Neurodivergence is always on my mind, literally and figuratively. I think about neurodivergence because I am neurodivergent; but in being neurodivergent, I am also metaphorized as having been taken over by neurodivergence, body-snatcher style. As in, neurodivergent people are often presumed to have a prior core self that is neurotypical, and their becoming neurodivergent is a matter of parasitism—as if an entity named autism or borderline personality disorder or PTSD wanders into our craniums and takes up residence. In these constructions, “on” is at once a metaphor and a literality: disability is presumed to layer itself atop some prior entity, whether brain or cochlea or liver. There is a core self, and in comes the crip, ready to set itself upon, ready to switch itself on, ready to don.

Neurodivergence is always on my mind, in the thinking-about sense, because neurodivergence is always in flux. Neurodivergence might be on, but it might also be around, between, beyond. Neurodivergence queerly drifts. For instance, I have long known that I am autistic, and at many junctures I have written about this publicly. But even in knowing that I am autistic, that knowing is always an object in motion. And nowhere has this coming-to-know felt clearer to me than it has with the tenuous relationship I experience between autism and OCD. Until recently, I have never been fully certain whether I have OCD. Therapists have sometimes remarked that autism describes everything about me that OCD can, in effect canceling out the possibilities of OCD. And yet therapists have also offered the exact opposite, asserting that not only am I autistic and obsessive-compulsive, but that I embody everything under the neurotic sun in the DSM.

While what I describe above sounds more like the flux of pathological categories, I mean to direct our attention to the inherent motion of neuroqueer knowing, neuroqueer becoming—wandering lines that are interbodily, affecting how we move and cogitate and dwell. An autistic friend once remarked to me that good obsessions are describable through autism, whereas bad obsessions are describable through OCD. Some days later, a social worker quipped that one could only be diagnosed with OCD if the experience of obsession is distressing. This binary—between obsessive pleasure and obsessive distress—feels so settled, so lifeless, so self-defeating.

I am also stuck on how knowing, in this instance, unfurls as an entity that is contingent on description. In other words, OCD is transformed into something at once epistemological and ontological, as a being-known-state that is preconditioned on one's ability to form and fashion it via wordstuff. But wordstuff feels the stuff of lies: when does wordstuff burn? when does wordstuff matter? when does matter stuff words? when does matter stuff words greyly, words that become stuffed because they are compulsions, compelled, blips and bursts that thrush my adrenaline, careen my ribcage, move me from doorway to stoveway to doorway to stoveway to doorway to stoveway and back again? When is description motion, and when is description a lie?

A recent therapist suggested that I am most describable through the scrupulosity subtype of OCD. It is an OCD experience centered around morality and harm. Will I set my dog on fire? What happens if I lie while teaching, and tell my whole class that I have seven children, or that I used to be a pilot, or that I have the power to teleport to Alberta, Canada when I look at it on a map? Will I set my dog on fire? Will I lie? Will I set my house on fire? Do I deserve to die?

It is easy to describe my obsession with harming others as inherently negative, just as it is easy to describe my obsession with the Electric Light Orchestra as inherently positive. But just as no obsessive-compulsion is value neutral, neither is it easily diagrammable: These are not tidy, pat narratives. Rather, these neuroqueer forms are always in motion, dispersing across numerous bodily and ecological sites, ever-shifting our relations to gender and eros and microwaves and dog shit. I am OCD as much as is my surround. Where do my thoughts wander, and how does fire enable my cognition to move? Where will these neurons take me?