.e. after a foundation of social belonging, validation, and stability has already been established. The individual may choose to explore questions of identity in order to form personal meaning once the basic conditions of acceptance are secure. By contrast, neurodivergent individuals are frequently pushed toward such inquiry prematurely, without the buffer of safety that makes exploration optional rather than urgent. Therefore neurodivergence can function as an existential accelerant; it increases the likelihood that existential questions—those about meaning, identity, responsibility, and belonging—will arise earlier, more frequently, or with greater intensity than they do for neurotypical peers.
Existentialism offers frameworks for understanding the human condition without appealing to fixed essences or predetermined purposes. It invites each of us to ask reflective questions about who we are, how we relate to others, and what responsibility we bear for the shape of our lives. For neurodivergent individuals, this can be clarifying; existential thought provides us with a language for difference without reducing it to defect, deficiency, or communal divergence. Even clinical psychology has begun to explore existential approaches as therapeutic tools for neurodivergent individuals.
One story that has long resonated with me comes from existentialist Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity only to watch it fall again. His story embodies the absurdity of human suffering. Yet, in Camus' work, he concludes that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” This happiness is not naive optimism, but the result of a similar lucid self-awareness: Sisyphus knows what a life without this suffering could be, knows his fate, knows it will not change, and yet affirms his struggle nonetheless.
This attitude of bold self‑awareness paired with defiant acceptance feels intimately familiar to many neurodivergent lives, especially those who no longer fear their neurodiversity. And while it doesn't answer the questions I continue to ask myself, it has helped me to ask better questions that beneficially serve my life, decisions, and personal philosophy.
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