Her suggestions for advocating and accommodating for yourself include up and moving to quieter, less stressful neighborhoods; quitting your job; going to the doctor and therapist and psychiatrist and specialist regularly; how to make the offices of corporate America and Silicon Valley more accommodating…essentially, it’s some pretty “meh” advice for people who have money, access to healthcare, and work for companies like Verizon and other big tech companies or architecture firms or universities. It isn't a "new study", as one of the back blurbs describes it - not in the sense of a scientific study. This book is powerful, much-needed for our times, and Jenara Nerenberg offers a unique blend of personal, scientific, and societal analysis.

Between a flawed system that focuses on diagnosing younger, male populations, and the fact that girls are conditioned from a young age to blend in and conform to gender expectations, women often don’t learn about their neurological differences until they are adults, if at all.Sharing real stories from women with high sensitivity, ADHD, autism, misophonia, dyslexia, SPD and more, Nerenberg explores how these brain variances present differently in women and dispels widely-held misconceptions (for example, it’s not that autistic people lack sensitivity and empathy, they have an overwhelming excess of it). I'll start with the actual writing itself: definitely needed more editing, topics do not flow well into one another, and the surface level coverage of too many topics ends up feeling disorganized altogether. I agree with a lot of people who are slightly put off with this book because it doesn’t really dive deep enough into different types of neurodivergent women who fall into these spectrums. This was yet another book by a well-meaning, cis-het, middle- to upper-class, white woman that just…totally missed the mark. When it comes to women, sensory processing differences are often overlooked, masked, or mistaken for something else entirely.

This wonderfully positive and accessible introduction to the neurodiversity paradigm is packed with life-changing insight for anyone whose way of experiencing the world diverges from the ordinary. The most interesting insight contained in the whole book is a couple (un-cited) paragraphs about the design of the environment/architecture as a function of European desires to demonstrate extreme restraint, and how that can be at odds with the optimal contexts for a woman of neurodivergence. It ends up feeling really "White Feminist" to spend so much time speaking about gender and gender alone.It was comforting to read about others that cope with similar experiences on a daily basis however I really would like more advice on how to actually deal with it. American psychiatry has increasingly taught our society to think that people can be divided into two categories: those who are 'normal' and those who are 'not normal. Unmasking is something that has many more risks for autistic Black women and autistic women of color than for autistic white women. The book de-pathologizes those of us who most profoundly and intensely think and feel the world around us.