by Aiyana Goodfellow, founder & executive director of NEUROMANCERS
I was eight the first time I felt overwhelming, numbing sadness. I was ten years old the first time I considered death as a freedom. I was fourteen the first time I lost control of my body through physical and verbal tics. I was fifteen when I found out I was autistic. And that was when the world started to make more sense to me.
I was used to being an outsider. I was used to being ‘different’ to my peers. Usually, I was proud of it. Nothing about these other children’s lives felt true to me, and nothing about the way most of them responded to me made me feel like they connected to me either. But to be able to put a name to something that could explain the strange chasm between my existence and the lives of most people around me was somewhat revolutionary.
I wanted more of that feeling, and searched for a space where I could explore who I was from this new lens. What I found was disappointing: narratives that encouraged me to assimilate into the schooling system and workforce. But by my mid-teens, I had already decided to be an enemy to all things capitalism. I needed a space that felt truly politicised and aligned with my already well-formed abolitionist principles. I needed something that felt like a political home, a community of people who would take care of each other in a way I knew wider society wouldn’t. As I imagined how this space would take shape, I discovered more and more how society was failing us, but also how much we were failing ourselves.
The neurodivergent community has an assimilation problem: too much emphasis is given to maximising productivity or exceeding in the workplace and educational system – even in our own community. Being neurodivergent is not an automatically radicalising experience, especially when one is insulated by racial or class privilege. When any community is severed from their political context, they become at risk of minimising or underestimating their own freedom. In our case, neurodivergent existence becomes individualised and problematised as something to wrestle control over, rather than embrace.
Whilst our survival under capitalism is often reliant on our ability to navigate these systems, this cannot be our only — or most significant — goal. So-called support that focuses on conformity, rather than community and personal empowerment, fails us. It inevitably favours those who can be seen as more ‘palatable’, inevitably separating us from our mad, mentally ill, intellectually disabled, and traumatised kin (who all belong and exist under the neurodivergent umbrella). Those who ever struggle to, or are not able to, conform can be left with a sense of inadequacy at best, or become victim to state-sanctioned violence at worst.
I was lucky to have developed divergent pride early in life. I knew that I could not be defined by oppressive ideologies, the underestimation of closed-minded adults, nor even my questionable inner fears. Because despite my rather irrepressible anxiety, I have always had self-belief, a foundation that has driven me to pen and publish my own books on anti-speciesist and anti-child theory, to pursue a career in acting, and to teach courses and workshops to humans across the world, most of whom are ten or twenty years my senior. I have an audacity that few young people are encouraged to possess.
However, many of us living in anti-child societies have our pride, confidence, and rebellious DELINQUENCY violently bullied out of us before we reach adulthood, by the familial, educational, and religious pillars of patriarchy. We arrive at adulthood with the promise of freedom, only to become systematically exhausted and terrorised by the horrors of bills, rent, and taxes. The wisdom of youth is undermined by the realist rationale of the grown ups. It’s only when you join them that you begin to understand how most of them don’t fundamentally disagree with revolution, but that they’ve simply given up on the possibility.
This experience and wisdom led me to found NEUROMANCERS in 2021, when I was fifteen, because too many of us have fallen out of love with ourselves (or never fell in love in the first place). To NEUROMANCE means ‘to fall in love with (neuro)divergence’. This practice invites you to be radically loving towards every part of yourself, even and especially those parts we are taught are ‘wrong’ or ‘disordered’. NEUROMANCING is not a patriarchal love, it is not about toxic positivity or perfect romance. It is real love. The kind of love that fights to be: it is queer, and Black, and rageful, and hopeful. It is revolutionary love.
In my ‘How to NEUROMANCE’ workshops, I ask participants:
How would it feel to fall in love with the unloveable?
How would it feel to uplift the parts of you that have been discarded?
How would it feel to unfreeze the frozen; to reanimate the buried?
For every day I’ve wanted to die, there are days I’ve wanted to live. For every moment of pain, there has been joy so powerful my stomach has ached from laughter. For everyone we have lost to the abuse, violence, and neglect of our social systems, there are thousands born into them each day who could experience so much better. We owe it to each other to make space for all of it, the hard and the soft, the easy and the difficult. We owe it to each other to leave the world better than we entered it. We owe it to each other to diverge from the norms that are keeping us trapped.
This is what NEUROMANCERS aims to achieve. NEUROMANCERS is a peer-led organisation providing abolitionist, autonomous, and accessible mental health care to the neurodivergent+ community.
Our value of abolition highlights the fact that psychiatry and traditional mental health systems are failing their claim to ‘care’ and succeeding in their underlying goal of pathologisation and (re-)traumatisation. We know we must (continue to) build anew.
We honour each other’s autonomy: we know our own minds and bodies best, and if we struggle to, it’s only because we have been disempowered from exploring further.
We will always be community and peer-led. The principle of access means we prioritise including those who experience multiple forms of marginalisation, especially Black and/or LGBTQ+ communities.
We use the term neurodivergent+ to make space for our whole community, including those who may not explicitly identify as neurodivergent but experience similar or overlapping discriminations.
Whilst the DIY culture of creating informal networks for mental health support is beautiful and necessary, it is also essential that we have robust ‘higher level of care’ options as traditional systems become more hostile and inaccessible by the day. NEUROMANCERS is an organisation that lives within this nuance. We are your peers, using our (ongoing) lived experience to guide us, surviving and struggling as we all are, but also developing something that seeks to be as organised and reliable as the systems which oppress us.
I am not suggesting that peer support be professionalised: it is a form of care that belongs to and will continue to be led by the people. The strength of peer support is that it can be entirely responsive to the needs of the person or community in question. Finding the balance between creating a replicable social service and remaining flexible is an exciting challenge. Our practice of Peer Solidarity, an explicitly politicised form of peer support, acknowledges the need for community healing alongside political education. Our experiences cannot be separated from our environments, cultures, and social systems.
My identity as a Black, queer, teenager completely shapes my neurodivergent reality. Although we are a mixed organisation building Peer Solidarity across various lived experiences, this is the perspective from which NEUROMANCERS forms our abolitionist, autonomous, and accessible mental health care projects.
Historically, we have been digitally-based — last year, at our peak, I led a team of thirty international volunteers, working across continents, borders, and timezones to offer vital support. We delivered over one hundred hours of peer groups and over fifty hours of one-to-one peer sessions as well as mini-grants, direct aid, and collaborations.
This year, we are restructuring. Our first major project of 2025, is the upcoming launch of our membership community! In response to the hostility and negative mental health impacts of mainstream social media platforms, we are offering a new international online community, that prioritises care over content, friends over followers, with no ads, no algorithms, and no repression. Members will access weekly events, care programmes, a library of resources, and become part of an invaluable community – as well as enabling us to fund and launch more exciting Peer Solidarity initiatives. If you’d like to stay up to date and be one of the first to join us, sign up to our waitlist.
NEUROMANCERS is truly my life’s work, of which I am incredibly proud of and dedicated to. I am a teenager who spends the majority of my spare time supporting and healing others. As you can imagine, this has not been easy. Peer work is essential care work and should be materially compensated. I deserve care. Not simply in return for my labour, or so I can continue to gladly pour into others. Simply because I am.
You can support me, and NEUROMANCERS, by donating, checking out our current volunteer opportunities and upcoming events.
If anything about this has resonated or perhaps only piqued your interest, I hope you become part of our community. I hope you choose care. I hope you fall in love with your (neuro)divergence.