In a time where discussions surrounding neurodiversity are increasingly entering mainstream dialogue, understanding its intricate realities remains a challenge for many. Neurodiversity encompasses a range of neurological differences, including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and others, all of which influence how individuals perceive, interpret, and interact with the world around them. Despite the growing visibility of neurodivergent individuals, the nuanced emotional and sensory landscapes they navigate are often oversimplified or misunderstood.
In response to this cultural gap, animator and illustrator Hanna Norberg-Williams has created a groundbreaking short film titled Eating Soup With A Fork. This animated piece isn’t just a visual journey—it’s an evocative metaphor for what it means to exist in a world built for neurotypicals while navigating reality through a different neurological lens. As a non-binary, autistic lesbian with ADHD, Hanna draws deeply from their lived experiences to craft a surreal, thought-provoking narrative that simultaneously challenges and enlightens the viewer.
A Striking Allegory for Misalignment
The film takes its title from a concept both absurd and poignant—trying to eat soup with a fork. This image, while humorous on the surface, speaks to the deeper incongruities neurodivergent people often face. Hanna’s protagonist is confronted with a dinner table where everyone is cheerfully slurping soup using forks, completely unbothered by the impracticality. Meanwhile, the main character fumbles with the same tool, bewildered by the irrationality and feeling out of place.
This allegorical setup embodies the frustrating and often isolating experience of existing in environments that are structured around neurotypical behaviors and expectations. The world, for many neurodivergent individuals, can feel like a series of obstacles that demand adherence to rules that seem arbitrary or illogical. Hanna’s metaphor illustrates not just miscommunication or difference, but a fundamental mismatch between internal logic and external expectation.
Unlocking Inner Dimensions: Animation Rooted in Subconscious Truths
The creative process behind Eating Soup With A Fork is nothing short of revelatory. While many animators might rely on external narratives or constructed scripts, Hanna Norberg-Williams approached their project from an entirely different starting point—the subconscious. Rather than fabricating a storyline from surface-level observation or generic characterization, they chose to excavate the mind’s hidden layers to develop a narrative structure based on pure emotional authenticity. This approach led to a strikingly unique visual and thematic experience that resonates deeply with both neurodivergent and neurotypical audiences.
Using subconscious exploration as a primary storytelling mechanism is an unconventional method in modern animation, particularly in short films. However, in Hanna’s case, this internal excavation was a necessary route for capturing the texture of neurodivergent consciousness. The goal wasn’t simply to represent autism or ADHD symbolically, but to immerse the viewer in the emotional viscosity and psychological patterns often associated with such identities. It was never about clinical definitions—it was about visceral truth.
Descriptive Sampling as a Portal to Creative Honesty
Drawing inspiration from psychological researcher Russel Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling, Hanna integrated a methodical approach to capturing their unfiltered internal dialogue. Through the use of randomised alarms, they were prompted to record their exact thoughts and sensations throughout the day. This wasn't journaling in the traditional sense; it was spontaneous, immediate, and often disjointed—more of a transcript of the inner monologue than a conscious narrative.
These samples became a living document of the internal world—raw, intimate, and sometimes disorienting. The thoughts ranged from intrusive sensory input to deep emotional ruminations. Reflections on texture, temperature, rhythm, social interaction, or momentary confusion became data points from which thematic structures could be sculpted. Within this scattered, nonlinear record, Hanna discovered cohesive patterns—ideas that resonated not just with them, but with a broader neurodivergent community.
The process blurred the boundary between creator and subject. By documenting rather than inventing, Hanna allowed their animation to develop organically. It wasn't about scripting a tale; it was about documenting a lived truth and translating that into an evocative, surrealist visual lexicon.
A Mirror to the Self: Navigating Internal Recognition
Perhaps the most profound outcome of this exploratory creative process was self-discovery. At the time of production, Hanna had not yet fully come to terms with their own neurodivergent identity. However, as they combed through their recorded experiences, patterns began to emerge—patterns that mirrored the symptoms, behaviors, and psychological dynamics common to those who are autistic or have ADHD.
