We introduce NeuroHub Community’s ecological approach to community and wellbeing through philosophical concepts grounded in practical application.
When I first started thinking about ecological metaphors for neurodivergent experience, I kept returning to two thoughts: the underground fungal web of mycelium, and the sideways-spreading, rootless rhizome.
At first glance they can seem interchangeable as they both resist hierarchy, they both spread without a centre and they both connect things that might appear separate on the surface.
The more time I spent with these thoughts and through discussions with Neurohub Community and Stimpunks, the more I realised they are doing quite different things, and that difference matters for how we understand Autistic and neurodivergent life, community, and identity.
Mycelium helps us understand how care flows and survival becomes possible.
Rhizome helps us understand how a person grows, learns, and becomes.
Mycelium: A Network of Care and Mutual Sustenance
Mycelium is the vast underground fungal web that connects trees and plants across a forest ecosystem. It’s sometimes called the “wood wide web” and what makes it such a valuable metaphor for care is not just how it looks, but how it actually functions.
Mycelial networks redistribute resources — carbon, water, nutrients — from stronger nodes toward more vulnerable ones (Simard, 2021). Older, established trees send sugars through the network to seedlings growing in shade, where they cannot yet photosynthesize enough to sustain themselves. The network actively compensates for inequality of access, it notices where something is struggling and it responds.
There is no central command, there is no king or ruling tree that rules all the others and send out orders, no hierarchy issuing instructions about who receives what. Care flows through relationships and proximity, quietly and continuously, largely beneath the surface.
I think this maps powerfully onto disability justice frameworks and neurodiversity communities. Mia Mingus’s concept of interdependence and access intimacy (2022) is about the understanding that we all need care and we all have something to offer, it resonates deeply with mycelial logic. Care, in this framing, is not charity flowing downward from those who have the power to those who lack power. It is a web of mutual interdependent sustenance in which everyone is both receiver and contributor at different times and in different ways.
For Autistic community specifically, the mycelium metaphor holds to me because it values depth of connection over breadth. It recognises that the health of the whole of our community depends on the health of each node, each person — including, and perhaps especially, the most vulnerable. It is a model of community that does not ask anyone to need less, perform more, or earn their place in the network, everyone is accepted as they are.
Distress and burnout, from this perspective, are not signs of individual failure. They are signals moving through a system — signs that the network needs to respond, that resources need to be redistributed, that care needs to flow more evenly.
Rhizome: Person-Centred Becoming and Non-Linear Growth
Where mycelium is a metaphor for community and care, I am now moving towards the idea of the rhizome being more of a metaphor for personhood and becoming.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduced the rhizome as a philosophical concept in their work One Thousand Plateaus — drawn from plants like ginger or couch grass that grow horizontally, without a single root or trunk, branching in multiple directions simultaneously, without a fixed origin or a predetermined destination.
This stands in contrast to what they called the arborescent, or tree-like, model that David Gray-Hammond discusses in our podcast — the familiar image of a trunk (a normative baseline) from which branches spread outward (deviations, differences, deficits measured against that centre). The tree model underpins so much of how neurodivergent people have been previously and in many ways are still understood — as branching away from a correct developmental path, as requiring intervention to redirect growth back toward the trunk. The rhizome refuses this entirely.
The rhizome has no correct path and no normal sequence, there is no centre from which deviation is measured. You can enter it at any point and it connects anything to anything. It is about multiplicity and becoming rather than arriving at a fixed, finished identity – which all resonate with me and reflect how our online neurodivergent communities evolve and support each other.
Thinking of the Autistic rhizome in this way does not position any person as a deficient version of something else. Walker’s neuroqueer framework (Walker, 2021) draws on this kind of thinking, that neurodivergent people are not branching away from normal; we are differently rooted, growing differently, becoming differently, and that difference is not a problem to be corrected.
For monotropic people, where your attention flows deeply into fewer, more absorbing channels (Murray, Lesser & Lawson, 2005), the rhizome maps onto how interests and understanding and interdependent flow actually develop. It doesn’t develop through a linear framework moving from step to step, but through deep lateral (often omnidirectional) connections: one fascination, interest, shared story or struggle opening unexpectedly into another, knowledge spiralling and looping, meaning accumulating in ways that don’t follow prescribed paths.
Rhizomatic becoming may look like chaos but it is a different kind of order and reflects the Chaotic Self David Gray-Hammond has written about extensively.
The mycelium describes our community: how we hold and sustain each other across difference, how care flows laterally rather than downward, how no one person’s thriving is separate from everyone else’s.
The rhizome describes the person: that each individual body and mind is not a deficient version of a normative type, but a genuine multiplicity in process of becoming — with its own valid logic, its own valid direction, its ownvalid pace.
Neither metaphor asks anyone to be fixed or cured, nor positions difference as a deficit and both resist the idea that there is one correct form that life, learning, or identity should take.
Through our onoging discussions I think they are useful to point us towards a different kind of world, it enables a reworlding that isn’t built not on compliance and normalisation, but on care, curiosity, and the recognition that neurodivergent ways of being are not deviations from life, but expressions of it.
Rhizomatic pathways open new worlds by allowing divergence.
Mycelial infrastructures sustain those worlds by enabling care.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15857859/
I re-read Wuthering Heights last year and just watched the new 2026 film adaptation. This isn’t a blog about gothic romance, or a critique of the film. It is more of a personal reflection on Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship that is beginning to make more sense to me as I re-read and re-watch various adaptations of one of my favourite books ever. I am rethinking their relationship through a new lens as I learn more about my own Autistic identity.
When Catherine Earnshaw says “I am Heathcliff,” it really resonates with me. It captures a connection to an inner world so intense it loses all sense of boundaries. For me, it captures my Autistic way of being where I can feel myself becoming part of someone or something else entirely. An all-consuming, whole-bodymind way of experiencing life. That deep monotropic pull of being totally immersed in whoever or whatever my attention is drawn towards.
There’s a theory of Autistic attention called monotropism — developed by Murray, Lesser, and Lawson (2005) that I have written about extensively. It describes how many Autistic and ADHD people organise their attentional resources. Instead of spreading attention broadly across many things at once, monotropic people tend to go deep, very deep. We tend to pour everything we have into fewer channels, whatever is inside our tunnel of attention gets the full experience: full focus, full feeling, full presence.
I think Cathy and Heathcliff’s all-consuming love can be reimagined and perhaps better understood through the lens of monotropism. Being monotropic is not just about cognitive resources, it is everything! It is about how people move, sense, perceive, and relate to each other. In their case, they are the centre of each other’s attentional worlds; they are completely entangled, even after years apart, their souls are still looped and hooked into each other. The wild Yorkshire moors aren’t just a backdrop to their relationship; they’re an important part of the environment and the shared language and memories they have created together since childhood.
Everything else sits outside of their relationship and the moors; Edgar Linton, Nelly, the drawing rooms, in fact, the whole performance of social respectability and ways of being in the world at that time, is all at odds with Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship.
Life demands that Cathy split herself. In her attempt to try and make her marriage work with Edgar Linton, she tries to focus on her new life without Heathcliff, but it is impossible. The idea of monotropic split conceptualised by Tanya Adkin helps explain how hard dividing attention is for Autistic people. We don’t know whether Catherine or Heathcliff would now be identified as Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, but my own personal resonance with their characters makes sense.
Catherine has to divide her attention between the competing loyalties of Healthcliff and Linton and maintain a respectable status in the society she is in. She tries to mask and fit in, she tries for years to manage how much she feels, how much she shows, how much intensity is acceptable in polite company. The neuronormative demands, the pressure on people whose minds and bodies work differently as they try to reshape themselves into a form the dominant social world can accommodate is exhausting. The cost of that reshaping runs through Cathy’s entire life. It isn’t just social pressure; it slowly begins to unravel her from the inside.
Her famous declaration — “I am Heathcliff” — makes complete sense to me. It describes exactly what it feels like when my deepest attention and my sense of who I am become genuinely inseparable, when another person or event that isn’t just important to me, it is my everything that is woven into the fabric of how I experience myself and life. Something some may be able to relate to. When that person or interest is gone, you are not just bereft. The loss goes all the way down, into the core of the self, until the flow that once held your life together may feel utterly broken.
One of the things that strikes me most, reading the novel this way, is who actually understands either of them. Edgar doesn’t understand Cathy, and Nelly doesn’t understand Heathcliff. The people around them consistently misread them, misjudge them, interpret their intensity as threat or instability. Milton’s double empathy problem (2012) describes exactly this—the way that people with genuinely different experiences can find mutual comprehension difficult, not because either person is deficient, but because the gap between their ways of experiencing the world is so great. Cathy and Heathcliff are, for each other, the only exception to that. They are the only two people in the novel who experience each other from the inside. Their connection and their relationship is the only place either of them is fully legible and are able to be their true selves.
This makes what happens at her deathbed almost unbearable to read. Heathcliff doesn’t grieve quietly; he demands she haunt him, he asks her to stay in any form — just not to leave him in the void where he cannot reach her. He says he cannot live without his life. He cannot live without his soul. He can not live without Cathy.
And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe – I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’ He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.
Chapter 16
Where the words of human experiences run out to describe the intensity, Brontë turns back to nature, to the knotted tree trunk Heathcliff dashed his head against. The sound Brontë describes Heathcliff as exclaiming is something beyond the human, “not like a man, but like a savage beast”.
Brontë wasn’t writing a story about Autistic people and neurodivergent lives. She didn’t have this framework in 1847; it may be a leap to suggest that any of this is related to anyone else’s experience as a neurodivergent person but my own. However, she was writing about something she felt deeply, she is writing about what it looks like when a person cannot do things by halves. When people love the way they attend to everything: completely, in depth, with the whole of themselves, in a world that keeps asking them to be less.
When we read Wuthering Heights through the lens of monotropism, the double empathy problem, and neuroqueer theory, something can shift. Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is devastating, but it is also the most real thing in the novel — the only place either of them is ever fully known. The world Brontë placed them in was never built to hold their intensity and passion. Many of us may in some ways share and resonate with their world and perhaps find ourselves reflected in Cathy and Heathcliff — in the depth, the pull, the all-consuming way of loving, the trying to fit in and adapt.
What Cathy and Heathcliff never had, and what so many of us are still learning we deserve, is the safety to be fully known, and the freedom to stop pretending to be less than we are.
Brontë, E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1847).
Garau, V., Woods, R., Chown, N., Hallett, S., Murray, F., Wood, R., Murray, A. & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2023). The Monotropism Questionnaire, Open Science Framework. DOI:10.31219/osf.io/ft73y
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
I find it genuinely awe-inspiring to know that the atoms that make up your body, the oxygen in your lungs, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood were forged inside stars that died before our planet even existed. Not metaphorically, we are actually, literally, made of stars!
A 2017 survey of 150,000 stars confirmed that humans and our galaxy share around 97% of the same kinds of atoms, and that the six elements essential to life — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur — are woven right through the Milky Way (Howell, 2017). We are a living part of the cosmos.
I have been thinking about this a lot, and what it may mean to us as Autistic people, and it is something that is evolving in conversations within the CASY Autistic Physics group and my recent collaborative work with Stimpunks. There is something about being made of stardust that resonates far deeper than a scientific fact for me.
As an Autistic person, I have always felt that the boundaries between myself and the world are more porous than I was told they should be. Everything feels entangled, I am deeply influenced by my environment in ways that go beyond what neuronormative frameworks tend to account for. Time, my past and present merge and move together; my pull towards moss and mushrooms, and my interest in water, are more than a ‘like’ or form of regulation or sensory relief, they feel like I am becoming more attuned to something deeper and more essential, something I can only describe as parts of my soul recognising what they actually belong to.
The elements in your body right now came into being through some of the most violent events in the universe. The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen in every breath, were forged in the cores of massive stars and released in supernovae: entire stars compressing their whole lives into a single catastrophic release. In that rupture, what had been locked inside was scattered outward, making things possible that could never have existed before.
Many of us, as neurodivergent people and from marginalised communities, may know something about transformation through rupture, about how the most difficult passages of burnout and exclusion can forge something that simply could not have existed any other way. As I have written, these periods of burnout seem to change me at my core. I never fully recover; the deepest burnouts feel like a seismic shift has taken place. My whole sensory system and way of relating to the world transforms.
For Autistic people, the idea of a fixed, bounded, separate self may sit uneasily, we are always in flow, always fluid and always responsive to everything around us. The theory of Monotropism developed by Murray, Lesser, and Lawson (2005) may help explain this. It describes the way Autistic (and may be ADHD/ AuDHD) attention tends to move in deep, singular currents rather than spreading across many channels at once. It is a different way of connecting: like matter drawn into a stellar core, our attention concentrates and transforms, and, like the star, what forms in that depth eventually moves outward and can expand, making new connections and new ways of being.
Ethodiversity is a concept that feels important here. Originally coined by Cordero-Rivera (2017) in ecology and evolutionary science, and developed by Tarragnat (2025) into a framework for thinking about human and nonhuman life together, it refers to the full range of behavioural and existential ways of being across species, not just neurological difference, but the diversity of how living beings sense, connect, relate, move through, and respond to the world. As Autistic people, our particular way of being is shaped by, and in turn shapes, everything around us, perhaps more intensely for some than others. We are not separate from the wider pattern of the cosmos; we are very much a part of how the pattern moves, interdependent on each other and everything around us.
For many Autistic people, this deep attunement to the world, to its textures, its moods, its patterns may be felt intensely. However, it is so often misread, pathologised, or masked out of our existence simply to fit into spaces that were not built for us. When we are in environments where we feel genuinely safe, something can shift. We are able to be our full selves, more open, more present to what the world is actually offering us —the things that bring us comfort, joy, and we can meet them on our own terms. That is what a real connection actually feels like, and we deserve spaces where it’s possible.
That sense of belonging and connection can ripple outwards. adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy (2017) that small patterns replicate into large ones, that the local and the cosmic are always doing the same thing at different scales. She centres the people that dominant systems have tried to cast as anomalies, Black, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, poor and names what many of us may already sense: that what looks like deviation is often a more honest expression of how complex living systems actually work. Emergence doesn’t need conformity; it needs difference. A universe that could only produce one kind of star would not have produced us or our world as we know it.
We are all made of stardust, and our entanglement, our porousness, our deep attunement to the world and cosmos around us are things we should all embrace, regardless of any labels or diagnoses we may or may not have.
Stimpunks, whose work on star stuff has been part of the thinking woven through this piece and through our collaborative work sums it up nicely:
The cosmos is within us, and we are a way for the universe to know itself — in every colour, key, and frequency of neurodiversity
“What more do you want? The ingredients in our bodies have been assembled in the hearts of long-dead stars over billions of years and have assembled themselves into temporary structures that can think and explore…” Brian Cox
brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.
Cordero-Rivera, A. (2017). Behavioral diversity (ethodiversity): A neglected level in the study of biodiversity. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 5, Article 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2017.00007
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Today is World Quantum Day. The date itself carries meaning: April 14th is a reference to 4.14, the rounded first digits of Planck’s constant, a precise measure of energy and time that governs how reality behaves at its most fundamental level. Quantum physics tells us that particles can exist in multiple states at once, that reality at its most fundamental level is not fixed, singular, or predictable in the ways we were taught to expect.
I am not a physicist by any means (!), but I have spent my whole life as an Autistic ADHD person living something that feels, may be able to be better explained by quantum physics than any textbook or psychology book about Autism. What follows is my attempt to use the language of physics as metaphor and resonance – not a literal claim, to describe what neuronormative frameworks about Autistic experiences have never quite been able to hold for me.
I have never experienced life as a single, stable or consistent reality. People talk about “being present” as though there is one shared world everyone occupies in the same way, with the same attentional depth, the same clarity, the same sensory experiences, and the same time perception. For me, my presence has never been singular; my reality is layered, permeable, and sensorily multidimensional. Memories, dreams, and the present moment all overlap and bleed into one another. ( I wrote more about dreams and exploring threshold consciousness, temporal ecology, and the porous boundaries between dreaming and waking in my blog about hypnagogic and hypnagogic experiences.)
I am realising I am constantly navigating worlds that coexist rather than worlds that take turns or operate in any linear, easily explained way that even the most neuro-affirming of Autistic spaces seem not to quite get all the time.
There are thin surface layers where language, rules, and social expectations dominate, brittle spaces that take enormous effort for me to maintain, even more so as I’ve grown older and more aware of my own needs. This is more than just masking at a surface social level to fit in, it goes far deeper and is more expansive. I have spent most of my life translating myself into legible, acceptable versions, until I found spaces like the CASY Physics Group, where other people seem to just get it too, where I do not have to translate at all and where all these weird experiences are beginning to make a bit more sense as I learn from and listen to others.
Beneath that surface of masking is what I can only describe as caverns and rivers of thought, ideas, and feelings, flowing like underground water, finding their own paths. Sometimes that current sweeps me into deep burnout, sometimes I can ride it, working prolifically, losing track of sleep entirely, pulled into a tunnel of meaning that feels more real than anything on the surface.
In quantum terms, this feels like it is may be closer to superposition, a holding of multiple states, multiple layers of reality being simultaneously open. The problem I have begun to realise is not just being neurodivergent, it is being in a world calibrated to expect only one state at a time – often based on neuronormative values and perceptions.
Holotropism and Neuroholographic Ways of Being
My understanding of these experiences became clearer when I encountered two ideas that finally gave me the language to describe my ways of being. The first is monotropism, the theory that many Autistic and ADHD people channel attention deeply into a single tunnel of interest at a time (Murray et al., 2005). I recognise this in myself and have written about monotropism extensively on my Autistic Realms website and also support Fergus Murray with Monotropism.org. However, Hendl H Mirra’s (2023) concept of holotropism expanded this considerably, describing something that feels closer to the actual space and time I live in.
Holotropism describes a way of being in which sensory gates are wide open, where self and world do not have sharp edges, and where experience is not additive — this thing, then that thing — but multiplicative: intensely rich, layered, and sometimes overwhelming all at once. In this framing, monotropism is not the root of our being but a salve, a way the holotropic mind protects itself, flooding one pathway to quiet the noise of all the others. I often find myself entering or seeking deep flow when the fullness of my openness becomes too much, as a way to help balance my bodymind. Being holotropic is not something I switch into occasionally, it is who I am, when I am safe enough to be myself.
“Neuro-Holographic” is an emergent idea that our group has embraced. Neuro-Holographic, as a concept here, refers to the idea that every small bit of energy and information, whether an atom or the universe, reflects every other part of itself in a seamless and meaningful way.
This has led to the awareness that, despite common misconceptions, we are very much empathetically connected to the things around us. Because our sensing mechanisms are super sensitive and often synesthetic (cross-sensing — for example, tasting colors or seeing sound) we often feel a part of the things around us. We don’t tend to see in hierarchies, but rather in “holograms,” as described. Always looking for connecting patterns in an overwhelming ocean of sensory, emotional, and energetic information, our relational culture focuses on how things go together and function. Because of these innate talents, insights, and a tendency toward invention, out of the box thinking, and an enthusiasm for combining patterns, autistic/Neuro-Holographic people have been responsible for many important developments in the larger cultures in which they find themselves. Being extraordinarily sensitive and seeing things in new ways is foundational to autistic culture.
The hologram draws on David Bohm’s implicate order, the idea that beneath observable reality lies a deeper enfolded order from which visible patterns emerge (Bohm, 1980). This is contested within some physics discussions and is not mainstream quantum theory. I am not claiming that quantum mechanics literally explains Autistic cognition, I am suggesting that this language describes my lived experience in ways that other frameworks never have. For those of us whose bodyminds work this way, finding that language is not a small thing; it can be life-changing and an opportunity to connect with others.
A hologram has a remarkable property: if you break it into pieces, each fragment still contains the whole image, not a portion of it, but the entire picture, seen from a different angle. The smaller the fragment, the less resolution it holds, but the whole is still there. This is how I feel my mind works, where a single sensation, such as a tone of voice, a shift in relational energy, or the light through my window, can activate entire networks of memory, imagery, emotion, and meaning simultaneously. When my thinking seems to wander off in all directions, it is not getting lost, even if that is how it can appear to others, it is doing what a hologram does, where every fragment still holds the whole picture and every thought connects back to everything else, to a greater or lesser degree. It can be exhausting to live like this at times, but it is also where my most creative ideas and sensory experiences happen, with connections and ideas spiralling up that surprise even me, that don’t make immediate sense until I have had time to sit with them and let them settle into something new.
Quantum Physics and Being Autistic
In quantum physics, a particle in superposition holds multiple possibilities at once — fluid, open, unforced — until something forces it to collapse into a single fixed state. When I first encountered this idea, something in me recognised it, not as a scientific concept I was learning (although I have tried!), but more as a description of something I had been living my whole life without having the words for.
When I am safe, I feel I am in superposition, and I am able to move between two natural rhythms: deep absorption and flow, that bright tunnel where the world narrows to what matters most and a quieter open awareness, where everything settles and connects without effort.
Collapse happens when the world demands linearity: one pace, one channel, one way of being, when I am always on someone else’s time and terms and expectations. When collapse is sustained long enough, it becomes burnout, which is not just exhaustion in the neuronormative sense, but something closer to what I would describe as a dimensional compression, where I am being forced into a single layer until all the others become inaccessible.
Recovery from burnout, for me, is not just about rest; it is about having enough unstructured time for flow and safety to slowly unfold back into the full dimensionality of who I am and find my bearings in whatever new configuration of self and world has emerged in the meantime. It is kind of like being a living portal where the door just closes off sometimes, and I need to find ways to re-open the door to discover whatever new ways of being await.
CASY Autistic Physics Community
Things have begun to shift since I found the CASY Community, where our Autistic ways of knowing and being are all unconditionally accepted. Dawn Prince-Hughes has described CASY gatherings as places “where dense, three-dimensional planes mesh with synesthetic and holographic perceptions”. It felt like Dawn and others were finally naming my internal geography. Our CASY Declaration states that, “there is no separation of mind in a conscious, holographic system — that the Autistic universe is more than the sum of its parts”.
This is what we and other member of CASY are calling Autistic Physics: the understanding that Autistic ways of being is not a broken version of neuronormativity but an entirely different relationship with reality. Liam McDermott’s research names this structurally, arguing that neuronormativity silently governs what counts as scientific knowledge, and that the rigidity of neurotypical-normative learning actively disables those of us who create knowledge non-normatively (McDermott, 2023).
Embracing Neuroholographic Ways of Being
World Quantum Day celebrates the fact that reality, at its most fundamental level, does not behave the way we may have been taught to expect. Particles hold multiple truths simultaneously, and connection happens across distances and time frames that conventional and neuronormative logic would say should make it impossible.
In the CASY Physics group, we have been sitting with these ideas in our online community, and we are finding that when we as Autistic and neurodivergent people share how we actually experience the world, through conversation, writing, art, and all the layered, neuroholographic ways we naturally think and express ourselves, something becomes visible that no outside account of us could ever quite reach. We share synchronicities, different temporalities, and so many experiences that many people find hard to empathise with or understand.
Living in layers has always been how I move through the world, holographically, relationally, in ways that neuronormative frameworks were never built to hold. What I have found in the CASY Physics group is that I am far from alone in this. When people who experience reality in many different and unique ways come together and share their experiences in their own language (through words, text or other creative media), on their own terms, something opens up that no outside account of Autistic people can ever quite reach. The universe, it turns out, works in ways that may feel rather familiar to those of us who have always lived this way, and finding each other, it turns out, is part of how the picture becomes whole and make a bit more sense.
Author’s note: This piece is written from my own Autistic experience. Autistic lives span an enormous range, this is just my perspective.
Murray D, Lesser M, Lawson W. Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism. 2005 May;9(2):139-56. doi: 10.1177/1362361305051398. PMID: 15857859. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15857859/
Reading Liam Ren’s idea “of neuroqueering methodologies, or neuroqueering as methodology” ignited a memory, a re-emergence of an experience that I had many years ago. Liam describes neuroqueering as something unfinished, and shaped by intensive frequencies, something that ebbs and flows. This resonated with how my own learning journey has unfolded over time. Meaning has rarely developed through linear progression; instead, it has emerged through immersion in specific hyper-focused interests, through deep monotropic intensity, and often a return to a previous deep interest (like this article about the artist Mark Rothko), a constant spiralling movement, ebbing and flowing between past and present.
Their reflections on the idea of a “synaesthetic art critic” and philosophical engagement beyond conventional academic structures brought me back to my student years studying History of Art and English Literature almost 30 years ago. Long before I had the language for words like monotropism, neurodivergence, or neuroqueer theory, I was already encountering art as a whole-body experience; as a field of sensation that reorganised bodily awareness. Art was something I felt, something I needed in my life, and still do. Abstract expressionist painting, particularly the work of Mark Rothko, became a place for me where perception, emotion, and bodily awareness seemed to merge, and I felt a bit more understood, it made me feel more complete in a way that only art, music, literature and poetry can.
The Gallery as a Plane of Immanence
One memory stands out with particular clarity: visiting Tate Modern in London to experience Rothko’s Seagram Murals, first-hand with my friend as part of our Uni course. The gallery space was dimly lit, quiet, and expansive. The paintings were monumental, not decorative objects hanging on the gallery wall, but immersive environments; I felt I actually entered in to them. The paintings were autonomous compounds what Deleuze describes as “blocks of sensations” that reorganised the gallery space. “The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (Deleuze, 1994).
Looking back now, the gallery setting can be understood as what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a plane of immanence — a field of relations within which thought becomes possible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Thought does not arise solely within an individual’s mind; it emerges through material and affective conditions: architecture, colour, silence, bodily positioning, and social presence with our surroundings. This space helped shaped my perception of the art before any conscious interpretation began; it was something I felt before the words arrived. In fact, I still have no words to accurately describe my experiences, which is possibly why art is so important: it fills the gap where words restrict us.
Plateaus of Attention: Monotropism and Sensory Duration
My friend and I lay down on the gallery floor, surrounded by vast fields of dark red and maroon. I let the colours wash through me, as though I were bathing in them, held within an atmosphere that seemed to slow and thicken time itself. We must have stayed there for a long while, suspended in a quiet intensity that resisted any sense of conclusion. I have returned to the gallery many times since, always with the same feeling: that I never quite want to leave, as though the encounter is still unfolding and I am still making sense of it.
This sustained immersive, monotropic experience could be understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a plateau: a continuous region of intensity that maintains experiential charge without moving toward resolution (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). My attention deepened rather than accelerated or reached any definitive answers about the work; my thoughts unfolded as time seemed to just slip away, and I felt I almost became part of the art itself. This narrowing of attention functioned as a temporary territorialisation of perception, through which sensory relations intensified rather than diminished.
The theory of Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005), may help explain this experience further. When the attentional resources of Autistic and ADHD people become highly focused, engagement with sensory or conceptual environments can become immersive and nonlinear. In the Rothko gallery, this narrowing of my attentional field did not feel restrictive; instead, it enabled an expanded relational field in which colour, the sounds of the gallery, the architectural scale of the building and paintings, my memory, and shared presence formed a kind of temporary assemblage. The meaning and memories created there emerged slowly through my ongoing immersion with the art and the space I was in.
Synaesthetic Encounter and the Body without Organs
I experience synaesthesia, where sensory impressions begin to overlap and blend. While immersed in Rothko’s deep reds and maroons, I felt and heard a low vibrating internal hum. The colours did not stay at a distance as something to look at; they felt as though they entered my body, with an affective force and pull, creating an atmosphere that was both calming and intense. Experiences like this can challenge expectations about how we are supposed to engage with art. Rather than observing from the outside, perception becomes immersive, relational, and deeply felt, maybe more so if you experience synesthesia in this way, but I only have my own experience to draw from.
I didn’t know it at the time, other gallery visitors probably thought I was a bit strange, but lying on the gallery floor also involved an unspoken disruption of normative spectator behaviour in a setting like this. Visitors are typically expected to stand, sit or move quietly, and observe from a respectful distance. By shifting bodily position — lying, sitting and walking around, I was unknowingly experimenting with perception itself and also neuroqueering the expectations of being in a formal public gallery space.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the Body without Organs (BwO) as a process in which habitual bodily organisation loosens, allowing new intensities and relations to emerge (1987). The BwO is not the disappearance of the structure of our actual human bodies but an experimental reconfiguration of how our bodies connect and respond, and can reconfigure in different spaces.
Within Tate Modern’s gallery, Rothko’s work disrupted and destaballised the boundary between me as a viewer and artwork. The gallery functioned as an assemblage in which colour, texture, depth, scale, sound, friendship and memory all combined to form a temporary field of relational intensity. In this reorganisation, my own perception of the art became more experimental. The pressure to interpret correctly when writing up my essay notes receded, and my attention plateaued into a state of sensation in which my identity and environment were mutually shaping each other as I let the colours flow through me, as I heard the sound of the deep reds, and felt as if I were becoming part of the art itself.
Neuroqueering Methodology and Lines of Flight
For many neurodivergent people, such intensive monotropic responses to art, literature, music, dance or poetry may be familiar. Through a Deleuzian lens, they could be understood as creative reorganisations of experience, minor reorganisations of affective and perceptual relations, subtle lines of flight that open alternative ways of being present in the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Liam Ren’s exploration of neuroqueering methodology helps frame these encounters as epistemologically significant. Neuroqueering challenges assumptions that knowledge must be produced through linear argument or normative cognitive performance. Instead, it recognises that understanding may emerge through affective immersion, relational environments, sustained attentional flow states, and our divergent ways of experiencing art and the world.
Abstract art like Rothko’s can therefore function as a neuroqueer methodological space, a temporary territory where dominant expectations of productivity, legibility, and behavioural regulation loosen for the person who is engaging with the artwork.
Becoming Through Colour
Reflecting now, my time lying beneath Rothko’s paintings enabled a different way of thinking to emerge, one shaped by duration, sensory attunement, and relational presence. Memory itself operates rhizomatically, as a process of ongoing recomposition rather than recollection, returning unpredictably and forming new conceptual connections across time (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), as has happened when I read Liam’s blog.
Such encounters suggest that philosophical becoming may occur not only in texts but also in embodied situations like this that loosen the organisation of the self and open new planes of relation. Neuroqueering methodology can therefore be understood as a lived practice of experimentation, a willingness to follow lines of sensation in our bodyminds into unfamiliar territories, to linger with the ‘what could this mean’, with the ‘what may happen if…’.
Rothko’s murals continue to offer such plateaus for me. They create environments in which perception can deepen, bodyminds can reorganise, and thought can unfold through relational intensity with the artwork and the surrounding space when conditions feel safe. In Deleuzean terms, art is not primarily representational but intensive. As Deleuze and Guattari write;
“the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 164).
Encountering these fields of colour can therefore feel less like interpreting an image and more like entering a sensory event, one in which attention shifts, time gathers, and experience becomes widened with duration.
Within such encounters, sensation may operate temporally as well as perceptually. Deleuze and Guattari describe how “sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant… what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears” (1994, p. 211). This contraction of vibration resonates with my own Autistic synaesthetic experiences of spiralling memories of sound, colour and physical sensations in my body, deep attention, and non-linear temporal flow. Art, in this sense, can become a way of inhabiting duration differently, allowing perception to loosen its usual coordinates and making space for alternative sensory epistemologies – creating new nodes on the rhizomes of our experiences and deepening our monotropic tunnels and interests.
From this perspective, aesthetic encounters are not simply personal responses but ontological events. As Nabais (2010) observes, art involves the “capture of the force of life and also creation of a life which stands by itself” and the creation of autonomous zones of sensation that exist independently of subjective interpretation. Rothko’s paintings could be understood as environments in which sensation continuously re-composes these experiences. Rather than resolving the chaos of an abstract work of art, art can hold open a field of intensity through which chaos becomes composed into sensation.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation” (1994, p. 204). If neuroqueering expands the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible, then philosophy may sometimes begin in these quieter aesthetic spaces and our relationships with a work of art — spaces where colour reshapes attention, duration transforms understanding, and sensory experience invites us to become otherwise.
Since writing this reflection, I have found myself thinking about how memory and theory shape the way we understand past experiences. What once felt like an open, personal sensory experience with art has become more organised through language and philosophy.
I have also begun to wonder about the gallery space itself. The quietness, dim lighting, and cultural expectations of contemporary art created conditions where immersive attention felt possible and safe. Lying on the floor felt like a small disruption of usual behaviour, but it was also an action that the space could absorb. This raises questions about who is able to experiment with their perception in public spaces, and under what conditions difference becomes accepted or contained. These reflections also make me think about how public spaces quietly regulate behaviour, attention, and movement, shaping what kinds of sensory engagement are seen as appropriate or disruptive. I am also aware that not all people are granted the same freedom to move, pause, or experiment with perception in public spaces. What felt possible for me in that moment may not feel safe or permitted for others. For some people, moving or sensing differently in public can lead to misunderstanding, correction, or exclusion rather than quiet acceptance.
Reflecting further, I notice an ongoing tension between using the theory of monotropism to understand deep attentional engagement, and engaging with philosophical ideas such as those of Deleuze and Guattari about becoming that resist fixed explanations. Neuroqueering methodology may live within this tension. It can help us name and affirm neurodivergent ways of experiencing the world, while also inviting us to remain open to change, uncertainty, and new ways of thinking, and to question the taken-for-granted standards of focus, composure, and productivity that shape how bodies and minds are expected to function in shared environments. Immersive sensory encounters can feel uncertain or overwhelming, reminding me that opening perception in this way involves a negotiation between curiosity, vulnerability, and the need for grounding.
Rather than reaching a conclusion, these reflections feel like a continuation. My encounters with Rothko’s paintings continue to unfold through memory, conversation, and ongoing sensory meaning-making. Perhaps neuroqueering is not about finding final interpretations or fixed language to define an experience or way of being, but about noticing how perception and understanding shift over time, opening space for new possibilities to emerge. These questions are not only personal but collective, connected to wider struggles over whose ways of sensing, thinking, and being are recognised as valid, and whose are overlooked, regulated, or misunderstood.
To neuroqueer perception may therefore be not only to experience differently, but to gently challenge the norms that decide which experiences are allowed to matter.
Next Blog: What may neurodivergent experiences reveal about how plateaus are lived, sensed, and sustained, and how might we neuroqueer them?
What is a plateau? Not a peak to be reached, but a region where intensities sustain themselves.
Plateaus are not entered so much as encountered, they are fields of relation where perception, time, and attention begin to shift.
In my next blog, I will explore and unfold some more!
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. Continuum.
Nabais, C. P. (2010). Percept, affect and micro-brains: Art according to Deleuze. In S. Di Marco, O. Pombo, & M. Pina (Eds.), Neuroaesthetics: Can science explain art? (pp. 165–175). Fim de Século.
This journey begins with curiosity, and with transformation.
Over the past few years, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari has become profoundly important to me. I am not a Deleuzian scholar and have no formal academic background in philosophy at all – the aim of this project is very much focused on community learning and expanding conversations.
Through cycles of debilitating Autistic burnout, I found myself searching for language that could help me make sense of experiences that felt difficult to articulate — deep attentional flow, sensory intensity, nonlinear thinking, moments of rupture, the slow processes of recovery and new ways of becoming.
Burnout, Deterritorialisation, and New Patterns of Becoming
Concepts such as the rhizome, multiplicity, body without organs, planes of immanence, assemblage, and deterritorialisation, explored in works including A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and later reflections such as What Is Philosophy? began to resonate with my lived experience as an Autistic and ADHD (AuDHD) person. My monotropic attention often feels like it moves through constellation-like interconnected tunnels of intensity rather than along a single stable path. My cycles of burnout feel like a sudden loss of territory, a destabilisation of the structures that once enabled my participation in the world. In this sense, burnout sometimes resembled a form of deterritorialisation: a disorientation that disrupted familiar rhythms while opening uncertain possibilities for forming new connections. Recovery does not mean returning to a fixed state, but gradually composing different patterns of relation, energy, and belonging.
Encountering Deleuze and Guattari’s work offered me ways of understanding these experiences not as personal failure, but as part of dynamic relational processes within the wider ecosystems I am part of. Their philosophy is helping me think differently about identity, learning, exhaustion, creativity, and the environments we inhabit. It is opening up a space to understand neurodivergent experience as movement, transformation, and ongoing becoming rather than as a deficit or fragmentation of a whole.
Rhizomatic Thinking and Nonlinear Understanding
At times, reading their work has felt disorienting, yet also strangely and comfortingly familiar. The nonlinear textures of their writing, moving through plateaus, building connections, going through the tides of intensities, and shifting conceptual landscapes, echo ways of thinking that many neurodivergent people may also recognise.
Ideas do not always unfold in a straight line; instead, they branch, loop, and return, forming clusters of attention and moments of unexpected resonance. In this sense, philosophical engagement can feel rhizomatic: thoughts emerging in multiple directions, forming nodes of meaning that connect across time, experience, and environment.
Rather than progressing step by step toward a single conclusion, understanding develops through community movement — through following lines of curiosity, pausing at plateaus of insight, and allowing connections to form gradually. Philosophy, for me, is therefore not only something to be interpreted, it is also something to be experimented with, inhabited, and lived through with repeated encounters with ideas, places, bodies, and other people. In this way, thinking becomes relational and ecological, shaped by the networks we are part of and the intensities that draw our attention.
Neuroqueering Philosophy
This project can therefore be understood as an act of neuroqueering philosophy and our ways of being in the world.
Drawing inspiration from the work of neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker, neuroqueering involves approaching established concepts, systems and ways of being in ways that challenge normative assumptions about knowledge, cognition, identity, and relational life. In this sense, neuroqueering is not only about representation, it is also a practice of becoming, an active reworking of how we think, connect, and how we can re-create meaning together against neuronormativity and conformity.
A Rhizomatic Community Project
This community project — Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming— grows from this ongoing process of engagement and constant iteration, finding and creating difference through repetition.
It is envisioned as a slow, collaborative exploration of philosophical ideas based primarily on Deleuze and Guattari, through neurodivergent lived experience, creative reflection, and relational dialogue. Philosophy does not only take place within academic institutions, it also unfolds in everyday life, through deep interests, sensory experiences, professional work, parenting journeys, community relationships, ecological awareness, and the rhythms of burnout and renewal that so often shape neurodivergent lives.
The project itself is intentionally rhizomatic. Anchor posts from different people may introduce themes or conceptual entry points, but participants are invited to respond in ways that feel meaningful to them — dipping in and out as attention, energy, and curiosity shift. Engagement does not need to be linear or continuous; it may follow rhythms of monotropic flow, periods of rest, or moments of pause and return – there is no expectation in how you take part if this interests you. I am really just hoping to develop my own deeper understanding and connect with others who are also interested in exploring this.
Contributions may take many forms: reflective essays, creative writing, visual work, dialogue, field notes, or theoretical experimentation. At times, there may be intense activity and connection; at other times, the project may enter quieter phases of reflection or renewal. These pauses ill not be seen as interruptions but part of the process itself, moments in which new insights gather, relationships deepen, and different possibilities for thought begin to emerge.
Over time, the project may come to resemble an evolving assemblage, a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and lines of thought intersecting, diverging, and forming new connections. Rather than building toward a single conclusion (as I have no idea where this will lead!), the process itself becomes generative: a collective practice of rhizomatic thinking, sensing and becoming together.
Practices such as linking to one another’s work, acknowledging influences, tagging shared themes, and responding across social media platforms are therefore not only practical but philosophical. Through shared hashtags — such as #NeuroqueeringDeleuze, #RhizomesOfBecoming, #NeuroqueerPhilosophy, and other evolving conceptual markers people can help form a visible network of ideas: a living rhizome of thought that evolves.
These small acts of citation, iteration, responding, and relational engagement enable ideas to travel, intersect, and transform across different spaces and communities. In this way, the project becomes more than a collection of individual reflections. It becomes an ongoing process of collective becoming, shaped through collaboration, dialogue, and the emergence of new nodes of thinking together.
Philosophical Lineages and Expanding Connections
While this project begins with the collaborative philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, which I am personally very interested in learning more about, it also recognises that their work emerges from a wider philosophical lineage. Thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz shaped Deleuze’s explorations of affect, duration, multiplicity, and relational existence. As the project develops, we may move across a wide variety of philosophical and sociological spaces, tracing connections between historical ideas, contemporary neurodivergent theories, and emerging forms of post-human thought and More-Than Neurodiversity.
This work is shaped not only by academic theory but also by us as members of the neurodivergent community. Through our lived experience, and by shared practices of reflection and care, it can grow through our neuroqueer writing, creative work, and grassroots spaces such as Stimpunks.
I would like to draw attention to those who are currently influential in my own work, including Nick Walker, Robert Chapman, Julia Lee Barclay-Morton, David Grey-Hammond, Ryan Boren, and more recently Liam Ren.
Post-humanist and new materialist perspectives also inform the project’s emphasis on relational ontology, movement, and ecological entanglement. The work of Karen Barad, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti may offer ways of understanding knowledge as something that is produced through relationships, between bodies, environments, and material conditions rather than as abstract theory alone. I have found Ombre Tarragnat’s concept of ethodiversity truly inspiring as it further expands this view, reminding us that diverse ways of perceiving, behaving, and relating are part of broader patterns of life beyond the human.
Together, I hope these influences and others will help shape a project that understands philosophy through a neuroqueer lens as an unfolding project across communities, experiences, and environments, through collective processes of thinking, sensing, creating, and becoming.
An Ongoing Process of Becoming
This is a long-term journey. Ideas may return, shift, and deepen over months or years, I have no final destination. Only plateaus, places to pause, notice connections, and continue thinking and creating together.
If these ideas resonate with you, I would like to invite you to take part. By sharing reflections, linking to one another’s work, and forming new connections, we can collectively expand this rhizome of thought, adding new nodes, pathways, and neuroqueer possibilities for becoming together.
Let the rhizome keep expanding!
References and Further Exploration
This project grows through dialogue with a wide range of thinkers, writers, and community spaces. The following resources offer starting points for exploring neuroqueer theory, neurodiversity scholarship, post-human philosophy, and related conceptual work that may inspire you.
Please do reach out to add to this evolving list!
Neuroqueer and Neurodiversity Thought
Ryan Boren — Neurodiversity advocacy, inclusive pedagogy, and neuroqueer learning environments. Stimpunks https://stimpunks.org/
Robert Chapman — Critical neurodiversity studies, philosophy, and social justice perspectives on mental difference. https://criticalneurodiversity.com
Helen Edgar — Autistic Realms Neurodivergent lived experience, monotropism theory, autistic burnout, relational wellbeing, and practical neuro-affirming resources for families, educators, and professionals. https://autisticrealms.com
Helen Edgar — More Realms Creative neuroqueer writing, philosophical exploration, and posthuman ecological thought, with experimental reflections on identity, temporality, and relational becoming. https://morerealms.com
David Gray-Hammond — Neurodivergent community building, neuroqueering practice, and collaborative learning spaces. NeuroHub Community https://neurohubcommunity.org/
Julia Lee Barclay-Morton — Creative neurodivergent writing, Autistic identity, embodied healing practices, and reflections on burnout, difference, and artistic process. Their platform The Unadapted Ones explores neurodiversity through memoir, theatre, and relational approaches to wellbeing and creativity. https://www.theunadaptedones.com/
Erin Manning — Movement, relationality, and process philosophy, with a focus on creative and embodied practices. http://erinmovement.com/
Brian Massumi – Philosopher of affect, movement, and relational process, whose work develops and extends Deleuzian thought and the emergent, more-than-conscious dimensions of perception and social life. https://brianmassumi.substack.com/about
Ombre Tarragnat — Ethodiversity, ecological neurodiversity thought, and more-than-human approaches to difference. https://www.ombretarragnat.com/
Some philosophical Currents Shaping Deleuzian Becoming……..
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari — Collaborative philosophy exploring multiplicity, becoming, assemblage, and rhizomatic thought. Key texts include Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and What Is Philosophy?
Henri Bergson — Duration, movement, and intuition. Bergson’s concept of durée (lived time) and his emphasis on creativity and process strongly influenced Deleuze’s explorations of temporality, change, and nonlinear experience.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Multiplicity, perspective, and the fold. Leibniz’s philosophy of relational perception and his metaphysics of monads informed Deleuze’s later work on subjectivity, complexity, and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
Friedrich Nietzsche — Becoming, difference, and creative transformation. Nietzsche’s critique of fixed identity and his emphasis on the creation of values shaped Deleuze’s philosophy of affirmation, transformation, and difference.
Baruch Spinoza — Immanence, affect, and relational ethics. Spinoza’s understanding of bodies as defined by their capacities to affect and be affected profoundly influenced Deleuze’s thinking about immanence, becoming, and ethical ways of living.
This project is not a fixed map but an evolving terrain. You are warmly invited to explore blogs and other creative work, follow lines of curiosity, and contribute your own reflections. Through shared experimentation, dialogue, and connection, the rhizome will continue to grow — forming new nodes of thought and new possibilities for becoming together.
From More-Than Neurodiversity to Ethodiversity: Sensory Climates, Monotropic Flow and Watery-Becomings (an exploration!)
I have been thinking about what it means to live as an Autistic person with a bodymind in a world organised around neuronormativity, speed, noise, and constant transition in often overwhelming environments.
This article explores how Autistic burnout and regulation can be understood as relational ecological reorganisations of monotropic attention with the wider environment, rather than solely individual neurological difficulties.
Drawing on Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory alongside Ombre Tarragnat’s concepts of Autistic weather-bodies and ethodiversity, Astrida Neimanis’s account of watery embodiment, and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs, this article reframes Autistic ways of being as forms of relational reorganisation rather than individual deficit.
This essay is exploratory and reflects an ongoing process of neuroqueering how my own attention, well-being, and belonging are understood. May be some of it will resonate with you?
Rethinking Neurodivergence in Neuronormative Societies
Autistic experience shows that well-being does not arise only from what happens within an individual. It develops through ongoing relationships between bodyminds, relationships, environments, and social expectations. Attention, sensory regulation, emotional rhythms, and energy flow are shaped through everyday encounters with the worlds we inhabit. When these relationships become strained or misaligned, experiences of burnout and fragmentation can occur.
Neuroqueer (Walker, 2021) and posthuman perspectives invite us to understand neurodivergence as shaped not only by individual neurology but also by sensory environments, social structures, technological systems, and political conditions.
A more-than-neurodiversity approach moves beyond helping individuals adapt to existing systems. Instead, it asks how those systems themselves might be re-organised to support diverse ways of sensing, attending, communicating, and relating.
These relational processes are not abstract. They are organised through school timetables, digital infrastructures of constant connectivity, and socio-political economic systems that prioritise speed and productivity. Such conditions shape how attention can move, how bodies regulate, and whose rhythms of participation are recognised as viable.
In societies organised around neuronormative values, difference only becomes visible through comparison with dominant norms. Neurodivergent individuals may therefore experience pressure to suppress sensory needs, split our natural monotropic attentional flow, or mask ways of being in order to remain socially legible. While these strategies can enable participation and may foster greater acceptance, the sustained effort required to maintain them can lead to exhaustion and burnout. Experiences such as meltdown, shutdown, and declining mental or physical health can be understood not just as individual difficulties, but as relational signals that our everyday environments and ways of being have become too intense, unpredictable, or unsustainable and that change is needed.
