Ever since my self-diagnosis, I feel a weird 'us vs. them' mentality referring to myself as neurodivergent vs. neurotypicals.

Permanently Deleted

It's hard not to feel that way when all my life I felt different from other people

Oh yeah, I definitely feel this. I'm self-diagnosed a few months ago

I don't feel this way at all and I would recommend discouraging it within yourself. Treating neurotypical people as a threatening hivemind will not help you cooperate with them in your day-to-day life, especially as they are the majority. Neurodivergent people are also not a hivemind and will have differing opinions. We are all individuals.

Well...it is a bit like us-vs-them. I'm all for modifying my behavior to make people comfortable around me, I'm willing to change, but it often feels like (1) nothing is ever enough, and (2) they're often unwilling to make any similar changes to accommodate us. And I do think that we need to organize based on our shared experience as neurodiverse people to defend ourselves from the weird expectations that NT people often expect from us.

That being said, NT people are not a monolith, and obviously there are lots of cool and reasonable NT people. But there are some things that they just can't intuitively understand because they're not in our skins. I don't think there's anything wrong with informing them of that, just as there's nothing wrong with NT people informing us about things we might be unable to intuitively understand.