This was more than a realization; it was a quiet, unfolding recognition. The film became an unintended confessional, reflecting back aspects of themselves that had long been obscured by social expectations and internalized norms. It was as if the subconscious, once given the space to speak freely, finally told the truth Hanna had been circling for years. In their own words, the experience was like "finally seeing into a mirror after years of distortion."
By the time the animation was complete, Hanna had not only built a compelling artistic work but also stumbled upon an identity that had always existed—just never fully acknowledged. The journey of making the film, though deeply personal, holds a universal lesson: when we create from within, we often discover more than we set out to find.
Psychological Fragmentation and the Aesthetics of Discomfort
One of the most powerful outcomes of Hanna’s creative method was the development of a visual language that mirrored psychological fragmentation. The aesthetic of Eating Soup With A Fork is intentionally unsettling—bold colors coexist with muted textures, smooth lines are interrupted by erratic shapes, and traditional animation logic is frequently subverted. These decisions weren’t made for shock value; they were extensions of the internal experience Hanna was trying to convey.
For many neurodivergent individuals, the world feels fragmented, chaotic, and unpredictable. Traditional sensory experiences can be overwhelming or distorted. Time may feel nonlinear, social cues may appear indecipherable, and internal logic may not align with external expectations. By translating these perceptual divergences into visual form, Hanna crafted an environment that feels not just surreal, but deeply real to those who experience similar dissonance.
The use of contrasting elements—light and dark, vivid and dull, structured and erratic—becomes a metaphor for navigating a world full of contradiction. The discomfort the audience feels while watching the animation isn’t a side effect; it’s the point. It encourages viewers to step into the storm of sensory and cognitive overload, to feel rather than analyze what it means to exist outside the neurotypical paradigm.
Transcending Narratives: Embracing Creative Fluidity
By working from a place of introspective spontaneity, Hanna liberated themselves from traditional storytelling frameworks. Eating Soup With A Fork does not adhere to a three-act structure or a clear protagonist-antagonist conflict. Instead, it presents a fluid, dreamlike journey—a kaleidoscope of moments, impressions, and emotional vignettes. This abstract composition mirrors the disjointed nature of thought and experience within many neurodivergent minds.
This abandonment of linear storytelling is not just stylistic—it is ideological. The structure (or lack thereof) challenges the viewer to abandon expectation and surrender to the fluidity of internal experience. In doing so, Hanna invites neurodivergent viewers to see value in their own thinking patterns, which may not conform to traditional logic but are no less meaningful or coherent.
This fluidity also speaks to the richness of neurodivergent creativity. So often, individuals with ADHD or autism are dismissed as disorganized or unfocused. In contrast, Hanna shows how nonlinear thinking can produce layered, intricate, and emotionally resonant art. What appears fragmented on the surface is, in truth, a sophisticated collage of emotion, intuition, and perception.
Emotional Cartography: Mapping Neurodivergent Consciousness
Through their thought diary and subconscious-driven process, Hanna inadvertently produced a kind of emotional map. Each scene in the animation is like a topographical feature—peaks of overstimulation, valleys of self-doubt, fault lines of masking behavior, and sudden geysers of imagination and play. Rather than narrating these concepts, the animation allows them to unfold organically.
Masking, for example—the psychological effort to hide neurodivergent traits in order to blend in socially—is not mentioned explicitly in the film, but it is felt. The viewer experiences the disconnection, the exhaustion, the eerie mimicry that defines the masked self. Likewise, stimming behaviors—physical or vocal actions used to self-regulate—emerge through repetitive visual motifs that feel instinctual rather than decorative.
