The Onion Project: Week 7 ~ Identity and Shared Belonging

Week 7  The Cultural Layer: Identity and Shared Belonging

As the onion opens further, we arrive at culture, the layer where identity begins to take shape not just inside the individual, but in the shared space between people. This is the point where I am becomes we are.

For Deaf people, this layer is called Deafhood. Deafhood is not a diagnosis or a label. It is not about what is missing, but about what is made. It is the process of becoming, the unfolding of self through language, community, and history. It is the recognition that Deafness is not a defect to overcome, but a culture to live, breathe, and celebrate.

Deafhood grows stronger the more it is shared. It flourishes in collective spaces: in Deaf schools, in Deaf clubs, in online communities, in living rooms where hands move freely and laughter travels through air and light instead of sound. Each person adds a verse to the shared story, one of survival, joy, creativity, and continuity. Deafhood says: I am not broken; I belong to a people with a language, a history, and a future.

Neurodivergence has its own parallel journey. Across the world, movements of autistic pride, ADHD acceptance, and neurodiversity celebration have emerged to reclaim difference from the grasp of pathology. These movements push back against the idea of being “fixed” and instead claim the word different as something sacred and self-defining. They remind us that what has been medicalized or misunderstood can also be named, shared, and transformed into community.

When the word condition becomes connection, everything changes.Autism stops being something to hide; it becomes a rhythm of thinking and perceiving the world in vivid detail. ADHD becomes not a deficit but a spark, a way of moving through ideas with speed, curiosity, and intensity. Each of these shifts reframes identity not as a wound but as a wonder: not as something to correct, but as something to cultivate.

The cultural layer reframes everything.

A Deaf child told they are “broken” may grow to see themselves instead as part of a lineage, one filled with poetry, humor, resistance, and pride. They discover that ASL storytelling carries beauty equal to any literature, that Deaf artists, leaders, and thinkers have shaped worlds of their own.

An autistic individual told they are “too much” may find home among others who stim openly, who value deep focus, who see the world in intricate patterns instead of straight lines. Together, they build communities where movement and silence, passion and pause, are not just accepted but understood.

An ADHD person told they “never finish” may discover that their creativity thrives in bursts and sparks that their restlessness is not failure, but fire. Within neurodivergent culture, scattered energy becomes kinetic brilliance. Projects that once seemed like chaos turn into collaboration.

Culture transforms shame into pride. It is the layer that shields us from erasure and gives us language to resist. It tells us that we are not alone, and we are not wrong for existing the way we do. It replaces isolation with kinship, misunderstanding with meaning. It says: You are seen. You are part of something larger.

When we reach this layer of the onion, we begin to see identity not as an individual struggle, but as a collective home. Deafhood and neurodivergence, though born from different histories, share a rhythm, both rise from communities that refused to be defined by deficit. Both turned silence and stigma into creativity, and both found strength in naming themselves.

When these two paths meet, they illuminate one another. Deaf culture teaches that visibility and voice can exist in motion, not just sound. Neurodivergent culture reminds us that the mind, too, carries infinite languages of focus, pattern, feeling, and imagination. Together, they show that thriving does not come from hiding difference, but from naming it, honoring it, and carrying it forward together.

This layer of culture is where transformation becomes legacy. When people gather to celebrate Deafhood or neurodiversity, they do more than affirm themselves, they rewrite the story of what it means to be human. They create futures where no one has to apologize for how they see, think, or communicate.

Next week, we peel further into the relational layer, where family and chosen community shape how we grow, love, and endure. Because belonging to a culture begins the story but sustaining it depends on how we hold one another.

~ A. Bret Cummens, M.Ed.