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  • The Fallow Field: Rest as a Freedom Practice

    The Fallow Field: Rest as a Freedom Practice

    Inspired by our Writing the Dawn Gather and Write session and Julia Lee Barclay-Morten’s Intuitive Processing Workshop, October 2026

    Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, painter, musician and educator who became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, filled Stray Birds with poems so short that many are a single line.

    Verse 24 reads:

    “Rest belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes“

    (Tagore, 1916).

    Nobody thinks of blinking as a failure of seeing. The eyelid closes so many times a minute, keeping the eye protected, and sight is only possible because it briefly rests. Rest, in Tagore’s line, is part of the work, held inside it, the way an eyelid is part of an eye.

    In an earlier post, Reclaiming Rest: Autistic Burnout, Monotropism and Resistance, I wrote about how Autistic and monotropic ways of resting can look very different from the rest that society recognises and validates. A monotropic bodymind focuses its attention deeply on a few channels at a time (Murray et al., 2005). This can bring joyful flow and, for me, long stretches when I forget to eat, drink, or notice my tiredness.

    Autistic burnout is long-term exhaustion, often with a loss of skills and expected ways of functioning, brought on by the chronic stress of living in a world that values neuronormativity (Raymaker et al., 2020). When we finally stop, the stopping is often read as laziness, avoidance or regression. If you are AuDHD like me and your rest involves movement, it may not be recognised as rest at all. It may seem like nothing meaningful is happening. I want to linger with what is seen as “nothing” and emptiness. Is anything ever really nothing or empty?

    Ma: the fullness of the space between

    The Japanese concept of Ma (間) offers a different way of thinking about emptiness. Ma is often translated as interval, gap, pause or the space between, though none of these quite holds it. It describes the meaningful space between things, in a room, in music or in a conversation, and the felt time of waiting, pausing and resting (Pilgrim, 1986). Older forms of the character showed moonlight shining through a gap in a gate. Later the moon became a sun, and both versions show light passing through an opening (Pilgrim, 1986, p. 258). The space between the gateposts is where the light comes in.

    Ma is shaped by Shinto and Buddhist thought and runs through Japanese architecture, garden design, theatre, music and everyday life. The architect Arata Isozaki brought it to wider international attention with his exhibition Ma: Space-Time in Japan (Isozaki et al., 1979). I come to Ma as a guest, I am a white British woman and Pilgrim (1986) notes that for some Japanese people it is a deep and living word that resists being analysed across culture and language at all (p. 257), so I hold my reading of it lightly and am mindful of this, but also inspired.

    What moves me is how much Ma treats the pause as being so full and alive. Isozaki describes how, in Japan, space and time were never fully separated and were understood as belonging to each other (Isozaki et al., 1979, as cited in Pilgrim, 1986, p. 256). The silence between notes gives a piece of music its shape, the empty space in a garden lets the stones and moss be seen, and the pause in a conversation leaves room for something unspoken to arrive. I see Ma as a full empty space, full of becoming.

    For many Autistic people, those pauses are where we can come back to ourselves. We may need longer processing time before answering, quiet stretches between social demands, or a whole evening of deep diving into our passions and interests after a busy day. These spaces are often treated as gaps to be filled, delays to be corrected or proof that we are falling behind. Seen through Ma, they become intervals with their own life and meaning.

    Pilgrim (1986) describes the Shinto practice of komoru, a retreat into a secluded space such as a cave or a temple room for renewal. These are places that hold nothing and yet are felt to be full of sacred power (p. 263). I think of my sensory den a little like this. Reclaiming these spaces means letting the pause belong to us. We do not have to justify the emptiness or fill it with something more acceptable.

    What would it be like to be a fallow field?

    Farmers have long left fields fallow, unplanted for a season or more, so the land can recover. A fallow field looks as if it’s waiting. You can imagine a farmer leaning on the fence and wondering when it will be ready. Imagine, though, being the field itself, and answering. It might say something like this:

    You see stillness, and I understand why. From where you stand there is only stubble and weeds and the slow grey of the sky. Down here it is busy in a way you cannot see or hear. Rain is soaking back into places that were baked hard from the summer sun. Worms are pulling last year’s leaves down into the dark. Roots I never planted are loosening the clay, and when they die they will become food for whatever comes next. I smell of wet earth and rot but I am moving, slowly at the pace of the cycles of frost and thaw. Please do not walk across me to check on me. I will tell you when I am ready, and you will know it by my greenness.

    This is how I have come to think about Autistic rest and burnout recovery. The fallow season is where our mind and body soil rebuild their capacity and energy. The repair happens deep inside us, out of sight. For me it keeps its own seasonal monotropic time rather than going by any expected schedule, such as a 6-week CBT course aimed at easing my depression. Rushing it, or ploughing it up to prove to others that something is happening, tends to strip away what was quietly being restored and leaves me even more depleted.