The beauty of this cartographic approach is that it bypasses intellectual understanding and connects instead on a visceral level. A neurodivergent viewer might feel recognized in these portrayals, while a neurotypical viewer may experience a sudden, intuitive sense of what those internal states might be like. This empathetic bridge is where the animation finds its greatest impact—not through explanation, but through resonance.
Art as Revelation: A Journey Toward Integrative Identity
For Hanna Norberg-Williams, the act of making Eating Soup With A Fork was not merely creative expression—it was existential integration. In allowing their subconscious to guide the process, they peeled back layers of social conditioning, performance, and uncertainty. What emerged was not only an evocative animation but also a clearer, more coherent sense of self.
This kind of integrative art is rare in its sincerity and even rarer in its impact. It offers an example of how deeply personal storytelling—especially when unconstrained by convention—can become universal. It demonstrates the value of neurodivergent voices in the artistic landscape, not as novelties but as essential narrators of human complexity.
Hanna’s work is a testament to the power of introspective creativity. It shows that by trusting the subconscious and embracing the authenticity of our internal worlds, we can produce art that does more than entertain—it transforms, educates, and liberates.
The Language of Visual Disturbance in Neurodivergent Storytelling
Eating Soup With A Fork, the animated short by Hanna Norberg-Williams, stands out not only for its thematic depth but for its audacious visual execution. At the intersection of aesthetic disruption and neurodivergent narrative, Hanna has constructed a sensory experience that reflects the tension of cognitive dissonance. The film doesn’t shy away from chaos—instead, it thrives on it, embracing a style that is unapologetically vivid, erratic, and often unsettling. This choice is not simply artistic; it is philosophically rooted in the very nature of neurodivergent perception.
Hanna uses visual discomfort as a dialect, a way of communicating internal realities often misunderstood by those outside neurodivergent circles. Rather than softening the neurodivergent experience to make it palatable for the mainstream, they heighten its authenticity through bold, disruptive choices in color, composition, and movement. This rebellion against visual conformity reflects a larger desire to depict lived truth, no matter how chaotic, fragmented, or emotionally abrasive it might seem.
A Canvas of Controlled Chaos
From the very first frame, viewers are plunged into a surrealist abyss. The background is rendered as an expansive black void—a visual metaphor for emotional emptiness or perceptual isolation. This abyss becomes the foundation upon which the narrative unfolds, making every other element appear heightened, more visceral. Over this dark expanse, Hanna layers conflicting textures and mismatched color schemes: lurid pinks jostle against muddied greens, while jagged lines distort familiar shapes.
This deliberate chaos creates an aesthetic that feels alive—one that mimics the ever-fluctuating emotional states and sensory experiences that characterize many neurodivergent minds. Sensory overload, executive dysfunction, and internalized dissonance are not explained—they are evoked. The frenetic brushwork, erratic pacing, and illogical visual cues all coalesce into a kaleidoscope of organized disorder, reflecting an internal world that rarely feels calm or orderly. Hanna uses this stylistic disarray as a structural backbone, ensuring that the audience cannot passively consume the narrative but must engage with it on a visceral level.
Discord as Design: Rejecting Visual Harmony
The animation’s dissonant aesthetic is not the result of careless design but the product of intentional anti-harmony. Where most animations seek visual unity through symmetry, repetition, and tonal balance, Eating Soup With A Fork dismantles these norms. Instead of guiding the eye comfortably through the frame, Hanna disorients the viewer, pushing against the conventions of cohesion. Characters emerge partially formed, environments are skewed in perspective, and visual logic is often upended entirely.
This subversion mirrors the cognitive experience of many neurodivergent individuals, who frequently encounter a world filled with contradictory messages, unspoken social expectations, and environments designed without their needs in mind. The film’s artistic incoherence becomes a metaphor for existential incoherence—what it feels like to navigate a reality where you are expected to function normally while using tools fundamentally unsuited to your needs. The act of eating soup with a fork is absurd not because of the fork itself, but because the context demands its use despite its inefficacy.