This article suggests that what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming a Body without Organs may help us understand Autistic experience as an ongoing neuroqueer ecological process. Through this lens, bodyminds are continually reorganising in response to changing relational climates. Drawing on Tarragnat’s ideas of Autistic weather-bodies and ethodiversity, Neimanis’s writing on watery embodiment, and Walker’s neuroqueer theory, I am reflecting on my own lived Autistic experience to explore how neurodivergent ways of sensing and relating can open new possibilities for ecological belonging and more liveable worlds.
Beyond the Brain: The Limits of “Neuro” Framing
While the language of neurodiversity has played a crucial role in reframing neurological variation as a natural and valuable aspect of human diversity, I think the growing emphasis on “neuro” as a primary explanatory framework also raises important questions. All humans have nervous systems and unique sensory and attentional patterns, all of which are shaped by our experiences and intersecting identities. When difference is understood mainly, or only through what are seen as brain-based (neurological) and diagnostic models, then understandings of divergence can become narrowed to recognised clinical categories, while the wider relational, cultural, political, and ecological conditions shaping experience remain less visible. This is not to deny the reality of neurological difference and being innately Autistic, but to argue that such difference is always lived through relational, cultural, and ecological conditions.
Neurodivergence may not always be a fixed identity or solely a neurological state of being. It can also emerge through different ways of sensing, relating, resisting, or reorganising participation in environments. For some, becoming neurodivergent becomes a conscious process of neuroqueering dominant expectations around productivity, communication, or emotional regulation. In this sense, divergence is not always bounded or stable, and it may not always be inherently positive. It can involve vulnerability, exclusion, uncertainty, and ongoing negotiation with social norms, the spaces we engage with, and the direction our neurodivergence leads us towards.
When divergence is measured primarily against socially constructed standards of independence, efficiency, social fluency, and normative regulation, important dimensions of human variation can be overlooked. Expanding the conversation beyond strictly neurological framings allows neurodivergence to be understood as emerging from interactions among the infinite experiences of different bodyminds shaped by intersectionality, environments, and also the systems of power we live within.
More-than-neurodiversity perspectives, including Ombre Tarragnat’s concept of ethodiversity (2025), further challenge hierarchical and human-centric assumptions about how difference is organised and valued. Instead of locating divergence solely within individual brains, these approaches understand embodiment as relational and ecological, a continual process of becoming shaped by sensory climates, technological infrastructures, social systems, and ecological conditions, it looks at our relations within a multi-species context, our way of being with the wider planet and all that it contains.
Exploring Autistic experience through ecological metaphors such as weather, water, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs offers one way of shining a light on how our bodyminds may reorganise themselves in response to shifting relational environments. These frameworks help widen the discussion from individual adaptation to collective transformation, opening the possibility of reimagining more liveable relational worlds.
Autistic Weather-Bodies: Sensory Climates and Masking
Ombre Tarragnat’s (2024) idea of the Autistic weather-body helps us understand how our experiences are shaped by the climates we live within. They suggest that our bodyminds are always responding to a “total climate” , not only the physical weather around us, but also biodiverse, sensory environments, social expectations, technologies, and socio-political conditions we live within.
These relational climates are not only social or human-centred; they are multispecies and more-than-human. Living beings, ecological communities, and so-called non-living forces such as air quality, light, temperature fluctuations, water, and seasonal rhythms all shape how bodyminds feel, focus, regulate, and relate. These dynamic conditions also respond to our presence and actions. Together, they influence the ecological possibilities through which different forms of life — human and non-human — can endure, adapt, and flourish. From this perspective, neurodivergent experience emerges within more-than-human ecologies rather than solely within and between humans, everything and everyone is connected!
For many Autistic people, changes in atmosphere are felt very directly and intensely; our bodies are perhaps more porous. Lighting, noise, other sensory input, unpredictability, digital pressures, and interpersonal tension and relationships can all influence our attention, energy, and capacity to regulate, and we may not always have control over this.
These shifts are not always dramatic; sometimes they are more subtle, a rising sense of pressure and anxixety in a crowded room, a flicker of fluorescent light that begins to feel painful, or even the bodily awareness of a storm approaching. I know that for me, changes in the weather can trigger migraines before the rain even arrives. These experiences remind us that our bodyminds are not sealed off from the world; we are not just humans in the world. We are continually sensing, adjusting, responding, adapting and connecting with the world.
Thinking about Autistic bodyminds as weather-bodies moves my thinking away from asking how people need to become more ‘resilient’ to change, trauma and ruptures of flow states. Instead, it invites us to consider how the climates of our everyday lives might become more liveable and flow more steadily and smoothly. We can consider what schools would feel like if they were organised around sensory comfort and intrinsically motivated attention tunnels of engagement rather than speed and constant transition? How might workplaces change if regulation and recovery were understood as necessary rhythms rather than signs of weakness?
Tarragnat also writes about how we actually weather environments too. All humans try to adapt, this may be more intense for Autistic people and a trauma response to the very climate we live in. We may sometimes mask or suppress our sensory needs when having a meal out with friends, push through our exhaustion to meet a deadline at work, or fragment our attention in order to try to stay socially acceptable and communicate in a busy cafe. Over time, this kind of acclimatisation can erode our sense of coherence, identity and well-being. Burnout, meltdowns or shutdowns may follow, often with severe mental health implications as we try to survive and function, and this pressure accumulates. These experiences are not personal failures; they are signals that our current relational climates have become too difficult to inhabit.
Like water, our Autistic weather-bodies are also fluid; our experiences move and change like atmospheric patterns. To deepen this ecological way of thinking, I think it could be helpful and interesting to turn to the watery metaphors of embodiment such as that proposed by Neimanis (2017). If weather shapes how we feel and function and how we may be weather-bodies, water also helps us understand how well our bodyminds can actually manage attention, emotion, and energy flow. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the plants and biodiversity around us and the ecosystems that grow within our world are all vital to our well-being and deeply entangled in a connected flow.
Understanding Autistic experience through these ecological metaphors may help us recognise that wellbeing is always relational. It depends not only on what happens inside our bodyminds, but on the climates and currents we all move within.
Watery Bodies: Monotropic Attention and Relational Flow
Posthuman feminist thinker Astrida Neimanis (2017) describes human beings as bodies of water, shaped by the flows that move through and around us. Water is not only something we drink, cook with, or wash in. It circulates through our blood and tissues, regulates temperature through sweat and breath, and connects us to wider ecological systems such as weather patterns, infrastructures, rivers, oceans and cycles in nature.
From this perspective, embodiment is not sealed within the skin. Bodies are permeable, porous, sponge-like, relational, and continuously responding to the environments they inhabit. We are not separate from the oceanic and atmospheric systems that sustain life. In a very real material sense, we are entangled with them, shaped by their rhythms, movements, and transformations. Our sensory and nervous systems are always responding and adapting to maintain a stable flow amid the different currents and energies around us.
For many Autistic people, whose perception often foregrounds sensory detail and pattern, this account of embodiment may resonate with lived experiences of permeability, intensity, and environmental attunement.
Monotropic attention, characterised by deep engagement with particular interests or sensory environments (Murray et al., 2005), can be imagined as a current that gathers depth and direction over time. When attention can move steadily toward meaningful activity, it may support learning, regulation, creativity, and a sense of coherence within the wider flow and environment a person is within.
However, many relational environments are organised in ways that disrupt rather than support these attentional currents. Educational settings often require rapid transitions between subjects, noisy corridors, and constant social negotiation. Workplaces often demand multitasking, immediate responses to digital communication, and participation in unpredictable meetings. Everyday life may involve sensory overload from traffic, crowds, bright lighting, smells, or competing demands at home and with our own health. These conditions can create what might be described as turbulent relational climates, in which the flow of attention is repeatedly interrupted and ruptured, leaving us without a safe anchor.
These turbulent relational climates are often produced and intensified through socio-political, economic, and technological systems that fragment attention and accelerate temporal demands. For example, constant news alerts on your phone may create a background sense of urgency or threat, pulling your attention and flow away from embodied rhythms and present-moment regulation. Algorithm-driven social media feeds, rapid email expectations at work, and productivity-monitoring apps can pressure people to respond immediately, compressing time and narrowing opportunities for rest or deep flow with our passions.
Economic precarity, shift work, and unstable housing conditions can further disrupt sensory and emotional regulation by creating unpredictability in daily routines and environments. Public transport delays, overcrowded urban spaces, and exposure to noise or poor air quality may also contribute to cumulative sensory load. At a broader level, climate-related events such as heatwaves, flooding, or seasonal disruption can reshape how people move, gather, and feel safe, while also affecting multispecies habitats and ecological stability.
Together, these forces create relational climates that are not only socially produced but materially and technologically mediated, shaping how bodyminds attend, connect, recover, and sustain participation in everyday life – which may all be felt more acutely if you are Autistic. Understanding burnout in this way highlights how neurodivergent distress is frequently structured by socio-political and material conditions rather than individual deficit.
From a hydrological perspective, responses such as overwhelm, shutdown, or withdrawal can be understood as the body adjusting to this turbulence. Just as rivers alter course when encountering obstacles, drought, or flooding, Autistic individuals may narrow their focus, find cracks and crevices to retreat into quieter spaces, or seek familiar routines in order to restore coherence and regain a smoother less distressing flow state, so our systems don’t get flooded or caught up in a storm. These adjustments are often misinterpreted as avoidance, lack of resilience, or disengagement. Yet they can represent adaptive attempts to conserve energy and re-establish sustainable regulatory pathways and streams of flow.
This shift from individual responsibility toward relational transformation raises a deeper philosophical question: how do bodyminds reorganise when familiar structures of engagement become unsustainable? Rather than understanding burnout as a breakdown, they may be read as processes of reorganisation. To explore this possibility, I am turning to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, which offers a way of thinking about how new patterns of regulation, relation, and participation can emerge.
Body without Organs: Autistic Becoming
I find Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the Body without Organs (BwO) helpful for thinking about how Autistic bodyminds may reorganise when everyday demands become overwhelming or unsustainable. The BwO does not refer to a literal physical state (!). Instead, it describes shifts in how attention, sensory experience, movement, and participation are organised and can become re-organised.
From my own experience, these shifts often become most noticeable during periods of burnout or intense overwhelm. At these times, familiar ways of focusing, communicating, or keeping up with daily life can begin to break down. For example, I might find that replying to messages or emails — tasks that once felt manageable — suddenly requires an enormous amount of energy, or that following conversations in busy environments becomes confusing and exhausting. Even simple routines such as preparing meals, travelling on public transport, or switching between tasks can feel disorientating, as if my attention is no longer able to stretch in the ways it once did.
It can feel as though the usual pathways for engaging with the world are no longer available. However, these moments are not only about loss or collapse. There can also be times when new ways of regulating and relating start to emerge as attentional resources redistribute in order to survive. For instance, I may begin to rely more on sensory anchors such as quiet spaces, repetitive movement, or focused creative interests. Communication might shift toward slower, more intentional exchanges, or toward written rather than spoken interaction. Daily life can reorganise around fewer but more meaningful connections and activities, allowing energy to be conserved and gradually restored. In this way, burnout can sometimes open space for different rhythms of participation and new forms of relational attunement to develop.
Reorganisation does not only happen in moments of crisis. It often unfolds through small, everyday neuroqueer choices. This might look like staying with a deep interest long after others have moved on, pacing or rocking to steady sensory overwhelm, wearing noise-cancelling headphones in busy spaces, or choosing solitude after social interaction in order to recover. Some Autistic people reshape their days so that activities happen in a predictable sequence, or protect uninterrupted stretches of time where attention can settle and flow.
What Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialisation can be felt here as a soft loosening of pressure, a step away from expectations to respond quickly, multitask constantly, or socialise in prescribed ways. As these pressures ease, different rhythms of living and participating can begin to take shape for others too and the ripples of change begin to take effect.
Many Autistic people recognise these processes in small but significant adjustments to how they move through the world. Erin Manning (2016) describes such shifts as “minor gestures” — subtle changes that reshape how we sense, focus, and relate within particular environments. This might involve rhythmic movement to steady sensory overwhelm, withdrawing into a meaningful interest after prolonged interaction, or becoming absorbed in creative or repetitive activity. These gestures can be understood as the mechanisms through which reorganisation happens. They are ways of actively redistributing sensory and emotional intensity, recalibrating attention, and gradually re-establishing a sense of coherence. Although often misunderstood as avoidance or dysfunction, such practices can help Autistic individuals re-climatise to demanding relational atmospheres and sustain participation over time.here.
As these processes are relational, they are shaped by the environments in which we live. Sensory-friendly spaces, predictable routines, flexible expectations, and collective care can make a significant difference. From this perspective, well-being is not something individuals achieve alone; it emerges collectively through interdependence with environments (beyond the human), that recognise and support diverse ways of focusing, recovering, and connecting.
For many Autistic people, reorganising routines and spaces becomes an intentional way of reducing neuronormative pressure. Creating sensory refuges, protecting uninterrupted time for deep focus, limiting unnecessary task-switching, or prioritising interest-led learning and creativity can support more sustainable engagement. These are not simply personal coping strategies. They are ways of experimenting with how attention, energy, and participation might be structured differently.
Neurodivergent becoming can therefore be understood as an ongoing neuroqueering process of adjustment and transformation, shaped by the continuous redistribution of attention, energy, and sensory intensity. Periods of immersion, withdrawal, or re-focusing are not simply signs that something has gone wrong. They may indicate that bodyminds are reorganising in response to pressures that exceed sustainable limits.
When these processes are recognised and supported, they can open pathways towards more liveable ways of being, not only for Autistic people, but within the wider relational ecologies we all share. In this sense, becoming a Body without Organs is not a final state but a dynamic practice: a way to loosen restrictive normative expectations, experiment with new rhythms of participation, and contribute to the gradual reshaping of environments so that diverse forms of attention, regulation, and connection can co-exist and keep transforming and flowing.
From Neurodiversity to Ethodiversity: Ecological Multiplicity
When Autistic reorganisations of attention and sensory When experiences of sensory intensity or overwhelm are understood as relational and ecological processes, rather than simply individual coping challenges, our perspective begins to widen. Instead of seeing regulation as something a person must manage alone, we can recognise how environments, relationships, technologies, and broader living systems all shape how attention, emotion, and energy flow.
From this viewpoint, neurodiversity is no longer only about differences between human brains. It becomes part of a wider story about how many forms of life sense, respond, adapt, and find ways to remain in the world. Ideas such as becoming a Body without Organs can be read as an invitation to notice these shifting patterns of connection and regulation, and to recognise the importance of ethodiversity (Tarragnat, 2025), or the diversity of ways living beings experience and engage with their environments.
Expanding neurodiversity toward the concept of ethodiversity strengthens this ecological understanding. Ombre Tarragnat (2025) uses this term to highlight how different perceptual styles, emotional intensities, and attention patterns contribute to the resilience of relational systems, including ecosystems and multispecies communities. For example, Autistic sensory attunement may make environmental pressures more noticeable such as persistent background noise, polluted air, or the stress of extreme weather changes.
Ethodiversity does not just build on neurodiversity by recognising additional forms of human difference. Instead, it draws attention to the diversity of ways living beings perceive, move, and participate in shared environments, as well as the impact of non-living things. From this perspective, neurodivergence can be understood as one expression of a wider ecological multiplicity of attentional rhythms, sensory attunements, and relational styles that help sustain more liveable worlds.
Understanding and embracing ethodiversity means creating relational systems that can support different rhythms of participation, perception, rest, and recovery. This includes recognising that people, other species, and environments do not all move, sense, or respond in the same ways or at the same pace. Designing spaces, communities, and policies with this diversity in mind becomes part of a wider ethics of planetary care.
When we value diverse forms of embodiment and ways of relating to the world, we also begin to recognise how closely human wellbeing is connected to ecological wellbeing. Sustaining multiplicity across cognitive, cultural, biological, and ecological domains is therefore not only a matter of social inclusion. It is also a condition for collective survival. For example, if water systems become polluted, this affects the health of entire ecosystems, and human communities are not separate from these impacts. In this way, caring for diversity in how life exists and adapts is part of caring for the future of the planet as a whole.
Cultivating Liveable Worlds: A Neuroqueer Ecological Future
Autistic experience highlights how wellbeing emerges through ongoing relationships between bodyminds, environments, and social expectations. Sensory overwhelm, burnout, fragmentation, and withdrawal can therefore be understood not simply as individual difficulties, but as signals that relational climates have become too intense, unpredictable, or unsustainable.
Thinking with concepts such as Autistic weather-bodies, watery embodiment, and the Body without Organs helps us recognise how bodyminds continually adapt and reorganise in response to these conditions. Practices of regulation such as retreating into focused flow, seeking quieter environments, experimenting with new rhythms of engagement, or stimming can be understood as efforts to restore coherence and sustain participation. Neuroqueering involves both resisting dominant expectations and actively reshaping environments to support different temporalities and sensory needs.
The concepts of Cavendish Space and Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, which I have been working on with Stimpunks, offer practical examples of how relational ecologies might be redesigned. By prioritising sensory accessibility, slower rhythms of participation, interest-led engagement, and collective care, these approaches shift the focus away from expecting Autistic individuals to adapt to rigid systems. Instead, they explore how environments themselves can become more responsive and sustaining.
Cultivating liveable relational worlds requires more than individual accommodation. It calls for collective transformation, reshaping educational, social, technological, and ecological systems so that diverse rhythms of sensing, regulating, and belonging can genuinely flourish. Supporting diverse modes of becoming is not only about inclusion within existing structures, but about reimagining those structures altogether.
Extending neurodiversity toward the broader horizon of ethodiversity invites recognition that multiplicity across perceptual styles, cultural practices, and environmental relationships contributes to more liveable shared futures. Practices that support sensory regulation, slower temporal rhythms, and sustainable participation may also align with wider movements toward ecological care and multispecies coexistence.
From this perspective, becoming what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a Body without Organs can be understood as an ongoing neuroqueer process of reorganisation. It involves loosening restrictive normative expectations, redistributing attention and energy, and experimenting with and queering new ways of participating and being in our relational worlds. Perhaps neuroqueering attention and sensory life is not only about Autistic survival, but about learning new ways of living together within the fragile ecologies we all share?
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. Bloomsbury.
Tarragnat, O. (2024). The personal is climatic: Autistic weather-bodies and posthuman feminism between weathering and (dis)acclimatisation. Sextant: Revue de recherche interdisciplinaire sur le genre et la sexualité, (41).
Tarragnat, O. (2025). Biodiversity, neurodiversity, ethodiversity: Towards a more-than-human and more-than-neurological turn in neurodiversity studies. TRACE Journal for Human-Animal Studies.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies. Autonomous Press.
Yergeau, M. (2018). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neurological queerness. Duke University Press.
Autistic community can function as a living ecology of support, growing rhizomes and mycelium networks of care through shared recognition, co-regulation and mutual understanding. Within education, healthcare and labour systems that often disrupt neurodivergent flow and safety, these relational networks help sustain belonging, support burnout recovery and create new possibilities for engagement and participation. Drawing on monotropism, masking research and neurodivergent design approaches developed through Stimpunks, this article explores how our collective Autistic spaces nurture survival, resistance and transformative futures.
The Autistic Rhizome
The Autistic community is often spoken about as a source of friendship and peer support – a place to find people who just ‘get it’ and accept us for who we really are in all of our weird and wonderful ways of being. Yet for myself and perhaps others, it also functions as something far more foundational, a relational ecology that enables actual survival within systems not designed for our ways of thinking, sensing, and being.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome offers a powerful lens for understanding this. Rhizomes grow laterally rather than hierarchically. They form networks of connection that adapt to changing environments and they persist even after rupture. In many ways, the Autistic community develops in similar ways, through shared flow states, shared recognition, and collective resistance to structures that fragment our attention and belonging.
This matters because our dominant systems, particularly education, healthcare, and capitalist labour structures, often operate through neuronormative assumptions about productivity, communication, and independence and ways of being which leads many of us into chronic burnout.
Education, Attention, and the Cost of Neuroconformity
Educational systems frequently prioritise standardised pacing, neuroconformity, and measurable outcomes over relational safety and cognitive and sensory diversity. For monotropic people (Murray et al., 2005), such environments can be profoundly destabilising. Constant transitions, sensory overload, and social performance demands can disrupt flow and contribute to experiences of masking, suppressing our need for sensory regulation, increasing anxiety and often leading to disengagement or exclusion.
Research on Autistic inertia highlights how difficulties with task initiation or switching are often misunderstood as defiance or lack of motivation (Buckle et al., 2021) rather than a redistribution of monotropic attentional resources. When these misunderstandings are embedded within institutions and systems, people may internalise deficit narratives or experience harmful interventions in order to try and fix or shape Autistic people into fitting into the neuronormative world. Trauma then accumulates over time, shaping later experiences of participation and safety and can lead to burnout and mental health difficulties.
Autistic community spaces (online and in person) can provide alternative ecologies for learning and care. where the neurodivergent love languages and the importance of interest-led exploration, flexible pacing, and co-regulation allow attention to stabilise and flow more evenly and a sense of belonging can emerge where we can be our authentic selves.
Healthcare, Misattunement, and Epistemic Injustice
Healthcare systems also frequently struggle to recognise Autistic communication styles, sensory realities, and embodied knowledge. The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) highlights how misunderstandings between neurotypes can shape diagnostic processes, treatment decisions, and therapeutic relationships. Autistic people may find their experiences dismissed, pathologised, or translated into frameworks that prioritise normalisation over wellbeing.
Such interactions can contribute to epistemic injustice — the marginalisation of individuals as credible knowers of their own lives. When healthcare encounters become sites of misattunement rather than support, relational safety is undermined. This may delay help-seeking or intensify distress.
Within Autistic community, shared narratives can restore legitimacy to lived experience. Collective knowledge and sharing stories offer alternative pathways for understanding burnout, coping, sensory regulation, and recovery.
Capitalism, Masking, and Burnout
Our labour structures and workplaces often reward speed, multitasking, social performance, and uninterrupted productivity. For many Autistic people, sustaining participation in such environments requires masking — suppressing natural behaviours or attentional rhythms to meet normative expectations (Hull et al., 2020; Mantzalas et al., 2022).
Over time, sustained masking combined with environmental mismatch can contribute to Autistic burnout (Raymaker et al., 2020). Burnout may involve loss of functional capacity, withdrawal from work or education, and profound exhaustion as all of our monotropic attentional resources go into survival mode. Framing these outcomes solely as failures of individual resilience obscures their structural roots. – it is a socio-political and ecosystemic problem.
Autistic community can act as a counter-space to these pressures. Rhizomatic networks of mutual aid, shared stories, advocacy, and shared pacing enable individuals to explore alternative participation models. Some may pursue interest-led work, flexible schedules, or collaborative creative projects. These movements can be understood as Deleuzian lines of flight — pathways through which individuals move away from restrictive assemblages and experiment with new ways of living (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Safety as Relational Infrastructure
Across education, healthcare, and employment, a common thread seems to emerge that safety is not only physical or psychological. It is sensory, attentional, relational, and political.
Safety involves being able to focus without constant interruption. It involves communicating without fear of misinterpretation. It involves participating without masking core aspects of identity.
The Autistic community often provides conditions for such safety through shared norms, slower rhythms, and recognition of diverse sensory and regulatory needs. Co-regulation and inter-dependence become possible when individuals do not need to defend their ways of being. Over time, these relational environments within the rhizome can support recovery from burnout and trauma.
From Resistance to Re-Designing Mycelial Networks of Care
Through collaborative work with Stimpunks, I have been involved in developing pattern language resources that articulate recurring neurodivergent experiences and their environmental contexts (Stimpunks, 2026a). These patterns form the basis for practical design “recipes” aimed at reshaping institutions and systems to support diverse cognitive and sensory ways of being (Stimpunks, 2026b, 2026c).
This work signals a move beyond simple neuro-affirming accommodation toward deeper neuroqueer transformation. It suggests a shift from approaches that seek only to make existing neuronormative systems slightly more tolerable, toward practices that fundamentally question how those systems are organised and whose ways of being they prioritise. Neuro-affirming accommodation can be important and often necessary in the short term, helping to reduce immediate barriers or harms. However, when accommodation is framed as the endpoint rather than part of a broader process of change, it risks leaving intact the underlying assumptions about productivity, communication, independence, and pacing that continue to destabilise Autistic attention, sensory regulation, and relational safety.
Neuroqueer transformation invites a more expansive reimagining. It asks what might happen if environments were not simply adjusted around the margins, but re-designed from the ground up to recognise diverse cognitive rhythms, sensory experiences, and ways of participating. This involves moving from reactive support toward proactive design, creating spaces where deep focus, flexible transitions, alternative communication styles, and interdependence are not treated as deviations to be managed, but as integral aspects of collective life. In this sense, neurodivergent design becomes both a practical and a political project: a process of reshaping institutions so that they can accommodate multiple modes of attention, embodiment, and relationality without requiring individuals to mask or fragment themselves to belong.
Rather than asking Autistic individuals to constantly adjust to environments that disrupt attention, safety, and well-being, neurodivergent design aims to reshape systems to support different ways of sensing, communicating, and participating. The knowledge that grows within rhizomatic Autistic communities plays an important role in this work. Through shared recognition, mutual aid, and collaborative experimentation, these communities generate situated understandings of burnout, regulation, pacing, and connection. Such knowledge does not remain purely theoretical; it informs new educational practices, healthcare approaches, creative collaborations, and models of participation that are more equitable and sustainable.
In this way, neuroqueer transformation is not only about resisting harmful structures, but also about cultivating alternative futures. It emerges through the gradual expansion of relational networks that support belonging, creativity, and recovery. As these rhizomatic forms of community continue to grow and adapt, they contribute to the ongoing redesign of social worlds, opening possibilities for ways of living together that honour neurodivergent difference as generative rather than problematic.
Expanding the Mycelial Network of Care: Rhizomatic Belonging and Collective Futures
Understanding Autistic community as rhizomatic reveals that belonging is not a fixed destination but an ongoing relational process. It emerges through shared attention, mutual recognition, and the gradual weaving of safer spaces within systems that often disrupt flow and participation. In this sense, community is not simply something we find; it is something we can actually grow together and shape for our diverse needs.
When burnout, trauma, or systemic exclusion make participation difficult, networks of care within Autistic communities can help us find new ways to stay connected and sustain ourselves. We re-root together, supporting one another and forming new points and nodes of connection within the wider rhizome. These journeys are rarely straightforward; they often involve slowing down, adjusting communication, and experimenting with ways of living that move beyond neuronormative expectations.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe this kind of movement as creating lines of flight, moments when people begin to move toward new possibilities and build different forms of support, creativity, and meaning. In many ways, this is what we are doing through spaces such as Neurohub Community and through collaborative work with Stimpunks: actively creating and living within alternative networks of belonging.
Expanding the mycelial network of care therefore becomes both a personal and collective practice. Each conversation that validates lived experience, each redesign of an educational space, each act of co-regulation within community contributes to strengthening these underground systems of connection. Through collaborative work such as the development of neurodivergent pattern languages and design approaches (Stimpunks, 2026), Autistic people are actively reshaping the environments and structures that have always required us to adapt or “fit in.” This work reflects an ongoing process of transformation. Neuroqueering our ways of being, and our relationships with others and with the environments we inhabit. This becomes a continual practice of reimagining participation, safety, and belonging.
These networks enable forms of engagement and participation grounded in safety rather than performance, in interdependence rather than isolation. They support new imaginaries of play, work, rest, learning, and socialising where our diverse ways of being are not merely accommodated but genuinely recognised as generative and transformational. Rhizomatic community creates a sense of belonging that becomes a form of re-world-building — expanding the possibilities for how our Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent lives can unfold.
Like mycelium sustaining forest ecosystems, these relational infrastructures often remain unseen by dominant neuronormative systems and are dismissed as meaningless. Yet they continue to grow, adapt, and nourish. We continue to grow as a community, even after rupture, new connections emerge. Through expanding networks of care, Autistic communities are not only surviving within existing structures but we are also gradually transforming them.
Autistic Rhizomes and Mycelial Infrastructures of Collective Care: How the Autistic Community Is Already Changing the World
The Autistic rhizome does not stop at the boundaries of the present and the here and now. It continues to grow through expanding mycelium networks of care, relational systems that spread quietly yet persistently beneath the surface of dominant neuronormative structures. These networks are not only symbolic of future possibility; they are already being lived, practiced, and cultivated in some community spaces today. Through shared recognition, co-regulation, mutual aid, and collaborative creativity and solidarity sessions, Autistic people are actively generating new conditions for safety, participation, and belonging.
This transformation is not in some distant horizon or unattainable future. It is unfolding now within spaces such as Neurohub Community and Stimpunks, where neurodivergent design approaches, pattern language resources, and collective learning, story sharing and support are reshaping how we understand care and what participation and engagement really look like. Within these rhizomatic spaces, knowledge and care move laterally rather than hierarchically. People reconnect after rupture, re-root after burnout, and experiment with new rhythms of engagement that honour our diverse communication, attentional and sensory needs.
Autistic mycelium networks of care function as living infrastructures of change. They nourish us while simultaneously influencing wider systems, always creating new nodes on the rhizome, new points to engage or disengage, demonstrating that alternative ways of organising education, healthcare, work, and community life are both necessary and possible. By growing together through shared experience and relational trust, these networks challenge deficit and neuronormative-dominated narratives and open pathways toward more equitable and sustainable neuroqueer futures.
The Autistic rhizome reaches forward and outwards, not only through imagination, but through action. Each moment of co-regulation, each redesign of an environment, each collaborative act of resistance, and each shared story, meme, or gif can contribute to an ongoing process of collective re-world-building.
I feel deeply grateful to be part of this transformation alongside communities such as Stimpunks and David Gray-Hammond’s Neurohub Community — spaces where the expansion of Autistic rhizomes and mycelium networks of care is not just envisioned, but really lived and enabling me to survive….. may be beginning to thrive……
References
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Buckle, K. L., Leadbitter, K., Buckle, C., Ellis, C., & Dekker, M. (2021). “No way out except from external intervention”: First-hand accounts of autistic inertia. Autism, 25(8), 2473–2484. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613211018185
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2020). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50, 2519–2534. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-03934-5
Mantzalas, J., Richdale, A. L., Adikari, A., Lowe, J., & Dissanayake, C. (2022). What is autistic burnout? A thematic analysis. Autism in Adulthood, 4(1), 52–63. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2021.0021
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Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
Exploring threshold consciousness, temporal ecology, and the porous boundaries between dreaming and waking through a neuroqueer lens.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences — vivid sensory and emotional states that occur at the boundaries of sleep — they may include visual, tactile and auditory hallucinations and are often described within biomedical models as temporary disruptions in wake-sleep and sleep–wake states. However, for many Autistic and neurodivergent people, particularly during periods of burnout, trauma-related stress, and prolonged systemic overload, these experiences may become more frequent and intense and deeply destabilising. This is something I personally experience: the deeper into burnout I move, the more the boundary between dreaming and waking can blur.
This article introduces the idea of neurodivergent temporal ecology as a way to help theorise this and explore how dream persistence between wake and sleep states and threshold consciousness may emerge from interactions among monotropic attention, neurodivergent temporal rhythms, trauma physiology, and the sensory and social environments we inhabit. Drawing on neuroqueer theory (Walker, 2021), philosophical accounts of temporality (Deleuze, 1994; Manning, 2013), Autistic burnout research (Raymaker et al., 2020), and sleep science (Ohayon et al., 1996; Mahowald & Schenck, 2005), this piece reframes hypnagogic and hypnopompic states as relational experiences rather than purely neurological anomalies.
Hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences in Autistic burnout are not merely sleep disturbances. They can be expressions of neurodivergent temporal ecology — moments when attentional, sensory, trauma-related, and environmental pressures destabilise normative boundaries between dreaming and waking and where our flow states between wake and sleep merge.
By drawing on my lived experience, I am suggesting that these different sleep states and versions of reality can challenge assumptions that consciousness should always be linear, stable, and organised. I am inviting people to rethink how sleep, perception, rest and wellbeing are understood, and to consider how environments might be reshaped to support diverse rhythms of awareness and reality.
Living at the porous edge of waking
For some Autistic and neurodivergent people, sleep may not always feel like a clear shift from wakefulness into rest or from rest into wakefulness. Instead, it can feel like temporarily living in a liminal threshold, a shifting terrain where dreams, memories, sensations, and waking perception overlap. This can be confusing, disorienting, and at times frightening.
During burnout or crisis, when sensory, emotional, and social demands exceed available energy, if you are anything like me, these threshold experiences may intensify. You might wake and still perceive dream imagery in your room, perhaps see spiders moving across the wall, shadowy figures in the corner that reach out to touch you, or hear voices that seem present and very real. These experiences can feel entirely real in the moment and may be accompanied by sleep paralysis and a sense of being trapped between worlds. Reaching out to touch the spiders, only to find your hand moving through empty air as the image fades, it can be deeply unsettling. Gradually, environmental and sensory cues become clearer, the dream loosens its hold, and waking awareness returns, often leaving emotional residue and exhaustion before the day has even begun.
Sleep research refers to these as hypnopompic experiences, which occur when REM dream processes persist briefly into waking consciousness (Ohayon et al., 1996). Similar experiences while falling asleep are known as hypnagogic states and are associated with narcolepsy, stress, disrupted sleep, and other neurological vulnerabilities (Mahowald & Schenck, 2005).
From a neurodivergent temporal ecological perspective, these threshold states are not simply individual neurological problems; they may reflect complex relationships among attention, trauma, sensory environments, and cultural expectations about time, productivity, and even how our rest and sleep function. Learning to accept this has made it less frightening for me, and accept it as something that is just a part of my life between worlds that intensify the more stressed or burnt out I am, although this may not be everyone’s experience.
Neuroqueer time and threshold consciousness
Neuroqueer theory challenges deficit-based interpretations of neurological differences by questioning assumptions that perception must always be stable, rational, and temporally linear (Walker, 2021). Expanding on this, I am suggesting that diverse experiences of consciousness may represent meaningful responses to lived conditions rather than signs of dysfunction.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic states are deeply liminal. For those of us already marginalised and living in the liminal spaces, it may be no surprise that our waking and dream worlds reflect this too?!
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences occur before our conscious awareness has fully stabilised into the structured clarity expected in waking life. Meaning is often felt before it can be explained. I often feel suspended between dreaming and waking, between my inner imagery and the external reality. It can be scary and confusing, which is why I’ve been thinking about this a bit more and trying to work out why it may be happening.
Philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) describe time as layered and shaped by intensity rather than simply progressing forward. Manning (2013) writes about how experience is something felt before it is cognitively organised. Sleep threshold states make these ideas tangible, revealing consciousness as fluid and relational, shaped through ongoing interactions between body, memory, the environments we live within and interact with, and social rhythms based on different intersectional identities and experiences.
Spiral time, rhizomatic memory, and dream flow
Many neurodivergent people experience memory and time in non-linear ways. Past events may re-emerge as sensory atmospheres or emotional presences, creating a sense that the past remains active within the present. This can feel like living within a spiral of time rather than along a straight timeline.
Within such temporal patterns, dreams may continue to influence waking perception. Recurring hypnagogic or hypnopompic experiences can involve familiar dream environments, emotional connections with dream figures, or confusion about whether an event occurred in a dream or in waking life. For me, these experiences often intensify during burnout, when attentional flexibility decreases and emotional processing becomes more difficult (Raymaker et al., 2020). It is like my mind is trying to anchor itself and regain a coherent flow.
Dream persistence that overlaps with reality feels like it is perhaps functioning as a survival mode. When the nervous system is overwhelmed, continuing internal processing during sleep it is may be an attempt to conserve energy or make sense of distressing experiences. Although this can result in anxiety or disorientation, it also reflects an adaptive effort to maintain coherence and flow.
I have found it helpful to think about Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome (1994), which offers a way of understanding experience as emerging through non-linear connections rather than clear beginnings or endings. Autistic perception often seems to move in this relational way, linking memories, sensory impressions from waking life, and dream imagery into shifting constellations of meaning and attention tunnels. At times, it can feel as though I enter or leave dreams at unexpected points — already somewhere in the middle of experience — rather than transitioning neatly from one state of consciousness to another.
Monotropism, inertia, and attentional depth
Monotropism theory suggests that Autistic and ADHD attention often involves deep engagement within a limited number of attentional channels (Murray et al., 2005). This can support creativity and intense focus but I think for some, myself included, it may also make transitions, including waking from sleep more effortful.
During burnout, reduced flexibility in attention can combine with the experience of monotropic split, intensifying the persistence of dream imagery across sleep–wake thresholds. Monotropic split refers to the way attention is divided between competing demands, where part of the bodymind remains deeply immersed in an internal focus while another part attempts to respond to external expectations (Adkin, 2022). This can create a feeling of cognitive and sensory stretching or fragmentation, particularly when environmental pressures require rapid shifts in attention and we are expected to bounce out bed and go to work or begin parenting duties!
In such states, the nervous system may struggle to complete the transition between dreaming and waking. Our attention tunnels, the deeply focused channels through which monotropic cognition often operates, may begin to blur across states of consciousness. A person may feel suspended, as if floating between inner imagery and outer reality, experiencing a slowed, blurry awareness where perception has not yet fully stabilised. Dream environments, emotional tones, or sensory impressions can linger as waking demands begin to intrude into our attention tunnel and pull us back into reality.
Research on Autistic inertia may further help to explain this process. Autistic inertia describes difficulties initiating, stopping, or switching between activities or cognitive states (Buckle et al., 2021). When combined with ADHD-related fluctuations in attentional regulation, including oscillations between hyperfocus and exhaustion, these dynamics can contribute to what might be described as temporal momentum, a continuation of cognitive immersion beyond the usual boundaries of sleep and waking (Heasman et al., 2024).
Dream-like flow states between conscious and unconscious may not be just sleep disturbances but may be understood as an interaction among monotropic attentional depth, inertia-related challenges in shifting states, and the physiological effects of burnout. As our attentional energy resources diminish and re-accolate and distribute themselves, the bodymind may remain engaged in internal processing, trying to organise its patterns and regain a flow state that makes more sense as the body begins to wake or go to sleep. This can result in an almost layered experience of perception, uncertainty about what is real, and needs a gradual re-orientation to the external world rather than an abrupt transition. It is why waking up can be sooooo hard!
Understanding hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences through the lens of monotropic split and Autistic interia may offer a more nuanced account of the threshold consciousness for neurodivergent people. It highlights how attentional styles, environmental demands, and states of exhaustion interact to shape the ways neurodivergent people move and flow between dreaming and waking, immersion and return.
Burnout, trauma, and ecological strain
Autistic burnout is increasingly recognised as a consequence of prolonged stress, masking, and environmental mismatch (Raymaker et al., 2020). Trauma can fragment sleep cycles and intensify emotional dream content (Mahowald & Schenck, 2005). Sleep deprivation has also been linked to perceptual disturbances and cognitive dysregulation (Ohayon et al., 1996).
Frameworks such as Gray-Hammond’s ecosystemic model (2026) highlight how burnout, altered perception, and sleep disruption or changes interact with environmental pressures. These perspectives suggest that psychiatry can sometimes individualise systemic strain, locating distress solely within the person rather than addressing the conditions that contribute to it.
Altered states of consciousness may therefore be better understood as ecological signals, indications that our nervous systems are adapting to environments shaped by expectations of neuronormativity, constant productivity (even in sleep and the ways we sleep and rest!) and sensory tolerance. Productivity-focused time demands can place particular strain on neurodivergent people whose rhythms of engagement, ways of resting and recovery differ from dominant norms, leading us to burnout and more unusual sleep patterns.
Ethodiversity and relational consciousness
Ecological neurodiversity introduces the concept of ethodiversity, recognising that multiple cognitive, sensory, and relational styles coexist within shared environments (Tarragnat, 2025). From a this perspective, consciousness is not simply produced within the individual brain but emerges through ongoing assemblages of body, memory, environment, culture, and time. These relational conditions shape how attention moves, how energy is resourced, and how safety is experienced.
Building on the idea of monotropic split, burnout can be understood as a state in which these ecological relationships become strained or fragmented. When attentional demands exceed available capacity, the nervous system may remain partially engaged in internal processing even during periods of rest. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences can therefore be seen as threshold moments in which perception is reorganising across disrupted ecological conditions.
Sleep is More-Than biological restoration; it can also be a site of cognitive and sensory integration, where experiences are slowly being sorted, re-patterned, and re-assembled in an attempt to regain coherence and flow. Dream imagery may persist into waking awareness because the bodymind may still be trying to regain a safe flow state before waking. More time in nature and engaging in stimming and monotonous flow states with what interests you and what you are passionate about may help rebalance this…….
The gradual fading of dream imagery on waking may reflect a process of ecological realignment, a slow recalibration of our internal temporal rhythms. While these experiences may signal burnout and misattunement with surrounding ecosystems, they may also indicate an adaptive move toward recovery. For myself, being aware of my hypnopompic and hypnogogic states is a signal that I need deep rest, reduced overload, and environments that better support my own neurodivergent rhythms of monotropic attention and engagement. I need more time with my passions and interests, more time stimming and meeting my sensory needs in the dark, under my weighted blanket.
Dream Thresholds, Temporal Diversity, and Mingling with the Universe
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences remind us that consciousness is not always clear-cut or neatly divided into sleeping and waking. There is no ‘right way’ to sleep, to dream or to wake up!
For many Autistic and neurodivergent people, especially during burnout, these threshold states can become intense, immersive, and emotionally charged. Dreams may seem to linger in the room as we wake. Sensations and images can feel real for a few moments before gradually fading. These experiences can be frightening, confusing, and exhausting. At the same time, they may also reveal something important about how neurodivergent minds move through time and perception and why dream worlds and reality may blur at times – perhaps even beyond hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences and into the wider ways of daydreaming, immersing in fantasy and role play.
Recognising temporal diversity as part of neurodiversity means understanding that different nervous systems have different rhythms of rest, monotropic attention, and recovery. Productivity-driven expectations about how quickly we should fall asleep, wake up, or “return to normal” can place additional strain on already overwhelmed systems. When dream imagery continues into waking life — or when vivid sensory experiences arise as we fall asleep — it may be a signal that our bodymind is trying to process, integrate, and make sense of overwhelming experiences.
From a neuroqueer and ecological perspective, altered states of awareness can be understood as relational signals. They may point to our current environment as too demanding, to unsafe sensory landscapes, or to social pressures that require constant adaptation and masking. In this sense, hypnopompic and hypnogogic experiences could be seen as part of the nervous system’s survival response, continuing its work of sorting and patterning experience when there has been little time to rest while awake.
In my own writing on Autistic perception, I have described this as “mingling with the universe.” Sometimes neurodivergent awareness feels deeply interconnected with surroundings — sensory detail, memory, emotion, and environment all blending together in ways that are difficult to separate. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic states can intensify this feeling. Inner worlds and outer realities briefly overlap, reminding us that consciousness is not fixed or isolated but shaped through ongoing relationships with the spaces and systems we inhabit.
Understanding these experiences through a lens of Neurodivergent Temporal Ecology challenges narrow psychiatric interpretations that focus only on individual symptoms. Burnout, sleep disruption and differences, and perceptual instability often emerge within wider contexts — including sensory-hostile environments, pressures to conform to linear productivity time, and limited opportunities for genuine rest or recovery. Supporting neurodivergent wellbeing, therefore, requires more than medical responses. It calls for cultural and structural change: creating environments that recognise and support different rhythms of living, thinking, and sleeping.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences can be unsettling. Yet they can also offer insight into how neurodivergent minds adapt, survive, and find meaning. When dreams continue into waking life or merge as we fall asleep, it may be a sign that we have reached the limits of our energy, but it can also be an invitation to slow down, seek safety, and restore connection with ourselves and our environments.
Temporal Diversity
Recognising temporal diversity expands how we can understand neurodivergent sleep, mental health, rest, and care. It encourages us to move away from rigid ideas about what consciousness “should” feel like and toward more compassionate, flexible ways of supporting neurodivergent lives.
By understanding that our monotropic perception is always moving in relationship with sensory landscapes, memories, emotions, and social rhythms, we can begin to see reality itself as something fluid and negotiated rather than fixed. Sleep and waking become liminal crossings rather than fixed boundaries.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences are not just disruptions to sleep or sleep disorders, but perhaps signals about how well our environments are really supporting and making sense to us. I see them as part of my monotropic flow state that enables me to transition between waking and dream worlds – where both worlds are equally important. When we learn to listen to these signals, we can create the possibility of lives where different ways of sensing time and consciousness are recognised as meaningful and not pathologised. There is very little discussion about hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences; it is still very much shrouded in the same stigma as psychotic hallucinations, and I have found people look wary when I talk about this.
Recognising and sharing stories about these experiences may help neurodivergent people feel less pressure to force themselves back into fast, “normal” rhythms of waking and productivity. Instead, moving between dreaming and waking, focus and rest, can be understood as part of the natural diversity of human perception. Allowing time for slower realignment, through rest, sensory grounding, and meaningful flow states can support the gradual return of energy and clarity.
By learning to listen to our own rhythms and to the flow states that move between dreaming and reality, sleep and wakefulness, rather than constantly resisting or trying to cure these experiences, the meanings and re-orientation of flow within liminal dream spaces can begin to unfold more gently. Growing awareness and understanding of neurodivergent patterns of monotropic attention, rest, and recovery is part of an ongoing process of re-energising, re-orienting, and discovering more sustainable ways of being so we begin to re-world our experiences, not only in waking life, but also within our dream worlds and the shifting spaces in-between.
Buckle, K. L., Leadbitter, K., Poliakoff, E., & Gowen, E. (2021). “No way out except from external intervention”: First-hand accounts of autistic inertia. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 631596. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631596
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Academic.
Heasman, B., Williams, G., Charura, D., Hamilton, L. G., Milton, D., & Murray, F. (2024). Towards autistic flow theory: A non-pathologising conceptual approach. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 54(4), 469–497. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12427
Mahowald, M. W., & Schenck, C. H. (2005). Insights from studying human sleep disorders. Nature, 437(7063), 1279–1285. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04287
Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15857859/
Ohayon, M. M., Priest, R. G., Caulet, M., & Guilleminault, C. (1996). Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations: Pathological phenomena? British Journal of Psychiatry, 169(4), 459–467. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8894197/
Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Burnout can feel like the ground of our very experience and existence has shifted or collapsed. Pathways of attention that once felt sustaining become blocked or fragile. Environments that were manageable begin to overwhelm. Relationships may require more energy than feels possible.
Recovery is not about returning to who we were before burnout. For many Autistic and ADHD people, it becomes a process of re-assembling life differently, rebuilding the ecological conditions and relationships that allow our attention, identity and belonging to reform into a new shape.
Monotropism and the return of attentional flow
Monotropism reminds us that deep attention is not just about hyper-focus and special interests. It is a way of organising our entire bodyminds and ways we experience the world; structuring time, anchoring identity and supporting regulation.