    Pilgrim (1986) calls these intervals “pregnant nothings.” He draws on the Noh actor Komparu Kunio’s idea that time can be empty without ever being uncreative (p. 259). Isozaki describes Ma as the expectant stillness that comes just before a change, a moment called utsuroi (Isozaki et al., 1979, as cited in Pilgrim, 1986, p. 270). I picture the field in that stillness on the morning before its first green shoots. A fallow field is a kind of Ma in our internal landscapes, an interval between harvests where the light gets in through the gate.

    Rest as Resistance

    Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry (2016), has been advocating for many years that rest is a form of resistance against grind culture, capitalism and white supremacy, systems that treat human bodies as tools for production (Hersey, 2022a). Her work grows from Black liberation theology, womanism, Afrofuturism, somatics and community organising. It began from her own generational exhaustion as a Black woman in America and from remembering Ancestors whose rest was stolen through slavery (Hersey, 2022b). Access to rest is always shaped by race, class, disability, gender and care responsibilities. She asks anyone moved by her messages of reclaiming rest, perhaps reclaiming our fallow periods, to learn that history slowly and to honour it.

    Hersey describes rest as anything that connects your mind and body (Hersey, 2022b). She is talking about far more than napping in the day or buying expensive pillows and wellness products. For many Autistic people, that connection to meaningful rest might come through stimming, a sensory den, immersion in a beloved interest, long walks, solitude, or simply time when nothing is asked of us and we can ‘just be’ and embrace Ma.

    One of the most freeing threads in Hersey’s writing is her insistence that nobody is going to hand us rest, so we have to take it. Years of masking, compliance-based support and being told to push through can leave many Autistic people waiting for permission that never arrives, whether from an employer, a school, a clinician, or our own internalised voice of neuronormativity. A fallow field does not ask the farmer whether it may rest. The season simply is what it is. I find comfort in that, and in Hersey’s reminder that we are worthy of rest just as we are, without having earned it through exhaustion first.

    Grind Culture and Stolen Imagination

    In We Will Rest! The Art of Escape, Hersey (2024) writes that “grind culture has stolen our imagination” (p. 89). This line goes straight to the heart of what Autistic burnout is like for me as a creative person. When every hour is expected to be accounted for, there is no room left for daydreaming, wandering attention, or the long monotropic deep dives where ideas connect in unexpected constellations. Hersey speaks about what she calls the DreamSpace, the inner place of daydreaming and invention that rest opens back up (Hersey, 2020). The fallow field is a kind of DreamSpace for the land. Nothing has been planted, so anything might still grow, and it is full of potential. Wildflowers may arrive blown in by the wind, and the soil gets the chance to become something ‘other’ or ‘more than’ it was last year.

    Neuroqueering rest

    Nick Walker (2021) describes neuroqueering as the practice of subverting, refusing and diverging from the neuronormative and heteronormative performances we have been trained into, and of creating new ways of being in their place.

    Resting in our own Autistic ways is, I think, a form of neuroqueering. Stimming when we feel the urge, sleeping at unconventional times when we can, staying in pyjamas with a special interest all weekend, declining social events we know may drain us because of the pressure to mask, letting a work project lie fallow for months: each of these refuses the script of how a “productive” person is meant to move through time. Alison Kafer (2013) writes about crip time as bending the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds, rather than bending bodies and minds to meet the clock (p. 27). I have written elsewhere about monotropic time and how differently it can flow. A fallow season is crip time, monotropic time, field time, Ma, and I think it belongs to the one resting.

    Fallow as a freedom practice

    bell hooks (1994) wrote of love as the practice of freedom, and Hersey often returns to hooks in her books. I have begun to think of fallowing in the same way as Hersey, as a freedom practice. It is something we return to repeatedly, never complete, and never do entirely alone, as we are always connected to something somewhere. Some of my rejuvenating rest happens interdependently, remotely, online, and through body-doubling sessions such as Gather and Write or the Intuitive Processing Workshop.

    Hersey (2024) calls on us to “collectively build new worlds, as we simultaneously dismantle and deprogram ourselves from the systems that prop up and perpetuate the racial, social and environmental harm done by white supremacy and extractive capitalism” (p. 151). The word extractive matters here. Land that is farmed year after year without rest becomes depleted, compacted and eroded, and humans treated the same way burn out, and some of us die. Fallowing refuses extraction. It trusts that what is resting is also rebuilding, and that the rebuilding is part of making a different world possible.

    That collective dimension is what keeps me hopeful, as a fallow field is never really alone. It is held by the weather, the soil life, the hedgerows, the mycelial networks thriving underneath and the patience of whoever is waiting.

    Pilgrim (1986) points out that the Japanese word for human being, ningen (人間), is written with the character for person alongside the character for Ma, read here as gen (p. 256). The philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō placed this idea of betweenness at the centre of his ethics (LaFleur, 1978, as cited in Pilgrim, 1986, p. 275).


    To be huMAn


    To be huMAn, in the shape of the word itself, is to stand among and in relation to others. In English, too, Ma hides inside the word, and “human” is thought to share its root with humus, the soil. Perhaps to be human is to keep becoming, never finished, always taking shape in the Ma between us and in the earth beneath us. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) place becoming in the middle too, describing the rhizome as always between things, an intermezzo (p. 25).