Color Psychology and Emotional Saturation
The color palette in Eating Soup With A Fork plays a psychological role far beyond aesthetics. Each hue is chosen not for beauty or realism, but for emotional resonance. Saturated primaries, clashing neons, and grim, washed-out tones are layered and juxtaposed in ways that create an ongoing sense of tension. Hanna leverages color to represent emotional overload—using hot pinks and acidic yellows to simulate anxiety, while cold greys and shadowed blues convey disassociation and internal suppression.
The absence of traditional lighting and shadow logic further enhances the surreal atmosphere. Color exists independently from form, often leaking across frames or bleeding into character outlines. This disregard for realism is not negligence; it’s a calculated expression of neurodivergent sensory perception. For someone whose experience of the world is filtered through hypersensitivity or emotional amplification, color is not merely visual—it is tactile, auditory, and psychological. Hanna’s use of color becomes a vehicle for non-verbal storytelling, bringing audiences directly into the protagonist’s turbulent affective world.
Texture and Form as Emotional Triggers
Beyond color and composition, the film relies heavily on the emotional connotations of texture. Rather than relying on polished surfaces or fluid animation, Hanna opts for a jagged, intentionally rough style. Elements often appear hand-drawn, with shifting outlines and uneven textures that evoke a sense of instability. Backgrounds pulse, objects morph unpredictably, and textures replicate the erratic rhythms of a distracted or overstimulated mind.
This aesthetic language resonates particularly with viewers who experience sensory integration differences, where texture can be overwhelming, comforting, or disorienting in unexpected ways. By incorporating these tactile illusions into the animation’s visual grammar, Hanna invites the viewer to feel these textures not through touch, but through sight. The disintegration of smoothness becomes a parallel to the breakdown of masking, revealing the raw, unfiltered self beneath layers of social performance.
In a cinematic world dominated by hyperrealism and digital gloss, Hanna’s animation stands as a stark counterpoint—reaffirming the value of imperfection, intuition, and emotional fidelity.
The Surreal as a Cognitive Mirror
Hanna’s use of surrealism does more than create a dreamlike aesthetic—it mimics the fluctuating, often abstract nature of thought within the neurodivergent brain. Logic bends, objects defy physics, and emotional states are illustrated through visual metaphor rather than literal representation. A bowl of soup may transform into an ocean, a dining table may stretch into infinity, and a fork may split into fractals. These distortions are not random; they act as cognitive reflections, translating complex emotional landscapes into symbolic form.
This surrealist language challenges viewers to interpret meaning on a sensory and symbolic level, rather than through straightforward exposition. It demands an empathetic engagement—requiring the audience to lean into discomfort, ambiguity, and vulnerability. For neurodivergent viewers, the surreal may feel more real than realism itself. It aligns more closely with their lived experience of thought fragmentation, perceptual shifts, and emotional layering.
Hanna’s animation is, in essence, a hall of mirrors—one that doesn’t distort but reflects the authenticity of internal dissonance. It becomes not just a representation of difference but an embodiment of it.
Articulating Emotional Reality Without Words
One of the most remarkable aspects of Eating Soup With A Fork is its ability to articulate deeply complex emotional experiences without relying heavily on dialogue. The absence of spoken language places the onus entirely on visual and auditory cues to convey the narrative. In doing so, Hanna taps into the universality of emotion while also respecting the nuanced, non-verbal communication styles that many neurodivergent individuals rely on.
This decision also democratizes the viewing experience. Viewers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds can access the film’s message without translation, while those with communication differences may find solace in a narrative that speaks their language—one made of images, sensations, and atmospheres rather than words.
This type of visual storytelling is an act of inclusivity. It opens the door to understanding and connection without demanding conformity to neurotypical modes of expression. The visuals, in their discomfort and unpredictability, become a kind of emotional syntax—a grammar of difference that anyone can learn to read, if they’re willing.