At some point during a period of burnout, you may find that you can slowly reconnect with interests and little things that bring glimmers of joy to your day. Reading about a long-held fascination for short periods, returning to creative or sensory activities without pressure to produce anything. Walking familiar routes that provide predictability, stim watching and stim listening to things that help you get into a flow state. Sorting, collecting, or organising objects and sensory tools may all help restore coherence and get the flow flowing again.
These acts may appear small from the outside, yet they allow what may feel like broken and fragmented experiences to gather again.
As attentional flow returns, you may notice the fog slowly shifting, slightly clearer thinking, reduced anxiety, renewed motivation, and greater emotional and sensory stability. Recovery is not about forcing productivity, but about restoring ecological continuity and flow of attention.
Rhizomatic becoming after burnout
Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as a model of growth without a single origin or direction.
I see my own neurodivergent life unfold in this way, branching through interests, looping across time, and forming connections that do not follow normative developmental pathways or socially expected ways of being.
Burnout can disrupt these rhizomatic processes, blocking the flows that sustain becoming. Recovery involves reopening movement and flow. It may mean allowing new pathways to emerge rather than attempting to restore previous ones.
In this sense, recovery is not a return. It is a continuation of becoming, but under different ecological conditions.
Mycelial care and interdependence
Recovery rarely happens in isolation. Disability justice perspectives emphasise that wellbeing emerges through interdependence, not independence.
Neurodivergent communities often form mycelial networks of support, distributed systems of care that include practical help, shared knowledge, advocacy and emotional attunement.
These networks reduce the pressure to mask or perform. They create environments where different rhythms of participation and communication are possible and where our energy levels are supported rather than judged.
Through such relational infrastructures, survival becomes collective and more sustainable.
Relational fields and minor gestures
Erin Manning’s work helps us understand recovery as a shift within relational fields, the dynamic interplay of body, environment, affect and movement.
Large changes are not always necessary to begin healing. Recovery often unfolds through minor gestures:
protecting time for deep focus and stimming
reducing sensory demands and engaging in sensory flow
slowing daily rhythms
Connecting with trusted people who really ‘get you’
creating spaces for rest and other forms of communication and engagement
These small adjustments can reopen possibilities for movement and engagement.
Intra-action and ecological repair
From a posthuman perspective, experience is never purely individual. Karen Barad describes life as emerging through intra-action, the entanglement of bodies, environments, technologies and social structures.
Burnout signals that these entanglements have become unsustainable. Recovery therefore involves ecological repair: reshaping environments, renegotiating expectations and rebuilding trust between body and world.
This might involve sensory redesign, flexible participation, or alternative ways of organising work and education.
Re-assembly and re-worlding
As attentional pathways reconnect and care networks strengthen, our identity itself may shift and begin to reform.
Values may move toward sustainability, mutual aid and sensory safety. Participation in education or work may look different from before. Recovery from burnout is not about becoming who we once were. It is about becoming who we can be within more supportive ecologies.
In this sense, burnout can function as both rupture and opening within the liminal spaces where we live. It reveals the limits of existing systems while inviting the creation of new ones.
Re-assembly, is part of the broader work of re-worlding, cultivating neuroqueer environments in which diverse ways of sensing, thinking and relating can flourish.
Rhizomes remind us that there are many pathways of becoming. Mycelial networks remind us that no pathway is walked alone. Recovery begins where attention, care and possibility meet so we can re-world together and thrive in our own ways.
Find out more:
Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Pluto Press (UK).
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Deligny, F. (2013). The Arachnean and other texts. Univocal.
In my previous blog, we explored how monotropic attention can create deep rhizomatic pathways of learning and belonging, and how mycelial networks of care help sustain neurodivergent lives.
But what happens when these pathways become blocked? What happens when the networks that once supported us begin to strain or collapse? Or we don’t have the support networks there to begin with?
Many Autistic people describe burnout not only as exhaustion, but as a more fundamental disruption, a loss of flow, safety, and connection, a seismic shift that transforms our entire way of being.
Burnout is not simply “doing too much.” It can feel like the ground of our known experience itself has shifted and fallen through the cracks.
Burnout as a fracture in relational life
Burnout often unfolds gradually, and the buildup may go unnoticed for some of us; we may suddenly find ourselves in the depths, drowning. Attention may become harder to sustain. Sensory tolerance may narrow, social interaction and communication may feel increasingly effortful. Activities that once brought joy may feel distant or even unreachable.
The body may signal distress through meltdowns, shutdowns, pain, disruptions in sleep and eating patterns, or even difficulty initiating movement beyond wanting to curl up under a weight blanket in bed.
Time can feel slowed, fragmented, or just utterly overwhelming and confusing as it isn’t lining up with the neuronormative expectations of the world around us. These experiences are not isolated symptoms. They are signs that the flow between body, attention, our relationships, and the wider environment is under strain.
Rather than viewing burnout as a personal deficit, it can be understood as a fracture within a wider relational ecology.
When environments demand constant masking, rapid task-switching, or sensory endurance, the deep attentional flows that support our ability to engage in life can begin to fracture.
The disruption of monotropic flow
For many Autistic/ ADHD people, interests are more than hobbies. They are passions that provide structure, regulation, identity, and meaning. Burnout may involve losing access to these sustaining pathways and flow states.
A person who once found comfort in researching Tudor history, coding, drawing, gaming, building collections, or walking familiar woodland routes may suddenly feel unable to engage. Attention slips away, motivation may feel brittle, and even small tasks can require more effort and capacity than we actually have available.
This disruption can feel frightening and disorientating. Without stable attentional anchors, the world may become unpredictable and difficult to navigate. Burnout is therefore not only physical or emotional fatigue. It can be experienced as a collapse in the ecology of attention. We need to re-map and re-world our lives to navigate through burnout.
Social and sensory worlds under pressure
Burnout is socio-political and also emerges within overwhelming sensory contexts of the very spaces we need to live in to exist – our homes, education and work place settings and even in healthcare, the very places that are meant to understand and support us.
Open-plan noisy offices, bright, busy classrooms, bureaucratic systems, and performance-driven cultures can create chronic friction with our neurdivergent monotropic flow states. Over time, the effort required to adapt may exceed our available energy.
Masking, consciously or unconsciously adjusting behaviour and communication to meet normative expectations, can intensify this strain.
The cost is often cumulative and can run deep.
Many people describe reaching a point where:
communication becomes difficult
noise, scents, lights, certain textures and even previously safe food may feel physically painful or overwhelming
decision-making may slow down in a fog
everyday routines and exectutive functioning tasks may feel too overwhelming
trust in our environments and relationships with others can begin to diminish
These are not signs of personal weakness. They are signals that the relational conditions and environments supporting us have become unsustainable. Things need to change for us to survive.
Neuroqueer politics of burnout
Understanding Autistic or neurodivergent burnout in ecological terms shifts responsibility away from individuals and toward systems.
Speed, productivity, and independence are often treated as neutral values. In reality, they reflect specific cultural priorities that privilege certain cognitive styles while marginalising others.
Neuroqueer perspectives invite us to question these assumptions. They ask:
Who defines what counts as functioning?
Who has the power to say what rest should look like?
Whose attentional rhythms are recognised as valid?
What forms of participation and engagement with the world are made possible or impossible?
Autistic burnout can be read as both a social, political, and personal phenomenon. It exposes the limits of environments organised around normativity.
Recognising this does not remove the pain of burnout, but it may help to reduce shame and open space for collective change.
Toward ecological re-assembly
If burnout represents fracture, our recovery is not just restoration of previous capacity; it is often a process of re-assembling life differently.
This may begin with small shifts:
lowering demands
re-establishing sensory safety
reconnecting with trusted people
returning gently to meaningful interests or finding new glimmer of joy
allowing time to move, communicate and experience the world at a slower pace
These changes can feel minor, yet they may help re-imagine and re-build the conditions and environments that allow attention and participation to re-emerge.
Recovery is rarely linear. It unfolds through experimentation, adaptation, and relational support.
In this sense, burnout can become a liminal threshold, not only of loss, but of potential transformation to new ways of being and relating.
This three-part blog series explores neurodivergent experience through an ecological lens inspired by David Gray-Hammond’s Ecosystemic Model — following pathways of deep attention, moments of burnout and disruption, and the possibilities of recovery and re-assembly.
Drawing on ideas of monotropism, Deleuzean ideas of rhizomatic becoming and relational care, the series considers how Autistic and ADHD lives are shaped not only by internal differences but by the environments and systems we move within.
Together, these pieces invite a shift away from deficit models toward an understanding of attention, wellbeing and belonging as relational and collective processes and the need to neuroqueer and re-build our worlds.
Neuroqueer pathways of attention, care, and becoming
Many neurodivergent people describe their lives through images of connection. Threads of interest, networks of support, underground support systems (often on-line) that quietly sustain our survival.
Two concepts have emerged for myself over the past few years: the rhizome and the mycelial network.
They may appear similar, both spread sideways, both resist hierarchy, both form connections beyond visible structures.
Yet they may help us understand different dimensions of neurodivergent life.
A useful way to hold this is:
Rhizome helps us understand how attention moves and meaning forms.
Mycelium helps us understand how care flows and survival becomes possible.
Monotropism — the tendency for attention to flow deeply into a smaller number of interests — offers an important bridge between these ideas.
Monotropic attention as rhizomatic movement
Monotropism describes how Autistic and ADHD people’s attention is often organised through depth, intensity, and sustained engagement. Rather than spreading evenly across many demands, attention may gather into tunnels of focus that feel meaningful, regulating, and absorbing.
These tunnels do not move in straight lines. They branch, loop, spiral, pause, and reconnect. One interest may lead unexpectedly to another. Knowledge and experiences grow sideways rather than step by step.
This pattern resembles rhizomatic movement.
Learning may begin with a fascination with trains, sensory stimuli, animals, and gradually extends into wider networks of understanding. Identity may also emerge through these pathways, shaped by sensory experience, relationships, and environment rather than fixed developmental stages.
For many Autistic people, rhizomatic attention develops in liminal spaces — between belonging and exclusion, coping and exhaustion, visibility and misunderstanding. Living on these thresholds requires ongoing negotiation of energy and safety, shaping how attention flows and where connection and knowledge become possible.
Rhizomatic becoming is therefore not just a creative exploration, it is also navigation. It is an adaptation within systems that may not recognise or support monotropic ways of being.
Mycelial care and the ecology of regulation
Rhizomes can help us understand how our attention moves, mycelial networks can help us understand how life can be sustained and become more-than, so we can thrive.
In nature, underground, fungal systems connect organisms through shared pathways of nourishment and communication. Resources move toward areas of stress and these signals travel so that survival emerges collectively.
Neurodivergent wellbeing often unfolds in similar relational ways.
everyday acts of relational care (See: Minor Gestures, Erin Manning)
Distress and burnout are not individual signs of failure. They often arise between people and environments structured around narrow neuronormative perceptions and expectations of productivity, attentional resourcing, and behaviour.
As Manning suggests, small relational actions such as checking in, allowing rest, and respecting communication differences all accumulate over time. These “minor gestures” form survival infrastructures that enable people to continue participating in the world.
Mycelial thinking and processing remind us that regulation is rarely solitary; it is ecological.
Re-worlding through monotropic pathways
When our Autistic/ ADHD monotropic attention is supported rather than suppressed, new possibilities can emerge. Learning experiences can shift from compliance-driven to interest-led. Work can follow rhythms of deep focus rather than constant multitasking and overwhelm. Communities can form around shared meaning rather than normative expectations.
Re-worlding begins in the margins and liminal spaces where alternative forms of knowledge and belonging are already being created like Neurohub Community and Stimpunks. These spaces allow people to connect without having to become “less weird” or more productive to be valued.
Rhizomatic pathways open new worlds by allowing divergence.
Mycelial infrastructures sustain those worlds by enabling care.
Together, they help us move from survival toward collective flourishing.
Ethodiversity and more-than-human belonging
Ethodiversity (Tarragnat) invites recognition of the many valid ways to sense, regulate, and participate in life. Humans are not separate from ecological systems but deeply entangled within them.
For many neurodivergent people, relationships with environments — light, sound, movement, animals, landscapes — are central to our wellbeing. Regulation may occur through connection with water, trees, textures, or different rhythms and flows. These are not luxuries but essential forms of co-existence and participation in shared ecosystems.
From this perspective:
attention is ecological
identity is relational
care is collective
difference is generative
Neurodivergent experience becomes part of a wider diversity of life’s ways of being.
Toward neuroqueer ecologies of becoming
Rhizomes remind us that there is no single correct pathway through learning or identity. Mycelium reminds us that there is no solitary pathway to survival. Monotropism shows how deep attention can create new routes through meaning and connection.
Together, these ideas invite movement toward worlds shaped by curiosity, interdependence, and collective care. Re-worlding does not begin with large structural change alone. It begins in everyday practices, such as following interests, building supportive relationships, co-regulation, parallel play, body doubling work and creating sensory-affirming spaces, and sharing knowledge across communities. All of the Neurodivergent Love Languages are relevant and important.
Neuroqueer ecologies are already forming. They grow through attention, care, and shared imagination.
With thanks to Nick Walker and Andrew Reichart for their recent conversations with me. This piece is independent of their work, and Nick has not read this blog prior to publication. My understanding of the neuronormative paradigm and its implications might differ from theirs. Andrew has helped me understand that the normative paradigm is what drives and enforces neuronormativity and systemic injustice. It is only by critiquing and dismantling this that we can expose the harm and move forward. Nick will write more about the neuronormative paradigm in their upcoming Neuroqueer Theory Anthology, in which I will have two chapters (one of which I co-authored with Ryan Boren, Stimpunks, who also kindly provided editing feedback for this blog).
In a recent webinar workshop Neurodiversity 101: You Are Not Broken (19th Sept, 2025), Andrew Reichart used a term conceptualised by Nick Walker that instantly resonated with me: the neuronormative paradigm. It was one of those lightbulb moments that brought immediate clarity; it gave a name to something I had felt and tried to articulate for years but had never had the words for. Through exploring the neuronormative paradigm, I hope to bring some clarity to why it matters to name the systems that harm, so we can start to see how deeply neuronormativity is woven through our schools, workplaces, healthcare settings, and even our shared ideas of what it means to be human.
Walker has been using the term neuronormative paradigm in their work since the publication of Neuroqueer Heresies (2021) as a replacement for the term pathology paradigm, which they have since said they “regret ever introducing, because it’s too easily misinterpreted and some of the misinterpretations have caused considerable harm”. With permission from Nick Walker (Walker, 2025, personal communication), I am exploring this concept and its relevance to understanding how society and systems define what is considered “normal”, especially here in the UK, US and other Western cultural landscapes.
The term neuronormative paradigm builds on and moves beyond Nick Walker’s earlier concept of the pathology paradigm. According to Walker (2021), “The pathology paradigm starts from the assumption that significant divergences from dominant sociocultural norms of cognition and embodiment represent some form of deficit, defect, or pathology. In other words, the pathology paradigm divides the spectrum of human cognitive/embodied performance into “normal” and “other than normal,” with “normal” implicitly privileged as the superior and desirable state..” It describes a view in which neurological differences, such as being Autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent are medicalised and seen as deficits, disorders, or abnormalities that need to be corrected or cured. It locates the problem within the individual, assuming there is one “right” or “normal” kind of brain and behaviour.
The neuronormative paradigm, creates and enforces the social, cultural, and political systems that uphold the very ideas of normality. It sees neurodivergent people as broken or deficient. Us having the concept “the neuronormative paradigm, helps us name and challenge the power structures and systems that determine who is valued and who is pathologised. It enables us to challenge the foundations of a society that privileges certain ways of thinking, being, and communicating while marginalising others. This shift reframes the issue as the problem not being within neurodivergent people, but within the systems that define and uphold “normality” itself. By having a term for this, we can critique it, expose the harm, shift our thinking and move towards the neurodiversity paradigm.
The neuronormative and neurodiversity paradigms offer fundamentally different worldviews; one demands uniformity, while the other celebrates diversity. Language is powerful and can help make things visible. Until we can see how neuronormative domination has shaped our lives, we cannot dismantle the structures that bind us and move towards the neurodiversity paradigm, where all bodyminds (Dychtwald, K, 1977) are recognised as vital to the living ecology of human diversity.
What is the neuronormative paradigm?
The neuronormative paradigm creates and enforces the social, cultural, and political systems that assume there is one “right” way to be, one “correct” way to think, feel, sense, and move through the world. It privileges particular ways of learning, knowing, sensing, communicating and even resting and regulating while dismissing neurodivergent forms of being. Within this framework, neurodivergence is often treated as a problem to be corrected rather than as a meaningful expression of being human.
Neuronormativityrefers to the dominant system of norms and practices in society that not only define but also enforce how attention should function, how senses should be regulated, how emotions should be expressed, and how we should act within society. These hierarchies produce profound epistemic injustice, positioning neurodivergent people as unreliable narrators of our own lives. Its power intersects with systems of ageism, racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and colonialism, reinforcing structures that determine who is dismissed or erased. Within the neuronormative paradigm, value is measured through capitalist notions of productivity and conformity, while other ways of being and relating are devalued and pathologised, leaving us disabled by the very environments we live in.
By contrast, theneurodiversity paradigm views neurological differences as a natural and valuable form of human diversity, part of the broader spectrum of biodiversity and cultural diversity. It sees Autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent ways of being as integral to the richness of human experience, not deviations from it. From the perspective of the neurodiversity paradigm, our value is reframed through an ecological and relational lens, one that honours dignity, identity, inter-dependence and embraces the richness of all ways of being rather than being valued purely for adhering to neuronormative expectations for capitalist gain. This shift also opens space for neuroqueering(Walker, 2021) and invites us to imagine new possibilities for how minds, bodies, and relationships can form, embracing the potential to be in a constant state of becoming and transformation, both personally and collectively, as we rebuild society.
Moving between paradigms
To move meaningfully towards the neurodiversity paradigm, we must first understand, critique, resist and dismantle the neuronormative paradigm. Until we do this, we risk remaining stuck, with many people speaking the neurodiversity-lite language of inclusion while reproducing the same hierarchies of neuronormativity that cause harm. Recognising the dominance of neuronormativity enables us to name the pressures of minority stress (Botha and Frost, 2018) not as personal failings, but as social injustices. Once we recognise this, we can begin to rebuild environments and systems where everyone can live in their wonderfully diverse ways, and we can all get the support we need to thrive.
Where Neuronormativity Shows Up: Examples of communication and attention
Within the framework of the neuronormative paradigm, spoken language, eye contact, and small talk are generally treated as the “right” and expected ways to connect and communicate. An Autistic person who communicates differently, those who use AAC, are nonspeaking, or express themselves differently, may be seen as lacking social skills, or even be seen as less competent and less intelligent than they really are.
“When the rights of abled people take precedence over those of disabled people, our great shame is evident, and we must not consider ourselves a modern, progressive society.”
Sabrina Guerra (2022)
Guerra’s words remind us that when society only favours certain forms of expression as valid language, it silences and can dehumanise those whose voices emerge differently. Her experiences of being presumed less capable, infantilised, and excluded expose the harm of the neuronormative paradigm in action.
When systems are built around verbal, cognitive, and behavioural conformity, it harms everyone. People with complex and higher support needs, or with profound and multiple learning disabilities, are too often left out of this picture altogether and even more deeply marginalised. They are often denied autonomy, agency, and meaningful participation in decisions about their own lives. For these individuals, the weight of neuronormative domination can fall even more heavily.
Neuronormativity doesn’t only dictate how we should communicate; it also defines how we are expected to pay attention, manage our sensory systems, regulate and use our bodies. Our ways of resting, recharging, stimming, and seeking sensory comfort are often misinterpreted as pointless or disruptive rather than recognised as natural forms of self-regulation that carry great meaning and support our wellbeing.
An Autistic or ADHD child who becomes deeply immersed in a single topic or sensory interest is often labelled as inattentive, obsessive, or even defiant. Within the neurodiversity paradigm, such focus could be recognised as a form ofmonotropic flow and could be better understood through the theory of Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005 & Heasman et al., 2024). These authentic ways of being are often pathologised within neuronormative systems. Instead, they need to be reframed and supported as valid ways of being, through neuro-affirming adjustments to both the environment and the ways our relationships are formed and evolve.
When we reframe neurodivergence within the neurodiversity paradigm, communication is understood as diverse, relational, and embodied. This perspective enables us to embrace authentically neurodivergent love locutions such as infodumping, penguin pebbling, and supportive relational strategies likebody doublingand parallel play. It validates Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people’s natural ways of connecting, through shared interests, flow, repetition, sensory attunement, movement, silence and interdependence as authentic and deeply meaningful. However, even as we begin to recognise these authentic and relational forms of communication, they still continue to exist within systems governed and dominated by neuronormative standards and expectations.
Neuronormative Dominantion
Neuronormative dominationis the measure through which human competence, compliance, rest, productivity, and even belonging are judged. This doesn’t just shape how difference is perceived; it also determines who gets to belong and thrive and who gains access to care. Those whose bodyminds align most closely with neuronormative ideals are generally rewarded with social status, employment, and safety, while those who diverge are more likely to experience poverty, exclusion, institutional harm and also greater health concerns. Neuronormativity can be seen to be reinforcing the existing hierarchies of class, race, gender, and disability as it embeds inequality deep within our economic and social systems.
Schools reward those who can sit still and divide their attention to focus on work, often in busy and overwhelming environments. Workplaces generally value multitasking, tolerance of sensory overload, and social compliance. Healthcare systems privilege people who can articulate distress in what is deemed as acceptable and expected ways, often dismissing how alexithymia and interoception may affect neurodivergent people. They rarely consider the overlapping needs of those who are multiply neurodivergent and also have additional physical, health or learning needs.
For those of us whose bodyminds work differently, the systems we have are not neutral. They are constantly reminding us that we are too much, too little, too fast, too slow, too sensitive, too emotional, or not enough or sometimes just ‘not right’! It leaves us marginalised not because of how our bodyminds function, but because the world has been built around such a narrow idea of what a “functional” or “normal” person should be like. There is no room for different ways of being without the risk of being stigmatised or it affecting our well-being. This is why our neurodivergent community is so important, it provides that space and sense of belonging where we can feel safer with other people who just ‘get it’ (Botha, Dibbs & Frost, 2022).
Minority Stress and Systemic Harm
The minority stress model, extended to include Autistic people’s experiences by Botha & Frost (2018), helps explain why neurodivergent people experience disproportionately high rates of anxiety, depression, burnout and death by suicide (Moseley et al., 2025). Minority stress arises when people from marginalised groups face chronic prejudice, discrimination and a lack of safety. For Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people, this stress is sustained by the systems that uphold neuronormativity itself.
As Milton (2012) describes in his concept of theDouble Empathy Problem, these challenges are not rooted in a lack of social or emotional understanding within Autistic people, but in a mutual misattunement between differently embodied communicative worlds and lived experiences. The problem lies in the cultural expectation that neuro-normative modes of relating and communicating are the best.
In my own work, I have argued that this problem isDEEP ( Double Empathy Extreme Problem; Dynamic, Embodied, Ecological, and Political) (Edgar, 2023). It operates through the power dynamics of whose communication counts, whose distress and ways of expressing joy is recognised (Wassell, 2025), and who is deemed acceptable. When neurodivergent people are constantly required to translate ourselves for neuronormative comfort, we carry a chronic social and sensory load that erodes our well-being and leaves us in burnout.
Living in a world that continually questions, corrects, or punishes our natural ways of thinking and sensing creates both external stressors (exclusion, stigma, systemic barriers) and internal ones (masking, self-doubt, hypervigilance). For multiply marginalised people, those who are also racialised, queer, economically excluded, or otherwise disabled, the value placed on neuronormativity compounds existing systems of oppression, further amplifying harm. Burnout, isolation, and masking are not intrinsic parts of being neurodivergent (Pearson and Rose, 2021); they happen when our ways of being come up against a neuronormative world that doesn’t understand or make space for our needs and constantly tries to ‘fix’ us, or worse just exclude us.
Empire of Normality
InEmpire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (2023), Autistic philosopher and researcher Robert Chapman traces how the idea of a “normal” person emerged alongside industrial capitalism. Chapman argues that normality is not neutral; it’s a tool of economic and political control.
Under capitalism, the ideal person is someone who works predictably, productively, and efficiently. Education and healthcare settings, as well as workplaces, have always rewarded people who align with this model and marginalised those who don’t. Chapman demonstrates how this empire of normality continues to govern our institutions, where people prioritise compliance over creativity, speed over sustainability, and uniformity over humanity. As Chapman notes, normality serves as a biopolitical tool, disciplining populations to conform to capitalist ideals.
Neuronormative domination thrives in Capitalist societies; however, the consequences for many neurodivergent people mean we may be left trapped in “stuck states”, exhausted, feeling fragmented and in perpetual burnout. The effects of the neuronormative paradigm are costing lives. Sadly, Autistic people have been found to have up to an eightfold increased risk of death by suicide compared to non-Autistic people (Brown et al., 2024) and up to 66% have experienced suicidal thoughts. There are 2,025 Autistic people and people with a learning disability currently in mental health hospitals in England, and of these 72% are identified as Autistic. These should not be inevitable consequences of being different; it shows how the system is failing to meet our needs.
Dismantling the neuronormative paradigm: Enabling everyone to thrive
As awareness of neurodiversity grows, the language of neuro-affirming practice has become more common. Yet this shift can sometimes be superficial and many people and organisations may sound progressive whilst they are still operating within neuronormative frameworks that prioritise conformity over authenticity and compliance over genuine inclusion. It can be difficult to know who to trust when words of acceptance are used to mask practices that continue to pathologise or control. These “neurodiversity-lite” approaches soften deficit language and adopt inclusive terms without creating the structural change needed to support real neurodivergent flourishing.
Dismantling the neuronormative paradigm means recognising neurodiversity-lite and calling it out, resisting the deep cultural and political systems that define human worth and behaviourist practices that seek to control the ways we use our bodies and restrict our potential. We need to unlearn and restory the narrative that only values and rewards us through compliance, productivity, and proximity to a myth of normality. Actively rejecting the neuronormative paradigm means accepting that there is no single, universal norm, no one right way to be. We need to reimagine and redefine our notions of value, ability, and worth, as well as what it truly means to be human, beyond the confines of neuronormativity.
When we begin to unlearn these patterns, we can create space for a living ecology of bodyminds, an interdependent, intertwined web of diverse ways of communicating, sensing, moving, thinking, and relating that have always existed beyond the limits of a supposed normality. We need to build spaces where difference is not seen as a deviation but a vital part of a collective whole.
Dismantling the neuronormative paradigm and embracing the neurodiversity paradigm means moving from correction to connection, from conformity to reciprocity. It invites us to expand our bodyminds, to neuroqueer ourselves and our societies, to subvert the assumptions of normality and open new ways of being, knowing, and belonging. To neuroqueer is to live in ways that resist neuronormativity and enable us to reclaim autonomy, agency and creativity. It isn’t just about inclusion; it’s about liberation. It’s about cultivating a society where everyone can grow and flourish together.
By naming the systems that harm, we can embrace neurodiversity, transform our systems and rebuild our worlds so that everyone can thrive.
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Murray D, Lesser M, Lawson W. Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism. 2005 May;9(2):139-56. doi: 10.1177/1362361305051398. PMID: 15857859. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15857859/
Moseley RL, Hedley D, Gamble-Turner JM, Uljarević M, Bury SM, Shields GS, Trollor JN, Stokes MA, Slavich GM. Lifetime stressor exposure is related to suicidality in autistic adults: A multinational study. Autism. 2025 May;29(5):1184-1208. doi: 10.1177/13623613241299872. Epub 2024 Dec 10. PMID: 39655441; PMCID: PMC12038079. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39655441/
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Jacobsen, K. (2025). “I had this fear that as an autistic person, they would take me less seriously”: Trans autistic experiences of epistemic (in)justice in gender-affirming care. International Journal of Transgender Health, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2025.2566190
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Marya, R., & Patel, R. (2022). Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Penguin Press.
Bruno, G., Lindblom, A., Tupou, J., Kewene, F., Waisman, T., & Magiati, I. (2025). Decolonizing autism research: Integrating Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. Autism, 29(11), 2637-2643. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613251382398 (Original work published 2025)
Bruno, G. (2024). Decolonizing Autism: An Exploration into the Experiences of First Nations People in Canada. In University of Alberta Library. https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-k592-zc85
Bruno, G. (2023) Indigenous Perspective On Building Inclusive Autism Practices (presentation)
oJhansson, Anna M. (2025) “The Intersectionality of Indigenous and Neurodivergent Identities in American Indian Education,” Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 7. Available at: https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/access/vol9/iss1/7
“The whole world is only a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it endows itself with representation of the enclosed world.” — Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (1993, P. 24).
Thoughts…..
I am exploring how Deleuze’s ideas in The Foldentwines with the theory of monotropismand the lived textures of Autistic perception and attention through a neuroqueer lens.
What if monotropic attention and perception is folded, what happens when we unfold?
What if Autistic time moves in spirals, not lines?
Folding Worlds
“The world is an infinite series of curvatures”
Sometimes, when I’m deeply absorbed, following the rhythm and flow of an idea, a line of flight, or feeling sound ripple through air the world seems to bend inward. Time loosens, boundaries blur and my mind folds into the moment until it feels like my thought, body, and world are all moving together as one continuous curve.
Deleuze, in The Fold, imagined reality itself as endlessly pleated, an intricate fabric of curves and contours where inside and outside are never truly separate, each perception and experience establishes ‘folds in the soul’. (p. 112) As Autistic people our sensory systems are more porous, each life, each experience, each moment, is a fold within this larger flow of existence, all entangling together with the environment around us.
As an Autistic person, you may feel like I do, that you live in the liminal spaces, the in-between. The world doesn’t divide neatly into subjects and objects but moves almost as if it is a single and multiple simultaneously, perhaps holographic , a folded plane of becoming.
Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005) is the theory that explains how Autistic and ADHD experience is shaped by deep, focused attention. Instead of our attention spreading thinly across many things, our attention folds inward, gathering tightly around may be just one or a few single streams or tunnels of interest or sensation at any given time. It’s not a limitation, it’s a different rhythm, it is how we experience flow and can be a really energising and regulating experience when we are looped into something positive that helps us. Our minds tend to curve toward what holds meaning, creating a rich, textured world from within that fold where our attention dwells.
Where neurotypical attention might skim across multiple channels of attention, monotropic attention lingers and has capacity to stay focused for long periods, especially when in the right supportive environments. Monotropic attention inhabits, it listens deeply and it is in these moments of flow, the world is not distant as some may think, rather the world is inside us, rich and intense. It is like it is folded through our senses, our language, our movement to such intensity we become-with our surroundings.
Unfolding
“A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern”. (P.6)
Folds can be fragile, like origami. When too many demands pull at once, such as sensory input or social expectations, it is like the fold can’t stretch without straining and something has to give before it breaks. Overload, fragmentation, and burnout emerge when the world presses too hard against our natural curvature and forces the fold to carry more than it has capacity for. We may experience more meltdowns or shutdowns and over a longer period could enter a full burnout. Burnout, in this sense, isn’t failure of our body minds; it’s like a wound in the fold. It happens when we are forced to unfold too quickly, without time or gentleness and without the right support.
Liminal Folds
The space between inside and outside, that delicate threshold in the liminal zone, is where I live and perhaps many other Autistic people live too. It’s the edge of sensory, emotional and social attunement, where the world can feel both too near and too far at the same time. Safety, trust, and co-regulation allow the fold to breathe, it gives space to expand and recover. To unfold safely, enables us to unmask ‘to increase and grow’.
When others meet us at our own tempo and in our own authentic ways, our fold can open slowly, naturally, toward a node of connection with others. It strengthens the vulnerable liminal spaces in-between, it can be empowering and gives us energy to follow that curve of a fold and see where it takes us, to resist neuronormative linear ways of being.
Neuroqueer Curvatures
To neuroqueer is the act of living otherwise, resisting the norms that demand sameness, linearity, and temporality. It invites us to honour different ways of moving through the world: curved, recursive, and rhizomatic.
Through this lens, embracing your Autistic/ADHD monotropicness can become a neuroqueer ecology. It is a way of being that disrupts the assumption that we must flow in straight lines and contort ourselves and fold and contort ourselves to fit into heirarchies and systems. To embrace the liminal and the Autistic fold is an act of quiet defiance, a refusal to flatten complexity or to perform productivity and neuronormative expectations at the expense of our own well-being.
Our monotropic deep focus isn’t a deficit, it’s an orientation, it is a different way of being and living. To embrace flow and see where the fold takes us. It reveals a world that thrives on depth and immersion rather than breadth. To move with with the flow of our monotropic attention, along the fold is to inhabit curved time, the slow, spiral rhythm of a mind that folds toward what matters most to us.
Folding Time
For many of us, life doesn’t move in a straight sequence. It curves back, loops, and gathers around moments of attention. This is folded time, neuroqueer temporality or what others have called mad time, time as felt texture rather than moving like clockwork.
When I am in deep flow, the past and future dissolve into the intensity of an ever expansive ‘now-ness’, when the fold releases, I spill gently back into a wider space, I always need time to recalibrate, to find the edges again and to find something to loop and back hook into before I can move on.
To live through folded time is to understand that attention has its own seasons. Some days are for spiralling inward, composting thoughts and gathering energy and others may be for stretching outward, connecting, creating and reaching new nodes.
Folding with the World
“Perception establishes the folds in the soul” (P. 112)
In the folds of Autistic attention and perception lie whole worlds of knowing and becoming. Through monotropism and neuroqueer theory, we can reimagine these folds not as constraints, but as living spaces of creativity, connection, and a different temporality.
Within these curvatures, difference becomes depth, a way of sensing the world through texture, rhythm, and relation rather than conformity. Our attention moves like tidewater, folding and flowing inward to nourish the self and unfolding and rippling outward to meet the world again.
When we are allowed to move at our own pace, these folds open into more realms of possibility, spaces where curiosity can root, where safety and belonging can take form.
To live within the Autistic fold is to recognise that we are not separate from the world, but continuous with it, each of us a unique curvature in the greater flow of being. By embracing our folds and natural flow of monotropic attention, we can honour the quiet sensory moments, our rhizomatic ways of being, and the beautifully entangled ways we come to know, feel, and create within our selves and connect with others.
Reflections
How does your attention fold?
What might unfold if your natural rhythms were met, not resisted?
References
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. U of Minnesota Press. (quotes from Continuum edition, The Athone Press, 2006).
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press
This piece brings together four strands of thought: I have been hugely inspired by David Gray-Hammond’s recent writings about the metaphysics of neurodivergence, Robert Chapman’s historical and mad studies framing, Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory as transformative praxis, and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Each offers a potential lens for us to reconsider what it actually means to be neurodivergent, how our identity is shaped and recognised, and how it might be reimagined beyond fixed categories and labels.
1. Neurological difference from the statistical norm: in structure, function, or developmental pattern.
2. Lived cognitive difference: a phenomenological divergence in perception, attention, or reasoning.
3. Social positioning as “different”: the recognition of these differences by ourselves or others, often in ways that create barriers or stigma.
This proposes that neurodivergence is neither purely biological nor purely social, but emerges in the interplay of embodiment and environment. Tracing through history, Robert Chapman’s Mad Pride in Revolutionary England: The Ranters as Mad Activism (2025) deepens this understanding by focusing on the Ranters in the 1640’s to show how categories of difference, from “mad” to recent terms such as “neurodivergent”, are shaped by power, capitalism, and state control. Labelling is never neutral; it has been used to regulate, exclude, and also to organise resistance throughout history and continues to do so, causing so much harm to marginalised people and anyone who is different.
Where Chapman maps the long shadows of how difference has been policed, Walker turns us towards neuroqueering acts that stretch those boundaries and enables cognitive, psycholgical and somatic liberty for everyone. Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies (2021), frames the act of neuroqueering as both a deliberate refusal of neuronormative conditioning and an emergent process that unfolds in everyday life, which has the potential to create radical systemic change to benefit the whole of society.
This is in parallel to a Deleuzian perspective, which sees identity as never being static but built from many connections, relationships, and processes. Neurodivergence is not a fixed thing, but a living mix of our fluid bodyminds entangled with our environment, constantly shaped by the social, political, and ecological worlds we move through and the relationships we have.
The Metaphysics of Neurodivergence
Neurodivergence is often treated as a fact, decided by a medical diagnosis or by self-identification. Neurological variation without lived difference might go unnoticed; lived difference without social recognition might remain unlabelled or misattributed. It is the interaction with norms, expectations, and power structures that creates and solidifies the socially constructed category of neurodivergence, even for those of us who are innately different from birth.
Gray-Hammond suggests the idea of neurodivergence rests on three intertwined dimensions. None alone fully defines it, but together, they create its lived reality, of these, being positioned as “different” or “weird” often shapes daily life most directly and affects our wellbeing and how well we can function and thrive. This raises their deeper question: Is neurodivergence defined by the way it is lived and experienced, or by an underlying difference that exists whether or not it is recognised?
From a Deleuzian perspective, differences are not static traits but elements of a shifting assemblage. Neurodivergence is not a fixed essence but an ongoing process of becoming, shaped by sensory and cognitive patterns, environments, and cultural narratives, all filtered through intersectional privilege and oppression. Difference is generative, producing new perceptions, movements of thought, and ways of living, even if it is temporarily somewhat stabilised or held through labels such as being Autistic or ADHD.
Gray-Hammond distinguishes between essential properties, those without which neurodivergence would not be what it means today and accidental properties, which can change without altering the underlying being. Essential properties might include monotropic attentional flow, sensory processing patterns, physical disabilities, or other health differences. Accidental properties might include diagnostic labels, learned coping strategies, or outward behaviours. This matters because it undermines claims that compliance-based behavioural interventions “cure” neurodivergence, it suggests that outward behaviour can be suppressed or reshaped, but our essential cognitive and sensory architecture often remains split, fractured by trauma and masking, leading to burnout and mental health crises.
In Empire of Normality (2023), Chapman reminds us that the notion of “normal” is not an objective truth but a social construct, shaped by cultural and historical contexts. Over time what is seen as “normal” and what is deemed as “pathological” have shifted, not because humans have changed dramatically, but because society’s priorities and systems have. These boundaries have often been drawn to serve industry, capitalism, and the institutions that sustain them, rewarding some ways of thinking and being while excluding or penalising others. A clear example is the behaviourist approach entrenched in the US & UK school systems, where reward charts and social stories enforce neuronormative behaviours, harming Autistic children and pushing them to deny their needs expecting them to fit in at all costs.
In this light, Gray-Hammond’s question, ‘who counts as neurodivergent, and under what conditions?’ is not only personal or diagnostic, but it is political. It invites us to question the shifting line between “different” and “acceptable,” “normal” and “abnormal,” and to consider whether this line can be moved, reshaped, challenged, or even erased.
Walker’s neuroqueer theory builds on this idea, framing neurodivergence not only as a site of vulnerability for stigma and oppression, but as a space of creative potential. Neuroqueering resists the idea that support or education should aim to make neurodivergent people “normal”. Instead, it treats difference as a strength, a way to stretch the boundaries of what is possible, to reimagine living, thinking, and relating. It holds space for diverging even further from the norm, for exploring new ways of being and learning, and for the radical possibility that anyone can become neurodivergent through the act of neuroqueering and by choosing to move away from normativity.
When we see neurodivergence as dynamic, shaped by relationships, environments, and histories rather than as a fixed list of traits, we can step beyond the rigid binary of “neurotypical” vs “neurodivergent.” This opens neuroqueering possibilities for a more fluid and liberating society, one that values diversity not as a box to tick but as a living, evolving force. It is an invitation to embrace difference, explore transformative ways of becoming, and continually reinvent ourselves, our work and the worlds we share. However, even as we reimagine neurodivergence in more fluid and relational ways, the language we use and the labels we inherit carry the weight of the histories that have shaped how difference is seen and treated.
Hidden History of Neurodivergent Labels
The words and language we use to describe people have never been neutral. They are shaped by politics, history, and power. Robert Chapman’s historical account of Mad Pride shows how labels for cognitive difference often come from systems built to manage and control people. In the 1640s, for example, radical groups like the Ranters challenged the strict religious and social rules of their time. They refused to conform, rejected rules imposed from above, and gathered in ways that disrupted the status quo. They didn’t use today’s words as being neurodivergent but they clearly didn’t fit into the expected norms of the time. Their defiance and solidarity can be seen as early acts of Mad Activism resisting the idea that there is only one “right” way to think, feel, or live.
Neurodivergent people have often been denied the right to name and define our own realities. For most of history, “official” knowledge about us has come from deficit-based medical models, shaped by institutions and used to serve those in power.
As I shared in my blog ‘Autistic Mental Health: Beyond the Pathology Paradigm‘ (Aug, 2025), research suggests that as many as 8 in 10 Autistic people have a mental health condition. Sadly, Autistic people have been found to have up to an eightfold increased risk of death by suicide compared to non-Autistic people (Brown et al., 2024). For Autistic children, the risk of thinking about or attempting suicide is 28 times higher than for their non-Autistic peers. These are not just numbers, they are lives cut short by systems that fail to meet our needs.
2,025 Autistic people and people with a learning disability are in mental health hospitals in England. Of these, 1,455 (72%) are Autistic.
240 under-18s are in inpatient units. Of these, 230 (96%) are Autistic.
The number of Autistic people without a learning disability detained in mental health hospitals has increased by 141% since 2015.
In 2015, Autistic people made up 38% of the total in hospital. Now it is 72%(National Autistic Society, 2025).
These statistics are not personal failings, they are systemic failures of education, healthcare, mental health services, and broader society to support Autistic people and those of us who are different in ways that affirm our needs, identities, and ways of being. This is epistemic injustice, as the people most affected are excluded from the conversation, and the words we need to describe our lives are often missing, invalidated or treated as problems. A clear example of this is neurodivergent experiences of burnout.
When a community lacks language for its own experience or our experiences aren’t believed, it is easier to cause harm. It’s not just about being misunderstood; it’s about blocking self-understanding, choice, and autonomy. Every label we inherit, from being “Autistic” or “weird,” “defiant’ or “disordered”, carries a built-in set of assumptions about how we should be seen and treated. Labelling can trap us in someone else’s story…..or it can be reclaimed and re-storyed to tell our own narratives.
The power to name and label, and use certain language shapes who is recognised as being fully human and “right” who is pushed to the margins. The meaning of labels is always shifting; institutions try to lock differences into fixed categories, diagnoses, risk labels, and lists of “deficits.” In response some communities are pushing back, reclaiming words like “Crip”, “Autistic” or “Mad” and filling them with their own values, histories, and pride. But changing words alone is not enough, real change needs systemic transformation, and neuroqueer theory offers ways to put that into practice.
Refusing Normal: The Practice of Neuroqueering
Neuroqueering can happen on many levels and in many different ways; from the small, everyday choices we make in how we use our bodyminds to the larger work of changing systems. On a personal level, it can mean moving, speaking, or sensing in ways that feel natural to us, even if they go against social expectations. On a collective level, it involves challenging and dismantling the systems that enforce able-bodiedness, demand constant productivity, and dictate narrow, “acceptable” ways of socialising and communicating.
However, living neuroqueerly by stimming openly, rejecting therapies aimed at making us “normal,” choosing to play, learn, work, or rest in our own ways can still lead to exclusion, discrimination. It is a risk without being in a safe environment with people who understand and accept your authentic self and ways of becoming.
Neuroqueer theory recognises that neurodivergence doesn’t stand apart from other forms of oppression. The same bodymind that pushes back against neuronormativity is also navigating intersectionality, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, class inequality, and the impacts of colonialism. True freedom for neurodivergent people means breaking down ableism and these other systems together. Deleuze, like Walker and Gray-Hammond, sees this refusal to “fit in” not only as resistance but as something full of creative potential. Embracing difference isn’t just about stepping away from the norm; it’s where new ways of living, relating, and imagining can begin and transformations can emerge.
Neurodivergence isn’t something that lives inside an individual’s brain; it takes shape in our bodyminds, who we are is inseparable from the rhizomatic networks of meaning and care, or their absence, that surround us and our environments. Liberation needs to be a collective flow: changing life for one means changing it for all of us. It needs to be co-created through the ways we think, feel, and act, shaped by how others respond to us, and vice versa.
Neuroqueer praxis is both personal and social, it is the daily choice to resist being pulled into the norm, while building community solidarity to challenge the systems that enforce neuronormativity. It’s about creating and sharing new ways of knowing, and about changing the very conditions that limit who we can be, moving beyond labels and expectations, so we can live as our authentic selves and build supportive, meaningful communities.
A neuroqueer politics of difference does not seek permission or validation from systems that marginalise. It works to build worlds where many ways of being are not only accepted but recognised as essential to our shared survival and joy. To live fully as ourselves is not just inclusion, it is the ongoing work of reworlding.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition(P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991)
At the heart of everything I do is a belief that lived experience and Autistic lives matter.
What if support for Autistic children began with listening to Autistic people?
That was the the question I had in mind when I first created Autistic Realms in 2022. I wanted it to be a space that I wish had existed many years ago when I was first trying to understand and support my own children, myself and the families I worked with as a teacher.
As an Autistic parent and someone who’s lived through cycles of burnout and the barriers that come with being misunderstood, I wanted to build a space that speaks from within the experience. A space that affirms our way of being and helps parents, carers, professionals, and young Autistic people themselves feel less alone.
What Is Autistic Realms? A Practical, Neuro-Affirming Support Hub
Autistic Realms is where I share grounded, neuro-affirming support for families, educators, and allies to support Autistic people, especially those facing barriers to education, burnout and systemic misattunement.
It’s mainly a family-focused space rooted in lived experience, academic research, community wisdom, and the need for real support that respects Autistic minds and bodies.
Topics I regularly explore:
Monotropism, deep focus, and flow
Autistic burnout
Supporting children who are experiencing barriers to education
Sensory processing and interoception differences
Autistic communication, play, masking, and identity
Neuro-affirming reading lists and community signposting resources
Explore My E‑Books
Over the past few years, I’ve created a growing library of over 20 practical, neuro-affirming eBooks and 100s of infographics, mostly focused on supporting Autistic young people and their families.
Many are completely free to download, covering topics such as sensory processing and managing transitions, low-demand parenting, support for executive functioning difficulties, and finding out about the theory of monotropism.
These guides are ideal for sharing with schools, therapists, and support networks—or simply for finding your own sense of understanding and validation.
Step Through the Portal Into More Realms
There’s also another thread woven through everything I do and love….
A slower, stranger space for art, literature, poetry, philosophical unravellings, and deep neuroqueering ways of becoming.
Which is why I have now created More Realms, a companion site for creative flow, theoretical and philosophical exploration, and the more sensory relational side of neurodivergence.
More Realms is where I draw on my background and love of Literature and Art alongside lived experience and neuroqueer ways of sense-making, to explore ideas through poetry, story, image, and more-than-human connection. Rooted in neuroqueering, posthuman thought, and ethodivergent sensory relationality, this space will host reflective writing, collaborative projects, and community-rooted explorations of art, literature, and alternative ways of becoming.
