From Diagnosis to Justice: Why I Built Fish in a Tree

Bridgette Hamstead

When I introduce myself, I usually begin with the official line: Bridgette Hamstead is the Founding Director of Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism, and Chairperson of the Neurodiversity Coalition of America. I have been honored to deliver keynotes around the world, to speak on the stage of the United Nations for World Autism Acceptance Day, and to serve as keynote for Global Neurodiversity Pride Day. I am also the author of the forthcoming book The Trouble with Being Good: How Late-Diagnosed AuDHD Women Break the Rules to Save Themselves.

But behind those credentials is a deeper story, one that connects lived experience with systemic change.

I came to this work not only as a scholar and organizer, but as someone who has lived the costs of misunderstanding and misdiagnosis. Like many late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD women, I learned early on to survive by blending in, by being “good,” by carrying the weight of systems not built for me. When I finally had language for my neurodivergence, it was both liberating and destabilizing. Suddenly, what I thought was personal failure revealed itself as structural exclusion. The problem was never me; it was the systems.

That realization lit a fire. I wanted to build the infrastructure I had needed all along: spaces where neurodivergent people are not pathologized, silenced, or forced to disappear, but seen as leaders, innovators, and culture-makers.

That is why I created Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism. What began as a local community effort has become a national and global hub for systemic change. Our work spans consulting with universities and corporations, auditing accessibility in cultural spaces, developing a graduate program in neurodiversity studies, and hosting global platforms like the Neurodiversity Justice Bookshelf and NeuroStage. At every level, our commitment is the same: to move beyond awareness into justice - real, structural, sustainable change.

My forthcoming book, The Trouble with Being Good, is part of that same mission. It blends memoir, research, and collective testimony from late-diagnosed AuDHD women to show how survival strategies often misread as pathology are, in fact, forms of resistance. It asks hard questions about family, gender, and medicine, and it insists that repair is only possible when systems, and not just individuals, change.

As I continue to write, speak, and build, I return to one guiding truth: audacity without infrastructure doesn’t last. That’s why Fish in a Tree is not just about vision, but about creating containers sturdy enough to hold that vision. We are building the boards, the networks, the coalitions, and the programs that will outlast any single person, because movements die if they live or die with one founder. I want more than that.

Fish in a Tree exists because I believe neurodivergent people deserve more than survival, we deserve futures rooted in dignity, equity, and liberation. My role, whether in a keynote, a consulting partnership, or a book, is to help light the way forward.

And I want to invite you to build that future with us.