Creative Connection Across Cognitive Realms
Art has long served as a bridge between worlds that otherwise feel divided by language, culture, and perception. In Eating Soup With A Fork, Hanna Norberg-Williams uses the power of animation to bridge another divide—the space between neurotypical and neurodivergent experience. While rooted in personal narrative, this film is an invitation to others to step momentarily into a parallel sensory and emotional framework, one that diverges from the presumed “norm” and reflects a deeper, more complex way of experiencing life.
This is not an explanatory film. It is not didactic or prescriptive. Instead, it opts for poetic ambiguity and emotional nuance. By harnessing surrealist symbolism and disorienting visuals, Hanna constructs a cinematic environment that does not attempt to teach through instruction but through immersion. For neurotypical viewers unfamiliar with the subtle intricacies of masking, stimming, or sensory overload, the animation provides a rare opportunity to empathize—not through facts, but through feeling.
This strategy reframes the conversation about neurodivergence entirely. It says: You don’t need to understand every detail to empathize. You need only be willing to feel what it’s like when the tools you’re given don’t align with the tasks you’re expected to perform.
Emotional Translation Without Literalism
The genius of Eating Soup With A Fork lies in its ability to translate emotional truths without relying on literal language or diagnostic terminology. Clinical descriptions of neurodivergence often fall short of conveying the daily dissonance and psychological labor involved in navigating a neurotypical world. Hanna's film offers a counterpoint: an aesthetic translation of the unspoken and the unseen.
Rather than describe sensory dysregulation, it replicates the experience through sound design and visual cacophony. Rather than define masking behavior, it visually demonstrates the character's confusion and effort to imitate others at the table. Rather than use exposition to explain social disconnection, it lets the viewer feel the alienation through metaphors like the impossible task of eating soup with a fork.
By replacing conventional storytelling with affective logic, the film mirrors how many neurodivergent individuals relate to the world—less through language and more through intuition, pattern, and emotional resonance. The message is clear: narrative need not be linear, verbal, or objective to be powerful. It only needs to be felt.
Collapsing the Distance Between 'Us' and 'Them'
In many mainstream conversations about neurodiversity, there is a persistent sense of otherness—an unintentional but damaging implication that neurodivergent people exist apart from the rest of society, as anomalies or exceptions. Hanna’s film counters this narrative through radical emotional proximity. It does not place neurodivergent people in a separate category. Instead, it asks viewers to recognize the universal human emotions embedded in these experiences.
The sensations of confusion, frustration, exclusion, and yearning for understanding are not exclusive to those with autism or ADHD. They are human. What makes the neurodivergent experience distinct is not the existence of these emotions, but the frequency and context in which they arise. Eating Soup With A Fork humanizes this reality by dissolving the viewer's resistance to discomfort and replacing it with empathy.
When a neurotypical viewer finds themselves viscerally frustrated watching a character struggle with a fork in a sea of normalcy, they are not just witnessing neurodivergence—they are feeling it. This moment of emotional alignment collapses the barrier between 'us' and 'them,' revealing that the human experience is far more interconnected than we often allow ourselves to admit.
The Aesthetic of Empathy
Visual storytelling offers a powerful alternative to language when exploring emotional landscapes that resist simple categorization. In Hanna’s animation, empathy is built not through character development or plot twists but through a carefully curated visual language designed to replicate the emotional rhythms of a neurodivergent mind.
Fluctuating hues, non-linear sequences, inconsistent proportions, and fluid transitions all contribute to an atmosphere of instability—one that mimics the instability of trying to interpret environments not built with your perception in mind. This is not beauty for the sake of aestheticism; it is intentional discomfort. And yet, it is precisely in this aesthetic dissonance that empathy is cultivated. Viewers begin to feel the cognitive effort involved in navigating such a world.
By the time the film concludes, the audience has not just witnessed a story; they have inhabited an experience. This sensory intimacy transforms passive spectators into active participants, drawing them closer to emotional truths that might otherwise remain abstract or misunderstood.