It’s a space to spiral, stretch, and reimagine, where words tangle with moss and metaphor, and where Autistic and disabled creativity is not marginal, but central.
I am hoping that More Realms will help me keep Autistic Realms clear and accessible for those seeking practical support, while also honouring my own creative process and flow.
More Realms is for you if you’re curious about:
Neuroqueering time
Mad studies
Posthumanist ideas
Deleuzean inspired philosophy
Poetics, liminality, and more-than-human belonging
Creative storytelling from the margins
Nature, rhythm, and spiralling attention
More Realms is a space of becoming, for those who long to wander deeper—into the wild edges of thought, where nature invites pause, neuroqueer ideas take root, and sensory worlds unfold. A place to linger. To meander through tangled textures. To drift in spiral time. To create our own maps.
The word resilience is often used as a weapon, especially against parents/ carers whose children are different, who may be neurodivergent and who are more likely to need accommodations in school to succeed. I have found the word ‘resilience’ triggering for a long time, it has been used against me as a parent, against my children and against many of the families and young people I support. Being told you need to harden up and be ‘more resilient’ shows a lack of understanding and a lack of openness as to the reasons why a person may be struggling. It doesn’t enable curiosity or for people to share their story, it is a closed statement, a dead end that can only lead to more harm for many people.
The word resilience is often used as a judgement. It is used as a word to shame parents/carers and to imply they are not good enough at parenting; they aren’t parenting in the ‘right way’ in the ‘normal’ way. It is often implied that low-demand parenting styles are about ‘giving in’ and one of the root causes of neurodivergent children being more ‘needy’ and unable to fit in; neurodivergent needs can be hugely misunderstood. However, if people were more understanding and schools more neurodiversity-affirming, perhaps those struggling wouldn’t be told that they needed to be ‘more resilient’ to survive – let alone given the chance to thrive?
Being told, ‘your child needs to be more resilient’ implies that they are not good enough as they are, they need to be better. It is often suggested that in order to do that, we need to teach our children that needing extra reassurance, using comforters, needing specific routines, needing extra time, and needing things done in a certain way are not important and that children should just ‘get on with it’; children should be ‘more resilient’ and it is our fault as parents if they are not. Using the word resilience in this way is ableist and denies needs.
As parents / carers of neurodivergent children (such as Autistic, ADHD and PDA) we are often told we need to be firmer and stronger in our parenting approach. In the UK, many parents whose children are struggling with their mental health or having difficulty in education are often invited onto parenting courses, essentially with the aim of learning to be a ‘better parent’. A few of these courses may be helpful and neuro-affirming, but the majority are currently ableist and harmful; they are shaming and stigmatising for the parents of neurodivergent children (whilst they also don’t acknowledge that many of the parents of neurodivergent children are more likely to be neurodivergent themselves).
To make our children more resilient, it is frequently suggested that we should enforce more rules; we need to adopt a behaviourist approach and not be such a pushover. There is often a huge misunderstanding of the benefits of a flexible, compassionate, low-demand approach, especially for PDAers. We are expected to teach our children to fit in at almost any cost to their well-being and our well-being as parents/carers.
It is very common for neurodivergent children to struggle with transitions, especially the transition into school and new settings or when meeting new people. One example of a common scenario where we may be told we need to be more resilient as parents, and our children need to be more resilient, too, is that of children who get upset at the school gates when leaving their carers. Children who are struggling or being ‘difficult’ are often bribed into school with reward charts, their needs are then left unmet and trauma cycles can begin to grow. Over time, this gives a message to children that they need to mask, build up their armour, and if they can make it through to the next star on their reward chart, it will all be okay. However, masking is exhausting, denying and not having needs met can eventually lead to burnout and ill health.
Teaching people they need to be resilient to be accepted and fit in is harmful.
A parent whose child may be crying and clinging onto them as the school bell rings is a child who needs more connection with their safe person (not less) and it shows they aren’t yet ready for the transition. Parents are told things like, ‘Oh, they will be fine once they are in; stop fussing, you are making this worse for them’.
Many parents are told to be more resilient, to be firmer, to not let emotions get in the way of how we ‘should parent’. It is suggested we need to ignore our gut instincts and pain as our child is being peeled off us and escorted into school crying – with the words ‘they will be fine in a bit’ thrown back at us, even though we know they won’t, not really. We know they may settle down eventually, but the fallout from that trauma and needing to mask all day will be released after school when they get home. Meltdowns and shutdowns will likely be triggered when children are once again in their safe space at home and trying to process and regulate after a day of masking and trying to be ‘resilient’.
Blame and shame are often attributed to parents who ask for accommodations to make transitions (such as the above) easier for their neurodivergent children. Children often need support plans for accommodations as simple as needing a comforter or a more relaxed start of the day. Such accommodations should be available for all in neuro-affirming settings and not seen as an ‘extra’, just as a ‘difference’.
Teachers may says things like; “No comforters are allowed in school, if we did it for one child we’d need to allow it for everyone….We can’t have a class full of teddy bears or blankets’. Or you may hear things like; “They are too old for a comforter now, you should have got rid of that years ago!”. We are often told as parents; “you need to stop fussing and giving in, it isn’t helping your child, you are making this situation worse”. It is implied that if parents parented ‘better’ and were more resilient themselves, their children wouldn’t have so many issues. The word resilience becomes heavy with shame when used in this way. It is neuronormative society that needs to embrace resilience, not that neurodivergent or disabled people need to be more resilient.
The word ‘resilience’ has been used against many people and neurodivergent or disabled families I know, including their children and young people, to suggest that they are not doing enough, they are not strong enough, not mature enough, not mentally well enough and that they need to build up some armour to make themselves stronger. We are told we need to be more resilient so we can then fit into society and conform to neuronormative ideals. If neurodivergent people could only be more ‘resilient’, it would save other people making accommodations.
When used in this way, the word resilience puts the blame on the person (often the disabled, neurodivergent person), and it reinforces the uneasy and unfair power dynamic and denies the need to make environmental and societal changes.
I am suggesting a reclaiming and reframing of the word resilience.
Radical Resilience
Radical resilience is about using our resilience, our strength, to challenge the systems and advocate for our neurodivergent and disabled needs in a society that predominantly values neuronormativity, at all costs.
Resilience can be a powerful tool against the systems and people who try to use the word to shame and make neurodivergent and disabled people feel like they are not good enough, not mentally well enough, too weak, too soft and those who are not learning, working, or parenting in what is expected to be the ‘right way’.
We shouldn’t have to become more resilient to fit in; we shouldn’t need to deny our needs and teach our children that they can only survive. We shouldn’t need to mask, suppress and deny our authentic selves to thrive.
We need to change environments, not fix people.
Autism + Environment = Outcome
(Beardon, L. (2022). What works for autistic children. Sheldon Press. P.22
Neurodivergent and disabled people don’t need to be more resilient to fit in, but we can use our resilience to advocate and make change. I am not suggesting this is easy, and there is a great deal of privilege in being able to do this in a safe space—race, gender, and many other factors will impact a person’s ability to advocate and be taken seriously, but when we can, we need to try to shift the narrative.
If people’s needs were met, there would be no need for the word “resilience.” I think we need more softness and flexibility, more acceptance and understanding of differences, better communication between people, and less of a double empathy gap (Milton, 2012). We shouldn’t need to keep fighting ableist systems we need neuro-affirming practice and care for everyone. Our children shouldn’t need to be told that they need to be stronger and that they should be more resilient. We are enough.
Radical resilience involves reclaiming the word resilience, embracing change, facing difficulties head-on, and not just surviving but thriving in the face of adversity. It also involves thinking outside the box, being open to new possibilities, and adapting to difficult circumstances in innovative neuroqueer ways.
To be radically resilient, we need to find possibilities in between hard spaces to transform the landscape and enable more neuro-affirming environments for people to flourish. In the right environment, resilience isn’t a word of shame; it can be used to create new ideas and pathways for change and strengthen people’s advocacy skills to enable a neurodiversity-affirming society.
Burnout can creep into our lives as a type of deep exhaustion that won’t lift, no matter how much sleep you have. It can leave you feeling lost, disconnected from joy and leaving you with no energy or capacity to keep pushing through. For many neurodivergent people, the demands of conforming to normative expectations around work, rest, and productivity make us especially vulnerable to burnout. Healing from burnout is not just about stopping everything, when you are ready it is also about reconnecting with ourselves and resting in meaningful ways that work for us, not against us. One of the most powerful ways to do that for some people may be through creative flow.
Create by Betsy Selvam Image of two hands on deep red background cupping a bright pink flow with symmetrical flourish of cream flowers and botanicals growing from within
Flow as Restorative Resistance
In her presentation on Art as a Therapeutic Tool, Betsy Selvam spoke about the transformative power of creative expression in healing. Betsy said creative practices and, “art opens up space for healing and a way of reclaiming your own narrative.” This idea resonated deeply with me, using art, writing and creative practice to connect with others in the community can help rewrite the stories written for us by systems that have never understood us as Autistic people.
Letting go of how we should rest or should work opens up a pathway towards restorative flow. When we’re in flow, when we are completely absorbed and immersed in our monotropic interests and passions, may be in a creative activity, something shifts. Engaging with your interests if you are Autistic is about more than simply having a hobby, it is a core part of being monotropic, it enables us to be present, to feel, to flow and liberate ourselves from other demands. Finding time and pockets of flow is essential for everyone’s well being to help prevent, and also heal from burnout.
Burnout Recovery Through Creative Practice
Engaging in creative flow, whether through art, writing, dancing, crafting, or other joyful sensory activities, can be really cathartic.
Flow helps by:
Offering a soothing rhythm for overwhelmed sensory and nervous systems
Supporting regulation and reconnection with our bodily needs
Fostering a sense of purpose and empowerment outside capitalist demands of neuronormative expectations of productivity
Reignites curiosity, imagination, and playfulness and can bring joy!
Creates connections with others and opens up opportunities for collaboration.
Burnout recovery isn’t about returning back to “normal”, I think it’s about creating a new rhythm of being that honours your flow, your natural fluctuations of energy, your attention, and your authentic story. Creative practice provides one of the few spaces where this is possible, it enables a space where you can be present with yourself without judgment or pressure . You don’t have to be good at art, craft, writing or dancing, it is the process that is important, the taking part and joining in rather than the end product.
Reclaiming Rest
In the dominant neuronormative culture, rest is often framed as a reward for hard work or as a pause before getting “back on track.” For neurodivergent people, especially Autistic and ADHD people, rest needs to be understood differently. Rest isn’t just a break, it’s re-balancing. Engaging in flow states can be deeply restorative and energising and help with resting in a meaningful way that replenishes energy.
I have explored ways of reclaiming rest and affirming flow states and energy cycles in my article here – Reclaiming Rest.
Collective Flow
While individual creative practices are powerful, shared flow can be just as healing and even more transformative for some people. When we come together in collective flow and creativity by body doubling, co-writing, co-making and co-creating without pressure it is at these times we can build community and strengthen our connections. Shared flow can help remind us that we’re not alone in our experiences, they allow us to share regulation, joy, and foster interdependence where people can co-create meaning together and create a shared sense of belonging. Collective flow allows for a shared rhythm where when one person’s flow may be slow and they’re finding things difficult, another person’s flow can support them and relieve some of the pressure. Flexible, neurodivergent friendly approaches to work and creativity are helpful for this – things like body doubling and asynchronous working have transformed my life and enabled more room for creativity at times that work for me.
Reclaim Your Narrative
A common barrier to engaging in creative flow is the belief that you have to be ‘good’ at it. Healing through creativity isn’t about skill, I think it is more about presence, it’s about expression and letting go of expectations. You can scribble, collage, sew, move, doodle, dance or journal as a way of discovering more about yourself, there’s no wrong way to create.
As Betsy reminded us, art and creative practices can help you reclaim your narrative. It’s not about being productive; it’s about connecting and reconnecting with yourself, giving yourself permission to explore and to be creative in ways that work for you, finding ways of rewriting your narrative and constructing your own ways of being. Giving your self permission to try new things, experiment and explore.
Engaging in flow, letting go of expectations of how we ‘should’ rest and ‘should’ be working, can be really cathartic. It can help you cope, help prevent burnout and also support the recovery journey.
From Pathology to Possibility: Reclaiming Our Stories
Autistic people have been spoken about, written over, and pathologised for far too long. Our lives have been turned into case studies, symptoms, behaviours, and ‘outcomes’. We have been flattened, squashed into diagnostic criteria, and dissected through checklists and things like social skills programmes built around what we are perceived as lacking. These narratives have been written about us, but not for us in a helpful way, and certainly not with or by us.
The Practice of Unknowing: Reimagine Knowledge
It is Autistic Pride month, and I have been inspired by the idea of ‘unknowing’ in David Jackson-Perry’s new paper, which was released last week, ‘Unknowing in Practice: The Promise of Discomfort, Failure and Uncertainty in Neurodiversity Studies’ (2025). Jackson-Perry writes, ‘The practice of unknowing I am thinking of is not a state or a thing, not a noun, like ignorance, but decidedly a verb, an orientation, an ambition to stay with the discomfort, to re-imagine and embrace failure as holding creative potential, to sit with uncertainty‘. Academics and professionals need to ask, ‘How might we put the verb ‘to unknow’ into practice?’.
To feel proud as Autistic people, we need academia and systems to create space for neurodivergent community voices to be heard, recognised and valued so our stories can be validated. We need more accessible resources so non-academic people can weave in and benefit from the good neuro-affirmative research that is out there. We need different modes of communication and storying to be accessible and taken seriously.
Community Concepts and Crediting Lived Experience
Research is only of benefit if it helps those it is intended for and is put into practice (such as discovering the value of the Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) and the theory of monotropism (Murray et al., 2005). A good example is Crompton et al.’s (2025) recent research about information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people, where various formats were provided to make their work more accessible by creating a short video. We need more space for neurodivergent researchers to work and for non-academic theories and ideas that have been evolved by advocates and through communities to be taken seriously and credited, for example, Tanya Adkin’s concept of AuDHD burnout and Meerkat Mode (2023).
Restorying is about listening, believing and creating new and openly accessible ways to share information and experiences. It is about unlearning the old stories written about us without our consent and voices. It is about refusing the scripts that reduce our sensory worlds to dysfunction, our deep monotropic interests to obsessions and invalidating our ways of communicating differently. Restorying is about rejecting frameworks that only see Autistic people through what we are not, how we lack, what we should be and instead it allows our community language and different ways of expressing ideas to be valued and validated.
Restorying as Resistance
To restory is to reorient towards our authentic selves, our communities, our ways of experiencing, sensing, knowing and sharing. Restorying is a political and embodied act of resistance and can be seen as a way of neuroqueering (Walker, 2021) and resisting neuronormative domination. As Jackson-Perry writes, “looking outside the academy to engage with and cite work produced by neurodivergent lay-people, advocates and scholars publishing outside academic journals holds considerable potential to unknow, or to re-story, with advantages to both ethics and knowledge production.”
I am not in academia; I am a former early years and primary school teacher based in the UK. I am a late-identified monotropic AuDHDer with a multiply neurodivergent family. I set up Autistic Realms as a way to advocate for neurodivergent children who are so often misunderstood and experiencing barriers to education and burnout. As a former SEND teacher with my training rooted in behaviourism, I have had to unlearn everything I knew about Autism, I have had to sit in the unknowing and am still trying to find ways to relearn and rewrite my own personal and professional narrative.
I am slowly rewriting my story and making sense of years of misunderstandings, mislabeling and the consequential layers of internalised ableism due to the suppression of my authentic needs and masking. I have had to battle through repeated burnouts and have got stuck in the scary unknown space of trying to work out my identity and what being Autistic may mean for me. With the support of the communities I am now part of through sharing stories with others, I am beginning to find comfort and validation and slowly starting to make sense of things and reconnect.
Jackson-Perry’s paper explores how embracing unknowing, discomfort, perceived failure, and uncertainty can radically reshape neurodiversity studies and academia, giving space for non-academics to have a voice and reshape the narrative. I don’t think this is limited to academia; embracing ‘unknowing’ is a much-needed practice in education, health care, and workplace settings, as well as for individuals to reflect upon in their own lives. We all need to unlearn how Autism has been told to us, we need to allow time and space for unknowing to happen and learn from each other.
Reorienting Towards Authentic Autistic Ways of Knowing
Everyone has a story worth listening to, Jackson-Perry argues that ethical engagement with neurodivergent experience requires a shift toward humility, relationality, and co-produced knowledge. We are all interdependent and part of the broader ecology of life. To have one story placed on a higher pedestal than another makes no sense and reinforces ableism and hierarchy. It further silences so many neurodivergent and disabled people who do not have the privilege to enter academia; it continues the cycle of Autism research being done ‘on’ and ‘about’ people and not with people and very rarely by Autistic people, although it does feel like things are really starting to change for the better – hurrah!
As Grace, Nind, de Haas, and Hope (2024) argue inExpanding Possibilities for Inclusive Research, we must radically rethink what actually counts as knowledge and what counts as a valuable story or piece of research. Their work, which centers on the experiences of people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities, demonstrates that genuine inclusion requires not just inviting marginalised people into pre-existing research frameworks but transformingthose frameworks entirely. Their paper calls for a decolonisation of research, a move away from hierarchical, ‘expert-driven’ knowledge production towards collaborative, sensory, and relational forms of doing research WITH people. We need to create more space for Autistic people to carry out research. For those with PMLD we need to be involving them in our research and working with them as researchers too. There is opportunity for everyone to play a part in the restorying of Autism and research, but to do that we need to really tune in and listen to ourselves and those we are with, not just to words, but to responses and felt experiences, however they may be expressed. We need to lean into the unknown space of ‘what if’, ‘may be’, ‘perhaps’ and explore together.
Restorying Through Community and Connection
Restorying is not just about reclaiming the narrative; it is about reclaiming the conditions under which knowledge is made and valued, going beyond academia and university based research. It means refusing research that extracts from us while treating us as unknowable and unworthy. We need to honour Autistic knowledge as it exists in our community, such as in online chat forums and in ways expressed outside of verbal language—in art, music and bodily responses, especially for those with profound and multiple disabilities and those from other marginalised intersections of community and the non-speaking community.
Jackson-Perry and Grace et al. (2024) collectively urge a reorientation from knowing about people to being with people, from capturing data to cultivating relationships, from seeking certainty to sitting with ambiguity and uncertainty and possibilities, this needs trust. This is the epistemic ground of neurodiversity justice, and it happens when we trust each other as co-authors to create and share moments of Autistic joy, infodumping and penguin pebbling. It happens in the making of new resources such as the Map of Monotropic Experiences which I have created with Stimpunks community; it emerges in the care we extend through slowness, body doubling and parallel play. It happens in the nonverbal attunements we practice as we stim and co-regulate, it happens in the neuro-affirming ways we can give time and space for each other, especially in online communities, our basecamps. Humans are interdependent and neurodivergent people and our communities are deep and rhizomatic, our stories need to reflect that.
Central to the work of both Jackson-Perry and Grace et al. is a call to resist extractive research practices and instead foster shared, embodied, and situated ways of knowing and unknowing. The academic world and our education system still cling tightly to its authority over what counts as ‘real knowledge’. Even in fields like Critical Autism Studies, where Autistic concepts and research such as the Theory of Monotropism and the Double Empathy Problem are increasingly acknowledged, the structures and practices to adopt this meaningfully in real life settings such as our schools and health care system are still often defaulted to gate keeping.
Autistic ways of knowing, rooted in sensory attunement, pattern making, connection, and deep, often nonlinear ways of processing, are frequently dismissed or, at best, absorbed into more palatable forms that meet institutional standards in a very neurodiversity-lite way. Community spaces such as Stimpunks and Thriving Autistic are helping to bridge these gaps, enabling space for communities and professionals to come together. They are spaces that support the unknowing and unlearning we need to go through personally and collectively. They are affirmative spaces where people can come together to discover more about their identity and support each other in the restorying process, whilst also adding to the wider network of knowledge being shared, created and validated.
Decolonising Research and Knowledge: Relationality, and Inclusion
Neurodivergent community knowledge has always existed beyond words on paper through campfire storytelling and yarns such, as those which Yunkaporta describes in SandTalk. Knowledge and stories are alive in blogs, Facebook threads, Discord chats, community workshops, zines, mutual aid groups, and conversations in our homes. Knowledge also happens in shared moments of attunement and in the sensory experiences we may have, however small and fleeting. Knowledge lives in how we hold space for each other when one of us is spiralling and another is helping to co-regulate; it happens through interdependence, not hierarchy and it happens when we connect with each other, feel safe and feel a sense of belonging. It is in the metaphors we create together to explain our inner experiences, such as those in the Map of Monotropic Experiences,. Knowledge emerges in the care practices we have to build to survive in a world that rarely meets us halfway, even under weighted blankets, fairy lights and stimmy sensory tools.
However, this knowledge has historically been treated as anecdotal, unreliable, messy, and even more so for those with profound and multiple learning disabilities, those who are non-speaking and those who do not use the written word. Generations of voices have been deemed invalid as they have not been translated into academia’s (and educational and workplace) formal, disembodied language. When attempts have been made, it often presumes our experiences and forces normative values on us in an attempt to ‘fix’ us.
From Knowing About to Being With
Restorying is about protecting the soul and felt experiences of our knowledge; it is about recognising that our stories do not have to meet academic conventions or certain educational standards to matter and be included and valued. Our ways of making meaning through metaphor, art, music and sensory resonance are legitimate. They are part of a different epistemology, one that is emergent, embodied, and relational and needs to be honoured in academia and within our educational system from Early Years and beyond. We need space to be with each other and for Autistic experiences to be validated for what they are, not as a means to know more about Autism to make us fit in, but to find out about Autistic people so we can create environments for us to thrive and be ourselves.
When we restory and share art, music, photos, memes, blogs, comics, podcasts and YouTube videos and messages together on line we are creating new frameworks, we are building new maps from the liminal spaces and edges where we have been left stuck and unheard. Community-led restorying does not need to ask for permission as it is rooted in collective care in our Discord servers and spaces, such as Stimpunk’s weekly Solidarity Sessions and Thriving Autistic’s monthly meetups and Discovery sessions.
Community-led restorying is in every Facebook, Bluesky and X thread you may join in and contribute towards. Adding to a story can be as simple as giving a single emoji thumbs up response to a post, every message we respond to can help add to the narrative and re-shape the future and make it a bit easier for others. By joining these communities, we are coming together and enabling a space to heal and restore together, to share and unite in a commitment to justice to be heard and seen. Community stories don’t just happen through published books and journals, they happen in multiple forms and through multiple spaces including in events such as Autscape, organisations such as AMASE and neurodivergent-led mentoring, and educational provision such as GROVE (all of whom I know and support/ work with).
Many Voices, Many Ways of Knowing
Restorying and embracing the practice of unknowing can inform how we advocate and support each other to co-create a more accessible future for everyone. It means building tools and resources that emerge from our reality and differences, not what service providers think we may or should need.
Restorying means refusing the binary between ‘academic’ / ‘professional’ and ‘lived’ experience, as many of us (like myself) also exist in the blurry space in between. By restorying involves including many different voices, in many different ways we can co-create knowledge that is decentralised, rhizomatic and truly honours the most marginalised people in society.
Autistic Pride: Restorying as Healing and Resistance
The deficit model of Autism is not just outdated; it is harmful. It erases our strengths, flattens our complexity, and narrows our futures. Restorying is how we can keep on undoing the harm that deficit-based research has caused Autistic people. Sharing our real lived experiences stories in whatever way we feel comfortable is a way of reclaiming our pasts, healing, reimagining our present, and expanding co-creating futures rooted in dignity, interdependence, and neurodivergent flourishing.
We all have a voice, no matter how that sounds or may be expressed. We need to keep telling our stories. Restorying is how we can reclaim our Autistic voices, honour our ways of knowing, and build futures rooted in connection, not correction.
Join community spaces, share your blogs, art, music, videos, creative projects, info dump about your passions, and join body-doubling groups and solidarity sessions for support. Let’s cite each other across social media, reply to each others posts, share each others work and stories. This will help to build archives of collective knowledge and create even more spaces for our voices to be heard.
We all have a voice and a story to tell and as Jackson-Perry said, there is ‘considerable potential to unknow, or to re-story, with advantages to both ethics and knowledge production‘. Autistic Pride Month is a great time to share, come together, rewrite the narrative and be heard.
Grace, Joanna, Nind, Melanie, de Haas, Catherine and Hope, Joanna (2024) Expanding possibilities for inclusive research: learning from people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities and decolonising research. Social Sciences, 13 (1), [37]. (doi:10.3390/socsci13010037).
Jackson-Perry, D. (2025). Unknowing in practice: the promise of discomfort, failure and uncertainty in neurodiversity studies. Neurodiversity, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330251348083
Kavanagh, Day, A., Day, Kavanagh, M., Hartman, D., O’Donnell-Killen, T., & Doyle, J. K. (2025). The Neurodiversity Affirmative Child Autism Assessment Handbook. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005b). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperOne.
“Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.” [And that may even be a good thing].
After years of repeated burnouts and living in an ongoing survival state, I know that I will never recover. Returning to the same place and state I once was is impossible. Too much has changed. My burnouts are deep; they have changed my very core way of being and experiencing. There has been a whole seismic shift in how my sensory system responds to life and what it needs. As Dr Devon Price wrote, ‘You might not recover from burnout. Ever‘, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find new ways of living and navigating life.
It feels almost inevitable that I will continue to have cycles of burnout as the whole of society, and the way the world works is generally just not suited to being monotropic. Constantly dividing attention resources to get through your day is exhausting for monotropic people; it can lead to the concept Tanya Adkin developed and has written about with Emergent Divergence: The neurodivergent ramblings of David Gray-Hammond – ‘monotropic split’.
I do believe the more you know about your Autistic/ AuDHD identity and the more you understand the theory of monotropism, the more you can help with the healing process. You can begin to find ways to work with your flow and not against it – even if these are just little rock pools of rest and respite where you can unmask and be yourself in your safe place with safe people who understand you – as you continue to battle against the constant crashes and tides of neuronormativity that can feel so heavy and pull us down.
Knowing more about your monotropic processing style and recognising the glimmers that help rejuvenate your sensory system and bodymind can all help. Little changes to your day and lifestyle can all add up. Connecting with others and sharing experiences can be invaluable; it helps you feel less alone and can help you make sense of things. Being present and embodied at a DEEP level with neurokin can help to bridge the double empathy gap. Having a basecampenables enables safety and provides more space to focus and communicate, create a collective flow and sense of belonging with others who ‘get it’.
We may not be able to fully recover from burnout (as in go back to how we were), but we can eventually move on with the right support and in the right environment. Seek out smoother spaces to work with our inner monotropic needs. If you are monotropic you need to find ways that work with you so you can embrace flow, try and find those tiny moments and safe places where you can rest and restore some of your energy so you can keep riding the waves.
Rest can become a radical act in a world that often equates our worth with productivity, especially for Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people navigating the tides of burnout, where even our ways of resting may look different. I have been really inspired by Tricia Hersey’s wonderful writing and their recent book, We Will Rest! The Art of Escape from Nap Ministry (2024).
The Tides of Burnout and Monotropism
Following on from my blog Tides of burnout and being monotropic I believe Autistic burnout is more than exhaustion; it’s a profound depletion of mental, emotional, physical and sensory resources. Burnout is often caused by prolonged masking, sensory overload, and the relentless demand to conform to neuronormative standards.
From my own experience of Autistic burnout, I think the theory of monotropismis key to helping us understand why and how burnout happens and can also support better ways for us to move on through burnout. Monotropism is a theory developed by Autistic people in the late 1990s and resulted in the paper Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism (2005) by Dinah MurrayMike Lesser, Wenn Lawson. Monotropism is a neuroaffirming theory of Autism (and many ADHD people resonate with it too!) where a person’s attentional resources are focused deeply on a limited number of interests/ events or experiences at any one time. While this deep focus and flow can enrich our experiences, things like shifting attention can be really challenging, especially when external demands pull us away from our areas of interest.
The dynamics between the theory of monotropism and societal expectations can create a cycle for Autistic people. Intense focus can lead to overexertion, and difficulties with interoception may mean you aren’t even aware of when you need a rest or when you are tired, and it may mean you miss some of the signs of reaching a burnout crisis. The immersive, joyful feeling of being in deep flow can mean that you want to carry on and on as time passes quickly, 5 hours may feel like 15 minutes, and you may not have eaten, drunk or moved. Alternatively, not being able to engage in flow and battling systems and trying to fit in to your place of work can be utterly draining, even if you enjoy your job! Often being around other people, having multiple demands at any time, and having to socialise and communicate in ways that fit into other people’s frameworks can leave us feeling more than depleted at the end of the day.
When you are in a flow state, external demands can feel painful, they take even more energy, and may leave you in a state of inertia, unable to do anything and feeling paralysed. Balancing the needs of wanting to immerse yourself in your interests and things that bring you joy, and the demands of work and family that may pull against your inner needs, means you may have even less capacity and even less energy to even know what you need to rest in a meaningful way. The feelings of needing to mask to fit in and juggle and balance your innate inner Autistic monotropic needs with the demands of neuronormative expectations can feel like you are trying to swim upstream; it is exhausting. Meltdowns, shutdowns, or reduced responsiveness can be a form of enforced rest when your body and mind are overwhelmed. Meltdowns and shutdowns are your body and mind in survival mode; they are a sign you need deep, authentic, meaningful rest.
Rest as Resistance
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, advocates that rest is not a luxury but a form of resistance against oppressive systems that devalue our well-being. She asserts, “Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.”
For Autistic individuals, embracing our authentic ways of resting challenges the internalised narratives that equate our self-worth with neuronormative ideals.
Reframing Rest
Rest isn’t solely about sleep, yoga or other mindfulness-type activities; it’s about creating spaces, creating physical and emotional spaces, and meeting our sensory needs so we can exist without the pressure of performing to society’s expectations and suppressing ourselves. For monotropic people (Autistic/ ADHD), this might involve engaging deeply with our special interests, spending more time stimming, spending more time in your sensory den or simply allowing yourself more moments to be yourself without judgment.
How Autistic & Monotropic Rest May Look Different
The most restful spaces are often those where we don’t have to mask or justify our needs and where we feel safe.
Deep focus on special interests and passions
Society may see this as “work” or “obsession,” but for many monotropic people, being immersed in your flow state with something you are passionate about can be regulating and restorative.
Stimming
Stim vocalising and stim movement, such as rocking, tapping, flapping, or pacing or dancing may seem active, but they are often soothing and regulating, helping to release stress and maintain flow. Stim listening and stim watching can make you feel cosy and safe. They bring predictability and comfort, especially when the world feels chaotic. Resting in motion and stimming can give you back energy and give you more capacity to manage.
Solitude
Rest might mean being completely alone or managing to do your work by using body doubling strategies to help you focus your energy resources more easily and effectively, without the pressures of socialising or working in more conventional ways.
Monotasking (doing one thing deeply)
While multitasking is often celebrated, sustained single focus is how many of us find flow and peace, even if that feels more like a constellation type of thinking, with your mind diving in a million directions as you connect so many things together and doesn’t feel very ‘mono’ at all !
Spending time in dark, quiet, or low-stimulation environments
This sensory rest is vital for decompressing from overload, even if it looks like “doing nothing.” Using this like weighted blankets, ear defenders, and fidget tools are often essential for flow states, not optional extras as they can help you feel safe, regulated and rested.
These are not distractions but often meaningful ways to self-regulate and can be a great way to embrace flow independently or alongside or with others.
Delaying or avoiding communication (texts, calls, emails)when you can
Social expectations can be draining; rest might mean letting people know you prefer to text rather than speak verbally, or you can manage an online meeting instead of in-person.
Non-traditional sleep-wake cycles
Monotropic focus may shift sleep patterns; rest might come at unconventional hours, and that’s okay if you have supportive people who understand you. Find out more about monotropic time in my recent blogs.
Withdrawing from roles, routines, or expectations temporarily
Stepping back from responsibilities may look like avoidance, but it can be intentional self-preservation and help reduce the severity of a burnout crisis.
Talk therapy may not feel restorative.
Many Autistic people find traditional therapy approaches overly verbal, which can further drain energy. Many Autistic people need extra time and space to process thoughts or emotions by ourselves, outside of the demands of conversation and social expectations. Restorative therapy care might look more like body-based, creative, or activities with less emphasis on verbal support (e.g. art, or nature-based therapy may help).
“Going out with friends” may be socially draining, not restful
Socialising, even with people we love, can sometimes increase stress and add to burnout. Rest might mean not attending and connecting in quiet, low-demand ways instead.
Unstructured time without expectation
Just having a safe space where nothing is expected of you can be deeply restful, even if it “looks” unproductive. Rest means breaking free from the pressure to always say yes, even when you’re running on empty.
Rest is More Than a Nap: Reclaiming Rest as Autistic Liberation
Rest, as Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry reminds us, is about more than naps. It is a radical, embodied act of refusal. Rest is a disruption of neuronormative grind culture, capitalism, and all the systems that treat human beings as machines. Hersey reminds us that:
“Rest pushes back and disrupts a system that views human bodies as a tool for production and labor. We know that we are not machines.” — Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance
For many Autistic people, especially those of us navigating burnout, masking, and a world that often misunderstands our rhythms of being, means that our ways of resting are often misunderstood, denied and even stigmatised. We have been taught to ignore our bodies, to push through overload and to meet neurotypical expectations at the cost of our well-being.
Rest is often more than sleep. It’s more than self-care routines or sensory tools marketed as solutions. Rest is anything that reconnects us with ourselves.Anything that brings our monotropic attention gently back to flow, safety, stillness, or regulation.
Rest for Autistic people might look like silence, repetition, solitude, immersion in a special interest, and a withdrawal from speaking and other expectations. Although society may not recognise these forms of rest as valid, I think they are deeply necessary. They are a reclamation of our authentic Autistic monotropic selves from systems that expect us to perform, conform, and endure.
When we begin to honour our need for rest, not just to “recover” from burnout but to resist the conditions that cause burnout, we can begin to move. Rest becomes liberation. Rest becomes connection. Rest becomes our right.
As Tricia Hersey urges:
“Find ways to connect back to your body and mind. Find ways to intentionally slow down… It is your divine and human right to do so. WE WILL REST.”
Tricia Hersey gives us permission to slow down and let go of shame. She urges us to create community. When you are in safe spaces with people who ‘get you’ and allow you to be your true self, rest comes easier. It can feel like a mutual collective flow that is validating and empowering.
“Create community. Build community. Be community. Community care can seem impossible when you are exhausted. It is possible. Community is anywhere two or more are gathered……don’t rush to do anything alone. To be an escape artist is to. being the collective. Supported in rest, care, and love. Demand the collective as a source of inspiration and change. Real change comes from the people” Hersey, T. (2024). We will rest!: The Art of Escape. Little, Brown Spark. Pg 35
Let us rest.
Let us resist.
Let us reclaim our unique ways of being Autistic.
Some things to reflect on….
1. What does rest mean to you beyond sleep?
How do you define rest in your own life?
Are there certain activities or sensory experiences that help you feel rested?
2. How does being monotropic influence your need for rest (or those you support)?
In what ways does deep focus on specific interests affect energy levels?
Can engaging with your passions serve as a form of rest? Do you feel it helps restore your energy? Can you find ways to make more time for activities and experience that enable you to engage in flow more often?
3. What societal expectations make it challenging for you to rest?
Are there pressures to be constantly productive or social that impact your ability to rest in ways that feel meaningful for you?
How do these expectations conflict with your personal needs for real, authentic Autistic rest?
4. In what ways can rest be an act of resistance for you?
How does choosing to rest and embrace your monotropic ways of being challenge societal norms or expectations?
Can you view rest as a form of self-advocacy or empowerment?
Do you think positions of power and privilege and intersectional issues also affect your ability to rest in meaningful ways?
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005a). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
When Autistic people are in burnout, we’re often told to “rest”, to slow down, take time off and pull back from pressure.
These suggestions don’t work for me as rest doesn’t feel restful when it’s a demand and disconnected from how I naturally think, feel, and process the world as a monotropic person. When I am in burnout I tend to go deep, I worm hole into Deleuzean philosophical podcasts, I read texts that I actually don’t always understand, I dive even deeper to try and make connections and sense. It is a way of regulating, it helps me feel good, I feel immersed and restored, it gives back energy when other things feel like they strip my spoons away. In former years I may have gone on long runs, very long runs, pushing my body and not my mind to it’s limits but my body is now tired…… Ways of resting like this are often shamed. We may be told we are a work-a-holic, indulging in pointless activities and disconnecting with ‘real life’.
For many Autistic people the type of rest that helps us isn’t about switching off, or trying to re-align with other people’s expectations of what rest ‘should’ look like. It’s about going deeper, into the things that hold meaning for us, into the flow of our interests, into the tunnels that carry us back to our temporal monotropic home. Our rest may be more sensory or related to art, crafts, lego, gaming, making slime, splashing in puddles, rearranging collections, or something else, but it is all valid how ever it looks, deep diving into things that we are passionate about helps regulate flow and can bring some joyful glimmers into a life that often feels VERY hard!
Why “rest” doesn’t always feel like rest
Burnout for Autistic people is real, complex, and often invisible due to things like interoception differences, until it hits, intensely. It can come from sensory overload, constant masking, everyday demands that chip away at our energy, and the pressure to keep up with expectations that were never designed with us in mind. When we reach burnout, when we have no more energy or spoons left to mask or push through anymore, well meaning friends often tells us to ‘rest’ and take time off work, but resting isn’t always as simple as stopping. If I can’t do the things that are pulling my attention at that time I am left really dysregulated and it prolongs and intensifies burnout.
Unstructured time can feel disorienting, especially when usual routines fall away, being told to “just relax” or “do something gentle” can feel like more pressure and another demand to mask, especially if those things don’t match how we truly regulate. Sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out how to rest in a way that actually helps you regulate your monotropic flow and needs.
Structure inside unstructured time
In burnout, we often can’t tolerate external demands, but we still need something to hold on to, a sense of structure and a rhythm that gives us coherence when everything feels scattered and chaotic. For myself, that structure often doesn’t come from schedules or to-do lists, it comes from deep immersion.
Many Autistic (and ADHD) people are monotropic, meaning our attention naturally flows toward a small number of interests at a time. When we follow those interests, we’re not just focusing, we’re making sense of the world, finding comfort, and reconnecting with who we are and our authentic needs. It can be rejuvenating and restorative spending time with your passions and leaning into sensory experiences, activities and interests that help you feel good.
In burnout, these interests can become even more important, they give us a place to go when everything else feels too much. They give us structure insidethe unstructured and can help make life a bit more manageable.
Tunnelling
It can be easy to misunderstand what this looks like from the outside. When we tunnel into something , watching the same video on repeat, reading long philosophical texts, researching something niche for hours, people might think we’re avoiding life, or that we’re shutting down. Instead of seeing this as a disconnection with the world and feeling shame, I am trying to reframe it as a way of re-connecting.
Monotropic tunnelling can be a way to feel safe, to make sense of our experience, to process what’s happened in a way that feels manageable. It can be a way of caring for ourselves without needing to explain or perform. It’s a way of resting through depth, we aren’t switching off, we’re switching into something meaningful that holds space for us.
Monotropic time
Time doesn’t always move in straight lines for Autistic people. We don’t all experience time as linear or predictable. It loops, it spirals, it stretches and contracts depending on our energy, our environment, and our focus.
In burnout, time can feel strange, my days blur together, some moments drag endlessly and others disappear quickly. Trying to rest by the clock is hard and stressful. Leaning into monotropic spiral time opens up something different, it gives us permission to return to the same place again and again, to revisit, re-watch, re-read, re-iterate our thoughts and activities. It allows meaning to emerge slowly, even if it doesn’t look productive to others and you may not feel like you are making progress yourself you likely will be. We need to look at wider time frames, look back on weeks ago, years ago and it is then we may be able to see the difference in our repetition.
Reclaiming rest
For some of us, rest comes in the form of lying still, wrapped in silence under weighted blankets with fairy lights and candles burning. For others, rest may be movement, of our bodies, of thoughts, patterns, language, sounds. For many we may combine all of this and fluctuate between various states trying to get all the points on our spiky profiles aligned .
Regulation doesn’t always mean quietness or disengagement from work or traditional mindfulness activities that are so often suggested by therapists. Here are a few examples of how rest might look different for Autistic/ ADHD/ Monotropic people:
Immersing in a deep interest or sensory experience
Stim-watching or stim- listening to something familiar over and over
Revisiting a thoughts, questions, wanderings and half done projects
Researching a niche topic until the world feels more coherent and you feel that ‘just right’ sensation
Stimming and letting the rhythm bring calm and regulate flow
These aren’t distractions from rest or healing, they are rest and can help us heal, especially when they’re done on our own terms, at our own pace. Rest doesn’t have to mean stepping away from everything that matters to us. It can mean stepping more fully into it. It can mean honouring what actually restores us, even if it looks different from what others expect.
We can rest by allowing ourselves to spiral, to tunnel, to be nonlinear. To return to what we love without guilt, to make space for our bodyminds to move the way they want to move. We shouldn’t need to explain why something feels regulating, if it works, it works, and if flow feels good then embrace it!
We need to reclaim neurodivergent ways of resting from a system that doesn’t understand our rhythms. We need to create spaces where rest isn’t something separate from who we are, it’s something woven into the way we live through our in -person and on-line communities in practices such as body doubling, co-regulation and interdependent ways of being.
Embracing deep flow
Burnout can feel like everything is falling apart, but it could also be seen as a threshold , a place where we can pause, listen, and reconfigure, not to become someone else or mask to fit in, but to return to ourselves. We may need to stay in our monotropic flowy attention tunnels even longer than others expect, we may need to go deeper. We may need to let go of timelines, checklists, and expectations that don’t fit.
If you’re in burnout and feeling like conventional neuronormative based advice doesn’t work for you, you’re not failing, you’re not broken, you’re moving with a different rhythm, one that makes sense to your body, your mind, your way of being and that is valid.
Sometimes rest isn’t about pulling away, it’s about going deeper in and embracing our monotropic flow.
Seeing and feeling the blank looks and Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) at a really extreme DEEP level and still desperately trying to explain how you feel is exhausting!
Writing 100,000-word text messages to your friends and colleagues to try and justify and validate why you can’t do something or why you have done it the way you have because you’re monotropic and don’t want to miss out on any details is a very real thing!
Being with people who understand and “get it” is validating and important.
We all need a base camp. A base camp is a niche place of safety and radical inclusion. It is a safe place where you can be yourself and explore your identity, a space where people ‘get you’, where there is a more level playing field of shared life experiences from which to form friendships and explore new terrain. A base camp is a validating space where people encourage you to be you and even expand your version of yourself. A space where different ways of communicating, moving and different sensory experiences are validated and where co-regulation is a foundation stone that enables inter-dependence and independence.
Base Camps come in many forms: families, face to face community groups and also online communities.
In collaboration with Stimpunks, I have been exploring Neuroqueer Learning Spaces. These primordial learning spaces enable everyone to thrive in their own authentic, unique ways. They provide a basecamp from which to explore and learn with others in your own way in your own time and in a space that is comfortable.
The three primordial learning spaces comprise of Campfires, Watering Holes and Cave Spaces:
Caves:Space for quiet reflection, introspection and self-directed learning. A private space to transform learning from external knowledge to internal belief. Home of reflective construction.
Campfires: Space for learning with a storyteller, an elder or from others. Education facilitators need to subvert neuronormativity actively. They need to embark on their transformative neuroqueer journey so their re-storying can inspire neuro-cosmopolitanism.
Watering holes: Space for being with peers and social learning in validating neurodivergent ways by embracing parallel play and body doubling experiences. Community enables thoughts and ideas to expand rhizomatically. Valuing differences and unique strengths expands creativity into new horizons and can create a collective flow full of potential.
Find out more about Neuroqueer Learning Spaces and also discover Stimpunks Learning Pathways on their website. Learning Pathways are nestled within the online rhizomatic forest of the Stimpunks website. Learning Pathways is a free, open-access online tool set up to support and guide you on your journey of self-discovery. It provides the tools to help empower you as an autistic, disabled or otherwise marginalised person to self-advocate for your needs and promotes agency and autonomy.
A learning pathway is a route a learner takes through a range of pages, modules, lessons, and courses to build knowledge progressively.
Pathways don’t need to be traversed in order. Pick what looks interesting. Choose your own adventure.
Kieran Rose (2018) describes autistic burnout as a ‘crash where you keep on crashing’. This resonates deeply.
I have experienced cycles of burnout throughout my life due to systemic unmet needs living as an autistic person in a world primarily designed for non-autistic people. The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) is real, and as explained in my previous blogs, it is extreme and DEEP (Edgar, 2024). The Double Empathy Extreme Problem arises from feelings of disconnect; not only from cultural, sexual, political, religious, neurodivergent, or any other cross-section of differences but also through embodiment, or lack thereof.
I have been reflecting on my persistent cycles of burnout and why my body and mind never feel fully recovered, rested and restored no matter how much sleep I get or what I try. I have always had a busy family life and career as a teacher, but as an autistic person, I do not see or feel a boundary between myself and my environment; I feel a deep attunement to the space around me. However, I also feel a deep disconnect with the majority of society and the pressures of feeling I need to conform to dominant social norms that have always left me on the edge, feeling separate and, in many ways, disembodied and shattered into millions of fractals, it has left my soul feeling burnt-out.
Neurodivergent Rest is Different
Autistic and neurodivergent rest is different from neurotypical rest. The recommended recovery strategies for the majority of neurotypical people who are in burnout (and often also experiencing depression) are to try to engage more with others, to try and do more exercise, have a better diet, to try and join in more with the group activities and to generally be more active and engaged in society. This doesn’t work if you are autistic. Such strategies have left me with less capacity and a feeling that I am falling deeper and deeper into a void and becoming even more disembodied and disconnected, it has left me with even less energy to function and get through life.
Autistic ways of recovering typically involve giving yourself time and space to be yourself, to stim more, to engage in your monotropic interests, and to create more flexibility in your life so you can embrace your own autistic way of communicating and socialising rather than trying to ‘fit in’ to others’ expectations. Research led by neurodivergent teams is especially valuable in exploring ways to support those experiencing burnout. Research led by people who are also autistic or otherwise neurodivergent adds to the narrative of recognising and validating the inner experience of autistic people.
If you are experiencing burnout, a deeper understanding of autism and learning to embrace your own authentic autistic identity can provide ways to help give your body and mind authentic and meaningful ways to rest, recharge and recover. Learning more about theories such as monotropism (Murray, 2005), discovering more about the sensory system and how an understanding of the interoception system works is vital and can help enormously; it can bring a much-needed sense of meaning to life.
Research demonstrates how a better understanding of autistic identity can support wellbeing. It can help the healing journey for those in burnout and provide ways to help prevent cycles of burnout. It is valuable research, but it is not enough. If your soul feels burnt out, it will need more than this.
Burnout and Souls
I have realised what is missing from all the literature I have read about autistic burnout is how burnout affects our soul.
What do you do when your soul feels burnt out, broken into a thousand fractals, heavy and exhausted?
How can we help our souls recover from living in a prolonged state of persistent burnout?
