Two Infinity Loops

I'd never seen a neurodivergence pin at a tech conference before. I grabbed one, then had to go look up what I'd just said about myself.

There was a bin of pins at the AWS Summit.

Not the lanyard. A separate table near registration, with little enamel pins you could grab and clip to your badge. Pronouns: he/him, she/her, they/them. A few I recognized, a few I didn’t. And one bin of small rainbow infinity loops, labeled for neurodivergence.

I’d never seen that before. Pronoun pins have been around. But a conference putting out a neurodivergent marker next to the pronoun ones, like it was just another option on the table, was new to me. I grabbed a few without really thinking about it and clipped one on. Then I kept moving, back into the Javits Center and a few thousand people there to talk about AI and cloud infrastructure.

It wasn’t until I got home that I looked it up, and found I’d been carrying around a small piece of an argument I didn’t know existed. There are two versions of the loop. The rainbow one stands for neurodiversity broadly: autism, ADHD, dyslexia, the whole range. The gold one stands for autism specifically, gold because the chemical symbol is Au, the first two letters of autism. Both replaced the old puzzle-piece symbol, which a lot of autistic people reject for implying something missing.

I’d grabbed the rainbow one. There is a more specific one, the gold loop, and I hadn’t known it existed.

The obvious version of this story is that I picked the wrong pin. It is more complicated than that, and the complication is the whole reason I reached for the rainbow.

I was diagnosed with ADD and Asperger’s. Both of those labels have since been renovated out from under me. People see ADD, read ADHD, and picture someone bouncing off the walls, and I am not hyperactive, and never have been. The inattentive presentation is a different thing wearing a similar name. Asperger’s got folded into autism spectrum disorder, which on paper is tidier. In practice it means the word I’d made peace with disappeared, and the one that replaced it lands, for me, too strong. When I say autistic, people reach for a picture that isn’t me.

So I have two diagnoses and neither of their names works. One gets misread, one got deleted, and the one that took its place feels like a size too big. That is the actual reason the umbrella fits. Neurodivergent is not me being vague. It is the only word in the pile that doesn’t come with a wrong picture attached.

Which is what the gold pin would have done: named the specific thing, accurately, on its own terms. I felt no pull toward it. The specific thing has spent decades being named in ways that miss, and I reached for the rainbow because it is the one label that has never once made someone picture the wrong person. Finding the more precise option and not wanting it was not a correction. It was information.

The gold loop and the rainbow loop are not right and wrong. They are two settings on a dial: how much do you want named. Which way you turn it is an identity decision, and most people never get to make it out loud, because most of the time there is no pin and no bin and no label at all.

I know what the bottom of that dial looks like.

A while back a friend was telling me about his kid. The kid was struggling in some specific, familiar ways, and as my friend described them, I was quietly checking boxes. Each thing he mentioned was an early sign. I’d seen every one of them before. He wasn’t making the connection. He loved his kid and was worried about his kid and was describing, in detail, a neurotype he didn’t have a name for, to a person who could see it clearly and didn’t know how to say so without overstepping.

That is the dial turned all the way down. No symbol, no label, no shared vocabulary, just a parent and a child and a gap where the recognition should be. The pins at the Summit are the opposite end: identity made legible enough to hand someone a word for it. Most real life happens in between, closer to the friend than to the bin.

There is no pin for the in-between, just the friction of being read in real time. I go quiet in a meeting because I am turning something over, and it reads as checked-out, or disengaged. I get a few steps ahead of where a conversation is and answer the question two questions early, and it reads as impatience, or arrogance, or not listening. None of those are what is happening. But the person across from me is working from a picture I did not choose and cannot see, and most of the time I never find out which wrong picture they landed on. I just feel the room cool a little, and adjust.

No pin fixes that. But the line between gold and rainbow is worth keeping, because the distance between them is the distance between two real ways of being in the world, and people are standing in both.

I still have the rainbow pins in a drawer. I haven’t clipped one to anything since the Summit.

The pin was right. I just had to go home and find out exactly why.

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