Neurotypical Reflection and Self-Awareness
The film also serves as a reflective tool for neurotypical viewers. It challenges assumptions about what is considered "normal" behavior and encourages introspection about how societal systems demand compliance rather than compassion. Hanna’s metaphor of the soup and the fork calls into question how we define appropriateness and who gets to decide the rules of engagement in social or professional settings.
For some viewers, the film may inspire uncomfortable realizations about how easily exclusion can occur—not through overt malice, but through invisible norms and unwritten expectations. It may provoke reflection on how often we expect others to adapt without offering flexibility or understanding in return.
This reflective quality elevates the film from a personal exploration to a socially conscious artwork. It insists that empathy is not only about feeling for others but also about recognizing our role in shaping the environments that others must navigate. It invites a deeper engagement with inclusivity—not as a buzzword, but as an evolving, everyday practice.
Beyond Advocacy: Reclaiming Narrative Space
While many media representations of neurodivergence lean into advocacy or awareness campaigns, Eating Soup With A Fork does something subtler and more powerful. It reclaims narrative space not as an educational platform, but as an autonomous expression of neurodivergent identity. The film doesn’t aim to represent all neurodivergent experiences. It aims to articulate one, in all its specificity, contradiction, and emotional weight.
This approach allows the artwork to stand on its own creative merit, unburdened by the responsibility to explain or justify itself. In doing so, it resists the tokenization that often accompanies representation and insists on the right to exist as an artwork first, not just as advocacy.
The ripple effect, however, is undeniable. In granting space for authentic, unfiltered neurodivergent storytelling, Hanna opens the door for others to do the same. They demonstrate that art rooted in lived experience can not only challenge dominant narratives but also reshape them. That in itself is a revolutionary act.
A Shared Space of Understanding
Ultimately, Eating Soup With A Fork is a gesture toward unity—not by flattening differences, but by honoring them. It acknowledges that our internal realities are not all the same, yet asserts that we are all capable of extending empathy beyond our own cognitive templates. The film’s greatest success lies in its capacity to render the invisible visible, to turn emotion into image, and to use art as a universal translator between fundamentally different experiences of the world.
For neurodivergent viewers, the film may feel like recognition. For neurotypical audiences, it may feel like revelation. And for both, it offers a rare kind of connection—one that transcends vocabulary, diagnosis, and definition. It asks not for sympathy, but for solidarity. Not for correction, but for collaboration. Not for silence, but for listening.
By transforming lived complexity into emotional art, Hanna Norberg-Williams has done more than share a story—they have created a shared space where difference is not just accepted but deeply understood.
Highlighting Inner Complexity and Creativity
While the animation powerfully illustrates the challenges faced by those with atypical neurological profiles, it also underscores their unique strengths and vibrant inner worlds. Hanna is careful not to cast neurodivergence solely in the light of difficulty or adversity. Instead, they celebrate the imagination, curiosity, and resilience that often accompany it.
The internal experiences portrayed in the film are not simply chaotic or painful—they are also rich, nuanced, and deeply creative. Hanna emphasizes that neurodivergent people frequently possess an exceptional ability to hyper-focus, think innovatively, and explore ideas in ways that defy convention. These qualities, while often overshadowed by societal barriers, deserve recognition and appreciation.
By showcasing this duality—the simultaneous presence of struggle and strength—Eating Soup With A Fork refuses to flatten neurodivergent identity into a single narrative. It paints a picture that is both tender and truthful, and in doing so, pushes back against reductive stereotypes.
Embracing the Absurd to Understand the Real
Since earning First Class Honours in Illustration from Camberwell College of Arts in 2022, Hanna has honed a style that is distinctly surreal, often disquieting, and entirely their own. Their art revels in contradiction: calmness interrupted by noise, logic undercut by absurdity, structure crumbling into chaos. It is within these contrasts that Hanna finds the most expressive power.