I am describing the type of burnout and life circumstances where you can’t ever get the solitude you know you need and that you crave so you can heal. I am talking about the type of burnout and life circumstances where you don’t have the freedom to be yourself, unmask, stim, and embrace your monotropic interests for extended periods of time that you know you really need.
What do you do when you have family, work, other health difficulties and commitments that impact you?
What do you do when you can’t always get the prolonged flowy time that you know your body, mind, and soul need to really rest and recover?
Autistic Collaboration
The recent research carried out by Jorn Bettin and the Autistic Collaboration team shares devastating statistics of the inner experiences of autistic and marginalised people trying to survive in the world today:
Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not).
For the experience in workplace environments, our global survey results show that non-marginalised employees experience the culture in typical workplace settings as “normal”. In contrast, employees from marginalised population segments feel much less safe and welcome at work.
Over 40% of employees are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 25% of employees are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers.
Amongst employees who identify as neurodivergent, 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 40% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers.
The experience of being at the receiving end of internalised ableism starts at a young age in powered-up family structures and education environments.
Amongst neurodivergent children, 90% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self at school, and close to 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self within their families. Furthermore, over 90% of neurodivergent children often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, over 80% often or always feel disrespected, and over 70% often or always feel unsafe.
It is not always easy or even practical for many people to completely ‘opt out’ of what Bettin describes as the hypernormative and traumatising life path of “modern civilisation”. Feeling trapped can make life even more difficult, suffocating and isolating, it can feel like there will never be a way out from a full burnout. It can feel scary to think you will always be living in survival mode.
There are many people living in this situation, we have to try and hope so we can keep moving onwards. There may never be an opportunity for the deep, extended rest we know we need, and there may never be enough safe spaces to unmask and truly be our authentic selves, so we have to find other ways to somehow carry on, we have to look for the little glimmers in life, reconnect with nature find comfort in the elements around us in whatever ways we can, in whatever small moments of time we can capture between everything else life throws at us.
Connecting with others who share similar experiences is one way of validating the depth of this type of burnout. The autistic, disabled and neurodivergent community provides connections that offer a healthy ecology of care through shared lived experiences with others who ‘get it’ this is invaluable. The disabled and neurodivergent community is more than a community of activists; it provides a lifeline for those who are living in perpetual survival mode and offers solidarity, empathy and a feeling of belonging. The neurodivergent community offer a safe space where the DEEP double empathy problem is dissolved and where love and friendship can flourish.
Reconnecting with nature and taking little moments to recognise the glimmers of joy in life, even when it is REALLY hard, can provide nourishment in small ways to help keep you going from moment to moment. Connecting with others and trying to find ways to explore the expansion of our bodyminds may help some people (neuroqueering / neuro-holographic ways of being) may provide some breathing room and give hope. Carrying on in survival mode for so long is not sustainable. We have to find other ways to keep moving and nourish our souls before the bodymind can even begin to heal. We need love and friendship, radical acceptance and inclusion, and deep empathy to restore our souls.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005b). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Quantumness tends to prosper in very cold systems that are carefully isolated rather than part of a tepid soup awash with other activity.” (Lewton, T. 2024)
This may be a weird take, but … I think we could use the idea of quantumness and reframe it around an interpretation of marginalised groups living on the edges of society, in the liminal zones. Those who are feeling deeply disconnected, isolated and frozen in a system that is not designed for us or meeting needs. This is highlighted by AutCollab’s recent research where they shared:
Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not). (Jorn Bettin, Aut Collab 2024)
Collectively, our isolation can transform into something positive by our neuro-holographic energy coming together to enable neuroqueer transformations at a personal and also mass cultural level.
Disconnect at DEEP Levels in Liminal Spaces
As an autistic person, I do not see or feel a boundary between myself and my environment; I feel a deep attunement to the space around me. However, I also feel a deep disconnect with the majority of society and the pressures of feeling I need to conform to dominant social norms that have always left me on the edge; feeling separate and in many ways disembodied and shattered into millions of fractals. I experience the Double Empathy Gap (Milton, 2012) at an extremely deep level of intensity. The double empathy problem creates a gap of disconnect experienced between people due to misunderstood shared lived experiences. It is “a breakdown in reciprocity and mutual understanding that can happen between people with very differing ways of experiencing the world.”
I feel that as a society, those already marginalised are at risk of becoming even more disembodied, the double empathy gap is growing. In many ways, we are losing our primordial affinity with nature and drifting further from coherence, harmony, and the humanised ecology of care that we need. The double empathy problem feels extreme, it feels deep; it is what I have been describing as DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem (Edgar, 2024).
The DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem ) arises from feelings of disconnect, not only from cultural, sexual, political, religious, neurodivergent, or any other cross-section of differences but also through embodiment, or lack thereof. The double empathy gap is non-linear; it is deep, multidimensional, rhizomatic, and holographic (Mirra, 2023). DEEP could be a huge contributing factor that leads to burnout, ill health and is pushing people further out so they feel they are living on a knife edge just to survive. The DEEP gap can break people at their core, leaving them fragmented, disconnected, disoriented and disembodied, feeling like they’re falling into the void between spaces.
The DEEP problem may be intensified by being monotropic (Murray et al., 2005) and using most of my energy resources to zoom into these feelings and ways of being. This enables me to not only see the details, the harm, and the injustice but also to feel it in multidimensional synesthetic ways in how I see, feel, hear, move, and connect. All of these experiences merge and entwine in holographic ways.
I have been chatting to Dawn Prince-Hughes who is a lead in the CASY (Cultural Autism Studies at Yale) team, they describe similar thoughts and elaborate;
Because our [autistic] sensing mechanisms are super sensitive and often synesthetic (cross-sensing — for example, tasting colors or seeing sound) we often feel a part of the things around us. We don’t tend to see in hierarchies, but rather in “holograms,” as described. Always looking for connecting patterns in an overwhelming ocean of sensory, emotional, and energetic information, our relational culture focuses on how things go together and function. (Dawn Prince-Hughes, 2024)
Neuro-Holographic Communities
“Autistic culture is a unique phenomenon; it is constantly in the process of exploring itself, defining itself, and generating itself. Unlike holistic (non-autistic) culture, it is deeply relational. For many autistic people there is no strict boundary between self and environment, or self and other. We tend not to see things in hierarchies, but in relational ways that are in constant flux. “Neuro-Holographic” is an emergent idea that our group has embraced. Neuro-Holographic, as a concept here, refers to the idea that every small bit of energy and information, whether an atom or the universe, reflects every other part of itself in a seamless and meaningful way.” (Dawn Prince-Hughes, 2024)
In my previous blog, I intentionally used a hyphen between the words neuro and holographic to represent the in-between of neurology and holographic ways of being and experiencing the world, a pause for tuning in, an embodiment, a space of Ma. I have resisted using the word “neuro-holographism as that could imply another new theory or concept. Neuro-holographic is not a concept; rather, I feel like it IS the plane of immanence on which neuroqueer theory breathes and lives; it is the ‘wave that rolls and unrolls’ other concepts (Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy, 1994, p36). To resonate with the term neuro-holographic is to resonate with each other as human souls, to be embodied with your core self, perhaps with your spirit, and to be open to holographic connections with others.
Quantum Entanglement
Nerve fibres in the brain could produce pairs of particles linked by quantum entanglement. If backed by experimental observations, this phenomenon could explain how millions of cells in the brain synchronise their activity to make it function.
“When a brain is active, millions of neurons fire simultaneously,” says Yong-Cong Chen at Shanghai University in China. Doing so requires even distant cells to coordinate their timing, which has led some researchers to wonder if this coordination could be due to what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” — the instantaneous communication that occurs between particles linked by quantum entanglement. “If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role,” Chen says.
……Once the brain creates entangled photons, the property of entanglement could be passed onto other parts of neurons, like the protein pores that play a role in electrical signalling across the brain, says Chen. When any two objects are quantum entangled, changes in one immediately cause changes in the other — so if different parts of the brain were entangled, they could synchronise much more quickly than through any other type of connection.
All of these factors mean that autistic people’s interoception system and exteroception system will entangle and respond differently too. Neuro-holographic people have strong open sensory gates. In our communities, we are finding neuro-holographic people are being drawn together; their holotropic energy fields seem to align with others of a similar frequency, fusing together and creating connections in all different spaces across the globe in weird and beautiful ways both online and in person. People are being led by their heart, their soul, their inner true intrinsic self and way of being and discovering that they are not alone, weirdness is ok and can be embraced.
Annie Murphy Paul in The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking outside the Brainshows that bodily knowledge (interoception) can be more accurate, for instance in the work of day traders who must juggle huge amounts of information very rapidly, than conscious analysis of explicit data. “The heart, and not the head, leads the way,” she concludes.11 Leslie Shelton puts it bluntly: “Emotion is the master over cognition.” (Blum, S. D. 2024)
Beautiful Holographic Potential and Created Serendipity
The online community favors and enables this unique energy and connections to synchronise, entangle, fuse, form and reform and enables potential to expand rhizomatically, holographically. People and communities that are embodied and intune with each other can create serendipity. The more connected and embodied you are, the more connections form and the stronger the hologram and holographic community becomes. Each node of the hologram is a community where collective energy is created and multiplied, it enables increasingly expansive new serendipity and possibilities to emerge. It allows us to lean into and embrace neuroqueer theory (Walker, 2021) and neuroqueering possibilities.
When people feel validated, they can validate the experience of others; a sense of safety is created between people where there is trust and mutual understanding. This enables stronger connections to form in community clusters, at the nodes, which works to strengthen the rhizomatic neuroqueer network. People are in a better safer place to unravel, de-mask, and dearmour themselves from the restraints of trying to live up to neuronormative ideas when they feel they can trust and connect with those around them. Safe spaces enable radical inclusive ways for people to be themselves, so they can explore their own ways of being without stigma and without fear of prejudice. Perhaps it is only through enduring a life living in the liminal and on the edges that we can truly embrace or feel the potential of Walker’s neuroqueer theory and value the potential neuroqueering?
After years of isolation and existing in survival mode on the side lines of the liminal parts of society some people are naturally finding their energy is gravitating towards certain people and spaces. Like myself, they are connecting with others who resonate with them in small community groups which are all connecting rhizomatically. Community provides a sense of meaning to life and validates what may previously have felt like a very disconnected, disembodied, chaotic existence. “Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by the health of the ecology of care we are embedded in, by our sensitivity profiles, and our (in)ability to resolve cognitive dissonance.” (Jorn Bettin, AutCollab, 2024)
Persistent positive experiences (over months, years, decades) in the social and ecological environment beyond the human that allow us to feel understood and loved, i.e. experiences with non-judgemental animals and people with compatible sensitivity profiles — such positive experiences allow us to incrementally let go of internalised ableism, and they teach us how to nurture trustworthy de-powered (non-coercive) caring relationships with other living beings. (Jorn Bettin, AutCollab, 2024)
At a human scale, some ideas of quantum biology and quantum physics resonate with neuro-holographic concepts and ways of being. The beauty lies in the fact that the word neuro-holographic can only be felt or experienced in an undefinable, iridescent way as we are talking about energy, tiny particles of ourselves that can’t be seen or observed but are alive and seeking connections. Holographic energy is full of light and vibrations that can expand and ripple far beyond our own bodyminds to connect with others who are vibrating at a similar frequency. The fusion of this collective energy creates multiplicity and is ever-expanding, entwining, and merging with others, expanding each individual’s potential to challenge and subvert harmful systems and ways of being and discovering neuroqueer ways of embracing life in multidimensional ways. It brings people together to create ecologies of care, communities based on deep understanding, love and acceptance.
When people experience deep emotionally engaged thinking about complex issues, they are literally playing out that thinking process, our data would suggest and now many other sources of data would suggest, on the substrate of the cortisone cortical regions that literally also are feeling your guts.
Poets have had it right all along. (Immordino-Yang, 2024)
Connecting with others and following your intuition and your internal vibes or gut feelings in safe spaces enables people to explore emerging thoughts, to be open to explore the ‘perhaps’, the ‘may be’, the ‘could be’ and possibilities that ‘might happen’ if we truly embraced the neurodiversity paradigm and neuroqueer theory in creative ways, it enables awe and wonder and feelings of belonging. It enables our community rhizomes to expand into spaces full of radical, inclusive neuroqueer possibilities.
Opening up discussions and sharing lived experiences helps to bridge the deep double empathy gap. “A de-powered and less materialistic life is beneficial for our physical wellbeing, and that a socially de-powered life at human scale is essential for our mental wellbeing”(Bettin, 2024). We need to embrace the potential of quantum entanglement and it’s outcomes, it enables us to create new planes and plateaus to live together in our own authentic ways so we can keep holographically neuroqueering ourselves and the spaces we are in to create radically inclusive communities together.
Human Restoration Project. (2024, August 2). Keynote: Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang | Solving the Frankenstein Problem[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUG_ATjjiw4
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005a). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism (London), 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Prince-Hughes, D. (2024). Cultural Autism Studies at Yale — A meeting place for those interested in the exploration, identification, generation and preservation of autistic culture.https://culturalautismstudiesatyale.space/
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities.
Milton (2012) defines the double empathy problem as follows:
“A disjuncture in reciprocity between two differently disposed social actors which becomes more marked the wider the disjuncture in dispositional perceptions of the lifeworld — perceived as a breach in the ‘natural attitude’ of what constitutes ‘social reality’ for ‘neuro-typical’ people and yet an everyday and often traumatic experience for ‘autistic people’.”
I feel we are moving further away from embodied connections with each other; we are losing our primordial affinity with nature and drifting further from coherence, harmony, and the humanised ecology of care that we need (Bettin). The double empathy problem feels extreme, it feels deep; it is what I have been describing with my peers as DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem).
The DEEP (DOUBLE EMPATHY EXTREME PROBLEM) arises from feelings of disconnect; not only from cultural, sexual, political, religious, neurodivergent, or any other cross-section of differences but also through embodiment, or lack thereof. The double empathy gap is non-linear; it is deep, multidimensional, rhizomatic, and holographic (Mirra, 2023). DEEP could be a huge contributing factor that leads to burnout and ill health. The DEEP gap can break people at their core, leaving them fragmented, disconnected, disoriented and disembodied, feeling like they’re in a void space.
Bodyminds is a term used to challenge the idea the body and mind are experienced separately (Descartes). Walker (2021) expands on this idea by explaining:
“Mind is an embodied phenomenon. The mind is encoded in the brain as ever-changing webs of neural connectivity. The brain is part of the body, interconnected with the rest of the body by a vast network of nerves. The activity of the mind and body creates changes in the brain; changes in the brain affect both mind and embodiment. Mind, brain, and embodiment are intricately entwined in a single complex system. We’re not minds riding around in bodies, we’re bodyminds.”
Phenomenologists believe that embodied attunement is an essential, core aspect of our experience of and in the world. Through embodiment, we are able to navigate the maps, the caverns, pleats, and folds (Edgar, 2023) of our lives and perhaps, create new maps in more meaningful ways.
“In phenomenology, embodied attunement refers to how individuals experience the world through their embodied interactions with the environment. This includes the physical, sensory, and emotional aspects of our interactions with the environment. Embodied attunement involves a reciprocal relationship between the body and the environment, where the body is attuned to the environment and the environment is attuned to the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 2017; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2020; Gallagher, 2022)”.(cited in: Hipólito, I. & White, B., 2023)
There is a gap between those who are intune with their own bodyminds and the bodyminds of those they are with and people who are dis-embodied, (regardless of any intersectionality and other empathy gap that may be present). As Walker (2021) says;
“Mind is inextricably entwined with brain, and brain with body; thus, mind is inextricably entwined with body in a single complex system and in a continuous dance of mutual shaping.We’re not minds riding around in vehicles of flesh and bone; we’re bodyminds, bodies that think and perceive. Experience, awareness, sense of self, psychological development, and capacities for feeling, knowing, cognition, connection, and action are all entwined with — and shape, and are shaped by — habits of bodily usage, including habits of movement, posture, breath, contact, consumption, tension and relaxation, gaze, gesture, and expression.”
I am learning to be more embodied through somatic practice and connecting with other people exploring these ideas across various communities. The work of Kay & Dan Aldred (2023) about Embodied Education demonstrates how embodiment is essential for individuals to thrive, we need somatic practice embedded into the ways our education and healthcare systems operate and evolve, we need people to be deeply intune with others, embodied, so they can transform and work more meaningfully.
We need to carve out time to embody ourselves in the world around us, reorient ourselves, realign ourselves, our past, connect with nature, embrace the rhythms and cycles in water, on earth and in the air and sky around us to fire and energize our bodyminds. We need to take moments to breathe so we can recharge and gather the force we need to move, to transform and to neuroqueer ourselves and our spaces.
Neuroqueering is a verb; it is an act of doing and transforming intentionally through the bodymind. To neuroqueer is to seek out the gaps, the in-between liminal spaces where disconnect lingers. We need to look for opportunities within the cracks of broken systems and broken relationships so we can transform. I am finding these spaces within various online communities in the Dark Forests (Boren, 2024) of the Autistic Rhizome (Gray-Hammond, 2023), where perhaps there is a natural gravitation towards exploring these ideas due to people feeling marginalised, disconnected, and disembodied from society because of the DEEP double empathy gap caused by neuronormative society, prejudice and ableist systems.
I am trying to find spaces of Ma (pauses of potential inbetween people, objects, places and experiences) to find creative ways to liberate my bodymind from neuronormativity, I am seeking potential in the spaces in between to make positive, radically inclusive change through my work with Ryan Boren (Stimpunks, 2024) as part of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Project. It feels like ripples are happening, slow change is occurring, conversations are opening up, serendipity is flowing, and the potential of a neuroqueer-embodied future is beginning to transform more spaces.
References:
Aldred, K. L., & Aldred, D. (2023a). Embodied education Creating safe space for learning, facilitating and sharing.
Walker, N., & Raymaker, D. M. (2021). Toward a Neuroqueer Future: An Interview with Nick Walker. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.29014.njw
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities.
I am autistic and monotropic, and I am interested in exploring Helen Mirra’s theory of holotropism (2023) and how this may impact flow states and regulation. Holotropism synthesises the theory of monotropism (Murray, 2005) with deep ecology and holistic anatomy. Holotropism is a:
“multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain under the monotropism map…To be holotropic is to have wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence. A sense of wholeness occurs through these processes — less consciously in hyperfocus, more consciously in coherence.” (Mirra, 2023)
Flow & Monotropism
“Monotropism is a neurodiversity-affirming theory of autism (Murray et al. 2005). Autistic /ADHD/ AuDHD people are more likely to be monotropic (Garau et al., 2023). Monotropic people have an interest-based nervous system. This means they focus more of their attention resources on fewer things at any one time compared to other people who may be polytropic. Things outside an attention tunnel may get missed and moving between attention tunnels can be difficult and take a lot of energy. Monotropism can have a positive and negative impact on sensory, social and communication needs depending on the environment, support provided and how a person manages their mind and body.” (Edgar, 2024). Flow states are an intrinsic part of a monotropic person’s experience when engaged in their passions and deeply immersed in their interests.
Csikszentmihalyi was interested in finding out about flow states and intrinsically rewarding ways of being. He was interested in how and why people became engaged, not for external rewards, “not as compensation for past desires, not as preparation for future needs, but as an ongoing process which provides rewarding experiences in the present.” His research concludes that happiness is an internal state of being that can be achieved through flow.
He suggests one of the main elements of flow is the merging of action and awareness. For flow to be maintained, he says, “one cannot reflect on the act of awareness itself. When awareness becomes split so that one perceives the activity from ‘outside,’ flow is interrupted… These interruptions occur when questions flash through the actor’s mind: ‘Am I doing well?” What am I doing here?’ … When one is in a flow episode … these questions simply do not come to mind.”
Being in flow can be a joyful, happy state, but you can’t will yourself into a flow; there has to be a desire and interest that leads you there, perhaps a sense of wonder that draws you into a space you are comfortable with to explore your passions further. For Autistic/ ADHD people who are monotropic, it may be that they find it easier to enter a deep flow state when engaged in their monotropic interests; it may feel more satisfying and intense, all-consuming as more energy and attention resources are processed into fewer channels than for polytropic people. In a sensory deprivation tank, with no external stimuli, you are left with your bodymind and following the desire lines of your thoughts into unknown spaces, spaces that perhaps can’t be accessed otherwise. A deep flow state emerges from a sensory deprivation experience that leaves an openness for uninterrupted thoughts and sensations of just being in the moment and an expansion of the mind. A sense of freedom and weightless-ness not just of the body floating but of the mind too.
Flow states may be more intense for monotropic people; this can be positive and negative. It can be highly regulating when the flow is positive but also dysregulating when it latches onto something negative. Being monotropic it may enable easier access into a flow state as there are fewer attention channels to compete with resources and input. Being in a flow state can be a way of self-regulating, but it may also be the reason why other things are more difficult, such as switching attention to new tasks. Being in a deep flow may leave people in a state of inertia, immersed in cycles of looping concerns (Hallett, 2021) and feeling ‘stuck, with no way out’ (Buckle, 2021).
Floatation and Flow
Hutchinson and Perry (2003) explored Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory through the experience of floatation tanks (also known as sensory deprivation tanks). They suggest that the unique experience of a floatation tank is a “specific and reliable creation tool. On the whole, floaters seem to experience flow every time they enter the tank. Even better, they experience that most elusive and pleasurable thing: long periods of pure, uninterrupted flow. One reason the tank has this unique effect is that it is both experience and environment.”
If you are monotropic, life is likely to feel very intense due to the way you process everything from sensory stimuli and social interaction and the ways you navigate the demands of everyday life, always needing to divide attention and tear yourself away from the pull of your monotropic passions, the pull likely feeling very strong at times due to the feeling of flow it may create. When you are in a floatation tank, there are no other demands; there is no sound, no discernable scent, and no other desire or stimuli to spark interest. As the salt water is body temperature, the physical body seems almost to dissolve or melt away as it becomes one with the water. With no other stimuli, it may feel like the body and mind become a pure bodymind, a oneness with the water and environment. As Hutchinson says (2003, p111), “When you are floating, there is nothing in the tank that happens that is not you.”
Hutchinson draws on Csikszentmihalyi’s work by discussing “narrowing the field of consciousness. Floatation tanks are perfect environments for consciousness to expand, enabling one to be purely in the moment. For autistic/ADHD people, noise, lights, scents, people, demands and any external stimuli can overwhelming at times; with all this eliminated, you are left to just be. You close the lid, and there is a nothingness around you, waiting to be filled with thoughts or to absorb you in deep rest.
The saltwater is at body temperature, so once you are floating, there may be no definable awareness of where your body starts or ends. It may feel like it is dissolving into the space around you. This may invoke a hyper-awareness of the physical self; with no other stimuli, all you can focus on is breathing and the sensation of every muscle movement you may not have noticed before when not floating. After a time, even the feeling of having a body may dissolve as the mind expands and fills the space, or it may feel like the nothing-ness is filling you, enabling deep profound regulation, restoration and rest.
Profound Rest and Regulation
With no external input, there is an opportunity for an increased awareness and coherence of everything happening within your bodymind at a much deeper level; a sense of wholeness may be achieved as you are no longer splitting attention and fragmenting. It may feel safer as the environment is predictable, and all external unexpected lights, sounds, movements and social interactions are eliminated for the duration of the float; it can feel liberating. Time itself seems to expand as there is nothing except the self and breathing to impact or give reference to the passing of time. An hour in a floatation tank could feel like anywhere between 10 minutes to 10 hours, depending on the experience. It can be the most deeply restful state to be in, free from everything, it allows a sense of autonomy and a chance to gain control of thoughts without anything external impacting or distracting you. Mirra suggests that;
“If hyperfocus is flow, coherence is profound rest…If we are only cycling between hyperfocus and disruption of hyperfocus, our bodies as whole systems are neglected. Regular periods of coherence are, therefore, mandatory for our well-being. As we practice with coherence, over time, we may choose more time in coherence and less in hyperfocus. (De-centrating rather than concentrating.)” (Mirra, 2023)
Csikszentmihalyi observes that a person can only achieve flow when the environment is right and they feel in control and safe. For a monotropic person, life may feel intensely overwhelming; constantly having to divide limited attention resources to manage the multiple demands of life is utterly exhausting. Floatation experiences may help to give moments of control and help with regulation and rest, the effects often ripple through the bodymind for days afterwards, feeling revived and having a better balance.
When a person is floating, it can enable a natural flow state. It may feel completely liberating for some autistic monotropic people with no external demands and no sensory stimuli competing for attention resources. It allows the bodymind to return to a natural way of being and to expand enabling new thoughts and possibilities to emerge. The expansion of the body and mind creates a space for recovery and regulation to take place in ways that are not possible in real life when not floating. Floatation experiences may allow monotropic, holotropic people to safely enter “multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrains under the monotropism map” (Mirra, 2023), this could allow the sensory gates to open further without becoming overwhelmed and enable much-needed profound rest from what can be a very overwhelming world.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Csikszentmihalyi, I. S. (1992). Optimal experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
Hutchison, M., & Perry, L. (2003). The Book of Floating: Exploring the Private Sea.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism (London), 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker (2021) describes embracing neuroqueering as a verb. When considering Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, we need to reinterpret, rethink, redefine, and reimagine what those spaces may look like and the journey required to be able to facilitate them. We are considering whether we can use the template Walker created for designing autism courses as a template for imagining neuroqueer learning spaces. It has prompted us to question the differences between being neurodiversity-affirming, having everyone’s needs met, and then stretching those possibilities into neuroqueer learning spaces that enable unknown potential to flourish. Once you are free from the reigns of neuronormativity, the learning possibilities of radical inclusivity with cognitive and somatic liberty will be endless.
Yunkaporta (Sand Talk, 2020) talks about being a ‘strange attractor‘ (pg82), which seems very much in line with neuroqueer ideology. To be a strange attractor in education means taking a risk and disrupting the order and current system. There is enormous negativity around words such as risk, anarchy and chaos, but as Yunkaporta reminds us, chaos means having no structure and being rhizomatic, and anarchy means having ‘no boss’. He asks if we could have a structure without a boss or management system. Neuroqueer learning spaces need to be de-hierarchical; we need a community of people, not masters and students. We need empathy, trust, and mutual respect for the uniqueness everyone can bring to adults and children’s learning environments. Deep learning is rhizomatic; it does not happen linearly.
The current education system is causing so much harm to so many young people whose needs are not being met; their mental and physical health is suffering as a consequence, with some having no access to any meaningful education at all. If the current system isn’t working, tightening the reigns further on behaviour and attendance policies isn’t going to help; it will cause more harm. We need to create spaces where words like normal, typical, and even divergent become irrelevant so children feel safe to be themselves and can learn in ways that enable their bodyminds to be liberated.
Audre Lorde (1982) says, “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses…”. Neuroqueer environments are spaces for everyone to be neurodivergent, to be constantly evolving and expanding and reimagining themselves. We need to look for the slightest opportunity to make a change and find possibilities for playing, learning, exploring and opening up curiosity.
Being engaged, curious, playful and able to explore and move freely are essential components of learning to which everyone should be entitled. This is also reflected in the work of Alexander (Play Radical), who wrote a beautiful and inspiring Playful Manifesto. Their aims echo what we’d like to include in our own Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Manifesto;
“Create space to celebrate and recognise the infinite ways we play, communicate, and relate to each other as children and adults. And, in particular, lift those types of play that are often unseen or ignored and ways of communicating or relating that are often not valued by wider society.“
We are forming the beginning of our Open Framework for Neuroqueer Learning Spaces on the work of Walker’s (2021, pg144–156) ‘Guiding Principles for a Course on Autism’ which asks:
“What if both the education of youth and adults and the training of educators included the explicit understanding that no neurocognitive style is more “correct” or “normal” than any other and that the work of mutual accommodation is both an essential part of a proper education and an essential preparation for being a participating citizen in a civilised society?”
An Open Framework for Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
(open for discussion, just the beginning…)
Balance
We don’t want to strike a balance between the neurodiversity paradigm and the pathology paradigm. We are wholly and intentionally rejecting the pathology paradigm as it has been shown to cause so much harm, especially to neurodivergent and marginalised groups. Nick Walker (pg 72) stated, ‘To create a better future, one must first be able to imagine a better future‘. Audre Lorde (1983) suggested we need to create tools not just to dismantle the education system but to build a new house (in this case, a learning space) that empowers educational facilitators and young people. We want to avoid rebuilding the same education, but just in a different way; we need something different and neuroqueer learning spaces.
Why Sheets — Anti-Behaviourism
We are deeply aware of the barriers young people and their families face in today’s education system. Families can not wait years for an education revolution; they need and deserve some tools to help their child tomorrow morning after breakfast when they may have to meet with a head teacher. We hope that by providing small steps such as ourWhy Sheets inspired by Alfie Kohn(2019), we can offer support and help families reclaim agency and autonomy for their children battling behaviourism, school-induced anxiety and systemic exclusion so they can self-advocate. These resources will also be invaluable for professionals who need well-researched neuro-affirmative resources to support their work. These are short-term answers and are more of a lily pad for the more radical reform needed.
2. Facilitators and Guides
Neuroqueer learning spaces should be nonhierarchical and rhizomatic. This means that we need to shift away from having teachers and students and instead need facilitators and guides. Guides walk alongside children, follow their leads and interests, and support them in developing curiosity and deeper learning. Mutual respect can be formed when there is no hierarchy when you are ‘in it together’; it also develops creativity and enhances communication.
We need to guide and facilitate young people’s movement between Cavendish learning spaces in their own time, as described in our previous writing (Cave, Campfire, Watering Hole). We need a diverse range of people as guides and facilitators. This includes people from all backgrounds, cultures, and needs groups. Other than safeguarding issues, there is no reason why anyone should be excluded. With the right support, everyone has something they can bring that could inspire others to learn more.
3. Adults must embrace the neurodiversity paradigm and be willing to explore neuroqueer theory with an open mind.
When designing an autism course, Walker (2021) suggests that it is “not enough for the instructor to be autistic; they need to be autistic with a substantial history of active participation in autistic culture and community, including autistic rights activism, resistance to oppressive cultural and professional practices based in the pathology paradigm, and a celebration of autistic pride”.
Everyone who facilitates neuroqueer learning spaces must fully embrace neuroqueer theory, as Walker (2021) defines it. Neuroqueering is open to everyone but requires a lot of unlearning, relearning, creating and recreating. There are likely many routes people have travelled and are travelling to get here. For those facilitating neuroqueer learning spaces, people will need to be neurodivergent; if not born neurodivergent, they will need to engage in neuroqueering to become neurodivergent, to diverge their bodyminds from culturally ingrained performance of neuronormativity. Those who are neurodivergent will need to be open to diverging further against neuronormative expectations and be willing to explore the potential of neuroqueer learning spaces.
4. Marginalised Voices Must Be Central
Marginalised voices must be central to the learning space so they can reclaim power and autonomy. Students’ resources also need to be more diverse and reflect indigenous cultures. Total communication systems and access to alternative and augmentative communication need to be standard, and the freedom to move indoors/ outdoors and between Cavendish Learning Spaces (cave/campfire and watering hole) at home, in educational settings, and multisensory environments is essential.
5. Truth Is Where It Is
Non-disabled people and non-neurodivergent people have primarily led the discourse about disability and neurodivergent people so far. Marginalised groups have largely been excluded, silenced or misinterpreted. By having a diverse range of educational facilitators and guides from marginalised communities, first-hand knowledge can be passed down and shared to challenge that narrative and promote a re-storying and validation of experiences.
6. Educational Facilitators / Guides Must Model Neuroqueering
Most educational settings “reflect ableist and neuronormative values of the dominant culture” (Walker, 2012). Students are rewarded for conforming, and those who don’t or are unable to conform are discriminated against. We need educational guides to declare their learning space as a ‘zone of freedom‘ away from neuronormativity. In the words of Audre Lorde (1983), ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
7. Educational Guides Must Model and Invite the Embodied Expression of Neuroqueering
Educational facilitators must embrace neuroqueer theory and have an embodied approach to education, such as that suggested by Aldred (2023). We need to expand potential and provide a safe space for self-liberation where adult facilitators can shed neuronormative habits and children can grow up without the need for that shedding. We want children to have the freedom to be and become who they want to be. Educational guides must declare the learning space a “zone for free experimentation with shedding habits of normative performance and actively exploring, practising, reclaiming and cultivating non-normative modes of embodiment.”
Merleau-Ponty (1945) stressed the importance of nurturing relationships and fostering a sense of belonging and connectedness in our communities. For communities to happen, we need to start with the relationships of those we are with and the children we work with in schools and other settings. All our children deserve to feel safe and valued so their differences, unique interests, and ways of being are celebrated with others in an embodied, connected way of being together.
McGreevey et al. (2024) research offers a humanistic framework for “An Experience Sensitive Approach to Care With and for Autistic Children and Young People in Clinical Services“, which we feel will provide a secure base for creating a neuro-inclusive setting. “The experience sensitive approach is a coherent, neuro-inclusive framework that promotes a dignified, respectful, personalized approach to care”, which we believe will be equally valuable and essential as a foundation for neuroqueer learning spaces to promote:
Insiderness
Agency
Uniqueness
Togetherness
Sense Making
Personal Journey
Sense of Place
Embodiment
As Walker suggests, “introducing the practice of neuroqueering embodiment into the classroom (learning space) is an excellent way to introduce neuroqueering as a concept.” We are embracing this and would love for you to share your ideas to help develop this concept.
This is a community project. Feedback welcome.
If you’d like to add your signature to support our anti-ABA/anti-PBS/ anti behaviourism WHY SHEET resources, then please follow the links below:
To find out why we are anti-behaviourism, click here: ANTI-BEHAVIOURISM
Adding your signature to our resources will help add weight and give families the extra confidence to use these to advocate for their young people. Please click here: ADD YOUR SIGNATURE.
If you have any questions or would like further information, please contact us Ryan Boren at Stimpunks or Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms.
Lorde A. (1984a). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Comments at the “The personal and the political panel,” Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979). In Sister outsider (pp. 110–113). Sister Visions Press. (Original work published 1979) (LittleRad.org also has a copy of the original source)
McGreevy, E., Quinn, A., Law, R., Botha, M., Evans, M., Rose, K., Moyse, R., Boyens, T., Matejko, M., & Pavlopoulou, G. (2024). An experience sensitive approach to care with and for autistic children and young people in clinical services. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678241232442
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. Phenomenology of Perception. London : New York :Routledge & K. Paul; Humanities Press, 1974.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperCollins.
“Intentionally liberating oneself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity can be thought of as neuroqueering” (Walker, 2021).
More Realms has always been a space for me to push the boundaries of Autistic Realms and explore other ideas, theories, and possibilities of learning in different contexts by drawing on more diverse materials, including art, literature, and philosophy. Inspired by Stimpunks’ idea for Cavendish Learning Spaces, I invited Ryan Boren (Co-Founder and Creative Director of Stimpunks) to join me on a path to explore Neuroqueer Learning Spaces as a way of transforming education away from the enforced ideas of normality. This is forming part of my neuroqueering journey and to potentially form part of a chapter submission for Nick Walker’s upcoming Neuroqueer Theory and Practice Anthology.
This feels like a natural evolution and a bridging of Autistic Realms, More Realms and finding possibilities in the gap, the ‘ma’ that I began this blog series with. Often, within the gaps, the caverns, pleats and folds of spaces, we can shapeshift and find other meanings; connections can be formed. A collective flow can bring new possibilities, open up potential and allow us to find the ‘magic’ (Walker, ITAKOM Presentation, 2023).
Once again, I have started the beginning of this project in the middle of everything else! We dived in deep and realised our project had been underway for many years, but neither of us had the vocabulary of ‘neuroqueer’ and ‘neuroqueering’ (Nick Walker, 2021) to describe our thoughts and help us understand our journey. Now we have that vocabulary; it has opened up another world within a world. It enables us to connect and learn from others who are also interested in the neurodiversity paradigm and postnormal possibilities. It is carving out a pathway for us to expand our community networks and help facilitate a shift in the way education is currently structured. It is helping us move towards what Kay and Dan Aldred (2023) describe as an Embodied Education, which could be seen to be the golden thread that runs through Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
We know the vocabulary surrounding new concepts like this can be tricky to wrap your head around. It has taken us some time to unlearn and relearn, and we are still learning! We have created a brief summary (below) of some of our main concepts that may not be familiar to everyone. A more in-depth version of this is available on Stimpunks’ website, with further references and ideas to open up discussion.
Embodied education is a concept we will return to and weave through our work alongside other emergent ideas about being a ‘space holder’ to allow the freedom of creative learning to take place. We believe, ‘There is no learning without the body.’ Aldred (2023). To deepen our understanding of this, we will collaborate with different communities to discover what an embodied, neuroqueer education and learning space may mean for those facilitating education and how it could support young people and what it means for the young people and families.
Drawing on the work of Octavia Butler and Adrienne Maree Brown, “The idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others, and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralise our idea of where solutions and decisions happen and where ideas come from. We have to embrace our complexity. We are complex.” (Adrienne Marie Brown, 2017.
Within an educational context, this means decentralising education, or at least making attempts within our own lives to change the way learning spaces are set up and used, moving away from the hierarchical model of ‘Master’ and ‘Student’. As (Audre Lorde, 1979) says, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
We need safe spaces tobe witheach other in embodied, meaningful, collaborative, and responsive ways. Our children deserve to feel cared for, understood and safe to explore. We believe we needradical inclusivity to prevent the continuation of the severe mental health crisis our young people are experiencing today.
Over the past few years, I have discussed the current education and mental health crisis in the UK that has led to so many children experiencing burnout and living with the impact that the barriers of our UK education have created. This education crisis is also echoed in other countries, including America, where Stimpunks is based. Many of the issues are highlighted in Gray-Hammond’s (2024) CAMHS in Crisis, which I recommend for further insight into these problems.
It feels like we have reached a point where no one is happy or benefiting from our current education system. Fisher’s (2023) ‘Changing our Minds’ work highlights this from the perspective of teachers, students, and parents/carers. It has made me question our educational aims and what our schools are trying to achieve; it feels like we have lost our way. We no longer need workers for factory production lines; children are becoming more ‘disembodied’ as time passes, and teachers and students have even less autonomy than ever.
We are teaching children to be proud of what they know yet also ashamed of not knowing, teaching children that there is somehow a ‘right’ way to learn through reward charts and positive behaviour support programmes and revising for prescriptive exam criteria. However, it is by having a sense of wonder, curiosity, and unknowing that real learning takes place. This is why we chose the white rabbit symbol for our project. Our white rabbit (also known as Space Bunny) symbolises playfulness, curiosity, wonder, hope and the possibility of expanding learning potential. We use this as a symbol for people to follow us on our Neuroqueering Learning Spaces adventures. We are starting off down the rabbit hole, learning about the three Primordial Learning Spaces as theorised by Thornburg (2013).
Cavendish Learning Spaces are Neuroqueer Learning Spaces
Lorde (1979) declared, “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses…” Ourtriskelionmotif reflects this, with the golden thread of embodiment (being with yourself and being with others) weaving between the three primordial learning spaces. We will be exploring this in more detail as the project evolves. This allows children the opportunity to flow between their cave, watering hole and campfire spaces as needed and be in a perpetually evolving spiral of new learning possibilities by revisiting and expanding on thoughts, ideas and play processes to keep building on connections.
Without information and training, many teachers are likely unaware of the different paths and the need to DE-SCHOOL their learning spaces, UN-LEARN their training and embrace radical inclusivity. A quote often credited to Maya Angelou reads, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” We hope this project will allow people to learn from others so we can all ‘do better together’. Teachers can not take that ‘small opportunity’ if they don’t know where to look for it or even understand why it is needed.
When I was working in class as a teacher, I was often far too busy with the day-to-day planning to think too far outside of my next lesson. Only now, with the privilege of time and hindsight, I have discovered new possibilities by connecting with other communities. Likewise, families also need time to explore and space to connect, validate experiences and learn together. Time is often something many families do not have; family life is generally busy! However, everyone deserves the opportunity to access practical information about different educational pathways and support for their children and to be able to advocate for their needs. Education does not and should not only happen inside a school building between 9 am-3 pm sat behind a desk. We are passionate about expanding learning opportunities and neuroqueer spaces for learning to take place and giving families and educators some ideas and resources to be able to do this.
We want to create a campfire experience by bringing community networks together; we want to share stories, knowledge and create connections to be with each other. We want to provide a space that brings agency and autonomy back to families and school staff. Educational settings and families need freedom for niche construction so children can move seamlessly and weave between different learning spaces. For families opting for alternative learning routes, these pathways need to be made more accessible, and the journey and support need to be much smoother and more empowering for families.
We aim to provide practical resources for professionals and families to support them. For families this may include resources to support them in being able to advocate for their child (such as template letters and signposting to research). For educational settings this will include practical ideas to launch their neuroqueer learning spaces in their own setting.
Caves:Space for quiet reflection, introspection and self-directed learning. A private space to transform learning from external knowledge to internal belief. Home of reflective construction.
Campfires: Space for learning with a storyteller. Education facilitators need to actively subvert neuronormativity. They need to embark on their transformative neuroqueer journey so their re-storying can inspire neuro-cosmopolitanism.
Watering holes: Space for being with peers and social learning. Community enables thoughts and ideas to expand rhizomatically. Embracing unique strengths expands creativity into new horizons and a collective flow full of potential.
A radical change to learning spaces is needed to enable children to be embodied, feel safe and feel liberated enough to explore and be curious about the world around them. We can work and learn in infinitely creative ways, but we need to be embodied in order to do that and connected within ourselves and with the world and people around us. To feel embodied, you need feelings of safety; people need to value strengths, validate difficulties, and provide support where needed. The neurodiversity-affirming work by McGreevey et al.(2023) based on the Life World Model by Todres et al. (2009) applies equally to health care and education. It offers a humanising framework for everyone, not just autistic people. Everyone deserves to feel a sense of togetherness and have their journeys make sense so they have agency and autonomy over their learning journeys.
We have created alilypadto launch our project by inviting discussion around the following ideas:
“Cavendish Spaces” are based on flexibility, interaction, movement, and the role of embodied responsive experiences. They reject the boundaries of traditional classroom settings and examine how they restrict embodied experiences and lead to disembodied experiences and harm. Our project is multidimensional, non-linear and de-hierarchical. We need to deconstruct, dismantle and un-learn as part of the neuroqueering process to lift the burden of neuronormativity that is weighing our children down. We are exploring the idea of an embodied education. We are exploring how learning spaces may impact neuroqueer learning potential and radical cognitive and somatic liberty. Inspired by Ira Socol who suggestsZero-Based Design as part of this process which means children will be no longer be trapped in your past. It will enable us to:
“Reimagine the Learner Experience. Reimagine the Learning Spaces. Reimagine How Professionals Learn”. (Ira Socol)
We are looking at neuroqueering from all angles across the community. We are looking at ways to give agency and autonomy back to families and support those working in educational settings that facilitate and guide learning experiences. Importantly, we want to offer children timeless learning and neuroqueer space to be with others, be themselves and ‘become’ and ‘become what they are’ (Watts, 1955).
The path to escape the box of a sick society involves rediscovering timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating creative collaboration.
NeurodiVentures are a concrete example of an emerging cultural species that provides safe and nurturing environments for divergent thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction. NeurodiVentures are built on timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating trusted collaboration that predate the emergence of civilisation.
“The global mono-cult pretends that all aspects of life can be categorised and understood in terms of normality — by the hump of the bell curve. But the living planet does not conform to anthropocentric normality; it is chaotic, but it is beautifully and awesomely diverse.” Bettin (AutCollab, 2024)
We are documenting the neuroqueering process of our journey as a live- stream across Stimpunks website as the project unfolds. It is a reflection of the kaleidoscopic rhizome of Stimpunks, which is a beautifully awesome and diverse learning space in itself.
Our project shows an example of a neuroqueering workflow transformation, which we will expand on in future blogs. Stimpunks is a virtual space holder for my personal neuroqueering process and the community joining us. As a space holder they provide safety to explore, try out new ideas and work collaboratively towards a mutual goal without fear of judgment.
To neuroqueer, you have to un-learn. I visualise my neuroqueering as being like fractals in a kaleidoscope. It is a process of turning, changing and becoming by un-learning and re-learning and time-less learning from others in a campfire space, having time for self-reflection and self-directed learning in a cave space, joining in with and alongside others and celebrating diversity in a watering hole space. We are not perfect, and the project may be chaotic and messy in places. However, we feel passionate that we are heading in the right direction and want to celebrate the ‘beautifully and awesomely diverse’ potential of neuroqueer learning spaces with you.
Created Serendipity
“Seemingly serendipitous events are also based on our willingness to create connections and be in the space, and to put in the effort in the first place. I often tell people that if you start connecting with others in online spaces, you won’t just find great ideas, but the great ideas will find you.” (George Couros)
Created Serendipity is a beautiful thing. We would love for you to join us and expand the potential of neuroqueer learning spaces!
We’re requesting community writing and art about neuroqueering education, play, and learning spaces. “Cavendish Space” is the first piece in our “Neuroqueer Learning Spaces” project. It’s also our explainer for the project. The campfires in the “Cave, Campfires, and Watering Holes” concept introduced in “Cavendish Space” are places for storytelling. They are places for elders and experts to pass along knowledge. We want to weave campfire wisdom into community storytelling. Community storytelling is part of our neuroqueer journeying and becoming.
For each section of the “Cavendish Space” piece, we’d like to have a “Campfire Wisdom” (working title) callout box featuring submitted writing and art. We want to highlight the wisdom of experts and elders in our community and associate it with the campfire primordial learning space and the storytelling and cultural transmission it facilitates. We’ll integrate submitted writing and art into “Cavendish Space” and other pieces created by this project. The writing might be included in a chapter we’re working on for a neuroqueer anthology. We’ll also publish standalone pieces of your work. Anything of any length is welcome. A poem, a paragraph, a painting, a plea, a blog or any other inspiration you may have for Neuroqueering Learning Spaces.
“…human nature is to nurture and be nurtured” Immordino-Yang (2023)
All submissions will be attributed and linked to you whenever used. We plan on writing up this project and submitting a chapter for Nick Walker’s new Neuroqueer anthology.
“The growing cracks in the thin veneer of our “civilised” economic and social operating model are impossible to ignore”, Jorn Bettin (2020).
As a late-diagnosed autistic person, I feel a massive disconnect with the world around me. I am living in the ‘gap’ between so many spaces but also feel the potential of neuroqueering and transforming what could be voids into ‘Ma’, a space for neuroqueer potential. I have lived through cycles of autistic burnout caused by systemic unmet needs and seen the effects of an education system that is not meeting the needs of my children and the many children of the many families I support as an education professional. (I will expand on the terms Ma and neuroqueering throughout this blog).
