OCD, Black Femme Bodies, Colonial Stereotypes, and Neurodivergent Impulse
- Kiing Curry
- 17 hours ago
- 7 min read
Open Post
Orientation
This essay moves between personal memory, OCD pattern recognition, and the colonial stereotypes placed on Black femme bodies. The movement is intentional. The body remembers what systems attempt to erase, and pattern recognition reveals the architecture beneath what many call “personality” or “behavior.”
OCD, Black Femme Bodies, Colonial Stereotypes, and Neurodivergent Impulse
There is something I am only now beginning to understand clearly.
What happens when obsessive–compulsive disorder develops inside a body that was never given language for the mind it carries?
What happens when that body is Black.
When that body is dark-skinned.
When that body is large.
When that body is perceived through centuries of colonial stereotype before it is ever understood as a person.
I am somewhere around seventy percent into understanding my own mind now — learning how it moves, how it processes, how it regulates when it is allowed to return to itself.
But for most of my life, there was no framework.
No language for neurodivergence.
No understanding of impulse.
No recognition that my brain was moving faster and more intensely than the structures around me could hold.
Instead, there was only one demand:
Be normal.
Be normal in a country that refuses to admit the violence that produced it.
Be normal in families that were themselves groomed to survive colonial systems.
Be normal inside a mind that was never built for the narrow lane of “normal” in the first place.
Black Femmes and Women
When I say Black femmes, I am speaking about queer bodies who are perceived as women but do not identify as such.
When I say women, I am speaking about cisgender women.
These categories overlap in how empire treats them, but they are not the same.
I write them distinctly because the stereotypes projected onto our bodies operate with brutal precision.
And many of those stereotypes are actually misreadings of nervous systems that were never supported.
Impulse Without Framework
One of the clearest patterns I see now is this:
My mind was always moving at a high speed — processing pattern, emotion, and environment simultaneously.
But there was no framework to understand impulse.
No understanding of how a neurodivergent brain processes stimulation.
No understanding of obsessive thought loops.
No understanding of what it means to grow up inside a nervous system that never truly rests.
So impulse moved unchecked.
Not because of irresponsibility.
But because there was no map for the mind itself.
When a brain processes like a flash flood, decisions can feel urgent, immediate, necessary.
Without tools to pause that electrical current, action follows quickly behind perception.
This is not moral failure.
This is neurological reality.
But when it appears in a Black body, it is almost never read that way.
Instead it feeds the narrative empire already wrote.
Shopping and the Performance of Normality
Take shopping.
For most of my life I told myself I simply loved clothes.
And yes — I do.
Texture, color, fabric, silhouette.
But what I see now is something deeper.
My parents were undiagnosed people themselves, living inside the mythology of the American dream.
Fake it till you make it.
Appear successful before you actually are.
Perform stability even when the foundation underneath you is unstable.
That mimicry becomes survival.
And in my case, it intersected with OCD impulses that were never named.
My mind was always moving.
Always processing.
Always searching for the next configuration of self.
Shopping became a mechanism where impulse and performance merged.
As long as I was constantly reshaping the exterior — changing the presentation, updating the image — I could appear to be participating in the pace of capitalism.
But without understanding impulse regulation, the pattern becomes easy for the world to misread.
A Black body that spends.
A Black body that shifts identity.
A Black body that cannot seem to hold onto money.
Suddenly the colonial stereotype arrives right on time.
The welfare queen.
The jezebel.
The irresponsible Black woman.
But the truth underneath that narrative is far more complex.
The truth is a nervous system moving at full speed with no map.
Cars and Electrical Systems
Driving is another example.
And I have spoken about this before, so forgive the repetition.
But repetition is sometimes what clarity requires.
Think about it.
A fifteen-year-old whose brain has been running in obsessive loops for years.
A teenager who has never received accommodation for sensory overload or neurological processing.
And then we hand that teenager the keys to a motorized electrical vehicle.
We treat driving as a rite of passage in American culture.
Sixteen means freedom.
Sixteen means independence.
Sixteen means normal.
But no one stopped to ask whether my brain — already operating like a lightning storm — was meant to control another electrical system moving at high speed through space.
So what happens?
