Thankfully, Everything Is A Story

How neurodivergent thinking can change our future

I was born into a world where everyone seemed to know a story I hadn’t been told.

A glance meant something. A pause meant something else. There were invisible scripts and unsaid rules, exchanged in the space between words, in eyebrows raised and lips bitten. They played roles in a theatre I couldn't quite see, reciting lines I’d never read.

Growing up as a ‘not yet diagnosed’ autistic meant I had to learn the story. Line by line, painfully memorised. Eye contact here, small talk there. Laugh now, nod then. Every social contract was a plot twist I didn’t see coming. But slowly, carefully, I began to read the room.

And in doing so, I began to see the structure beneath the script. That this pretence wasn’t just for social interactions, but society itself.

Because that’s what the world is: a story.

Every social interaction, every institution, every system, every rule, every norm, belief, process, how our economies work, money itself, voting, marriage, work, funerals, capitalism and communism…all just a story.

We are the storytelling species. Not just around campfires, but in every corner of our existence. Yuval Noah Harari famously wrote in Sapiens that ‘the truly unique trait of humanity is our ability to believe in things that exist purely in the imagination’. Every system is a story we’ve agreed to tell together. Shared fictions with real-world consequences.

For most of us, willingly suspending our disbelief in these stories isn’t optional. Neuroscience shows us that human consciousness itself may be nothing more than an elaborate narrative. As cognitive scientist Michael Gazzaniga explains in Who's in Charge?, the brain’s left hemisphere acts as an ‘interpreter’, constructing coherent explanations of our actions after the fact. You reach for a glass of water, and then your brain invents a reason why.

You snap at your kids, and your brain invents a justification from their behaviour.

Even the you you think you are, is a story being told by your brain. An ongoing autobiography, revised moment by moment.

Antonio Damasio, one of the world's leading neurologists, argues that our sense of self arises from the brain weaving together memories, sensations, and perceptions into a cohesive (but invented) narrative. In Self Comes to Mind, he writes, ‘The self is a perpetually recreated neurobiological state’, one that exists to make sense of the world and our place in it.

What feels solid is scaffolded, woven from air.

Social niceties? Stories.
Gender roles? Stories.
Success, failure, beauty, professionalism?
Stories upon stories, written by those who came before us, revised by those with the loudest voices.

And once you see that, you cannot unsee it. And if you're born neurodivergent, you saw the chaos before you could make sense of the stories (or if not make sense, at least learn to mimic). As someone who had to learn the story of being human, not inherit it effortlessly, I’ve developed a strange superpower. I can see that it’s all constructed, not natural or inevitable. I can trace the narrative lines. I can ask: why this story? Who wrote it? Who benefits? And, most importantly, what else could be written?

Because if everything is a story, then we could tell a different one. I’m often bemused, then exasperated, by those who argue are systems are unchangeable, our destiny set, change impossible within a social order that is immoveable.

I want to shout at them IT’S ALL MADE UP! And made-up things can be remade. The story is vulnerable, which is both terrifying and possibly will save us.

We can rewrite the rules of business to value care over consumption. We can change the plotline of leadership from dominance to empathy. We can tell new tales of who belongs, who leads, who thrives. We can burn the scripts that no longer serve us and improvise something astonishing.

Our institutions? They’re stories backed by shared belief. Our economies? Stories dressed up as math. Our cultures? Tapestries of story layered over story, some wise, some broken, many long overdue for revision.

Even the climate crisis is the result of a story, a tale we’ve been telling ourselves about infinite growth on a finite planet. But what if we rewrote it as the story of coming home? Of choosing to care. Of remembering we’re not the protagonists of nature, but part of its cast.

There is radical hope in this idea. Hope not rooted in naivety, but in authorship.

If everything is a story, then we are not passive readers. We are the co-authors of what comes next. We can tear out the tired pages of extraction and exclusion. We can ink new lines of solidarity, regeneration, and belonging.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in his work on perception and consciousness, describes our experience of the world as a controlled hallucination…an ever-updated story our brains create based on sensory data and expectation. What we perceive isn’t the world as it is, but the world as our brains predicts it to be.

If our perceptions are that malleable, then our stories about each other, about ourselves, about what’s possible, are even more so.

I’ve spent 50 years carefully tracing the stories, so that I can pretend they are real. Because acting as if this is all real is a pre-requisite of societal acceptance. Even if that often felt ridiculous, willingly conforming to a set of habits that aren’t habitual and norms that aren’t normal.

That was a necessary mistake, but one I’m starting to correct. Because each page we turn on our story is less adventure and more tragedy.

In moments like this, the neurodiverse are called. Those who can see the constructs must lead in dismantling them.

We have lived our lives as outsiders to the story. We are seer of stories. Translators of truths. We witness the architecture of the unseen.

And we are needed. Because the old myths are collapsing. The world is aching for new narratives. Ones with room for nuance, neurodiversity, and necessary change.

Let’s write them together.

Because everything is just a story.

And that means we can make it a beautiful one.

⭐ Please share this post on Linkedin, on other social media and email it to friends who might need this advice on becoming a powerful storyteller ⭐