Neuroqueer has a verb form, unlike neurodivergent or neurodiversity. Nick Walker (2021) defines neuroqueering as “intentionally liberating oneself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity ”. Neuroqueering has helped me navigate and transition through a difficult period of my life and given me hope for myself, my family, and also those I support. ‘Anyone can neuroqueer. Neurodivergent or neurotypical. Gay or straight. Anyone can neuroqueer and be neuroqueer” (Ryan Boren, Stimpunks 2024). Neuroqueering is a form of embodied shapeshifting; it is an internal process that helps you discover potential in the spaces in between in Ma.
Ma: The Inbetween
I love this description of Ma from Ghibliosophy as it captures everything I am trying to convey within the context of neuroqueering, a journey which I began almost 25 years ago before I had the vocabulary of neuroqueering or even knew I was autistic; I have recently revisited these themes in my blogs in Middle Entrance and Caverns, Pleats and Folds:
“Ma’ is a captivating Japanese philosophy that finds beauty in the spaces between — the pauses, the silence, the emptiness. It’s like the breath between words, giving rhythm and depth to our experiences. Embracing Ma is not just about appreciating the void; it’s about understanding its potential. It invites us to pause, breathe, and find richness in moments of stillness. By integrating Ma into our daily lives, we open ourselves to a world of mindfulness and creativity, where every pause is an opportunity for growth and a deeper connection with the world around us. In the art of Ma, we learn that sometimes, what we don’t do or say can be as powerful as what we do.”
I have felt the burden of trying to be linear when my mind and body are anything but. Trying to conform and fit into the rigid boundaries of neuronormative society for so long has left me feeling shattered. I have taken a lot from Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk (2020). He has helped me realise why things have felt so hard and why I have felt so heavy and weighed down. Re-storying my own life through the lens of monotropism (Murray et al, 2005) and the neurodiversity paradigm has helped explain repeated cycles of burnout cycles to the point where I crashed entirely and would likely still be crashing if I had not found support and ways to move on through the neurodivergent community over the past few years.
Yunkaporta (2020, pg. 97) has drawn a symbol with two circles adjacent to each other and another line joins them to form a circle, this is enclosed within a hexagon shape. Yunkaporta suggests that the left-hand circle represents the abstract world of mind and spirit, and the right represents the concrete world of land, relationships and activity. The lines above and below, joining the circles, represent communication. Below is my reinterpretation of this image, with the flow of embodiment between the circles in Ma, where neuroqueering can happen and evolve and keep expanding and evolving and connecting with other spaces.
Yunkaporta explains the importance of metaphors being the ‘language of the spirit’, the language of ritual and magic. Transformative processes can create change in people. One way is through sharing stories and building connections, comparing stories and developing ever greater understanding as more connections and stories are shared and the story rhizome expands. As Yunkporta says (2020, pg 114), “We don’t want our stories to be used at bedtime to put children to sleep; we need an exchange of stories to be awake and grow.” I think the lines Yunkapoeta draws in the sand (see image above) could also be seen to representing the importance of embodied relationships, the flow of connections between people and their surroundings, the transformative process that enables people to continuously unfold and reform, to be creative and find joy in between neuroqueer theory and practice, in Ma.
Meaning in Ma and Connections
I have recently read The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (2017) and Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta (2020). These are two texts, one about trees and one about Indigenous cultures questioning how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation and how we may be able to do things differently. I enjoy reading, but I often find more joy in discovering meaning in my thoughts that appear between texts. The shared message between these books is that we need to be more in tune with the world around us, make meaningful connections, and support our communities and stories from those around us and our elders from the past. We need to create time and space to be with each other in a more embodied way; we can find meaning in the spaces and the gaps in the inbetween-ness of Interaction as described in my previous blog, ‘Being With’ and within and between the Cavendish Spaces of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
“People today will mostly focus on the points of connection, the nodes of interest like stars in the sky. But the real understanding comes in the spaces in between, in the relational forces that connect and move the points”. (Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 2020)
People, like trees, need each other; we need to focus on the ‘points of connection, the nodes of interest’. as mentioned in the above quote by Yunkaporta (2020). I find it valuable to be a part of an online community; it is currently one of the few spaces I can access where I can connect with people. The connections I am making are essential and allow me safe spaces to explore conversations with others, mostly about monotropism, the neurodiversity paradigm and neuroqueer potential, as described in Connections and Becoming. However, communities can be formed in many different ways. Just as trees can form woodlands and forests and protect each other, people also need to create more caring communities that work with the flow of people’s needs and interests and not against them, which can liberate them so they can thrive.
There is an ever-expanding network of online spaces that are evolving and branching out like a rhizome and connecting with other networks where more nodes and connections form and spiral out again and again from each point; this is repeated endlessly, and we have just added another with our Discord Server to explore Neuroqueering Learning Spaces. A rhizome, as conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and studied in my previous blog, ‘Middle Entrance,’ is a network with no central point of origin. It also has no dependency on other networks and can keep evolving and expanding.
Rhizomatic Potential
David Gray-Hammond and I discussed the concept of the Autistic Rhizome last year. The rhizomatic potential of online spaces enables people to explore different topics and interests, including neuroqueering learning spaces, a community project by Autistic Realms and Stimpunks, which we hope will transform future learning spaces. As more people show an interest and more connections are formed, the online rhizome keeps expanding, adding new potential and even more possibilities. Katie Munday came up with the concept ‘Neuro-Anarchy” and with David Gray-Hammond they co-wrote the blog “Neuroqueer neuro-anarchy and the chaotic self (2023). They suggest that most people are arriving in these spaces ‘by existing on the fringes of their communities and challenging the politics within them’. This appears to be the case for the majority at the moment, but also a significant proportion of the people who have been in contact with us via Stimpunks are parents and professionals who do not identify as neurodivergent themselves but are advocating for their children or those families they support professionally, they want a safe neuro-inclusive space so they feel less alone and more connected with others that hold the same ideals and beliefs.
It has been shown that single trees planted alone often grow less well and live shorter lives than those amongst other trees in a community. Trees connect through a nourishing network deep in the soil. They use this network deep underground to communicate and care for each other. Wohlleben shares how he discovered that trees could communicate by scent, share food, and nourish other trees struggling or in danger. We can learn much from forests and trees and what Simard et al.(1997) called the ‘wood wide web’ in our human communities and within the rhizomatic online networks of the emerging community exploring neuroqueering. Gray-Hammond (2024) reminded me that “we are not all trees”. Humanity is rich and diverse, and we all have our ecosystems that need to coexist and grow.
Gray-Hammond (2024), in response to my first draft of this article, wrote;
“Our mind can be thought of as rhizomatic. Each neuron is connected to the others through intricate paths. Each experience and thought is linked to the others. Each point is like the atoms of the wave. My human life takes form. Neuroqueering allows me to change the behaviour of that rhizomatic thought structure, moving freely between solid, liquid, gas, Earth, water, and air.”
This builds on the quote from Yunkaporta (2020) and emphasises that the only restrictions on neuroqeer potential are our minds; we are all human, but what that means for each individual is unique and can be transformed. Buddhist Teacher Daisaku Ikeda suggests that we could imagine life as a wave. A wave takes form within the ocean, follows its path, and eventually crashes into the shore before returning to the ocean. To neuroqueer is to consider what we may need to do to change the wave’s trajectory within us; this may mean going deeper within ourselves and allowing our bodyminds to expand further. Online spaces offer opportunities to make connections, form friendships and be with people in ways that will enable freedom to be and communicate in ways that work for them and in ways that fit into their day and lifestyle, with no demands and no expectations — other than to be accepting of differences and be kind.
The concept of creating primordial Cavendish Caves spaces, which we are exploring in our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project, are spaces of quiet contemplation. They offer a chance to reflect and recover; for some people, this may involve listening to music, watching TV programmes on repeat or online gaming. For others, the Cave space may provide an opportunity to embrace the sound of silence. For me, it is within this silence that neuroqueer potential may be found, the bodymind replenished and new ideas created. It is within a silent space filled with Ma that I can breathe in safety and comfort and breathe out and expand ideas, to shapeshift and transform myself and my thoughts,
I see ‘Being With’ as a process of coming together. Deleuze’s (1987) concept of the line of flight allows us to explore meaning between created spaces and through our connections with people. It is a way of moving beyond and between the gaps of the often preconceived ideas of what ‘being with’ people may mean and what our roles as educators and care facilitators may be. ‘Being With’ creates an opportunity for an embodied sense of belonging and wonderful, meaningful shared experiences. ‘Being With’ is a process of coming together and being full of potential. ‘Being with’ means being willing to explore the unknown and benefit from Cavendish Learning Spaces (cave, campfire, and watering hole), as we have described in our previous blogs.
Yunkaporta (2020) suggests that we must diversify, connect, interact, and adapt. “Diversity is not about tolerating differences or treating others equally and without prejudice. The diversification principle compels you to maintain your differences…you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and sustainable.” I think this is important for neuroqueering; we need to seek out differences, work with diversity and connect with others to benefit from the potential that can bring for people in their learning spaces and those facilitating learning spaces.
According to Yunkaporta (2020), “Interaction is the principle that provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. This principle facilitates the flow of living knowledge. You must transfer knowledge (and energy and resources) with as many other agents as possible, rather than trying to store it individually.” The final guideline they suggest for sustainable communities is adaptation; within a neuroqueering context, this is not about adapting to the society that we already have that is breaking so many people; it is not about adding more accommodations into children’s care plans. There has to be a point where if a child needs so many accommodations, people should start to question whether the setting or provision is even suitable; nobody wants to feel different and like a burden. If there is no defined ‘normal’, there will be no need for accommodation, everyone will be different, and everyone’s needs will be met.
Instead, I feel Yunkaporta’s idea for adaptation is more about adapting ourselves, allowing ourselves to change and transform. For this, we need safe spaces online and in the community. Yunkaporta describes this as taking on the role of a “strange attractor’ to “facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system” In my mind, this all has excellent neuroqueer potential to explore further and ties in beautifully with Bettin’s (2021) work where he suggests that we need to “Grow competency networks and catalysts rather than leadership and leaders — to get things done and distribute decision making to where the knowledge resides.”
Collective Flow
Connections create communities, and as described in my previous blogs, communities can generate a collective flow and potential for people to ‘become’ and for society to be shaped by us for our future. For flow to happen, there has to be intent, and people have to want their intention to lead somewhere positive, even if that endpoint is the unknown, in Ma. Knowing and feeling the energy and potential of others who also want to explore neuroqueer learning spaces is exciting. Not having an exact end destination or prescribed route to get there is still more exciting. We will all have to neuroqueer ourselves to begin reimagining education and consider neuroqueer learning spaces.
Looping back to Yunkaporta’s (2020) Sand Talk and connecting this with Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies, we can learn a lot from focusing on the things people usually ignore and being able to discover the unknown potential in learning spaces. We need to neuroqueer ourselves from within to have an effect and even begin neuroqueering learning spaces.
In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker describes what it means to embrace neuroqueering as a verb. In learning spaces, we need to reinterpret, rethink, redefine, and reimagine what those spaces may look like and the journey required to facilitate them. I am considering if we can use Nick Walker’s template for designing autism courses as a template for designing neuroqueer learning spaces. It has made me think of the differences between being neurodiversity affirming and having everyone’s needs met and then neuroqueering those spaces to enable unknown potential to bloom; once you are free from the reigns of neuronormativity, cognitive and somatic liberty and learning potential are endless.
Yunkaporta talks about being a ‘strange attractor’ (2020, pg82), which feels to me as if it is in line with neuroqueer ideology. To be a strange attractor in education means taking a risk and creating chaos. There is enormous negativity around words such as anarchy and chaos, but as Yunkaporta reminds us, chaos means no structure, like a rhizome, and anarchy means ‘no boss’. He asked if we could have a structure without a boss or management. If the current education system is causing so much harm, we must move away from it and create something new. We need to make something where words like average, typical, and even divergent become irrelevant, as everyone will be diverging to and from each other, constantly evolving and expanding.
Walker (2021) posed a question that I think we need to consider for our learning spaces:
“What if both the education of youth and adults and the training of educators included the explicit understanding that no neurocognitive style is more “correct” or “normal” than any other and that the work of mutual accommodation is both an essential part of a proper education and an essential preparation for being a participating citizen in a civilised society?”
Family is important, but not everyone has a loving family that they can depend on, and even if you have a loving family (for which I am grateful), then found or chosen extended family and friends can still play a hugely important role in life. Whānauis a Maori term for an extended family group, as written by Jorn Bettin & Ulku Mazlum(2022). “Whānau is much more than the Western notion of “family”. It is a deep connection, a bond that you are born into that no one can take away from you.”
There is so much we can learn from other cultures. Adults and children need time and space to co-create Whānau in our neuroqueer learning spaces. As Bettin (2021) reminds us, “In many indigenous cultures, children with unique qualities are recognised, are given adult mentors with similarly unique qualities, and grow up to fulfil unique roles in their local community, connected to others with unique knowledge and insights, perhaps even in other communities. If we are embedded in an ecology of care, we can thrive and share the pain and the joy of life.” (Bettin, 2021)
The Magic Is Open
The magic of neuroqueering is open to everyone; it embraces the neurodiversity paradigm and celebrates the endless variation and potential of unique body-minds in our society and beyond as we learn from other Indigenous cultures. To neuroqueer is to become neurodivergent and to expand, unfold, create and recreate continuously. To neuroqueer is to explore the magic between spaces and discover possibilities that can emerge from Ma and be transformed into new spaces. We hope that by providing some ideas for neuroqueer learning spaces and opening up conversations about what neuroqueer learning spaces may be like, we will continue to expand the community rhizome. We are adding another node to the rhizome by opening up conversations for others to contribute so we can create more possibilities.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism (London), 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Simard, S. W., Perry, D. A., Jones, M. D., Myrold, D. D., Durall, D. M., & Molina, R. (1997). Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field.Nature, 388(6642), 579–582. https://doi.org/10.1038/41557
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities.Autonomous Press.
Wohlleben, P. (2017). The hidden life of trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World. William Collins.
Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperCollins.
In Milan Kundera’s novel, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1981), he described the heaviness of life, the restrictive oppression and boundaries that can tie us all down, yet there is freedom in the possibilities the mind can bring and in the choices we can make. We can subvert the restrictions of neuronormative society; we can, to some extent, choose our line of flight and see the potential in the folds of our thoughts. This potential may be expressed through art, literature, science, music, movement, conversations and joining in collective flow states as a community and also through neuroqueering as discussed by Nick Walker in my previous writing.
This article is continuing my exploration of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the creation of concepts and theories, such as monotropism. I am interested in the inner experience of flow states and also the flow states within society as I have noticed that a new collective flow state is gaining momentum within the neurodivergent community. Talk about the theory of Monotropism (Murray, Lesser, Lawson, 2005) and The Monotropism Questionnaire (Garau et al., 2023) is flooding some social media channels, and many people (especially those who are Autistic/ ADHD) are sharing their experiences and resonating with this theory and the potential for a new way of framing their own experiences.
Monotropism Questionnaire
The Monotropism Questionnaire (Garau et al., 2023) research article has been shared millions of times across various social media platforms over the past few weeks. There are likely many reasons why the Monotropism Questionnaire has been taken so many times and has been so popular. However, I believe one of them is the feeling of validation it brings to autistic/ADHD people. It seems to be helping to create a sense of connection and understanding, a sense of safety and reassurance from other people that ‘get it’.
Neurodiversity Affirming Flow
There is a new energy and strong flow behind neurodiversity-affirming work, especially within education and mental health organisations. There is a variable weight to flow states and momentum created behind all the research; it is interesting to consider how and why this particular piece of research has moved so fast, especially across social media platforms. For example, Dr.’ Joey’s post on TikTok about the Monotropism Questionnaire now has over 3.5 million views, a staggeringly high statistic for any topic.
Validation
There is a deep yearning for people to feel understood, for their strengths to be celebrated and for their difficulties to be acknowledged. There seems to be a growing number of neurodivergent people seeking support and a growing number of neurodiversity-affirming, neurodivergent-led charities, organisations, and groups emerging to help people who have previously been marginalised and left feeling alone.
Many of the new organisations, groups and online spaces that are evolving are proving to be a wonderful coming together of different minds, a collective response to the long-standing unmet needs of neurodivergent people. They are an example of the internal experiences of neurodivergent people being acknowledged and represented in the community with shared experiences, empathy and understanding. This coming together and uniting through shared experiences and theories such as monotropism could be seen as being like a collective flow state; a combined energy of mutual understanding created by accepting and validating each other’s similarities and also differences.
Collective Flow
Deleuze and Guattari are philosophers, and they explored aspects of a broader interpretation of flow, a collective flow state in society. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari specifically talk about society’s economic and social flows; this is a broader interpretation of flow compared to the internal channelling of attention resources described by Monotropism Theory (Murray et al., 2005) or the flow states described by Csikszentmihalyi (1990).
Deleuze describes the bigger picture, the flowing river of a community and society. However, the flow in society could not happen without the diversity of all different minds sharing their passions, skills and knowledge, all working together. The world is in a constant state of flux, and society is in a continuous state of movement. The world and its collective flow states are multidimensional; we live in a world of differences, and neurodiversity is that difference and where the creative potential lies.
Double Empathy
The Monotropism Questionnaire may be popular with Autistic /ADHD people as it reflects their experiences beyond a purely cognitive understanding and resonates with people’s inner states of being. Many people are taking the questionnaire and only then asking, ‘What actually is monotropism?’
A lightbulb moment is often felt, a moment of clarity and relief of being heard and feeling understood; this is reflected in all the likes and excited reshares across social media.
If you have constantly felt on the outside of spaces, there is often a deep yearning to be understood and to feel a part of ‘something’. By taking the Monotropism Questionnaire, there is a feeling of connection with others; there is no double empathy problem (Milton, 2012). Instead, there is a wonderful mutual understanding which reflects so many aspects of life, the positives and the challenges, and there is value in sharing these experiences.
Todd May suggests that the question Deleuze & Guatarri are asking about philosophy is, ‘How might we live?’ rather than, ‘How should we live?’This quote feels particularly relevant for the neurodivergent community and could be a way of reframing our understanding of autism and thinking about what it means to be Autistic/ADHD. Work led by neurodivergent people researching for their community is proving valuable, resonating deeply and is slowly flowing into other research. (I collated a Summary of Monotropism Research for Summer 2023, which can be found on Monotropism.org).
Monotropism is not a new theory, but the collective flow of the online community may have been what was needed for the current to gather this strong momentum and create such an exciting amount of energy. It has quickly moved out of purely academic circles into spaces where people are now sharing their own experiences of monotropism. People are sharing some of the struggles in their lives as they have tried to live up to the expectations of how they felt they “should be” against the norms of the neuromajority. People have been coming together to share ideas of how to manage being monotropic and sharing ways to try and balance energy.
Monotropism and Inner Experiences
Monotropism could be considered the most accurate reflection of autistic/ADHD experiences that we currently have. I feel it reflects a deep inner experience and way of processing that impacts every aspect of life, from cognition, attention, communication and socialising to sensory experiences and mental well-being.
Diving into your monotropic flow state can create a feeling of joy and safety. Immersing yourself in familiar topics and interests in an overwhelming and chaotic world is reassuring and can provide comfort. The theory of monotropism is helping some people understand and find ways of managing their energy and attention resources to support them in their day-to-day lives. It offers explanations for other difficulties people may have with focusing, switching tasks, concentration, attention, communication, interactions, socialising and also physical and sensory processing. Realising that others relate to this theory and struggle with more challenging aspects of monotropism is drawing people together across social media which can only be a positive outcome.
Creative Potential
Deleuze draws on the idea that philosophy is a process of creation, a process of possibilities and the art of concept creation. As a concept, monotropism absolutely works for me. I can apply it to every aspect of my life. Monotropism helps me understand myself and relation to others and the world around me, it is helping to bring some sense into what can feel like quite a chaotic world. There is potential in the theory on both a personal level and in the wider implications for supporting people in education and other settings and family life.
Rhizomatic Flow
Our collective flow from within the neurodivergent community is rhizomatically evolving and starting to branch outside the autistic community. Interest is growing that was not here even six months ago; webinars and training sessions are popping up over the internet, and new writing is being shared all the time.
I believe we need to embrace this flow and channel it into productive research and enable the inner experiences of neurodivergent people to drive the research so it is more meaningful for everyone. Neurodiversity is where potential and possibilities lie. Everyone has an integral and equally important role in creating and contributing to our community flow state and in the possibilities that may bring.
Celebrating Differences
The Monotropism Questionnaire has possibly gained significant momentum because there is a collective need for a shared neurodiversity affirmative understanding from within the neurodivergent community. Everyone deserves to flourish and live their best life; having your inner experiences validated is intensely valuable and has the potential to create new possibilities and better outcomes for autistic/ADHD people.
If we accept and celebrate differences, we can all work together to shape the course of our collective flow. More research into monotropism and inner Autistic ADHD experiences will help support and benefit everyone.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest:
‘Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of land at all times.’
(A Thousand Plateaus (2013), Chapter 6, How do you make yourself a Body Without Organs?, pg. 187)
What would it mean to build a hearth that welcomes not only diverse minds, but diverse ways of sensing, relating, and becoming across human and more-than-human lives?
This blog emerged from a conversation with Stimpunks during our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project planning, where we explored what it truly means to create spaces that sustain neurodivergent people, rather than simply include. We found ourselves returning to the image of the hearth, the Cavendish Campfire, a warm, relational centre where ethodivergence is held, honoured, and co-regulated. This piece reflects on ethodivergent hearth building as a neuroqueer practice of community care and more-than-human kinship.
Ethodivergence speaks to the richness of relational, sensory, and affective difference. It’s about how we move, connect, feel, and attend, how our rhythms and responses don’t always align with dominant norms. Drawing from Ombre Tarragnat’s (2025) concept of ethodiversity, this expands neurodiversity beyond the human brain into relational ecology, honouring the full range of our inter-being ways with the world across all species of living and non-living things.
More-than-human refers to the interconnected ecology of life that includes not just humans but also animals, plants, weather systems, seasons, fungi, rivers, stones, moon cycles, and sensory environments. It’s a way of recognising that our ways of being, knowing, and healing are shaped by more than just other humans and that these entanglements are vital, not peripheral.
The hearth is a warm centre, a gathering space, a site of return and regeneration. It holds history, presence, and possibility, it’s where people tend the fire together, share stories, and learn from one another, a rhythm of shared becoming. To build ethodivergent hearths is to make room for new forms of kinship, ones that honour slow attunement, deep presence, and non-normative ways of sensing, being, and knowing. It’s an invitation to live otherwise, interdependently, in communities shaped not by conformity but by relational integrity and care.
Beyond its physical form, the hearth also holds sensory and emotional resonance, it is a centre, part of the basecamp, that may not be an actual campfire fire or a room, but a feeling. Sometimes it lives in the softness of our favourite weighted blanket, the texture of moss under our fingertips, the familiar paths we may return to in the woods or our local park, the stillness shared with our chosen family and pets. In ethodivergent hearth building, these sensory and relational centres become vital anchors, places to return to without performance, where our difference is held with warmth rather than shame or stigma.
Cavendish Spaces and ethodivergent hearths are built slowly, relationally, through co-regulation, sensory consideration, and access intimacy. There is room for fallow rest time, stim time, quiet time, time that bends to our bodyminds rather than our bodyminds being twisted into neuronormative time constraints that lead us into burnout and mental ill health. These are spaces that reject extraction and standardisation and instead, they welcome divergence and difference through shared rhythms, bodily autonomy, and relational consent, psychological and sensory safety. Cavendish spaces are like ethodivergent hearths for the soul where people gather not to fix or scrutinise, but to sit alongside, validate, and co-exist.
To think about and create ethodivergent hearths is to imagine what it means to design for difference, to centre care and safety for those of us often left out in the cold, on the edges and in the liminal spaces. It’s about making space for monotropic attention, sensory flow, and nonlinear emotional rhythms. It’s about pacing together through co-regulation, glimmers, multi-modal ways of communicating and attuned silence. It’s about giving permission for slow grief, spiralling joy, or messy recovery.
Ethodivergent hearth building means:
Not centring only human and normative ways of relating and knowing.
Honouring sensory, affective, and relational exchanges between people and natural or material environments.
Acknowledging that Autistic, disabled, and neurodivergent people often form deep attunements with non-human kin, sometimes more sustaining than traditional social models.
It might look like mutual aid networks, or shared rest practices, it might mean building more flexible time-structures that go beyond our clocks. This kind of hearth holds our queertime, our difference, our interdependence, without trying to fix, mask, explain, or justify. It’s a way of living gently with difference, and tending the fire that can help sustain us.
Ethodivergent hearth building invites a shift from thinking of community as exclusively human, towards something more ecological, embodied, and expansive, a shared hearth where difference is relational, and care ripples outward beyond species boundaries. Ethodivergent hearth building is a neuroqueer practice of relational community rooted in presence, divergence, and shared becoming where everyone can thrive.
In the online memorial event (24th June 2025) to celebrate the philosopher and writer Helen De Cruz’s life, Georgi Gardiner who hosted the session asked the question:
“If Helen designed a campus/university, what would it look like?”
I didn’t know Helen personally but have been deeply inspired by her writing and art. I wanted to write something to honour her work and share some ideas about how her philosophy has enriched our ideas for learning spaces.
(It is a coincidence the Learning Space Project I developed with Stimpunks is called Cavendish – this is unrelated to Helen’s set of beautiful illustrations for The Blazing-World, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Stimpunks’ Cavendish Space is named after Henry Cavendish, a scientist from the 1700’s).
Awe, Wonder and Different Ways of Knowing: Cavendish Space and Helen De Cruz
There’s something powerful about creating space for people to think and learn in their own unique ways. Whether it’s the sensory-friendly Cavendish Spacethat is the foundation stone of Neuroqueer Learning Spaces that I have developed with Stimpunks or the thoughtful, creative work of philosopher Helen De Cruz that may be shared around our campfires; both invite us to imagine how learning and knowledge can work for everyone.
I took part in a brilliant reading group hosted by The Philosopher 1923, where we explored Helen De Cruz’s work in depth. In the final week, we were lucky to be joined by Helen herself, and I remember discussing neuroqueer theory and the projects I was developing with Stimpunks, particularly the ways her ideas resonated with and helped shape our thinking. These conversations had a lasting impact , deeply influencing our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project, helping to evolve the vision behind Cavendish Space, and continuing to inform much of my current writing and emerging ideas.
Stimpunks’ Cavendish Space is named after Henry Cavendish, a scientist from the 1700’s who lived a very unique life. He was quiet, sensitive to sound, and followed his own routines, but he also made important scientific discoveries. For us he’s a symbol of what’s possible when people are allowed to think and learn in ways that work for them, when Autistic people are free to follow their monotropic passions and flow. Cavendish is proof that deep focus, quiet curiosity, and different minds can lead to wonderful things and ways of connecting with our true selves and others. Cavendish Space is all about creating places where people can follow their interests, feel safe, and get absorbed in what they love with people they trust, where there is also time to regulate, re-set and re-energise by ourselves.
Cavendish Space is a welcoming, flexible environment designed for everyone but especially beneficial for neurodivergent people to explore their interests. It honours sensory needs and bodily autonomy, creating a foundation where individuals can learn, reflect, and connect in ways that feel natural and safe. This approach aligns closely with Helen De Cruz’s work, which like Cavendish Space is grounded in the values of curiosity, care, and deep respect for expansive and divergent ways of thinking and being.
In her book Wonderstruck, De Cruz explores how moments of awe and wonder can open up our minds, inviting us to ask questions, be curious and see the world differently. For her, wonder isn’t just an emotion it is magic. Magic is wonder and power, it’s a vital way of thinking, of paying attention, and of forming meaningful connections with ideas, people, and the world around us.
Honouring Helen De Cruz’s work within Cavendish Space is about more than referencing her work, it’s about embodying the values she brings to philosophy and the wider world. She offers a deep respect for wonder, a commitment to epistemic humility, and a belief in the richness of diverse minds. Her philosophy invites us to reimagine thinking as something playful, relational, and open to all, not limited by conventional rules or hierarchies.
By weaving her influence into the fabric of Cavendish Space, we affirm that curiosity, care, and difference are not only welcome, they are essential to how we learn, grow, and imagine new futures together and can inspire awe and wonder.
This section of the poem from Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, speaks to me deeply and resonates with my Autistic experience of meaning as something felt, sensed, and lived through, especially in solitude, sensory immersion, and more-than-human connection.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
Autistic meaning-making is not abstract, but an embodied attunement, a “mingling with the Universe” that resists neuronormative expression yet pulses with emotional and sensory intensity.
As Erin Manning wrote, “Autistics…are hypersensorial, alive not only to the presence of the other, but more importantly, to the absence of category. They live the differential, feeling into the world’s quality of emergence. Bodying, for them, is worlding.”
Autistic experience often resists the default social scripts and expected ways of making sense of things, our thoughts are less linear, more constellation-y and rhizomatic. They may appear chaotic and not always make sense to others as the connections are happening deep inside us.
Meaning for me, often arises between things, in the liminal spaces, in the felt sensory and emotional moments, a subtle change of a sound, the shifting pattern of sunlight on leaves and my relationship with living things that don’t speak in human words, and also a more natural attunement to people who also can’t or prefer not to speak verbally.
Like Lord Byron’s “rapture on the lonely shore,” the Autistic sense of meaning-making may emerge most powerfully in the absence of human intrusion, words and voices, not from isolation, but from a deep, open presence with what is. It is why we may crave time alone, in our dens, out in nature, fully immersed in stimming activities and other forms of communication and connecting online. Alone time is so often stigmatised as being antisocial, but it is a different kind of sociality, and may be more meaningful for many Autistic people and is something to value and allow ourselves the time to lean into in what ever way we want and helps us feel good. It may be less about escaping and more about finding belonging in other ways and belonging otherwise.
Autistic people often experience a heightened resonance and connection with our environment, this may not always be with people, but with animals, objects, places, atmospheres and sensory experiences. This is not a deficit of sociality, but perhaps a re-routing of relational (monotropic) attention toward the more-than-human, an ethodivergent way of being. (Ombre Tarragnat, 2025)
I have written extensively about liminality, the in-between spaces where many Autistic people feel they may be stuck, but I think it is in these liminal spaces and states, where our bodyminds “mingles with the Universe,” that we can find a quiet calm that helps regulate, bring comfort and a meaning that allows us to emerge from the liminal or delight in the dwelling moments of the unspoken between realms. It is in liminality that Autistic perception becomes a kind of aesthetic felt knowing. It may not be easily verbalised or put into human words, “what I can ne’er express” but it is real, it emerges and can be captured in art, poetry and nature, in our online community spaces and is valid.
“There is society where none intrudes”.
“There is pleasure in the pathless woods” when we diverge from neuronormative expectations and follow our inner compasses.
Allowing ourselves to feel, wholly and completely and merge with our environment is a way of creating our own language, a bodymind way of being that doesn’t rely on human words and can be felt and understood in other ways………we need to create our own worlds, reworld, neuroqueer – so we can survive together in a world dominated by neuronormativity and find our own place of belonging.
Sharing early morning thoughts after having read more of Erin Manning‘s beautiful work last night ‘A Feel for Others Feeling You‘ (2025), about challenging normative orientations around the concept of mirror-touch synaesthesia and touch (inspired by the DeafBlind Protactile community and work of John Lee Clark).
“To feel the touch of the world is to feel the difference the world brings to all it comes into contact with, and this contact cannot be separated from all that worlds. To be a body is to be in contact. To touch is to feel the differential.” (Erin Manning, 2025)
Thoughts welcome – I am hoping to set up an alternative space to explore through Autistic Realms into More Realms to share, discuss and collaborate on things like this with anyone who is interested alongside CASY Cultural Autism Studies at Yale and Stimpunks communities.
“Ocean Waves by Adriel J Wool” is a meditation in ambient flow states. Introduced with a special tuning that allows the brain to touch and feel more true pythagorean intervals of musicality.
The flows and textures of nature follow patterns that resonate with the human body through its ability to hear sound.
The nervous system is a microcosm, however it relates in scale to the power of nature, and is comforted within her crests.
To breathe more slowly and more deeply. The sound spectrum is given in the powerful release of deep sound energy, very much like the Earth’s beautiful shores.”
“Ocean Waves by Adriel J. Wool isn’t a recording of the ocean, it’s a fractal composition of the nature of the ocean. Modulated into swells, the rhythm evokes the massive release of great ocean waves and the more humble release of the human breath“. Ryan Boren (Stimpunks)
The quote, “Attention without feeling, is only a report.” from Mary Oliver — Upstream: Selected Essays (2016) resonates with me as a deeply monotropic person. It summarises what happens whenever I find myself pulled into a moment so fully and immersively that the boundary between noticing and becoming begins to dissolve, and time melts away. These moments will be different for everyone, they happen when our monotropic bodyminds are pulled towards something, it returns when I am in woodlands and when I see moss, fungi, flowing water.
There’s something about moss, it’s soft resilience, its quiet deep greenness of a million shades, the way it persists and thrives on forgotten land and inbetween stones, on forest floors and brings old things back to a new life. Moss doesn’t demand to be seen, but when we do look, really look, really feel, and really give ourselves time to sense and be with moss, it offers a different kind of presence and an almost different kind of knowing and connecting and Autistic Joy.
I am exploring the idea of moss as an invitation to consider monotropism, ethodiversity, and neuroqueering our spaces as a way of creating belonging. Drawing from the work of Popova, M. (2023). The Magic of Moss and what it teaches us about the art of attentiveness to life at all scales, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others, alongside my emerging neuroqueer and holographic ideas, I am considering if moss (like mushrooms and water which I have written about before!), could offer not only a symbol and metaphor for neurodivergent thriving but a methodology to reclaim creative practice and ways of being that resists the fast, extractive modes of dominant neuronormative culture.
Monotropism (Murray et al, 2005) is a neuro-affirming theory of Autistic experiences. It describes a tendency to enter flow states of deeply focused attention, to move inward towards just one or a few connected interests, sensations, or patterns at anyone time and to dwell there. This is not just a cognitive style; for myself being monotropic it is a whole-bodymind sensory way of being. For many Autistic/ADHD people, monotropism underpins and helps to make sense of our sensory experiences, ways of learning, communication styles, and creativity. If you are Autistic / ADHD the theory of monotropism may resonate and help explain how you process and relate to the world.
In environments dominated by neuronormativity ,which are structured around multitasking, high demands, quick-switching of attention tunnels, and surface level engagement, monotropic people can be often misread as being obsessive, inflexible, or disengaged. If we reframe this deep-focus not as deficit, but as capacity and energy, it offers a more affirming lens of Autistic experiences as being a form of attunement with attentional resources, a way of giving attention feelingly and holistically.
For me, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss(2003) exemplifies monotropic attentional ecology. Her writing spirals and notices what others may overlook such as the micro-patterns of bryophytes (group name for any non vascular, rootless plants like moss) , the webs that cover forest floors and emerge through cracks and over sleeping objects. Kimmerer just doesn’t describe moss she enters into relationship with nature, her science and writing is guided by care, her noticing is lived, it feels very monotropic much like Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2023).
To attend like this, monotropically, with feeling and deep attention is not just to extract facts, but to stay present with complexity, multiplicity and connect with nature and our environment rhizomatically, completely and become deeply absorbed in greenness and texture. As Mary Oliver reminds us, “without feeling, attention becomes mere reporting“. For some monotropic people their perception may offer a different kind of report / blog writing/ creative experience, one filled with sensory details and emotional resonance, there are no barriers between the body and the environment, the moss, nature.
Nature Positivity: We Are Not Outside the Ecosystem
Nature positivitywas a term only recently introduced to me on Barbara Melville’s writing course. It made me think about how as a neurodivergent person I am not disconnected from nature but often deeply and almost painfully attuned to it, inseparable, we are a part of nature. We do not need to be brought back into the natural world; we need to be recognised as already being part of it. Our sensory experiences, our flows of attention, our non-normative experience of time, memories and rhythms, aren’t deviations from a natural or ‘normative’ baseline, they can be seen to be part of biodiversity and our wider ethodivergent ways of being (Tarragnat, 2025).
Ethodiversity is a term developed by Ombre Tarragnat (2025) to describe the variability of behavioural and existential styles within and across species. Ethodiversity invites us to move beyond a purely neurological model of divergence and into a more-than-human framework of difference. It reminds us that there are many ways to live, relate, and thrive not only for humans, but for all living things.
Moss embodies ethodiverse wisdom. It rejects hierarchy and human time, it forms webs, it’s value is in its interconnectedness and the spaces inbetween. We can learn from all non-human beings and living things, we are all interconnected and if we give our selves more time to tune in to the natural world we could perhaps can expand our ways of thinking, not just as humans for humans, but as part of nature. We can help to recreate a world where every living thing can thrive (non-human and human). It creates a space to think about our relationship with the wider planet we are in, the importance of environmental sustainability, not just focusing on our human-centric needs (Solarpunk ideas).
In this sense, moss, like many other aspects of nature, becomes a kind of kin, we are interdependent. I think lots of us are trying to survive from the edges, in the liminal spaces, trying to grow in shade and darkness through cycles of burnout. I live in the dark-mode, underground settings of Discord servers, it is where I feel at home, inbetween the reality of life outside my front door and where I really feel safe and a sense of belonging. Moss grows across ruins, rooftops, gravestones and inbetween the places and objects people normally tread over or overlook. It softens hard spaces and it survives and thrives on it’s own terms, in it’s own way much like our online community spaces.
Mushrooms and fungi, like moss, offer a metaphor of hope and an opportunity to think about how we can create a life from capitalist ruins which invalidates and overlooks neurodivergent needs and potential. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the Worldreminds us that life persists in the ruins of Capitalism, not in spite of disruption, but through it and can flourish through adversity. Like matsutake mushrooms thriving in disturbed forests, neurodivergent people often live in the edges of systems, through adversity, in fractured spiral time, outside of centralised blueprints and neuronormativity, however hard these systems try to contain us and pressure us to mask. This resonates deeply with monotropic ways of being, our ability to create our own Autistic rhizomes and communities, how our senses sometimes form unlikely but radically resilient connections in overlooked spaces.
Tsing’s emphasis on precarity, interdependence, and multi-species assemblages mirrors the sintered ways neurodivergent communities form: not through uniformity, but through shared friction and feeling. Our creative practices become more than self-expression, they are part of what Tsing calls the “arts of noticing,” where we document life not for control or mastery, but as a way of staying with complexity and multiplicity and to create shared meaning. It is a way to honour our entangled, emergent, sensory ways of being as ecologically vital. It reminds us that even in fragmented systems and broken ground, we can reclaim ourselves, find connection, and grow into something whole, be together and create something new.
Sintering
In Sintering: Neurodivergent Community Building(2025), I explored the metaphor of sintering. Sintering is the process through which individual snow grains gradually begin to bond. Tiny necks form between them, bridging the gaps, making the snowpack stronger, more resilient, and more resistant to collapse.
In Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead(2025), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers this as a metaphor for collective becoming. “Sintering is a joining,” she writes, “It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other… Sintering is bonding, it’s building coalitions with your neighbours” (p. 18).
This analogy resonates deeply with my own experiences of the neurodivergent community and the Autistic rhizome. Many of us begin our journeys alone trying to discover our real identity under the layers of masking and internalised ableism, realising we are caught in systems not made for us and that is why life has felt SO hard! Discovering I was Autistic was life changing for me. In my 40’s I suddenly had access to a whole world of new vocabulary to describe my experiences. It has been through connecting with other neurodivergent people through various online communities and sharing stories that my life has begun to make more sense. When we find each other across difference, across shared experiences, we can start to build bridges, rhizomes. Through conversation, care, and solidarity, we can begin to sinter.
Neuroqueering from the Liminal
InNeuroqueering Liminal Spaces (2024), I wrote about the spaces where categorisation breaks down between identities, between disciplines, between states of being. Neurodivergent people often find ourselves in these thresholds, not quite fitting in, living in the margins, I am suggesting that liminality can be a fertile and exciting place to neuroqueer and evolve from.
Moss is liminal, it exists between. It mediates, connects and holds and brings things together. In many ways it could be seen to reflect what neuroqueer creative practice can be, something that isn’t fixed, something that moves away from dominant frameworks, it is textured and radically relational and multidimensional.
To write from moss is to write from the in-between spaces, attune to our environment, to feel safe and at home. It is to resist linearity, binary ways, hierarchy and to embrace multiplicity, to value the process of becoming and connecting.
Moss offers a model for neurodivergent thriving, one that honours attention with feeling, presence without performance and growth without urgency. It teaches us to notice differently, to value slowness, to dwell in the cracks and embrace neuroqueering,monotropic felt time.
Our creative practice can be moss-like, it can be sintered through our shared stories and experiences. To attend with feeling and lean into monotropic time can be a lifeline for many people who are experiencing burnout. It is a way of reclaiming our authentic ways of resting and being.
Monotropic attention, a different ecology
In the Writing the Dawnworkshop I took part in this week, Barb Melville encouraged us to begin our writing with a nature-positive message. She asked us, not just what we notice, but why it matters. For me, moss represents a kind of quiet kinship, it is soft, slow and often overlooked and fills me with sensory joy. As a neurodivergent person, I see myself reflected in its persistence, its texture, its need for quiet, shaded places to thrive. In protecting nature and moss we are also protecting our sensory environments, the liminal spaces, and the overlooked ecologies that support neurodivergent ways of being and feeling safe.
This reflection can become call to action which Barbara invited us to think about. It enables us to think about reimagining ways of connecting, not just with nature but in the way we create our communities, educational spaces and care settings. We need to design practices that honour differences, not pathologise. Like moss, neurodivergent people thrive with more time and space, gentleness and connection in spaces like our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
My home is in the mossy, liminal spaces that we create together, in our reaching toward one another. Our strength is in radical resilience and sintering, our refusal to face the world alone, valuing interdependence and not conforming to harmful systems based only on neuronormative values.
Radical resilience does not come from hardness or conformity, but from mossy softness, it comes from flow and fungi like rhizomatic community networks and the cumulative strength of many unique connections forming bonds to offer support to each other. As Bruno Lataur summarised, “Learning to live in the ruins of capitalism means learning to do without the notion of projects and, finally, moving on to an attentive description of situations that cannot easily change scale…..With her dog Cayenne, Donna Haraway had proved how far one could take analysis of relations between species. With her matsutake (mushroom), Anna Tsing proves that we can go still further, modifying not only the landscape to be described but what we should expect of meticulous description.”
Mossy, messy, monotropic ways
Nature-positive writing what ever the focus – mushrooms, moss, trees, water can be a radical act of reclamation, helping us grow cultures and communities that are ecologically aware. Neurodivergent spaces are rhizomatic, soft, mossy, fluid, flowy, webby and spirally and entangled. They allow space for dwelling, noticing, interdependence and omnidirectional growth.
‘To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into light.’ pg 155 (Tsing)
Let’s keep growing spaces that honour slowness, texture, and sensory ways of knowing and feeling, where monotropic ways of being are not just accepted, but celebrated. Spaces where infodumping, deep focus, stimming, and sensory richness are recognised as meaningful ways of connecting and building interdependence between humans, non-human beings and our wider environments.
Monotropism lets us sink into and experience the world with our full-bodymind presence, not just noticing, but flowing and feeling with the world in ways that bring resonance, validation, and a sense of belonging. Mary Oliver wrote “Attention without feeling, is only a report.”, for monotropic people how we use our attentional resources helps to explain everything, it is how we experience life in all it’s joyful mossy, messy ways.
“Next time the bus is late, take those waiting minutes to look around for signs of life….. amidst the noise and fumes and elbowing crowds, there is some small reasurance in the moss between the cracks.” (Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, pg 105)
References & Further Reading
Kimmerer, R. W. (2003). Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Oregon State University Press.
Oliver, M. (2016). Upstream: Selected Essays. Penguin Press.
Tarragnat, O. (2024). Biodiversity, Neurodiversity, Ethodiversity: Towards a More-Than-Human and More-Than-Neurological Turn in Neurodiversity Studies. TRACE: Journal for Human-Animal Studies. https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/144936
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005a). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Tsing, A. L. (2021). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Haraway, D. (2007). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. In Springer eBooks (pp. 117–158). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4
*“Memories scatter like shards of seaglass along a fractured spiral, the centre always slipping just beyond my grasp. Hazy images and sensations drift in and out of the fog, sometimes offering sharp glimpses, but rarely staying long enough for me to hold. Most pass by shrouded in a soft mist, like half-formed echoes trapped within a labyrinth. Sounds, images, smells, and feelings blur and merge, tangling into an ever-expanding rhizome, sprawling in all directions, folding in on themselves. Memories come more as felt impressions than as concrete events. Remembering isn’t straightforward for me; it’s less recall and more a process of re-navigation. I have to trace uncertain paths, try and find a thread to hook into to regain my flow, often sensing that what I’m reaching for is just out of reach if trying to recall a specific event, but my sensory memories are more clear and vivid as they are felt sensations – which is hard to explain to people who may not experience their memories in this way. ”
I am currently on a Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice course led by KR Moorhead, Marta Rose and Meg Max. This week we were exploring time and memories, which felt very apt given my recent monotropic outpourings about time. In this week’s session I wrote the above piece about how I experience memories.
Memory may not be linear for neurodivergent people. It may feel like a spiral of felt sensations. Being monotropic shapes how I re-sense moments, navigating echoes and threads of sensory experiences rather than always recalling events. I felt validated that some other people seemed to relate and share similar experiences of their time not being linear and also being quite hazy recalling specific events but having really vivid recollections of more sensory experiences.
Monotropism and Memories
Monotropism is a theory of Autism (Murray et al 20025) that describes a way of focusing attention that tends toward deep but fewer channels. For those of us who experience the world monotropically, attention locks in and tunnels can form like portals. These attention tunnels can lead to intense engagement and immersive sensory experiences, but they may also shape how we encode, retrieve, and relate to our memories.
Memory for me is not a fixed archive of past events filed neatly on shelves. It is alive, constructed in the present, woven from threads of past focus, emotion, embodiment, and attention. For monotropic people, those threads may be less linear and deeply context-bound in our sensory experiences. We may not remember when something happened in conventional, sequential neuronormative time but we may vividly feel how we experienced something, we may recall the sensory landscape, the tone, the rhythm of presence or absence.
Spiral Time and Felt Time
I’ve written previously about monotropic experiences of time as being like ever expanding rhizomatic spirals like rather than a linear A-B or 9am to 10pm of time as lived by the clock and conventional calendar. I think this also shapes how memory functions, rather than stretching out along a clear chronological line, time for me feels like it folds back in on itself and experiences and memories happen and are stored within the folds (a concept from Deleuze that I have written about at length). A moment from years ago might feel right now, while a conversation from yesterday may feel distant or unretrievable unless there is something to hook me in and brings it back into focus so I can retrieve the thread and follow the flow.
In monotropic spiral time, memories don’t behave like neurotypical people may expect or how we may have been brought up to understand how memory works. My memories don’t line up neatly, they tangle, twist, merge and drift like mist through a forest. Sometimes I feel I’m not remembering in the traditional sense at all, but kind of re-sensing, like I am trying to feel my way through a fog of echoes and impressions, a texture, a tone of voice, the way the light fell. It makes my memories of concrete events feel hazy and fuzzy but my experiences feel vivid and it can be quite confusing and frustrating at times.
