Abstract
My research is an autoethnography about my relationship to the culture of neurodiversity and disability inside and outside of the classroom. My self-(psycho)analysis emerged from my reflexive, recursive journaling research methods. I discuss my obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis, revealing an alternative rhetoric to discuss neurodiversity outside the Western psychiatric, medical model of disability. I include my experiences with Exposure and Response Prevention therapy. Then I connect these experiences to my identity and positionality in the composition classroom. Reflecting the content in my article, the format of my writing mirrors neurodiverse thinking. I mirror jarring, disruptive neurodiverse-inclusive structure in my presentation like disability rhetorician Dolmage (2014), writing studies researcher Rainey (2021), and writing studies researcher Sanchez (2021). I intentionally problematize neurotypical academic mores in the composing and presenting process. As I revised my research, Pentacle Writing Theory emerged as a non-linear, non-circular fluid intersection of ideas from point to point forming a star—or pentacle. I bring a linguistic and disability rhetoric lens to my research as an alum from Sacramento State with a master’s degree in English Composition, Rhetoric, and Professional Writing and as a current premedical student at American River College pursuing a specialty in psychiatry. Alternative rhetoric was theorized in the 2000s and I now present an application of this theory in my research: I look at the dominant language of Western medicine as it shapes diagnostic, “prescription-only psychiatric” treatment, privatized insurance, public perception, and personal self-regard.