Cars get wrecked.
Cars get damaged.
Cars get destroyed.
And again the narrative forms.
Reckless.
Irresponsible.
Careless.
But what if the question was never asked in the first place?
What if the real question was:
Why are we expecting a dysregulated nervous system to master a machine that requires intense sensory processing and split-second decision making?
If you're wondering. I rarely drive now and when I ride it is in the back seat.
Sexuality, Impulse, and Silence
The same pattern appears in sexuality.
I think about the ways men were able to access and harm my body.
And I mean all of them.
Not because I lacked intelligence.
Not because I lacked intuition.
But because there was no framework connecting impulse, hormones, and obsessive cognition.
Imagine being a teenager whose mind never stops moving.
Imagine the electrical intensity of adolescence layered on top of that.
Now add religious doctrine.
Virginity.
Purity.
Moral discipline.
“Just don’t do it.”
That is the instruction.
No discussion of the nervous system.
No conversation about impulse regulation.
No space to understand the body as a site of chemistry and electrical response.
Just prohibition.
And when prohibition inevitably fails, the stereotype is ready again.
Promiscuous.
Fast.
Out of control.
The jezebel myth reborn through modern language.
The Cult of Normal
We laugh about cults.
We watch documentaries about charismatic leaders and strange belief systems.
We point at the screen and say:
“How could people fall for that?”
But many of us are living inside the largest cult in existence.
The cult of normal.
The cult that insists colonialism is over.
The cult that insists slavery had no psychological aftermath.
The cult that demands every body perform the same narrow range of behavior regardless of how that body was formed.
Inside that cult, neurodivergence disappears.
Trauma disappears.
History disappears.
And the moment a body deviates from the script, stereotype rushes in to explain the difference.
Seeing the Pattern
I am only now reaching a place where I can step outside the performance of normality and see the architecture clearly.
For most of my life I was wearing a costume I didn’t even realize existed.
Normal had become second skin.
I couldn’t tell where it began and where I ended.
Now, as regulation returns slowly to my nervous system, I can see the pattern.
Impulse without framework.
A fast mind with no map.
A Black body forced to perform stability inside a system that thrives on misreading it.
And when those misreadings appear again — the stereotypes, the projections, the dismissal — I recognize them for what they are.
Not truth.
But colonial pattern recognition operating exactly as designed.
The work now is learning how to interrupt those patterns.
Not by shrinking.
Not by apologizing for the mind I carry.
But by understanding the system clearly enough to refuse its story about me.
Granting Myself Time
What I am learning now — slowly, deliberately — is that the world never intended to give me the time required to understand my own mind.
Colonial systems move fast on purpose.
They produce urgency.
They produce scarcity.
They produce constant pressure to perform stability before stability has actually been built.
For a neurodivergent mind — especially one shaped by trauma — that pace becomes another form of violence.
Because healing a nervous system is not fast.
Understanding obsessive loops is not fast.
Learning impulse regulation after decades without framework is not fast.
It requires something the colonial world does not respect:
Time.
Time to observe.
Time to pause before action.
Time to notice the electrical signal moving through the body before it becomes behavior.
And most importantly, time to understand that many of the patterns I carried were never personal failure.
They were survival responses inside a system that refused to name what was happening.
So I am granting myself something that was never offered.
Time.
Space.
And what I call Indigenous wildfire.
Not the destructive fire empire imagines when it sees chaos.
But the kind of fire that clears land so that life can return.
The kind of fire that removes what was choking the soil.
The kind of fire that allows the ecosystem to reset itself.
That is the work I am doing with my mind now.
Clearing the underbrush of stereotypes.
Burning away the colonial stories that were attached to behaviors no one understood.
Making space for a nervous system that was always intelligent — even when it was dysregulated.
This is slower work than the world wants.
But it is the only work that actually leads to freedom.
And for the first time in my life, I am allowing myself to move at the pace my body requires.
Not the pace empire demanded.
But the pace of regeneration.
And so the fire becomes medicine — clearing what empire named disorder so the body can remember its own rhythm.
This lil light of mine
you can’t steal my shine
OCD, Black Femme Bodies, Colonial Stereotypes, and Neurodivergent Impulse