They describe the world itself as a frequently absurd place—filled with systems and social cues that don’t always make sense, especially to someone whose brain is wired differently. Exploring that absurdity becomes not just a creative strategy, but a philosophical one. By exaggerating the illogic of everyday life, they are able to reveal the truths hidden beneath the surface.
In Eating Soup With A Fork, this tension between absurdity and meaning becomes the engine of the narrative. The viewer is not given easy answers or comforting resolutions. Instead, they are asked to sit with discomfort, to engage with ambiguity, and perhaps, to reflect more deeply on how we define normalcy in the first place.
A Personal Story With Universal Resonance
Though the film is specific in its viewpoint, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt out of sync with the world around them. It captures the sensation of misalignment, of trying to meet expectations that were never designed with you in mind. For many neurodivergent individuals, especially those who also navigate marginalizations around gender and sexuality, that sense of otherness can be magnified.
Hanna’s work is a reminder that these experiences, though isolating, are not uncommon—and that by sharing them, connection becomes possible. Their animation is both an act of self-expression and a bridge toward collective understanding.
The Transformative Power of Authentic Storytelling
Eating Soup With A Fork doesn’t try to simplify or sanitize the neurodivergent experience. It resists the pressure to package difference into easily digestible narratives. Instead, it embraces complexity, contradiction, and emotional honesty.
This makes the animation not just a creative achievement, but a cultural intervention. At a time when representation is often superficial or performative, Hanna offers something deeply real. Their story isn’t told through labels or diagnoses, but through metaphor, color, texture, and tone. The result is a piece of work that is as intellectually stimulating as it is emotionally moving.
Cultivating Compassion Through Visual Language
At its heart, Hanna’s film is a call for compassion. It asks viewers to approach difference not with judgment, but with curiosity. To consider that just because someone sees the world differently, it doesn’t mean their view is wrong—only that it offers a new and valuable perspective.
Art has always had the power to build empathy, and Eating Soup With A Fork does so in a way that is both accessible and profound. Without resorting to didacticism, it teaches by showing, by feeling, by immersing. It is an invitation—to listen, to understand, and to imagine more inclusive ways of living together.
Final Thoughts:
Eating Soup With A Fork is more than just an animated short—it is a poignant and imaginative reflection of what it means to move through life as someone whose internal world doesn’t always match the expectations of the external one. Hanna Norberg-Williams has taken their lived experiences and transformed them into a metaphorical, surrealist work that cuts through the noise of traditional representation. By rejecting conventional storytelling and diving into the abstract, Hanna opens a pathway for viewers—both neurodivergent and neurotypical—to connect with the deep, often unspoken emotional currents that run beneath the surface of neurodivergent life.
What makes this piece so resonant is not just its bold visuals or clever metaphors, but its emotional honesty. It captures the dissonance, confusion, and even exhaustion that can come from trying to function in a world not built for you, yet it also celebrates the brilliance and creativity that arise from seeing things differently. Through moments of chaos and calm, disorder and insight, Hanna shows that the neurodivergent experience is not monolithic—it is layered, evolving, and profoundly human.
The animation serves as a compelling reminder that “normal” is often just a shared illusion—one that excludes more than it includes. When societal systems are based on a narrow view of how people should think, behave, or communicate, those who fall outside that framework are often left feeling inadequate or alien. Eating Soup With A Fork dismantles that illusion with clarity and empathy, revealing the value in perspectives that challenge the status quo.
Ultimately, Hanna Norberg-Williams’ work asks viewers to do more than simply acknowledge neurodiversity—it invites them to value and celebrate it. In a culture that too often demands conformity, this film is a rallying cry for authenticity, difference, and radical acceptance. It is a reminder that sometimes, using a fork to eat soup isn’t a mistake—it’s a metaphor for a world that needs to change its expectations, not its people. Through vulnerability and imagination, Hanna has created something rare: a work of art that speaks not just about difference, but from within it.
