About

ND Always

Neurodiversity n.
The natural variation in human nervous systems—part of the living diversity of our species.

ND Always is a podcast and media project hosted by Dr. Heather McMillen, a multiply neurodivergent (ND) psychotherapist, educator, artist, and scholar practicing in Pasadena, California.

Here, neurodivergent is used in a spacious sense, to name individual ways of being in which inner complexity, patterning, and perception often exceed typical language or expectations. One way to imagine it is to borrow an image from audio recording: picture an internal mixing board, with different channels amplified, muted, or fluidly tuned outside what a culture tends to expect as the middle range of thought, emotion, sensation, imagination, or behavior—think artists, inventors, collectors, and innovators of all kinds who are not well represented by normative categories.

In her professional role, Heather has also observed that while many clinicians enjoy working with highly creative people, relatively few demonstrate expertise in neuro-affirming care. This includes giftedness, autism, ADHD or AuDHD, sensory or learning differences, and perceptual experiences such as chromesthesia or synesthesia, among others. One of the gaps this project hopes to address is the striking correspondence between creativity and neurodivergence, and the relative lack of spaces willing to host that overlap with both depth and care.

Heather’s goal for ND Always is to illuminate the rich, vivid inner worlds of makers and helpers through thoughtful exchange, with the hope of extending into public life the sense of recognition and belonging she is honored to witness every day in her practice.

At the same time, ND Always does not seek to name or claim an identity for anyone. Neurodiversity includes everyone, and the world is better for it. Some guests may identify as neurodivergent themselves; some may not. The aim is not to flatten people into categories, but to invite a richer conversation about creativity, difference, embodiment, psyche, and the conditions that bring people creatively alive.

Guests are invited not because they fit a rigid identity construct, but because the host believes they have something valuable to contribute to the conversation, whether through their work in the arts, the healing professions, or the lived complexity of their own experience.

ND Always is, among other things, a love letter to neurodiversity and neurodivergence, to creativity, and to ways of being that have always existed, whether or not they were named. ND Always was, and always will be.