Labyrinths and the Rhizomes
For monotropic people our minds and memories may feel less like walking through an album of neatly arranged photos and more like navigating a vast, living labyrinth. I can’t easily “go back” and retrieve a memory, it feels like I have to wander, I have to reach out and try and sense where the thread of recall might catch and hook onto something, what I often find is not a single event but a tangle, a rhizome of multisensory experiences that I have to unravel.
This rhizomatic quality of navigating time means my memories don’t live in isolation, they’re not strictly filed under “birthday, age 9” or “Monday morning, March 3rd.” Instead, they seem to connect through shared emotions and sensory patterns. One feeling or sensory experience might loop me back to three seemingly unrelated moments, a smell might pull on threads across decades and I don’t always know why. This can be disorienting in a world that expects time and memory to be neat and logical but it’s also a kind of richness, a depth of connection that linear systems seem to often miss. It can make conversations with friends and family hard as it seems like I am not interested enough in people to have created a core memory like in the Disney film Inside Out, my memory of real life events feels like a sieve where things happen then disapear but they are all there, it is just perhaps that they are stored differently.
It brings me back to my first blog I wrote on More Realms (2023), Middle Entrance. In 1943, T.S. Eliot’s collection of four poems were collated to form Four Quartets. The final poem in this series Little Gidding (1942), continues Eliot’s exploration of time and our connections with each other through generations and current society.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
My memories, relationships and ways of being are like constantly evolving spirals that spin in and out in multidimensional ways. Different connections and experiences add to and contribute to a wider, deeper fluid rhizomatic network of potential that is always in a constant state of flux. This idea of an evolving spiral, hooking onto a node of the rhizome and returning to a new beginning in the middle, liminal spaces, within the folds is how I experience memory. I need time to process, time to rlect and for memories to and beautifully reflected in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea”.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
Navigating Memories
Memory for me feels less like recall, I am not able to press a button and retrieve a file (unless it is related to my own special interest about Autism research or teaching in which case my filing cabinet seems to ping open!). It is more like a re-navigation, I have to find the right entry point and node of the rhizome, I need to feel for the thread, follow it gently and try not to tug too hard in case it disappears back into the fog. I often know I know something, but I can’t get to it directly. I need the right conditions or sensory cue to draw it out and that takes time and and can make me appear distant or uninterested when the opposite is true.
This is why questions like “What did you do last weekend?” can feel like demands rather than simple curiosity. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention, it’s that the question doesn’t align with how my memory map works or how I perceive time. If you ask me what the light looked through my window like as I sat reading in bed, or how the air felt when we stepped outside I might have a more instant response but I probably won’t be able to recall the chronological sequence or events and relate things in an easy to understand order, it is like that gets lost in the spiral. It can be frustrating at times just to have fleeting impressions of memories that I know mean a lot to me but I can’t easily retrieve.
Understanding and Support
Understanding memory through a monotropic lens may helps us honour our different ways of knowing, recalling, and connecting with events and people. For those supporting Autistic individuals, whether as educators, therapists, or family members this means shifting assumptions and instead of assuming memory is absent or deficient it may be better to consider asking things like:
How do memories show up for you?
What helps you reconnect with something you felt or experienced?
Is there a sensory or emotional thread that brings it back?
This may also be empowering for those of us who live and experience life monotropically. It validates the experience of having a different bodymind, of perhaps remembering more through attention tunnels of sensation rather than facts or dates. It recognises that memory is not a failure when it doesn’t fit neurotypical expectations it’s perhaps just a different kind of map that we have to navigate.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
When snow first falls, its flakes are delicate and vulnerable, but over time, a quiet transformation begins. Sintering is the process through which individual snow grains gradually begin to bond. Tiny necks form between them, bridging the gaps, making the snowpack stronger, more resilient, and more resistant to collapse.
Sintering
In Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead(2025), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers this as a metaphor for collective becoming. “Sintering is a joining,” she writes. “It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other… Sintering is bonding, it’s building coalitions with your neighbours” (p. 18).
This analogy resonates deeply with my own experiences of the neurodivergent community and the Autistic rhizome. Many of us begin our journeys alone, caught in systems not made for us. Discovering I was Autistic was life changing for me. In my 40s I suddenly had access to a whole world of new vocabulary to describe my experiences. It has been through connecting with other Autistic people through various online communities and sharing stories that my life has begun to make more sense. When we find each other across difference, across shared experiences, we can start to build bridges. Through conversation, care, and solidarity, we can begin to sinter.
World Making From The Liminal
In Neuroqueering in the Liminal Spaces, I explored how if you are neurodivergent, community connections often emerge in the spaces-between: the liminal zones where identities are unmoored and reforming. Liminality is not a passive in-between, but an active threshold a place of transformation. To neuroqueer is to inhabit these spaces intentionally, resisting the pull of normative timelines and expectations. It’s where we begin to re-imagine our relationships to time, to each other, and to ourselves. These are places where we unlearn and relearn and begin to create our own worlds so we can move beyond survival and can thrive.
Simpson writes, that “world making requires love, kindness, and care. It requires collectivity and relationality… [it] generates the knowledge needed to move onto the next step” (p. 41).
Trust in Human Scale
Jorn Bettin (2024) Trust in Human Scale explores how neurodivergent people are often asked to stretch beyond sustainable limits, to conform to institutional scales that demand efficiency over relationship, compliance over trust, “We are trusted only to the extent that we comply.”
This is why our sintering matters so much. Human-scale relationships form in peer support groups, online community spaces, through shared projects such as our Map of Monotropic Experiences, they prioritise relational attunement and rely on mutual trust rather than extracted performance.
As the Jorn Bettin says: “It’s not that neurodivergent people don’t trust. It’s that we often trust with more depth, more integrity, more sensitivity to rupture.”
Trust at human scale is fragile and strong, just like the sintering bridges between snow grains.
As Jorn Bettin writes in Trust in Human Scale, we need “a refusal of scale, a refusal of institutional metrics for safety and success.” Instead, we root ourselves in relationships, in slowness, in deep listening. These are the bonds that hold. As Simpson says, ‘world making is a communal struggle’ (pg 34).
Sintering Communities
Perhaps sintering is not just a metaphor, but we could use this as a method to build community? Together we can re-build our future through slow bonds, mutual trust, and the gentle resistance of staying human in systems that try to scale us and deny us our authentic Autistic identities.
Our home is in the liminal spaces that we create together, in our reaching toward one another. Our strength is in sintering. Just as snow grains join through small necks of ice to become a strong, stable snowpack, we can build strength through our relationships, our co-regulation, our refusal to face the world alone and to conform to harmful systems based only on neuronormative values.
Radical resilience does not come from hardness or conformity, but from the cumulative strength of many unique connections forming bonds and community spaces to offer support to each other.
Autistic/ADHD people are more likely to be monotropic and resonate with the theory of monotropism. Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser developed the theory of monotropism in the late 1990s. It is typically described as a neuro-affirming theory of Autism, but I think it is also a temporal mode.
I am considering whether being monotropic is not just about using attentional resources differently, but could also be about experiencing time differently due to how we use our attentional resources.
If you’re monotropic you may notice that:
Time is immersive and fluid.
Transitions may feel disruptive because they pull us out of durational temporal coherence and flow.
How you use your attentional resources may feel like being in a tunnel, and the world outside of that tunnel may feel like it is melting away or completely disappearing.
Temporal markers (like deadlines, calendars or clocks) may lose meaning or become really stressful and cause intense dysregulation.
Transitions may feel disruptive because they pull us out of durational temporal coherence and flow.
Autistic people often have to mask to fit in, we may struggle to be understood due to differences in our lived experience with other people. This mismatch of ways of experiencing the world is not just a communication gap and difference, as described in the Double Empathy Problem (Milton 2012) it may also be a Double Temporality Problem. Perhaps the world and the majority of people run on neuronormative time (temps), but monotropic people live and experience life more in felt experiences (durée) – in fluctuating flow states, a different internal rhythm that is unique to each person.
The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) distinguished between two kinds of time:
Durée: lived, qualitative, and immersive duration. This is the rhythm of consciousness itself and FELT experiences.
Temps divides time into identical units, i.e., seconds, minutes, and hours. Durée is felt time. It is how we experience time from the inside, and for Autistic/ADHD people, that may be more sensory and dependent upon the environment and how safe we feel. Bergson saw durée not as a subjective illusion but as the real nature of time, with clock-time being the abstraction.
Monotropic time is FELT. It is immersive, expansive, flowy, omnidirectional and deeply rhizomatic. Monotropic time is like a temporal home.
I believe we need to release ourselves from the grip of neuronormative time. To neuroqueer time is to subvert expectations of how you think you should be living according to the unwritten rule book of society’s norms set out by the majority of the population. Neuroqueering time isn’t just for neurodivergent people; it could benefit everyone.
By neuroqueering ourselves and neuroqueering time, anyone and everyone can break free from the neuronormative time structures that bind us all to capitalism and restrict and cause harm to lives in so many ways. We may be able to live more attuned to our own temporalities and more at one with our environment and those around us if we liberate ourselves from the ticking hands of the clock and find more flexible ways to manage our flow and our own time.
Let’s dwell in our natural flow and rhythms, actively resist neuronormative time, find spaces to neuroqueer time further in the liminal spaces and embrace our own unique rhythms and monotropic time.
Further reading and a more in-depth exploration can be found in my blog:
Bergson, H. (1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Bergson, H. (2022). Creative Evolution. Routledge.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press.
In my previous blogs, Monotropic Time and Neuroqueering Temporalities (2025) and Quantum Neuro-Holographic Thoughts from a Liminal Space (2024), I explored how Autistic and other neurodivergent experiences often unfold outside of neuronormative frameworks. I am AuDHD and deeply resonate with the theory of monotropism. Through the lens of monotropism, I experience time as a multidimensional holographic spiral, immersive, shaped by deeply focused attention tunnels and being engaged in fluctuating states of flow. I am considering if our sense of time perception as monotropic people is different as we find ourselves on the edges or in the in-between liminal spaces of society, trying to fit into neuronormative time frames, which go against our innate, authentic ways of perceiving time.
I am on the edge of a new monotropic interest (time perception) and want to loop back to some of the thoughts I have been exploring over the past 2 years about the neuroqueering potential of Deleuzean philosophy and bring in some of the main concepts from the philosophy of Henri Bergson who I am just beginning to explore. Both thinkers profoundly reimagined what time is. Rather than seeing time as an objective, linear sequence of moments, like many neurotypical people may perceive time using conventional clock-time and calendar time, both Bergson and Deleuze highlight that time is not linear; it is experiential, fluid, and heterogeneous in nature. Both of their concepts of time seem to fit into how many neurodivergent people experience time and my own experience of time.
I can only write about my own experience of time as an AuDHD, monotropic person. My time is not linear; it stretches, loops, pulses, collapses, and dilates in tune with my fluctuating energy, capacity and attentional resources, depending on my environment and access to flow states. My time is measured in sensory experiences, moments and patterns rather than calendar events. I find it really hard to recall specific memories and events unless I have a photo to ground something. I have only recently begun to realise that the theory of monotropism may also help to explain how my recall and memories may be different from those of other people who are not Autistic/ ADHD due to a more fluid sense of time. I find memories really hard to pinpoint as my memories are often not based on time but on sensory experiences and patterns of thoughts, events and situations. It can make joining in conversations hard with others who don’t experience this, and I am only just beginning to understand why that may be, for me at least!
“Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.” ― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
Post-Human Theory and Being Part of the Environment
I resonate with Ombre Tarragnat’s post-human theory, where they discuss Subverting the autistic bubble metaphor (I): the Umwelt Theory (2025). Autistic people are not in a bubble where we can’t be reached and can’t reach out. Jakob von Uexküll’s (2010) concept, the Autistic Umwelt, has traditionally been described as Autistic people being bounded, bubble-like, and even sealed off from the world; unapproachable or unable to be a part of the ‘real’ functioning world where neuronormativity rules. This view is painfully inaccurate and really harmful.
I like and need my time alone, in my cave space, but what may seem like an Umwelt for me is more like a porous, shimmering neuro-holographic bubble, shaped not only by perception but by constant affective, sensory, and cognitive entanglement with my environment. I am not an ‘other’ in my own bubble, separate from real life. I feel I am deeply entangled and part of the environment, not separate from it, but living in it. I am in a constant process of folding and unfolding from the liminal in between spaces of my bodymind, trying to navigate the reality of society’s expectations for how I should be and my day-to-day life as a mum, trying to juggle family needs, work needs, and manage my own Autistic ways of being.
As Autistic/ADHD people, we may be, as Tarragnat suggests, practising “worldmaking where the boundaries between the subject and the world dissolve”. In many ways, we have to create our own spaces and live in our own timeframes to survive (and hopefully thrive)! I think it was James Baldwin who said, ‘The place we need does not exist, we must create it’. Tarragnat, in their blog, From the Autistic Umwelt to Autistic Worldings, drew my attention to the work of Stacy Alaimo (2016), who, in line with post-human feminists, suggests that Autistic people are not ‘in the world…. but we are of the world’. We need safe spaces to be our authentic selves and be of the world and accepted.
My relationship with my environment is fluid, porous, and deeply relational. This profoundly shapes how I live, perceive, and manage my time. I connect strongly with the theory of monotropism, yet I also see value in layering a post-human and neuroqueer lens to help frame my temporal experience.
As an Autistic person, subverting neuronormative time often feels essential for my survival, even more so now after repeated cycles of burnout. I need to find ways to help prevent another burnout cycle or at least lessen the impact, if I can. I feel I need more space to honour my own monotropic rhythms and energies, more space to go with my flow, rather than against it, as described in my recent blog about my Map of Monotropic Experiences, Stuck States vs Flow States.
I believe this kind of release from the grip of neuronormative and capitalist time isn’t just for neurodivergent people; it could benefit everyone. By neuroqueering ourselves and time, anyone and everyone can break free from the neuronormative time structures that bind us all to capitalism and restrict our lives in so many ways. Instead, we may be able to live more attuned to our own temporalities and more at one with our environment and those around us.
Bergson’s Durée and Monotropic Time
Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser developed the theory of monotropism in the late 1990s. It is typically described as a neuro-affirming theory of Autism, but I think it is also a temporal mode. I am considering whether being monotropic is not just about using attentional resources differently but could also about experiencing time differently due to how we use our attentional resources, and this impacts us.
If you’re monotropic you may notice that:
Time is immersive and fluid.
How you use your attentional resources may feel like being in a tunnel, and the world outside of that tunnel may feel like it is melting away or completely disappearing.
Temporal markers (like deadlines, calendars or clocks) may lose meaning or become really stressful and cause intense dysregulation.
Transitions may feel disruptive because they pull us out of durational temporal coherence and flow.
I think this may be why neurotypical expectations around punctuality, deadlines or “moving on” often feel unnatural and sometimes even painful for monotropic bodyminds. I am suggesting these aren’t signs of being too rigid or an innate dysfunction; instead, they may reveal a mismatch between temporal systems, different ways of perceiving time.
Monotropic people may innately value and resonate more deeply with continuity and internal flow. Neuronormative time, which the majority of the population live by, values and prioritises a more fragmented, externally governed time (that of the clock) that fits into workplace demands much more easily. This conflict of time perception can cause a lot of pain and is a constant tug-of-war and hard balancing act to maintain.
It dawned on me whilst listening to Absurd Being today that this mismatch of experiencing the world is not just a communication gap and difference, as described in the Double Empathy Problem (Milton 2012) it’s also a Double Temporality Problem. Perhaps the world and the majority of people run on neuronormative time (temps), but monotropic people live and experience life more in felt time (durée) – in fluctuating flow states, a different internal rhythm that is unique to each person.
The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) distinguished between two kinds of time:
Durée: lived, qualitative, and immersive duration. This is the rhythm of consciousness itself and FELT experiences.
Temps divides time into identical units, i.e., seconds, minutes, and hours. Durée is felt time. It is how we experience time from the inside, and for Autistic/ADHD people, that may be more sensory and dependent upon the environment and how safe we feel. Bergson saw durée not as a subjective illusion but as the real nature of time, with clock-time being the abstraction.
Clock-time has been constructed by society. It is what Freeman (2010) in their book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, called chrononormative time. Chronomormative time is an understanding of time set up by society for the purpose of production. It makes an ideal framework for capitalist society to thrive, but potentially goes against the natural rhythm of many neurodivergent people and causes harm and stress, and can lead to burnout, as I described in my last blog, Monotropic Time.
For many Autistic people, durée may actually feel more like our authentic way of being than temps. This duality of time may help explain some of the difficulties we experience (feeling of always rushing, being overly early or ending up late to events, stressed with deadlines, juggling diaries and executive functioning tasks – ending up either late or early to events!). Autistic/ ADHD people’s difficulties with time may be due to our internal sense of time not being innately aligned with external clocks and calendar time. In many ways, neuronormative time goes against the natural flow of monotropic time perception. Monotropism is defined by having an intense focus on a limited number of interests. I think this generates a different temporal experience, one that often resists fragmentation as it breaks up flow.
Fragmenting time into minutes, hours, and days is needed to physically function in the world today, but it can also cause many problems for monotropic people and needs to be carefully managed. It takes huge amounts of energy to navigate my way through every day. I have to set many alarms, I have reminders up everywhere, and task manager apps to keep myself on task and to ensure my work and family life functions, but this also has its downsides. It can be highly dysregulating to have my monotropic flow and time upset by alarms, unexpected events and interruptions, as all I want to do is live in my monotropic time and deep dive and remain in a flow state (often by myself or with intermittent parallel play/body doubling way of working and existing)! It is when I am experiencing monotropic time and completely engaged and absorbed that several hours can pass by unnoticed and feel like minutes. Alternatively, when in states of overwhelm, every minute can feel stretched and unbearable, and it feels like it is lasting hours.
Rather than living by the ticking of a clock, I feel I do better and feel better when I am living my life in monotropic time, it supports my natural way of being, but real life demands – family, work, household chores make that hard at times, really hard! Monotropic time is deep and rhizomatic; it doesn’t flow easily across a calendar of events, it is almost as if it is multidimensional or neuro-holographic. A monotropic way of being is not measurable by using a 24-hour clock or regular calendar and is unique to each individual. It is shaped by emotional salience, sensory flow, and what I could describe as interest gravity (the weight and pull of attentional resources towards certain things that draw us into flow states), not by ticking hands or digital countdowns.
Flow States: Restorative Time for Monotropic BodyMinds
Flow is the psychological state of full immersion in a task or activity. This concept is not limited to neurodivergent people; everyone benefits from flow. I think flow is deeply aligned with both durée and monotropism. Coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), flow involves things like:
Intense focus,
A distorted sense of time,
A merging of self and action,
And deep emotional reward.
Monotropic people often enter positive flow states with ease, especially when we’re able to follow our interests without interruption and when we are in neuro-affirmative supportive environments. This is when we thrive as monotropic people. Flow is not just about work and productivity, it is about sensory experiences. Flow can be joyful, rejuvenating, restorative and balance the bodymind (it can of course have it’s flipside though, especially for those experiencing OCD as discussed in my blog Monotropism, Autism and OCD (2024).
For myself, monotropic flow isn’t just a productive state, it’s a healing one. It brings regulation, coherence, and balance. However, when I am forced into chrononormative routines, my access to flow is often denied. Flow, for my monotropic mind is like a temporal home, it is my basecamp. Being outside of flow and battling with neuronormative time has significantly contributed towards my repeating cycles of burnout.
Deleuze, Becoming, and Neuroqueer Temporalities
From my limited understanding of the philosophy of Deleuze and Bergson’s thinking, I see Deleuze as having expanded Bergson’s concept of time a bit further. As I have previously written, I feel that Deleuzean concepts fit Neuroqueer theory really nicely, as described by Nick Walker in their book Neuroqueer Heresies, (2021). Deleuze in his book The Fold (2006), describes time as being folded, and nonlinear. I explored this in more detail in my writing about Caverns, Pleats and Folds (2023).
It is in these folds and liminal spaces that perhaps monotropic people can find flow, as the spaces outside of the liminal are so hard to fit into. If we lean into the folds and gaps in society, we can create our own spaces and ways of being that really meet our needs, so we don’t need to mask, reduce or suppress ourselves to fit into society’s expected ways of being, including fitting into neuronormative time. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze proposed that time is not simply a container for events, but an active process of becoming, it is a ceaseless unfolding where past, present, and future interweave. It is in these in-between spaces that we can unfold and be our authentic selves and be expansive.
It is perhaps when we find our safe people and safe spaces that we can engage in flow, live in monotropic time and neuroqueer time, further opening up more possibilities for ways of being and ways of living. An example of this is how my sleep has always been seen as dysregulated and somehow ‘wrong’. I have naturally always been awake more in the early hours of the day and late hours of the night, even as a young child – maybe because the world is quieter then and I can just be myself in flow. No amount of sleep training advice or medication over almost 50 years has ever really had an impact. Battling against this to live and work in neuronormative time has been hard and led to burnout and mental health difficulties. Now that I am no longer working as a teacher and restricted to set hours, I have more flexibility with time. I am able to plan my day around my own attention tunnels and children’s needs to enable a smoother flow that is more in line with my monotropic perception of time. I carve out pockets in my day for monotropic time and flow as I juggle against the reality of needing to keep to appointments and other work commitments, and meet my children’s needs. It is a bit of a balancing act, but being aware of this helped enormously.
Deleuze wrote of time being “out of joint,” embracing it as a space for new potentialities. Many neurodivergent people live in this “out-of-jointness”: in liminal, quantum, speculative time. We are not delayed or broken; rather, we may be differently temporal. Understanding this and having a more flexible approach to time and managing flow could be really helpful and support the well-being of many Autistic/ ADHD people.
Neuro-Holographic Time: Folding Time and Memory
In Quantum Neuro-Holographic Thoughts from a Liminal Space, I explored how my Autistic perception often feels layered, recursive, and multidimensional, like a hologram where each part contains the whole and is deeply entangled and resonating with the space around me.
I think this matches Bergson’s view of memory as something durational, not stored data but rather a living resonance. A smell can collapse decades, a sensory pattern can echo across timelines and dimensions of time (neuronormative time and monotropic time). Many Autistic people may not live in a rigid timeline but instead live more in a temporal field, one that is sensitive, porous, and entangled and could be described as being neuro-holographic.
Neuro-holographic time is not fragmented; it’s folded and can be unfolded and expanded. Time may be experienced differently within a fold. Folds hold memory, emotion, and sensory perception as simultaneous experiences. In this folded time, our sense of identity itself becomes fluid, unfolding in nonlinear rhizomatic omnidirectional ways. We are not fixed selves on a schedule; we are more like events in motion resonating with our environment.
Neuroqueering Time: Time Travelling
To neuroqueer time is to resist the assumption that there is one correct way to be on time, or one right way to live, to grow, to succeed. Chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010) is the cultural pressure to conform to timelines of productivity, milestones, and life stages. But for many Autistic/ ADHD people, these timelines feel alien and can cause stress and lead to burnout as neuronormative time goes against monotropic people’s natural flow and use of monotropic attentional resources. It can feel like we are maybe time travellers going between neuronormative time and monotropic time, time travelling is exhausting (and misunderstood!)
By embracing felt time or monotropic time (durée ), we can engage in flowy, spiraly time, embrace the intensity, and find restoration and rejuvenation in the liminal spaces where we can be our authentic selves. We can begin to liberate ourselves from neuronormative time constraints and structures. When we stop forcing ourselves to match neuronormative ideals, time frames and rhythms that exhaust us can be liberated. We can reclaim our own unique sense of time, a different way of resting, a different way of working and managing our days. I didn’t choose to be measured by neuronormative time frames, it has actually caused me harm. I am starting to lean more into my authentic monotropic ways of being, which includes a more spirally, expansive, flowy perception of time too, which is supporting my well-being.
By neuroqueering ourselves and neuroqueering time, anyone and everyone can break free from the neuronormative time structures that bind us all to capitalism and restrict and cause harm to lives in so many ways. We may be able to live more attuned to our own temporalities and more at one with our environment and those around us if we liberate ourselves from the ticking hands of the clock and find more flexible ways to manage our flow and our own time.
Like Bergson’s idea of duree, monotropic time is FELT. It is immersive, expansive, flowy, omnidirectional and deeply rhizomatic. Let’s dwell in our natural flow and rhythms, actively resist neuronormative time, find spaces to neuroqueer time further in the liminal spaces and embrace our own unique rhythms and monotropic time.
References
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Bergson, H. (1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Bergson, H. (2022). Creative Evolution. Routledge.
Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Dwelling in Resonance: Monotropism, Monotropic Time, Spirals & Neuroqueer Temporalities
“Lodged in all is a set metronome” –
(W. H. Auden, 1969 – from the poem In Due Season)
Consider if you’re Autistic/ ADHD/ Monotropic and what happens if your internal metronome beats to a different rhythm to other people?
For many of us who are Autistic, ADHD, or AuDHD, time is not a straight line. It spirals, loops, expands, contracts. It may feel like you have your own rhythm or internal metronome that others may not be quite in synch with, or like you are singing a song that others cannot hear the beat of. I will briefly explore the theory of monotropism (the tendency towards deep, focused attention where more of your attentional resources are used on fewer interests at any one time) in relation to my experience of time as an AuDHD monotropic person and offer am emerging neuroqueering perspective of the fluidity of time.
(This is a shortened and edited version of my much longer blog about Monotropic Time (2025), which evolved from my series of Medium blogs, where I have been exploring some Deleuzean concepts within a framework of Neuroqueering Liminal In-Between Spaces (2023) ………amongst other random ideas!)
Neuronormative Time
Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of “chrononormativity” is introduced in her book Time Binds (2010). She explains how we learn to use our bodies through normative time—schedules, deadlines, and life stages—all governed by the logic of productivity. According to Freeman, chrononormativity encompasses the socially reinforced expectations and norms of how we spend our time – it makes us question what governs ‘productive’ time and what we see as ‘rest’ time.
In a world dominated by chrononormativity or what I will call (neuronormative time), the capitalist, clock-driven expectation is to be productive, punctual, and linear, neurodivergent ways of moving through time are often pathologized. If you are Autistic/ ADHD/ AuDHD you may find you are often stigmatised for being “late,” “chaotic,” or “disorganised,” when in fact, you may simply be existing on a different temporal wavelength. As Tolani and Venkatesan write in The Time We See (2025), time isn’t neutral. It’s structured by ableism, productivity demands, and neurotypical developmental milestones. If you fall outside this invisible scrip, if your time bends, stretches, and spirals, you’re often thought of as disordered or somehow needing fixing or interventions. Perhaps the differences in the way we experience time can be explained by the theory of monotropism? Perhaps it is an ontology?
Monotropic Time
I think the theory of monotropism (Murray et al. 2005) could offer us a lens to reframe time for Autistic/ ADHD/ AuDHers who are more likely to be monotropic (Garau et al. 2023). If you use more of your attentional resources on fewer areas of interest than others, then perhaps your experience of time will narrow too in some ways and expand in others? Just like our monotropic experiences when zooming into our passions and perhaps deep diving into a rabbit hole of research and creating ever-expanding constellations of rhizomorpheous connections or being so immersed in a sensory experience of looking at light reflecting on water or onto your wall that you feel you have may be almost become the tiny fragments of light (or may be that is just me?!) ?
Having a different perception of time could also help explain a large part of the Double Empathy Problems (Milton 2012), especially between monotropic and polytropic people. If you’re like me and monotropic, hours can feel like minutes when you’re in a deep attention tunnel and fully engaged in a flow state; outside demands may feel like they literally melt away or dissolve. It is perhaps not that we’re “losing time”; but rather, we can reframe it that we are dwelling within time, immersed in a resonant spiral of attention that is tunnelling ever deeper the longer we are engaged and the deeper into a flow state we go. It may feel like pure Autistic joy if you are engaged with something positive (alternatively, it could end up feeling like an eternal loop of hell and ruminating anxiety-filled, all-consuming thoughts if your attention has hooked into something less joyful).
When in flow, the concept of “now/not now” becomes irrelevant. You are simply in flow, it can feel like the the world outside of your attention tunnel filled with neuronormative demands and expectations is literally melting away. This could be seen to be monotropic temporality. If you are monotropic, you may feel more attuned to your environment; everything may be felt more intensely, thoughts and time itself is not linear, and everything from the core of your being may be more interconnected. Time itself may be felt differently as we experience the world differently. If you are monotropic, you may feel that time is spirally and rhizomatic and flowy, just like your thoughts, sensory system and interests or passions!
The Riverbanks of Monotropic Flow
In my Map of Monotropic Experiences, I describe monotropic time as being like a flowing river. When we’re in the right environment and are able to follow our passions and immerse ourselves freely in sensory experiences, we may be able to swim easily within the natural smooth current and flow of our bodyminds. However, when we’re pulled out of our attention tunnel and flow state by unexpected events, transitions, and external expectations and demands, the river can turn turbulent.
It takes more energy resources to fight against external demands and neuronormativity; it can feel like you are swimming upstream; are using all of your energy but not getting very far and never reaching where you want to be. This is only sustainable for so long before people end up spiralling into what I have visualised as burnout whirlpools. Monotropic people are may be more likely to get stuck in states of inertia, loops of anxiety and ruminating thoughts, not because they’re broken, but because the majority of the world refuses to flow with us and we are swimming against our natural tides. You can only swim upstream against your natural flow for so long before you are likely to hit burnout and start to struggle.
Monotropic time is nonlinear, rhizomatic, and relational. It’s shaped by sensory experiences and a deep embodiment of the environment and relationships around us. If you are monotropic, you may have a different temporal ecology that needs support, not correction. Without the right accommodations, support, and safe spaces to be your authentic self, the waters of neuronormativity can be dangerous and lead to burnout and mental health difficulties.
Neuroqueering Time: A Temporal Liberation
“Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.” ― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
To neuroqueer time is to resist the tyranny of the capitalist clock and neuronormativity. It is to refuse productivity as a measure of worth and instead honour attunement, resonance, flow states, connections and meaningful relationships with people and with our environment. As Nick Walker writes in their book Neuroqueer Heresies (2021), neuroqueering is not just about identity, it’s a practice of creative survival. Neuroqueer temporality isn’t just for Autistic people or ADHDers, it’s also an invitation for everyone to find their own rhythm and dimension of time that works for them.
From Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception to Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of flight that I wrote about in my blog Middle Entrance (2023), some ideas are slowly starting to make a bit more sense for me and are beginning to connect in new ways. I began my Medium blog (which is now hosted on Autistic Realms) by exploring Lefebvre’s ideas around the concept of space being alive. I feel space (like my own Autistic/ ADHD identity and energy) is fluid. Space constantly changes and depends on the interactions of those around us and objects within other spaces. I have been exploring ways of finding meaning in the spaces within what could be considered ‘ma’ to enable thoughts to develop and create connections with others from as I explored in my neuroqueering from the liminal in-between spaces blog(2023).
Embracing monotropic time could be seen as a form of neuroqueering as defined in Nick Walker’s (2021) book Neuroqueer Heresies. I have been considering if the energy created by these connections can lead to even more new spaces, ideas, and possibilities by subverting the expectations of the normativity of relationships and communication in my blogs about neuroqueering from the in-between and liminal spaces. I am now looping some of these thoughts back around and centering them on the theory of monotropism and my different way of experiencing time.
If we embrace our natural monotropic flow states and monotropic spiral time, we can maybe begin to understand time not as a schedule or governed by a ticking clock or by timetables set out by neuronormative expectations. Instead, we can explore how, as Autistic/ ADHD people we may experience living in monotropic time more as a form of relational, moment-to-moment negotiation between our environment and ourselves. From a neuroqueering perspective, if we embrace monotropic time, it can enable us to expand and defy time set out by neuronormative ideals and be liberated from the ticking clock of capitalism.
A World Beyond the Clock
Whether we call it spiral time, neuro-holographic time, or monotropic time, what matters is that we validate these different temporal realities. Because for many of us, time is not measured in minutes but in meaning. Monotropic time is like a portal, whereas neuronormative time may feel more like a prison at times, or at least like we are trying to swim upstream and going against the very essence of our natural monotropic flow and rhythm.
In 1943, T.S. Eliot’s collection of four poems were collated to form Four Quartets. The final poem in this series Little Gidding (1942), continues Eliot’s exploration of time and our connections with each other through generations and current society.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
This quote seems particularly relevant to my deep interest in evolving spirals and finding meaning in gaps and spaces and an experience of monotropic time that I am continuing to explore and loop back to Eliot’s poetry.
I visualise time, relationships and ways of being as constantly evolving spirals that spin in and out in multidimensional ways. Different connections and experiences add to and contribute to a wider, deeper, fluid rhizomatic network of potential that is always in a constant state of flux, perhaps more so if you are monotropic. This idea of an evolving spiral and returning to a new beginning in the middle is beautifully reflected in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea”.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.
To support monotropic people, perhaps we need to bend or unfold neuronormative time. As Autistic/ ADHD/ AuDHD people, we likely need more space and flexibility to thrive in a world dominated by neuronormative demands and governed by neuronormative time. We need to create room for flow, for stillness, for neurodivergent ways of resting, regulating and rejuvenating, for our monotropic deep dives and immersive sensory experiences and for our nonlinear rhythms. We need to let go of the myth of “normal” time and start dwelling in resonance, which may enable us to be more at one with the natural flow of our bodyminds and our environment.
We all have our own internal metronomes that are responsive to the environment around us. As monotropic people, we may need more flexibility and a softer, more supple understanding and acceptance of our different perceptions of time from people around us. As Tolani, P., & Venkatesan, S. (2025) summarise their paper published last week The Time We See: ADHD, Neuroqueer Temporality, and Graphic Medicine, “It is crucial to recognize that time perception is not universal but varies across neurotypes, suggesting a broader and more inclusive view of temporal experiences.”
To support monotropic people, we need to create safe, spacious environments where time is allowed to stretch, spiral, and soften. Monotropic time must be honoured not as a deviation but as a valid, expansive and different rhythm and way of living.
When we make room for fluidity and loosen the grip of rigid schedules, tight timetables and linear binary expectations, we can then enable space for monotropic time perception to unfurl, unfold and expand rhizomatically so we are not just surviving and trying to swim upstream but can immerse ourselves in flow and thrive to be our authentic monotropic selves.
Neuroqueer temporality isn’t just for Autistic people or ADHDers. It is an open invitation for everyone to discover their own rhythm, their own flow, their own temporal dimension that feels right. Each person moves through time differently, shaped by their neurology, bodymind, and personal lived experience for some it may be they experience time more neuro-holographically.
To honour neurodiversity, we need to slow down, soften, and make space for each other, and for ourselves. When we allow time to bend, spiral, expand and breathe and when we embrace flexibility and presence over pressure, demands and neuronormative expectations we can create environments where everyone can flourish in ways that are more meaningful to them and everyone has the potential to thrive.
Heasman, B., Williams, G., Charura, D., Hamilton, L. G., Milton, D., & Murray, F. (2024c). Towards autistic flow theory: A non‐pathologising conceptual approach. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12427
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005a). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Rapaport, H., Clapham, H., Adams, J., Lawson, W., Porayska-Pomsta, K., & Pellicano, E. (2023). ‘I live in extremes’: A qualitative investigation of Autistic adults’ experiences of inertial rest and motion. Autism, 28(5), 1305–1315. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231198916
Tolani, P., & Venkatesan, S. (2025). The time we see: ADHD, neuroqueer temporality, and graphic medicine. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 68(1), 117–138. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a953457
Cartographers are people who create maps, and they transform physical geography into an accessible format so people can navigate in and through the spaces of the world. I recently watched a National Geographic documentary about caving ‘ Explorer: The Deepest Cave | Disney+ (disneyplus.com’). It led me to consider the underground maps inside the earth, the connections, pathways and hidden caverns that have not yet been explored. There is a whole space deep below the ground where you are currently that offers new possibilities, and it is within these folds of rocks that form the earth there are even more folds and spaces full of potential to explore. Whilst watching this film, I related it to the potential for people and thinking about how we need time and space to explore and discover what is inside us, time and space to make connections with others to give our lives meaning and time to explore the spaces within our folds, pleats, caverns and channels.
A particular moment in the documentary sparked my imagination. Around 11 minutes into the film, the cavers were trying to find the best route to go next. They created a small amount of smoke as they explained that ‘the stronger the smoke, the bigger the spots between the rocks are,’ which would indicate a path for them to explore. They said, ‘The wind can go places that we can’t. So the question is, can we follow the wind?’
‘Can we follow the wind’?
This leads me to Deleuze and his work around The Fold (1993). ‘A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold…’ (pg. 6). A fold is like a continuous curve; there is always a deeper element. I see this as much like a cave with pleats in its geography, where there are ‘folds of winds, of waters, fire and earth’. As I sat watching this programme with my son, I began to think about the infinite nature of our bodyminds and how caving could work as an analogy to describe the internal process of neuroqueering that is expressed outwardly on a cartographer’s map.
Neuroqueering and being a part of the neuroqueering community is the equivalent of trying to work your way around a rhizome, another concept Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss in their book One Thousand Plateaus. The outward map of how we live our lives in society reflects how we present ourselves and our bodies. This map can also reflect the journey our bodyminds take over time as we age. Increasingly, people are leaving digital trails of their thoughts all over the internet. They are making connections within these spaces, leading to an ever-increasing multidimensional map between cyberspace and the reality of where we are physically.
Choosing to neuroqueer your bodymind can be seen as an act of rebellion. However, I see it more as an act of seeking connections at a much deeper level with those in a similar space to you rather than needing to outwardly represent ‘queering’ in the way perhaps the punk movement did in the 1980s. Maps are a way we navigate paths as we head towards a destination, or they are used to reflect on past journeys and movements. If you choose to neuroqueer, you may find an intersection where the digital paths of the internet communities meet the folds inside your bodyminds. Within these rhizomatic communities, meaning is potentially being created for so many people who are otherwise unable to connect or feel a connection with people outside of these spaces in their local communities.
There is a natural human need to feel understood and connected; connections build relationships and support good mental health. For some people, those connections and relationships may not look different from the more conventional norms the majority of society holds but are equally valuable. For people who feel marginalised either by neurodivergence, disability or by being in another minority group, there is often no space already carved out for support and building connections in local communities. This can cause feelings of isolation and disconnection. Yet, the need to find people who understand and can connect within the same folds, with similar interests and values, can lead people to create their own communities.
It feels like a rabbit warren of underground tunnels and caves where people meet, mainly through online social media platforms. The continuous physical growth of these spaces where people are connecting is slowly creating ripples and heading into real family spaces and showing a genuine need for change in our education system as more and more children are showing how the current frameworks are just not meeting needs and resulting in school attendance difficulties and mental health concerns. There is a rise in the UK in families actively seeking alternative pathways through home education or alternative provision routes. Neuroqueering is not just a philosophical theory; it is about actively looking for positive change and creating new paths in your life and for your family towards a happier future.
Deleuze considers if ‘the world is infinitely cavernous if worlds exist in the tiniest bodies, it is because everywhere there can be found a spirit in matter’ (1993, p.7). This supports the idea of energy flow and the importance of the soul as a subject if we want to go beyond any boundaries and evolve and improve our mental health and that of our families. If this is the case, we need to unfold ourselves; this could be linked to a much deeper concept of autistic unmasking, where you find ‘some little opening’ of possibility within yourself to expand your body-mind; it is a space within a tiny fold / unfolding that we may be able to begin to neuroqueer. Much like the cavers who have to physically twist, turn and contort their bodies to fit through the gaps to find new caverns, we can find new spaces within and between the folds of our bodyminds through neuroqueering.
The potential to neuroqueer is inside us all, within a fold in a cavern. This may feel much deeper within some people than others due to the heaviness of neuronormativity, adding its layers and creating tighter folds for some people. It would be interesting to discuss if the concept of folds and caverns within autistic people is more porous or open to the possibilities of neuroqueering than non-autistic people.
Neuroqueering could enable a metamorphosis, a transformation process from within a fold. This is like how Deleuze describes a butterfly being ‘folded into the caterpillar that will soon unfold’. Deleuze finishes his first chapter by describing how ‘ the Fold is always between two folds’. Neuroqueering offers the potential to explore what is between the multiple folds and creases we live in and that are within us.
Let’s ‘follow the wind’ and see where neuroqueering takes us.
I experience and interpret ‘Being With’ as a process of be-coming together. Deleuze’s concept of the line of flight allows us to explore and follow meaning together. This article will explore these ideas in a bit more detail.
This post is a pulling together of several discussions I have had online over the past few weeks that were initially inspired by Joanna Grace and her team of researchers (all of whom have profound and multiple learning disabilities). Joanna Grace has been sharing the progress of their PhD project across social media, exploring the idea of ‘Being with and Identity’.
The 3-minute YouTube video of ‘Being With’ was part of The Research Methods e Festival (an online event organised by NCRM) looking at identity and ‘Being With’. There are two videos I’d like to share that I feel capture the wonderful potential and essence of what I believe should be at the heart of care and educational experiences for everyone celebrating the potential of:
*togetherness
*sense of embodied belonging
*shared experiences
* safe spaces
Video 1
Video 2
Bridging a Gap
Up until now, people with profound and multiple learning disabilities have been the “missing voices of inclusive research” (Walmsely, J). They have been the people others have researched on or for but not with (Nind, M. (2017),Practical Wisdom of Inclusive Research). This new research is helping to bridge that gap, not just by finding the voices of those with profound and multiple intellectual and learning disabilities but by providing space for them to share their way of being collaboratively. By being with people, we can create a space of shared experiences; there is potential and possibilities for a more enriching time together. This may be felt as an experience, a shared engagement rather than an event that can be easily captured in words or put into a lesson plan in school. It involves trust, not only between the people involved but within a school setting it also involves trust within the education system that those facilitating learning know the people they are working with.
Creating a Space of Being
Joanna Grace’s research team includes a girl called Felicity. In the video below, Joanna Grace talks about ‘creating a space of being with Felicity so that space can become a research encounter. This is an intended becoming of togetherness and enables a creative shared meaning that can only be experienced in a space of safety which is built up over time.
Giving time and ‘being with’ enables a deep connection to grow. I am familiar with intensive interaction and think it’s a truly wonderful approach. However, at the same time, having something called an approach can be a way of ‘othering’ those we are trying to include. This new research builds on intensive interaction in many ways, but I also resonate with this perspective shift and the simple potential of ‘being with’. These videos are only a glimpse of the wonderfulness that can happen when people are with each other in an embodied way, tuned in, sharing a flow state and rhythm together. To truly understand it, you have to ‘be with’.
“The concept of ‘being with’ is linked to finding the rhythm of the children but also attention to the ‘rhythm’ of colleagues, materials and ideas.” (Clark, A. (2023), Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child).
Felicity-ness
By creating space and time to be together, Joanna describes how it “enabled the Felicity-ness” of her “dancing fingers” so they could “dance together!”. I love the phrase ‘Felicty-ness’ as it sums up what can only be experienced in person with a unique individual. It is a feeling created between two people that may occur through dancing fingers, a vocalisation, an eye movement, or a different body movement. It is a moment that only happens in response to each other’s presence, a togetherness. The Felicity-ness of Felicity was able to shine through the space in what could have been missed in a busy classroom or by being preoccupied with everything else going on in life.
Working with children with profound and multiple learning and intellectual disabilities felt like my happy place to be. We shared and created sensory experiences together. Within the structures of a school setting, I aimed to ensure the children led our time together as much as possible and I tried to work as a facilitator to help enrich and develop those experiences in some way as a ‘teacher’ along with the class team. Sometimes things worked well, and other times less well. It was always a learning curve for me, too.
Tuning in and Togetherness
My Autistic Realms work is advocating to ensure learning environments are as neurodiversity-affirming as possible. I am not just talking about being inclusive practically or functionally and providing access to educational resources and differentiated meaningful learning opportunities; this should be a given. We need to be inclusive in our bodies and minds to be with each other. Being a teacher in the often stressful environment of a UK school system where everyone has targets to meet, and teachers are accountable for ‘progress’, I feel we are sometimes missing the essence of what ‘being with’ people is about in our role as teachers. If we focus more on ‘being with’ people, that narrative shifts slightly; there is less hierarchy and more equal opportunity to learn together.
To ‘be with’, you need to slow down and have time to tune in to a togetherness. It is very much in line with some of the core concepts of what has been described as ‘Slow Pedagogy’, an understanding of the need to value the present moment, the sensory needs and the pace and flow of the person you are with.
Line of Flight
Deleuze and Guattari (1980) explore the concept of the ‘line of flight’ in their work One Thousand Plateaus. Their work is helping me understand the neurodiversity paradigm and very fixed ideas we often have of people’s identities, systems in society and ways of being. Deleuze opposes the ideas of fixed identities, ‘normality’ and offers a way of embracing the differences and ways of being for everyone. I am still reading through much of their work, (definitely no expert on this) but I feel there is a strong connection between Deleuze and the neurodiversity movement and the process of ‘becoming’.
If we make spaces to be with people, we can follow a line of flight and have an embodied connection of ‘dancing fingers’ together. This could lead to a whole new, wonderful sense of belonging and a more meaningful connection and communication between people that can grow and ‘become’.
Being together allows people to join in a collective flow state, a line of flight, which can lead to new possibilities for individuals but also impact rhizomatically within a classroom and lead to more learning opportunities. However, I would argue that actually ‘being with’ is not necessarily about learning ‘more’ in the traditional sense of the next steps of a curriculum and mastering skills. Instead, transcending those preconceived ideas of what being a teacher means, what being a student is, and what being a person with profound and multiple learning disabilities may mean is a way of also reframing of identities. For me, ‘being with’ is about going deeper into the folds between people, embracing the shared feeling of belonging, being understood in the moment, and seeing where that takes you together.
Being-with and Be-coming
Deleuze’s concept of the line of flight allows us to explore meaning between created spaces and through our connections with people. It is a way of moving beyond and between the gaps of the often preconceived ideas of what ‘being with’ people may mean, what our roles as teachers educators, care facilitators may be.
‘Being with’ creates an opportunity for an embodied sense of belonging and wonderful, meaningful shared experiences. ‘Being with’ is a process of be-coming together and full of potential.
Thank you to Joanna Grace and research team, including Felicity and Senen (in videos above).
I believe that the DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem) is at the heart of all the systemic ableist issues we have in our education, social and healthcare systems. The lack of an embodied presence and connection between people being together as humans is causing harm. It is leaving marginalised people further on the edges and at an even further disadvantage socially, financially, politically, and in every other dimension possible.
(Original blog written August 2024, edited March 2025)
DEEP Disconnect
The disconnect, lack of understanding and gaping hole where a sense of belonging should be is creating huge mental health problems, especially for our neurodivergent young people who are the focus of my Autistic Realms work. Many young people are now left with no accessible education; they are slipping through the cracks of a broken education and mental health system and getting stuck between systems that value neuronormativity and ignore or misunderstand neurodivergent needs.
