David sits down with Eye to Eye's Alyssa Tundidor for a fireside chat. Covering everything from David’s origin story, to where Something Shiny came from, to co-creating spaces safe enough for folx who are neurodivergent. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org.
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Alyssa Tundidor (Alyssa Tundidor is Eye to Eye's Senior Mentoring Program Coordinator--for more on Alyssa, see below!) facilitates a fireside chat for the participants of the Eye to Eye Organizing Institute (OI) at the University of Denver. David names this is the first time he is sharing his story and he is not holding a tennis ball and is actually sitting down as he tells it, and he’ll be squirming the whole time as he does it. His first memory is around his story, in 5th grade, he is the kid in school with the really messy hair, and he’d write pages and pages of stories-no one could read them, they were not spelled correctly. And David is quiet when he’s writing in the corner, but nobody cares what he writes. Fast forward to his first year of graduate school at Northwestern University, he feels like a fraud, like they shouldn’t have let him in, did they know he failed a class in high school? And he was in class learning about ADHD and classmate who ran the Eye to Eye Chapter at Reed College says “oh” — he braces himself to be ‘fixed’ or told things, and instead she says “there’s this think called project eye to eye starting where they take college students with learning skills and putting them together with students in high school. Wanna join?" His first encounter with the organization is talking to David Flint, and he asks what he has, and David shares he has symbol recognition disorder and ADHD, and David Flink goes: “Awesome!” And that’s the first time David heard someone react that way without the pity or the “good for you!” Skipping past a lot in high school, getting in trouble a lot, skipping school, all of that, he’s sitting in a room at the OI with 27 other peoples, cross-legged, throwing racket balls against the wall, he felt like he belonged for the first time in his life somewhere. He belonged before…as long as they didn’t know… whatever that “nerghhh” is. OI and Eye to Eye was the first place where he experienced he didn’t have to hide a part of himself. Alyssa had a very similar experience with the OI, she was 23, she was at Radford University, and there were 60 people. What is the story behind Something Shiny? David gives the real story, not the marketing story. He’s a person who thinks really big but doesn’t really think about the details, of course he wants to save the world, he just doesn’t know what to do next. And he was getting paid to do all these trainings on ADHD, and he realized that there’s a paywall around getting good information about ADHD. You have to have certain privilege to know someone, to have money, to get accurate information. And most people trying to put forward accurate information are selling something. And it’s hard to find somethings like this without a sales push. When we can increase the understanding of things, we can decrease suffering. Alyssa speaks about listening to the qualifier episode, and it made her feel really seen and really heard. We had real feels right there. There’s this idea you’re getting at, when we’ve experienced something in the world, we can make it better for someone that follows us. There’s a cultural piece of learning differently when we’re neurodivergent. If you are part of a neurodiverse community, it’s very very hard to grow up without neglect. The people who love you don’t know how to love you. We don’t know what we need, that never happened. You can’t neglect neglect, you have to attend to it. Asking a neurodiverse person “how do you learn?” The answers 30 years ago would be “it’s hard, and it’s good that it hurts” and we all kind of bought into that. And then, all of a sudden, it doesn’t have to hurt. It's okay to swivel in a chair and have every chair in your office be a swivel chair—it’s about speaking to the things that are very hard for us to own because we’re afraid we’re going to get rejected. When you talk about them, you feel like more of community, not less. Alyssa wants to emphasize the belonging aspect—what inspired David to make a safe space for people who are neurodivergent. Someone at work said to him: “Just so you know, it didn’t bother me at all, but your energy was really big—it didn’t bother me, but it could bother someone” — that person saw my energy, and wanted to work together. We have to take steps to work together and not mask. It’s like hiding the parts of us that don’t look like everyone else. “I read books, I sit still, over the weekend, I read books, I sat still.” There’s emotionality and there’s a task, but if the task is understanding what the book says, does it matter if I read it or listen to it? Creating safety is looking at comfort, looking at who you are, and not wearing masks. Immediately take that mask off. Alyssa names that rejection hurts so much when you’re ND, and it’s true. And we’re talking about self-esteem and a sense of worth. How do we feel worth? We’re often getting our sense of worth from other people. When you can find other roles in the world to make a difference in someone else’s life. The big secret with mentorship is reciprocal: whatever you are doing to help someone younger than you, you are giving to yourself. It comes back to you. Don’t want to let someone down, so there’s a power to making a difference to other people’s lives. Alyssa asks: when is the first time you felt accepted as an ND person? It made David accepted and valued for who he was. There’s more places in the world than Eye to Eye—he felt that with his brother, he feels that with his partner, his friends. Who you surround yourself by is so much what you believe about yourself. His friends, his partner, believed in David before he did. What made David decide to become a therapist? David started wanting to save the world that was on fire as he saw it. His own experience with therapists was: they’re not that great. He wanted to be a special education teacher that teaches history, because he wants to fix all of education and name all of the lies and change the world. So, in college, he went through all the teaching classes, and they were going through lesson planning, and he realized that he wouldn’t get to teach what he would teach. He’s TAing psych classes because they’re easy, and he doesn’t mind them. So he ended up leaving education, talked to a psych professor he was friends with, “don’t know what to do now?!” But he learned he could be the difference, and he believes every life represents the world. In front of him, there’s a galaxy, and a galaxy of stars, and for him, it’s incredibly important to save the world. He felt limited that he could only work people in education become better consumers and producers, versus showing people what they want in this world and then destroying the things that don’t matter. It’s a good mic, so he won’t mic drop. What tips would he give young people navigating the world that is not built for them? He names: this world is not built for you, this world makes things worse, and you make things better. The second we pretend it’s built for us, we are ignoring things. We know that if we take weight and shading in different spots, it makes it easier for those with dyslexia to read. Like a dyslexic font. So why isn’t every book printed like that? A neurotypical person can read that book, but now everyone else can. We sit in a world, where you have every answer you want in your pocket that can answer everything, but we’re still working a school system that asks students to remember answers and not ask questions (and he loves teachers)…so not built for us. Don’t apologize for who you are.  Find the supports you need and make that space. This room doesn’t totally suck even though you are listening to someone talk at you—why? David is talking fast, moving a lot, saying risky things, this entire thing is an accommodation for neurodiversity. Neurotypical people can’t handle this energy. David just code switches, and that doesn’t work for us, at all. And it’s about you all do in every room you walk into as an Eye to Eye person. What’s one thing you want people to leave this chat with? Everyone get a mixing bowl, he wants everyone to add a cup of understanding to the bowl, then crack two pieces of compassion on top, meet with other people for a while, and then bake it. The real thing he asks: don’t be afraid to ask the questions, to say something people don’t want to hear, to ask for things, and anyone who makes you feel like you are less should not be in your life. 

To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org

Who is Alyssa? Alyssa Tundidor is Eye to Eye's Senior Mentoring Program Coordinator who has been with the organization for six years, first as a volunteer and as an employee for the last two years. She has ADHDI (inattentive type), which was identified as such in the first grade, and wanted to support neurodiverse young people in the way she wishes she had been supported when she was younger.

What is Eye to Eye? Eye to Eye is a national organization whose mission is to improve the educational experience and outcomes of neurodiverse young people, while engaging them and their allies in the movement for a more equitable and inclusive society. To learn more about Eye to Eye, visit www.eyetoeyenational.org

What's the IO? The Young Leaders' Organizing Institute (OI) brings together Eye to Eye student leaders from our programs to connect, learn, and train for the upcoming school year

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