We don’t want people to be ‘falling through the net’, feeling like they are ‘treading water in unchartered seas’, feeling adrift’ and ‘weathered like sea glass’ (Shepherd et al., 2024). As Gray-Hammond (2024) has highlighted, this impact stretches far beyond the young person; it can break family and professional relationships in multidimensional ways, and it is painful. Helen Mirra (conceptual artist) responded to my last post about DEEP with her insightful thoughts:
“I almost sense a space of opportunity being described — that while being in double empathy tangles unaware can be disorienting, that an awareness of the double empathy problem could rather have a potential for orientation — with a consciousness that Double Empathy needs to be recognised and acknowledged — maybe something like DEAP — Double Empathy Awareness Potential? Practice?”
I love trying to harvest something positive, to try and find potential in the in-between of things, the shattered systems, and our fragmented relationships. I feel eternally optimistic that things can change for the better; we can work towards radical inclusivity and embrace neuroqueer theory to find a space to breathe, re-connect, deconstruct and reimagine new possibilities. If we are embodied, tuned in, and have wide-open sensory gates, we can acknowledge the empathy gap and create a new plateau, a new space to rise above the disconnect. “Queer space is a space of somatic and cognitive discovery, made possible by the space between. It is through that discovery that we make connection with others possible” (Gray-Hammond, 2024).
Monocultures
I have had a few amazing and inspiring meetings this week, one with Jorn Bettin (AutCollab) and another with Dawn Prince-Hughes (CASY), both alongside Ryan Boren (Stimpunks). We all feel the DEEP gap of disconnect due to the domination of neuronormativity. Jorn has captured this within his writing about monocultures. Dawn is exploring similar avenues with the groundbreaking work being carried out by the Cultural Autism Studies Programme at Yale (CASY). Dawn has described this as people being;
Unable to see shades of lived nuance and constitutionally lacking organs of exquisite sensitivity, the truncated, neurotypical gaze rakes over the bodies of (neuro-holographic) life — whether designated autistic, animal, any other undesirable caste, or nature itself — they assess them only in terms of cost, threats, or utility. They can’t or won’t see them.
Modern, connectively truncated influence has driven an obsession with homogeneity and increasingly raised a maniacal rejection of inward and outward difference to a hellish art form. The lives (and deaths) of sentient, (neuro-holograhpic) beings is foundational to daily life and underscores the danger of using gifts evolutionarily tooled for a better, more compassionate future are pressed into service for the structure we were put here to change. (Dawn Prince Hughes, 2023) *neuro-holographic = my edits.
Ecology of Care and Transforming Spaces
Jorn Bettin (2024) wrote about Life in the compost heap of industrialised monoculture. He echoes my experience of burnout caused by systemic unmet needs. Jorn agrees that neurodivergent and other marginalised groups are often left out, alienated, and at the bottom of the compost heap. However, we can help people thrive; we can change our personal and institutional landscapes. Jorn, through their work with AutCollab, suggests that we need to embrace an ecology of care.
The emergence of ecologies of care is the emergence of a beautiful diversity of human scale cultural species and organisms in the cultural compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult. (Jorn Bettin, 2024)
Dawn suggests;
We can start a new, inclusive movement by leading the way back to the primal awareness, the connective wisdom, we were born with, because we are first and foremost, in all ways that matter, neuroexpansive minds. (Dawn Prince Hughes, 2023)
Through our discussions this week, we realised our vision and aims for Neuroqueer Learning Spaces (Boren and Edgar, 2024), reach far beyond education and the small communities we are already involved with. There is an energy-driving created serendipity that is dancing between our shared spaces and bringing like-minded people together. We all have our own stories and history, and for many neurodivergent people, we all have layers of trauma that live within our bodies, spreading back over generations and impacting our sensory way of being in the present and impacting our ways of moving forward. As David highlighted by drawing upon Nick Walker’s (2021) work;
The master’s house represents a dominant paradigm. In the context of neuroqueer theory, this would be the pathology paradigm. A paradigm within which deviation from normative embodiment is seen as disordered. The liminal represents a space outside of the paradigm. It is a pinnacle of queer space in that its potential is one of unbounded queening; in the liminal, the very meaning of being human may be called into question. (Gray-Hammond, 2024)
Helen Mirra (2023) expands on this idea of human potential in her concept of holotropism, which I have explored in my previous blogs. She writes;
“To be holotropic is to have wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence. A sense of wholeness occurs through both of these processes — less consciously in hyperfocus, more consciously in coherence”. (Helen Mirra, 2023)
David Gray-Hammond is bringing the conversation further forward and exploring my original idea of the potential of Neuroqueering in the In-between. He shares that;
The queer liminal space allows for connection and expansion because there is no axis to follow. There is no map to trace. The pathology paradigm seeks to arborify rhizomes, reducing them to roots and radicles. In liminal space, lack of structure allows for the organic development and joining up of rhizomes. It is in the liminal where minority silos come together. To the master’s house, it is an existential threat. To the oppressed minority, it is a place where what we were taught to be impossible becomes not only possible but probable. With infinite liminal space and infinite time, queer improbability becomes queer realisation. That which we are told can not happen is subverted into existence. (Gray-Hammond, 2024)
Neuro-Holographic
When people connect at a deeper level, going beyond any social, cultural, racial or gender differences, meaning can be found where words are not needed; we can be with each other as human souls. To have ‘wide open sensory gates’ is to be innately hyper-sensitive and hyper-empathetic. However, I do think everyone can work towards this regardless of differences in neurology. We can all become more embodied through somatic practices and having a willingness to open your sensory gates, to de-armour, un-mask and by being prepared to be vulnerable when it is safe to do so. Being embodied enables deeper more meaningful connections to form, it creates resonance and vibrations, vibrations are pregnant with energy, and energy is transformative, it has neuroqueering potential.
The word neuro-holographic has emerged from within the neurodivergent community, “a buried treasure of our culture that used many hands to lift up into the light”. As Dawn suggested, ‘We belong to the term, rather than the term belonging to us’.
So, what does neuro-holographic mean?
Dawn helped draw some light on what neuro-holographic means in the CASY Facebook Group (March 2025) and wrote, “So many autistic people are aware of, and affected by, the reality that there is no division between them and their environment — whether it is the person next to them, the dog running in the park, the plant in the windowsill, or the star at the edge of the universe.” Dawn shared a quote from Brian M Sabourin, which helps to explain the link between neuro-holographic thoughts and Autistic Physics a bit further:
“According to quantum physics a particle vibrating due to your sound when you speak can affect a molecule inside a star at the edge of the Universe instantly. This phenomenon is known as quantum entanglement. The greatest illusion of this Universe is the illusion of separation.” (Brian M Sabourin, Jan 2025)
When Dawn, Ryan and I discussed the term neuro-holographic, there was an instant shared resonance and affinity with the word, we were all on the same plane, the same plateau. We all experienced and felt validation from a shared understanding of quantum entanglement through our experiences of being Autistic and a different sensory system, feeling tuned into a wider energy with the environment around us. We shared a rhythm and way of being as neurokin, and the double empathy problem that persists in so many other spaces was somewhat dissolved – an experience echoed by many within the thriving CASY community group and within our online events, too. There is a sense of togetherness, belonging, and a shared intention to work against harmful neuronormative practices and instead to work together towards transformative neuroqueer possibilities.
To embrace being neuro-holographic is to embrace opening up spaces within our souls so we can work together and transform society and support each other.
Bodies Without Organs and The Plane of Immanence
In their work, One Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari discuss the idea of a body without organs. The body without organs is not a hollow body; rather, I see and feel that it is the plane where dwelling and possibility are, a kind of “liquid matrix” (Theoretical Puppets, 2021); it is primordial, a place where you aren’t restricted by your organs (literally your body in real terms, i.e. freedom of movement) or the organs (machines) of society. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that networks and connections are made possible through the body without organs as it liberates you from Capitalism and the knots of neuronormativity. It allows people to be free from control, free to follow our desire lines, free to be affected (experience affects).
To use the analogy in the webinar delivered by Theory & Philosophy (2020), to be a body without organs could be interpreted as us being similar to an unfertilised field. If no seeds are planted, if there’s no relational pull or movement, then the field will likely remain a field; it will never transform, it will never produce an outcome beyond itself, and there will be no crops. This could be positive or negative for a field, but when we talk about people, we don’t want people to remain static, unchanged or stuck or to stagnate, and we don’t want other people and systems to be deciding our use and destiny without our consent or input.
We need people to have agency, autonomy, and control over their own lives, enabling them to keep on transforming and being responsive, organically moving with the seasons and inviting natural processes. We need an attunement with nature so we can all morph in time and space organically, embodied, and as whole beings.
Returning to our primordial ways of being and being intune with the natural rhythms of the world around us allows people’s sensory gates to expand, it enables created serendipity to form further connections, adding luminescent nodes to the autistic rhizome. When connections develop in shared holographic space/time, it also creates deeper (perhaps, holographic?) connections of shared meaning, the potential for safe unmasking and bodily liberty; it enables neuroqueering potential and ideas to form more creatively.
In our meeting, Dawn, Ryan and all perceived and felt the word neuro-holographic at a deep inner level, in our core, it was a ‘felt’ understanding more than a cognitive or intellectual resonance. I am considering if using Deleuze and Guartari’s idea of being “bodies without organs” could help people understand the experience of being neuro-holographic. Neuro-holographic is a felt perception, an open ‘One-All’ that is perhaps more likely to be experienced when people are not tied down by neuronormativity and they have unravelled themselves and lived wholly in the in-between spaces.
To become a body without organs you need to have safe spaces and time to explore, you need to want to actively seek and find alternative ways, new paths, new plateaus and horizons and to change yourself and the wider systems, planes and spaces around you. There is definitely an element of privilege in finding safe spaces and communities to be able to do this and also to have the time to explore. If I hadn’t resigned from my teaching career, I would very likely have not had capacity to even dip my toe into reading about all this, I would have likely been left feeling very stuck. Exploring takes time, and it also takes time to neuroqueer your bodymind, My neuroqueering journey has been rhizomatic, chaotic but I have also found coherence as I connect with others on the plane of immanence as human souls all trying to find meaning in places where perhaps words and concepts are not even needed or relevant and cease to make sense.
The Plane of Immanence, as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (1994), discusses philosophical concepts as “fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another”. They continue to explain;
They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of the dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the ways introduces a powerful Whole aining open, is not fragmented; an unlimited One all….it is a plateau, it is a plane of immanence of concepts’ (they also stress that the plane of immanence is not a concept). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p35)
On the plane of immanence, there are rhizomatic networks or connections, becomings and energy. In their book One Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari explain that on the plane of immanence;
“There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. … We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development).”
I have intentionally used a hyphen between the words neuro and holographic to represent the in-between of neurology and holographic ways of being and experiencing the world, a pause for tuning in, an embodiment, a space of Ma. I have resisted using the word “neuro-holographism as that could imply another new theory or concept. Neuro-holographic is not a concept; rather, I feel like it IS the plane of immanence on which neuroqueer theory breathes and lives; it is the ‘wave that rolls and unrolls’ other concepts (Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy, 1994, p36). To resonate with the term neuro-holographic is to resonate as souls, with your core self, perhaps with your spirit.
To be part of society is to be part of a community and to live meaningfully. It means connecting as human souls and having a sense of belonging and a sense of togetherness with others. For many neurodivergent and marginalised people, this lack of connection and shared meaning is where disconnect and further stigmatisation often hits and breaks people. For a radically inclusive neuroqueer future, we need radical acceptance and to embrace liminal spaces, the plateaus, the sometimes painful caves, pleats, and caverns where we may become stuck in our lives. As David suggests,
The liminal space, then, is not a place of stagnation, but one of growth and evolution. It is the site of plasticity in the world’s communities. All communities exist within liminal spaces, much as planets exist in empty space. A community was once a nothing that became a something, liminality provided the potential to become.
Being Neuroholographic and Embracing Liminal Space to Neuroqueer
To be neuro-holograpic, to resonate with holotropism and embrace neuroqueer theory means that the weight of neuronormativity may be felt so painfully that it feels like it is piercing through the bodymind. This light can flow, it can move between the smallest of spaces and opening and shines through liminal spaces to offer some hope in previously dark void spaces. It allows light to enter Ma, a space where we can pause and breathe and act upon neuroqueer thoughts that can transform our bodyminds. It can enable new nodes on the rhizome to form from within our communities as we connect with others and transport us to new planes, new spaces to become and keep on becoming. Once DEEP is dissolved or there is a bridge or line of flight to rise above and support understanding of the differences between people, it allows for responsiveness without imposing on each other to change into something we aren’t (we don’t go from a barren field to a crop field ). We can transform within ourselves and create our own destinies by creating new paths. The impact of our inner transformation can lead to even more connections and so further expand the rhizome towards other bodies without organs to keep evolving, transforming and becoming.
Once we grasp and intentionally embrace the plateaus of liminal spaces, the smooth spaces, then the DEEP gap can dissolve and melt away, rising above the liminal disconnect. We can take a breath, be responsive to our environment and our relationships, and (in theory) ‘become bodies without organs’ to transform further. We can become neuroqueer in a phenomenological sense. Instead of the machines of capitalist society filling the spaces, if we embrace neuroqueer theory through the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs idea, then we can actively choose to subvert and queer the direction we travel in and neuroqueer ourselves and the spaces and relations around us, neuro-holographically.
Holographic Bodyminds
Dawn, Ryan and I tried to define the word and experience of being neuro-holographic, but we couldn’t; we just shared excited nods and stimmy responses of mutual agreement and joy at our connection. Perhaps the beauty lies in the way that the word neuro-holographic can only be felt or experienced in a luminescent, undefinable iridescent way, which creates a holographic energy of light and vibration that expands and ripples beyond our singular bodyminds to connect with other bodyminds, it creates multiplicity from the friction between us as humans. Connecting with others enables an expansion of our community rhizomes in exciting ways full of radical inclusive neuroqueer possibilities.
Dawn Prince Hughes works with Dr. Roger Jou, who founded CASY (Community Autism Socials at Yale) in 2014. This has now transformed into CASY (CULTURAL AUTISM STUDIES AT YALE). CASY offers a new way forward for Autism studies; they are a community that is truly pushing beyond the boundaries of normative hegemony but also stretches the potential of Neuroqueer Theory. CASY is based on a completely egalitarian and neuro-holographic model that stretches worldwide and involves many languages and cultures! If you’d like to find out more, please check out the links below:
Shepherd, J., Sutton, B., Smith, S., & Szlenkier, M. (2024e). ‘Sea‐glass survivors’: Autistic testimonies about education experiences. British Journal of Special Education. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12506
Theoretical Puppets. (2021, March 28). Gilles Deleuze on Gilbert Simondon, Synesthesia, and The Body Without Organs [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2yyW3ml6nM
Theory & Philosophy. (2020b, August 4). What is the Body Without Organs? | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari | Keyword[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irrNcRPGr8Q
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press
“By silencing our bodyminds, they (neurotypical society) have halted the growth of a chaotic self. We are no longer able to move fluidly through our experience, instead frozen like ice on an arctic tundra” (Gray-Hammond, 2023)
David Gray-Hammond (Emergent Divergence) and I are responding to each other’s blogs to help expand the Autistic Rhizome. We are adding nodules to the webs of discussions happening in the Dark Forests (Boren, 2024) of the online communities and creating an open-source bank of writing to carve a path for community discussion about neuroqueering.
David is continuing his ‘Reclaiming Neurofuturism’ series and has responded to my post The Double Empathy Problem is DEEP. He explored the litigious nature of disabled embodiment and questioned the intentional creation of minority silos via the double empathy divide (Milton, 2012). In support of my own thinking, David also suggests that we need to embrace the healing power of liminal spaces.
I am writing extensively about the in-between, liminal spaces and Ma as a potential chapter for Nick Walker’s new Neuroqueer Anthology (struggling to write it coherently so that it may make sense to others, but it is slowly forming!). Liminality has been a long term passion of mine, tunnelling back over 30 years. As an autistic person, I feel I have lived my entire life in the liminal. I have always been in-between or on the edges of social groups, always struggling with an internal battle due to the effects masking has on my sensory system. Being monotropic has meant the in-between is felt intensely; it has led to cycles of burnout and impacts my mental, physical and sensory health.
I am still living in the liminal, on the edges, often in spaces filled with anxiety and uncertainty. However, I have gone through a huge and difficult process of unlearning and relearning over the past few years since I realised I was autistic, rejecting the deficit ways of thinking about neurodivergence and dismantling my own ableist thought patterns. Patterns that have been reinforced over decades by the weight of neuronormativity. I am grateful for the autistic communities I am part of for supporting me and providing cushioning to help me navigate my way through this messy process whilst trying to prevent myself heading into a deeper burnout cycle. However, I still feel like I am living on the edges, even within the most caring and supportive neurodivergent communities.
The years of masking, the impact of living in a neuronormative ableist-driven society and going through cycles of burnout has, in many ways resulted in my bodymind being ‘silenced’, getting stuck. David echoed this feeling as he explained;
“By silencing our bodyminds, they (neurotypical society) have halted the growth of a Chaotic Self . We are no longer able to move fluidly through our experience, instead frozen like ice on an arctic tundra.”
Tundras are cold and harsh environments, but biodiversity adapts to the landscape and the short growing seasons, plants and animals transform their ways of being to survive. Tundras offer some hope that life can exist even in the cruellest of environments.
However, we don’t want people feeling frozen, stuck on an arctic tundra, trapped in endless freeze/thaw/burnout cycles. People deserve more than a life in survival mode where they are constantly on high alert for danger and in looping patterns of sensory regulation-seeking behaviour, living in Meerkat Mode (Adkin, 2023). In Walker’s inspiring presentation, ‘Expanding the Creative Potentials of Human Neurodiversity’ at ITAKOM (It Takes All Kinds of Minds Conference, March 2023), she explored how we need to work together so we can flourish so that the;
‘creative synergy, the chemistry that is between and among different minds’ can emerge…so the magic happens’.
We need our beautifully different bodyminds to work together; we need to develop a common language and be open to different ways of thinking, more accepting and inclusive. Radical inclusivity is a concept Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) and I have been exploring as part of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Project. There is no single path to radical inclusivity; it begins with being embodied, of being open to connecting with yourself and others, it is cultivated by ongoing neuroqueering efforts to meet needs, it is a confrontation with normativity. Radical inclusivity is more than accommodating needs; it is about fostering cognitive and somatic liberty to enable the potential of neuroqueering to open up new, as yet unknown possibilities.
Radical Inclusive spaces would benefit everyone. They are embodied spaces of deep connection and safety where people can tune in and be responsive to the needs of others. They offer a deeper connection, and they close the DEEP double empathy gap that I feel is at the root of so much hurt, pain, disconnect and disorientation. For radical inclusion, we need to work together. We need connections, a shared deep understanding, an embodied presence, a sense of meaning, and a sense of belonging. We need community, love and kindness to expand the rhizome.
Deleuze and Guattari’s One Thousand Plateaus (1980) explores the concepts of the rhizome and also the importance of plateaus being transforming spaces that resist the linear hierarchy of neuronormativity and embrace the potential of the multiplicity of rhizomatic connections. The possibility to use these concepts to explore neuroqueer theory shines through One Thousand Plateaus, it is like a sunbeam bringing hope in Ma, inbetween the doorways of the liminal spaces that so many of us may feel we are living in.
Rhizomes are open-ended; they have no middle, they have no start and there is no end. (Much like this series of blogs between David and I, I am again beginning in the Middle Entrance, again. You are joining conversations that have been evolving over the past two years in David’s Emergence Divergence Discord server, a node of the autistic rhizome, Open invite to join us there!).
In summary:
Rhizomes are interconnected networks of shared ideas and experiences filled with potential. Much like neuroqueer theory, rhizomes have multiple entry points, they are non-heirarchical. Anyone can neuroqueer, and anyone can enter a rhizome at any point, at any time, if the desire and intent are inside them to want to transform and explore neuroqueering.
Smooth Spaces challenge the idea of traditional hierarchy. They are continuous spaces where the theories of Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005) and Flow Theory (Heasman et al., 2024) can flourish and open up creative neuroqueer potential, an emerging way of being. I experience smooth spaces as the spaces in the gaps of the rhizome; they are the liminal spaces.
Plateaus are spaces of stability; they offer balance and equilibrium, equity, potential for awe and wonder and further expansion and transformation.
Liminal Spaces provide smooth, open plateaus, spaces to connect, transform, and neuroqueer from the safety of our rhizomatic communities.
This new series of blogs will provide a plateau for discussion, a space where the intensity you may feel of being stuck at or between a node point of the rhizome can gain some stability and grounding. We are seeking to expand our bodyminds as we write and connect with others, exploring the dynamics and discord of the DEEP Double Empathy Extreme Problem. As Walker (2019, pg 283) suggested in her thesis;
“we need to “look beyond social cues to the deeper dynamics of interacting bodies, exceptional tactile and kinesthetic sensitivity, and affinity for what I’ve termed the aesthetics of emergence”
We are opening discussions to explore the endless possibilities of an awe-inspiring neuroqueer future, to help bridge the DEEP empathy gap so many people are experiencing and to work towards a radically inclusive society.
“To recognise our responsibility to each other lies in our power to create better futures for each other. Connection is the striking surface of a hammer on the walls of the masters house.” (Gray-Hammond, 2024)
Heasman, B. et al., Towards autistic flow theory: A non-pathologising conceptual approach. Journal for Theory of Social Behaviour, https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12427
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005c). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Nick Walker. (2023, March 19). Dr Nick Walker • Expanding the Creative Potentials of Human Neurodiversity • ITAKOM Conference 2023 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOITXkj5bqM
Walker, N. (2019). Transformative Somatic Practices and Autistic Potentials: An Autoethnographic Exploration. California Institute of Integral Studies ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019. 27665905.
A behind-the-scenes look into the collaborative workflow between Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms) and Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) as we write about Neuroqueer Learning Spaces (NQLS) and continue our neuroqueering journeys, connecting with awe-inspiring people and discovering new ideas to explore along the way.
Liminal Spaces
Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) and I are neuroqueering ourselves and the spaces we work in as we write about NQLS. We met online in 2022 in the liminal spaces between various online neurodivergent communities, both constantly feeling on the edge of things, even in the most neuro-inclusive settings and groups we could find.
We are both autistic and multiply neurodivergent and deeply passionate about working towards radical inclusivity. Due to our lived experience as parents and professionals, we have seen first-hand the harm that the heavy burden of cisheteronormativity, neuronormativity and neuro-essentialism is causing, especially to neurodivergent people. Normativity is breaking people’s mental and physical health and severely destroying the tremendous potential that is inside everyone. We need to find caring spaces to connect with others, to create an ecological system of care (Bettin, AutCollab), a responsive space that enables authenticity and values the potential of everyone, regardless of neurology, disability, race, gender or any other intersection that is marginalised.
Liminality
by Carrie Newcomer (2021)
So much of what we know Lives just below the surface. Half of a tree Spreads out beneath our feet. Living simultaneously in two worlds, Each half informing and nurturing The whole. A tree is either and neither But mostly both.
I am drawn to liminal spaces, The half-tamed and unruly patch Where the forest gives way And my little garden begins. Where water, air and light overlap Becoming mist on the morning pond.
I like to sit on my porch steps, barn jacket and boots In the last long exhale of the day, When bats and birds loop in and then out, One rising to work, One readying for sleep.
And although the full moon calls the currents, And the dark moon reminds me that my best language Has always emerged out of the silence, It is in the waxing and waning Where I most often live, Neither here nor there, But simply On the way.
There are endings and beginnings One emerging out of the other. But most days I travel in an ever present And curious now. A betwixt and between, That is almost, But not quite, The beautiful, But not yet.
I’ve been learning to live with what is, More patient with the process, To love what is becoming, And the questions that keep returning.
I am learning to trust The horizon I walk toward Is an orientation Not a destination And that I will keep catching glimpses Of something great and luminous From the corner of my eye.
I am learning to live where losses hold fast And grief lets loose and unravels. Where a new kind of knowing can pick up the thread.
Where I can slide palms with a paradox And nod at the dawn, As the shadows pull back And spirit meets bone.
Our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project is born largely from trauma, grief and a shared passion for challenging, deconstructing and re-imagining what our education and healthcare system could be like if people were prepared to unlearn and unleash their bodyminds from the weight of conforming to neuronormative, socially constructed ways of being. The pressure to ‘fit in’ is real and intense, and neuronormativity is limiting for everyone (not just neurodivergent people).
The pressures and barriers to education and health care we have endured and are still battling against are heavy. It has left us, like so many other people in our situation,feeling broken and ‘weathered like sea glass’ (Shepherd et al.,2024). As part of NQLS, we have created a community-driven NQLS Manifesto and an NQLS Open Framework of Guidance. We are also in the process of developing anti-behaviourism resources to help parents/carers and professionals and those they support to challenge harmful practices, such as (Applied Behaviour Analysis) ABA and (Positive Behaviour Support) PBS. These WHY SHEET resources are free open license and can be edited and used to help self advocate for young people who may be facing barriers accessing education.
If you value this project, please consider signing our WHY Sheet endorsement page along with many other parents/carers and professionals to help give confidence, agency and autonomy to those needing these resources.
Where my voice has often felt dismissed as a parent, it is often validated, listened to and sought as a professional. Trust is an issue. Different voices are trusted by different people, in different places. Safe spaces are needed to develop trust, and time is needed to be with people to gain trust. Reaching out and connecting takes courage; there is always a doubt as to whether you are really in a safe space where you can truly trust and be trusted. There is a vulnerability in admitting things aren’t working, exploring what is under the surface, finding people to connect with who share your struggles and ethos, and having a shared hope for change to find a way out of difficult situations. We need spaces where we feel safe and where there is trust so that we can unlearn and relearn and continue to neuroqueer.
As a white professional person, being a part of both the neurodivergent parent/carer communities and the professional education and healthcare communities, I am aware I am in a unique and relatively safe position of privilege to even write and explore this topic. Enforced hierarchy and the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) are at the root of so many difficulties and often result in the voices of neurodivergent or disabled people being dismissed. At best, voices may be silenced, and at worse, lived experience can be so deeply misunderstood and misinterpreted it can lead to accusations of not parenting ‘right’, being sent on courses to try and make families conform to neuronoramtive ideals, or in some of the most severe cases we have seen lead to accusations of neglect, FII and safeguarding concerns (Shona Murphy).
Trust, safe spaces, and community are vital to NQLS and our own personal neuroqueering journeys. When the world feels unsafe, you need to create your own spaces and make your own connections. We think creating neuroqueer learning spaces is one possibility that is worth exploring.
Can we trust the space you offer? Can we trust the words you utter?
Can we trust the time decided? Can we trust the form provided?
Can we trust your singular view? Can we trust the treatment we receive from you?
Can we trust the way you perceive? Can we trust you to sit, listen and receive?
Can we trust you not to leave another dent……in us….again? Can we trust the system you’ve decided and provided … will it actually be in our best interest… … with our knowledge and guide?
Can we trust you to understand that sound is once, twice, three times as loud? Can we trust you to understand that light, ‘that light’… there is burning, burning our eyes?
Can we trust you to provide the space to breathe? Can we trust you to understand that our senses are more involved- BIGGER? Can we trust you to let us move away from you… that you cause the trigger?
Can we trust you not to deplete our hard fought for energy and vigour? Can we trust you to listen when we say we are tired…. and let us leave the room?
Can we trust you to give us time to form……form our own words…..it our way and not yours?
Can we trust you not to constantly correct when we misspell or stutter? Can we trust you to say what you are going to do and not just assume?
Can we trust you to understand that your correction……. may only be correct for you?
Can we trust you to not magnify difference and constantly question our existence? Can we trust you to leave us and let us decide?
Our work has taken place in the dark forests of online communities, “Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity”. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, Element, Discord and a myriad of other interconnected platforms that people are seeking because they are “spaces where depressurised conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.” The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet — OneZero via The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. This dark forest metaphor fits nicely with the NQLS idea of primordial learning spaces such as our Cavendish caves, campfires, and watering holes.
** Caves are spaces for quiet reflection, introspection, and self-directed learning.
**Campfires are spaces for learning with a storyteller — teacher, mentor, elder, or expert.
**Watering holesare spaces for social learning with peers.
Intermittent collaboration = group work punctuated by breaks to think and work by ourselves.
The golden thread of being a “space holder” has been inspired by Kay and Dan Aldred (2023) and is woven through our NQLS ideology. It is within the forests of online community spaces that the role and value of being a virtual “space holder” is valued. It allows the exploration of thought and the creation of connections within connections — rhizomes within rhizomes.
As a community, Stimpunks has a unique way of working; they have created and are nurturing the role of ‘space holder’. This has enabled me to safely explore, take risks and expand my ideas of how workspaces can be transformed. Stimpunks is a living example of how a neuroqueer learning space can work and is working .
Stimpunks offers various online platforms and spaces in their local community. They offer;
watering holes for collaborative work and parallel play,
campfires to learn from others & share resources
caves to rest, and have independent time to reflect.
Our Journey
Ryan’s IT skills have been embraced and expanded as we collaborated with people across various countries and communities, merging projects and ideas, which is something we will be continuing to develop. This is in line with AutCollab’s NeurodDiventures project where our “evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human”. NQLS aim to create radically inclusive, non-hierarchical spaces that are safe, nurturing environments for divergent (and neuroqueer) thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction. We believe NeuroDiventures is a wonderful structure for NQLS to build upon.
This has been, and continues to be a fairly intense, immersive roller coaster of a journey. Ryan and I are both Autistic, multiply neurodivergent and monotropic. We dived into this project with our entire bodyminds, leaving little space for other work, which has sometimes been tricky to navigate and manage, switching attention tunnels as monotorpic people is exhausting. Our shared interest, passion and seemingly endless capacity for neuroqueering our bodyminds and education has made our workflow fairly prolific. Whilst Ryan has created new additions to Stimpunks neuroqueering webpages, I have infodumped my thoughts as I have read through 100’s of pieces of work (academic research papers, blogs and books) related to the barriers of education our young people are experiencing and ideas for more humane progressive neuroqueering ways forward. Ryan has been diving into his own reading lists and also sharing with the Stimpunks team along the way. We have a mountain of materials; what we have reflected upon and written about so far is only the tip of the iceberg. We are trying to weave in emergent thoughts as we go along, creating a neuroqueering tapestry of ideas which is reflected via Stimpunks website and our blogs and social media posts.
Writing
As with all projects, there have been hurdles and obstacles to overcome and crashes along the way where we have just become ‘stuck’; this has been no exception. The ebbs and flows of our own mental and physical health have had an inevitable impact. We have had to find ways between our time zone differences, family demands, lifestyles and different workflow patterns to try and resolve things along the way. One of our biggest stumbling blocks was the actual process of writing. This was a significant issue given that our project needs to be reflected online through words and the spaces between our words to bring meaning to others.
We needed to find ways to write and work together in a shared space, which involved neuroqueering my own ways of working and collaborating. It has made me reflect upon previous projects, taking the positives and negatives and bringing some of those ideas into our shared new online spaces and neuroqueering them in the way we communicated and socialised in multiple online watering hole spaces where we discussed what we had learnt from others in our meetings (campfire spaces) and reflected by ourselves (in cave spaces) in our own niche constructed sensory dens at home.
The progress of my IT skills have been lying dormant since the late 1990s. Ryan is a former WordPress and Automattic lead developer with a very efficient workflow system fully embedded into Stimpunks running of their organisation. I worked as an early years and primary teacher in the UK, supporting those with profound and multiple learning disabilities. I learnt the importance of listening and being there even when verbal words aren’t used, the value of connecting in shared spaces, and the potential of guiding learning by following and building on children’s personal interests to deepen their learning through play to provide more meaningful experiences. These were all valuable experiences for NQLSs, but my tech and writing skills were not developed beyond the needs of class planning and report writing.
Collating vast amounts of research and creative writing using either my trusted Word or Google Docs was not working for Ryan; it was proving to be a huge barrier to any successful collaboration. While our independent work was carried out in its own fairly reliable way, our collaborative chapter for Nick Walker’s upcoming new Neuroqueer book, which we hope to submit a chapter towards, was very stuck.
I defaulted to multicoloured pens and paper and laboriously retyped my thoughts onto my laptop, transferring them to our websites, whilst Ryan was magically transforming our many conversations on a live stream via Stimpunks.
Due to the distance of around 5000 miles separating us, these conversations took place and continue to take place across multiple online platforms, often simultaneously, as we move between our many open tabs of Discord, Element, Word- Press, Facebook, Twitter and a myriad of other apps and spaces within the same conversations, often resting in HyperBeam for co-regulation and to share music and videos with other Stimpunks family peers, creating a sense of togetherness and belonging.
Whilst the conversations continued to flow, our collaborative chapter remained static as a 20k word draft of my stream of consciousness lay in Ryan’s inbox with hyperlinks to a vast amount of research to try and validate and justify (some of) my thinking (some of it is just my thoughts, and I am hoping they may resonate with others?!).
We called on the support of a member of the Steampunks team to help bridge the gap, but it soon became evident we needed an entirely different system to work. Being a tech person at heart, Ryan needed Markdown as a part of his creative writing method (Markdown gives documents semantic structure without specifying formatting at all). We have now transferred our working documents to GitHub, enabling a flow to resume, and I am quickly seeing the benefits of adopting Stimpunks workflow thinking and moving on from 1997. (However, I still use my multicoloured pens and paper to make notes as I go!)
We are approaching an extended deadline date for Nick Walker’s chapter submission, but with a neuroqueering workflow in place and the evolution of our ever-expanding Cavendish online spaces, we are making progress, hurrah!
Onwards
Living within Stimpunk’s myriad of primordial Cavendish Cave, Watering Hole, and Campfire spaces in the forests of the online community is proving to be an epic journey. I have found spaces where I can finally breathe, explore, have some me-time, continue my own neuroqueering journey and intermittently collaborate with others. I feel fortunate to be meeting some amazing people along the way. I am having fun, diving between and venturing out from the edges of liminal spaces to create and explore neuroqueer learning possibilities with others who share this passion and know the potential of Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
If you want to learn more, here are some codes to Markdown and plain text and the workflow thinking they enable.
If you’d like to learn more about collaborating, please contact us via Stimpunks. (PS, we accept submissions and collaboration from everyone in all formats and languages, including handwritten work using paper and pen, voice recordings/ podcasts, photography, art and all forms of Alternative and Augmentative Communication……all welcome, Mardown skills are not a requirement!).
Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Webinar — A summary and reflection
Neuroqueer Learning Spaces is a community project led by Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) and Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms). More information is available on Stimpunks’ website.
To support this project and open up further discussions about neuroqueering education and learning spaces, David Gray-Hammond hosted a live webinar, “Explore Neuroqueer Learning Spaces,” with Dr. Nick Walker on 6 May 2024. This is available to watch via David’s Emergent Divergence website and on Facebook & YouTube.
All quotes are taken directly from this webinar unless otherwise stated.
What is neuroqueering?
Nick began the webinar by reminding us that ‘Neuroqueer theory is an extension of queer theory into the realm of neurodiversity”. Everyone can neuroqueer. Neuroqueering is not limited to people who are innately neurodivergent and also queer; neuroqueering is open for everyone to explore.
Neurodivergent people can neuroqueer and diverge themselves into ever-expanding neuroqueer ways of being. Neurotypical people can engage in neuroqueering to diverge their bodyminds further and liberate themselves from socially instilled norms.
Neuroqueering is an act; it has intent; we can neuroqueer how we live and how we experience, interact, engage and respond to the world around us. Within our neuroqueer learning spaces, we are exploring how neurotypicality, which is socially constructed, can be queered to liberate bodyminds. As part of our Stimpunks Learning Spaces project, Ryan and I are also exploring the benefits and potential of embracing an embodied education within our neuroqueer learning spaces. An embodied education is also something that Nick expanded upon and stressed the importance of as she shared some examples of her practice within this webinar.
“Neuroqueer theory is about creative neurodivergence” (Nick Walker)
What if…?
“Neurotypicality is limiting” (Walker). Neuroqueering involves engaging with life and opening up possibilities. Neuroqueering expands potential, questions boundaries and subverts normality. It enables us to explore, to try, to be curious; it opens up questions and the potential of ‘What if…?’
The potential of ‘What if?’ is often found in children’s excitement, awe and wonder as they playfully explore the world around them. They may excitedly run up to you with a twig or shiny stone they have found, wanting to share that moment of finding something that fills them with joy and curisoity and is reflective of the pure magic of being alive and discovering the wonder of the world. Over time, the awe of finding the ‘Marvellous in the Real’ (Grand, 1978) often becomes eroded in people due to the neuronormative expectations that weigh down on our bodyminds to behave, act, talk and even only show joy in certain ways.
Nick and David expanded on this by referring to Nick’s writing about hand movements and stimming, which is also explored in Neuroqueer Heresies (2021, p183–191). There are often enforced school rules based on neuronormative values and expectations for having “quiet hands”, doing “good sitting”, doing “good looking” (making eye contact with the teacher in class) and demonstrating attention skills in specific ways. The use of Positive Behaviour Support(PBS) plans and Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) to reinforce certain behaviours and actions, such as ‘quiet hands’ has been proven to cause considerable harm and trauma, especially for autistic people as it aims to suppress and eradicate their innate need to regulate by stimming and expressing themselves authentically. There is a comprehensive resource list about the harm of behaviourism on Stimpunks website. We are also creating “Why” sheets to help parents and professionals advocate and provide neurodiversity affirming alternatives to support young people.
Many other questions were posed throughout the webinar, including:
How do we queer neuronormativity?
How do we queer our bodyminds?
What does this look like in a learning space?
(We hope to expand these webinars so we can loop back to some of these questions and the comments raised in the text chat. )
Systems
Nick and David briefly (it is a huge topic!) talked about systemic oppression and agreed that education needs a system of some kind. We can not just destroy the education system; it is not practical or realistic. Some parts can be used or at least transformed. We can neuroqueer the education system.
People need structure; routines are as important in neuroqueer learning spaces as they are everywhere else. Routines provide feelings of safety and reduce anxiety. More flexibility is needed for people to be responsive and open to change and transformation. We need to ask what our routines look like, what purpose they have, and what use are they? How responsive and adaptable are they? Are they created in collaboration with others?
Inspired by the quote from Audre Lorde (1984), “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, Nick said that we don’t need to burn the system down; instead, we should:
“Queer the system, queer the tools and create new tools.” (Nick Walker)
David highlighted that contemporary approaches to research looking at the oppressive structures of our education system are often reactionary, suggesting systems are torn down; however, this could be a barrier in itself to neuroqueering. If you are focused on tearing down the system, you are not neuroqueering. Neuroqueering is not destructive; it is transformative.
To neuroqueer is to transform, not destroy. (Helen Edgar)
Based on the work of Stafford Beer’s cybernetic principles, Nick suggests that it is not necessarily the idea of systems and hierarchy that are the problem; instead, it is the way neuronormative ideals currently enforce them. We need more flexibility and collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches.
To what extent are some parts of the current system repurposable?
Can we remake the tools, and create new tools?
What do we want to dismantle, and what do we want to reshape?
Space
How can we queer our physical learning spaces to free the body?
Nick shared her experiences as a professor, and she emphasised the importance of being a facilitator of learning. She shared with us how she values adopting a collaborative approach to learning where students are not passive recipients but are co-creators. She asks her students to question what knowledge they bring to their learning space so everyone can learn together.
Nick provides a liberating neuroqueer space for students to express their ways of sharing the knowledge they have gained and collaborating with others. Not enforcing neurotypical ways of demonstrating t ways (tests or enables people to express themselves in ways that suit them, whether through art, poetry or other forms of self-expression. This way of working leans nicely into the courses Nick delivers and facilitates. It would be interesting to know what neuroqueer learning spaces could look like for other subjects, younger age groups, and those with different needs and interests.
Based on her own experiences, Nick suggested a few practical ideas for neuroqueering the physical layout of learning environments. Even small changes can make a difference; instead of having desks in rows, she suggests having circles and a variety of other places that enable freedom of movement and embrace different learning styles.
In our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project, Ryan and I are looking at the potential of Cavendish Space based on the three primordial learning spaces advocated for by David Thornberg.
“Cavendish learning spaces are based on flexibility, interaction, movement and the role of embodied responsive experiences. There is no learning without the body. The boundaries of traditional neuronormative classroom settings not only restrict embodied experiences but lead to disembodied experiences and can cause harm”. (Boren and Edgar, Stimpunks, 2024)
Cavendish spaces are psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction. They have a golden thread of an embodied education running through them, and there is endless scope for learning the potential of the body, mind and soul. (Boren & Edgar, Stimpunks, 2024)
”Enabling autonomy of movement and acknowledging the different ways people learn best through their bodies needs to be considered. It is essential to allow people to move around, pace, stim, sit on the floor, and adopt positions and movements that are comfortable for them and have the freedom to change”. (Nick Walker)
This is only the start of our journey exploring neuroqueer learning spaces. If you are interested in our project and would like to learn more, please get in touch with us at Stimpunks.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate” — Carl Jung.”*
Thank you to David Gray-Hammond for hosting this event and thank you to Dr. Nick Walker for your support and the fabulous webinar.
* a quote often attributed to Carl Jung (nb. there is no reference we can find for this but Dr. Jung did say: The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Christ: A Symbol of the Self, Pages 70–71, Para 126.)
I am starting my new blog in the middle. I am in the middle of what is known as ‘midlife’ as I am forty-five; I am also mid-career, having resigned from teaching and not yet working in any other defined role. I also live much of my life in and between the online (primarily neurodivergent) communities.
These spaces have become my places of safety, support, and escapism and are a wonderful opportunity to develop connections. Henri Lefebvre (1991), in his work The Production of Space, explores the concept of space being a ‘living space’. Lefebvre wrote, “Nothing disappears completely… In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows… Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.”
Lefebvre’s ideas support my thoughts around the concept of space being alive; I feel space (like our own identity and energy) is fluid. Space constantly changes and depends on the interactions of those around us and objects within other spaces. I am exploring ways of finding meaning in the spaces within what could be considered ‘ma’ to enable thoughts to develop and create connections with others. I believe this could be seen as a form of neuroqueering as defined in Nick Walker’s (2021) book Neuroqueer Heresies. I am considering if the energy created by these connections can lead to even more new spaces, ideas, and possibilities by subverting the expectations of the normativity of relationships and communication.
‘Ma’ is a Japanese concept and has no English equivalent but can be loosely translated as the space between things or a pause between events. Fletcher (2001), in The Art of Looking Sideways, quotes Isaac Stern as describing music as “that little bit between each note — silences which give the form”. In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1980) explore the concept of a ‘rhizomatic’ model of thought and ‘shifting bodies’. I have been thinking about how ‘ma’ relates Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and neuroqueering by enabling the physical space between people to create the potential for energy to grow.
In our everyday lives, at this very moment, people are joining online communities for information, to seek understanding, and connecting with others. The general themes of this blog series will include an exploration of; the philosophy of Deleuze, the history of art (specifically the minimalist movement), the connections between language and the forming of relationships and an exploration of Nick Walker’s (2021) theory of neuroqueering. I aim to demonstrate how we can find a space to nourish and support mental well-being at some intersection between these concepts and topics for those interested and open to exploring these ideas.
I can already feel a deep flow weaving between these topics, even though that is currently happening in a slow, fuzzy, hazy way. My own thoughts will inevitably be shaped by the interactions and discussions I have with others about these subjects. I aim to create a singular, more coherent chapter which will contribute towards a larger anthology of work from within the community interested in neuroqueer theory. I want to be transparent about my aim with anyone who engages in shared stories and conversations with me on this journey. I value connections and collaboration and hope this will draw various people and communities together that are interested and resonate with some of these ideas.
In 1943, T.S. Eliot’s collection of four poems were collated to form Four Quartets. The final poem in this series Little Gidding (1942), continues Eliot’s exploration of time and our connections with each other through generations and current society.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
This quote seems particularly relevant to my deep interest in evolving spirals and finding meaning in gaps and spaces. I am returning to themes I started exploring almost 25–30 years ago from the new perspective and understanding of my autistic identity and, more recently, through an exploration of neuroqueering.
I visualise relationships and ways of being as constantly evolving spirals that spin in and out in a multidimensional way. Different connections and experiences add to and contribute to a wider, deeper fluid rhizomatic network of potential that is always in a constant state of flux. This idea of an evolving spiral and returning to a new beginning in the middle is beautifully reflected in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea”.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
I have struggled to start this blog as I believe there is no definitive way to start anything; finding a specific point of anything is impossible as there will always be multiple folds, pleats and deeper intersections, which could be classed as a ‘start’. I see this as trying to find a space ‘between two waves of the sea’ as Eliot wrote. There will always be something preceding and will always be another connection and intersection. However, if we can open our bodyminds, we can find moments of stillness, a pause, and meaning can grow from within the spaces between objects and others; this is where creativity and potential evolves.
In The Fold(1988), Deleuze explores this idea in his first chapter, ‘The Pleats of Matter’ by drawing on the work of Leibniz and Monadology (1714) in a beautiful description which summarises the infinite amount of folds and pleats that can occur within origami where, the ‘a fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern’. This concept of the monad further explores the folds of time and space as a continuous process of ‘becoming.’ This is something I will be returning to.
Throughout my following few blogs, I aim to ‘unfold’ and explore The Fold and other writing more deeply. I see these folds as a fluid state rather than a defined line, and it is within this fluidity that neuroqueering ideas can be further explored too. I visualise this being similar to the autistic experience of monotropism. This concept evolved from the work of Murray, Lawson and Lesser (2005), which I will also return to in a future blog; I see this as a way of identifying and understanding my experiences and how I relate to others.
Deleuze’s idea of folds and pleats fits into my interpretation of neuroqueering, which allows infinite possibilities to be created by subverting expectations and exploring how far your bodymind can go. Deleuze writes, “Unfolding is not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold. Particles are ‘turned into folds’ that a ‘contrary effort changes over and again’. It is a chance for infinite possibilities and potential for everyone and a way to embrace neurodiversity in the purest sense of the word, meaning everyone has potential.
Nick Walker (2023), at the ITAKOM conference, shared some of her ideas in her talk titled, ‘Expanding the Creative Potentials of Human Neurodiversity’. In this talk, she described the potential of neuroqueering to enable infinite possibilities through a collective synergy. It is through connecting with others that the ‘magic happens’. This suggests that the magic happens in the gaps and the spaces where the potential is within ‘ma’. I want to explore the ways that challenge our need to rely on language and words to allow us to discover the possibilities and endless interpretations of neurodiversity, where we can just ‘be’.
The concept of ‘ma’ represents a space of potentiality, a space that is open to the emergence of new ideas and experiences. Through the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical writings, minimalist art and neuroqueer theory, I would like to explore and develop a deeper understanding of how embracing the concept of ‘ma’ offers a way of creating connections and understanding the relationships that exist between people, things, and ideas.
My next blog will build on starting in the ‘middle space’, and I will explore Deleuze & Guattari’s philosophical term ‘rhizome’ as discussed in their work, A Thousand Plateaus. I am going to relate this non-hierarchical concept to the neurodivergent community and neuroqueer theory as I explore the idea that there is ‘no definable entrance or exit point or centre’ and there are ‘multiple ways in and out’ of experiences and our connections with others.