    In neurodivergent community spaces the Ma between us is often kinder, the double empathy gap is less problematic, most of the time (Milton, 2012). Rest becomes easier when we are surrounded by people who understand us, who do not need us to perform, and who will hold the space while we lie fallow for a while.

    Annie Dillard (1974) wrote that “the gaps are the thing” (p. 276), rest belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes, and the gap is where the light comes in.

    Wishing you some restful fallowing!

    References


    Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

    Dillard, A. (1974). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Bantam Books.

    Hersey, T. (2020, July 14). Slowly emerging after a 3 week Sabbath. The Nap Ministry. https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/slowly-emerging-after-a-3-week-sabbath/

    Hersey, T. (2022a). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.

    Hersey, T. (2022b, February 21). Rest is anything that connects your mind and body. The Nap Ministry. https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/2022/02/21/rest-is-anything-that-connects-your-mind-and-body/

    Hersey, T. (2024). We will rest!: The art of escape. Little, Brown Spark.

    hooks, b. (1994). Outlaw culture: Resisting representations. Routledge.

    Isozaki, A. (1979). Ma: Space-time in Japan. Cooper-Hewitt Museum.
    https://mcachicago.org/whats-on/exhibitions/ma-the-japanese-concept-of-time-space/ (these are only photos on internet I can find currently!)

    Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.

    Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autistic people: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008

    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

    Pilgrim, R. B. (1986). Intervals (“ma”) in space and time: Foundations for a religio-aesthetic paradigm in Japan. History of Religions, 25(3), 255–277.
    https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/463043

    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

    Tagore, R. (1916). Stray birds. Macmillan.
    https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/rt/stray.htm

    Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.


    Reclaiming Rest: Autistic Burnout, Monotropism, and Resistance
    What Is Neuroqueer? Neuroqueer Theory Explained
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    Courses, books and resources

    If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.

  • Betwixt Wall & Window: Neuroqueering from the Liminal & Hiraki Sawa’s art

    Betwixt Wall & Window: Neuroqueering from the Liminal & Hiraki Sawa’s art

    Afterimage: Hiraki Sawa’s

    Souvenir IV

    Hiraki Sawa’s Souvenir IV (2012) is a silent, black-and-white single-channel video set in an empty domestic room (this video has music on it, which I actually really like and seems to suit the mood for me but worth noting this was not the original as far as I can find out……).



    It comes from a period of Sawa’s practice shaped by a friend’s sudden memory loss, in which rooms become mental landscapes where recollections linger like objects left behind (James Cohan, n.d.; Ota Fine Arts, n.d.).

    Badger (2013) describes Sawa as an artist who “constructs beautiful video dreamscapes from pedestrian subjects” (p. 27), and here a plain room of patterned wallpaper, bare floorboards and a bright window becomes the site of a haunting. The title carries both meanings of souvenir: a keepsake we carry away, and the French word for ‘memory’ itself – it is a living distortion of may be how we perceive time, memory and feels exactly like my own burnout.

    Writing on hauntology, Badger (2013) suggests that “the present perpetually contains within it ghosts of the past” (p. 32). Sawa’s figure embodies this, present several times over and thinner each time, each moment still carrying the ones before it. I

    As I said, this is how my present state feels. Raymaker et al. (2020) define Autistic burnout as chronic exhaustion, loss of skills and reduced tolerance to stimuli, arising from the cumulative load of just trying to live in a world that values neuronormativity.

    Buckle et al. (2021) describe Autistic inertia as difficulty starting, stopping or changing course, and the figure seems caught mid-movement, leaving the wall without reaching the window, moving but not getting anywhere. At the moment, my days feel broken, looping, and each pass leaves a fainter version of me behind. I seem to be struggling more and more with work and I know I need a rest – this is all very familiar, so no need to worry about me, I have support and am ok. – was just inspired by this when I saw it this morning!

    The longer I look at this video, though, the more the fragments change their meaning. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) open A Thousand Plateaus by observing that “since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (p. 3).

    Sawa’s figure is a bit like a small crowd in one person, in burnout, fragmentation can feel like being scattered across too many demands, and yet the same image can be held as plurality, where every trace is a self that was truly there and still real.

    David Gray-Hammond: NeuroHub Community Ltd (2023) writes of the chaotic self, an AuDHD Schizophrenic self that grows rhizomatically and resists being shaped and restricted into a single tidy way of being. The distortion in Sawa’s image feels like it fits this chaotic self. The streaks of light record movement that a single, more in-focus frame would erase. Nick Walker Sensei’s neuroqueer theory invites exactly this willingness to let divergence from the expected form become generative, in my interpretation, to maybe open up more possibilities, to see what emerges from the liminal stuck states of burnout and the creation of new ourselves (Walker, 2021).

    I have written before about being neuro-holographic a concept discussed with Dawn Prince-Hughes and CASY Physics , and Sawa’s figure seems to portray that. For me, being neuro-holographic describes a felt understanding more than a cognitive or intellectual resonance of how we are woven into one another and into the world, a state in which there is no division between us and our environment and wider comos – being intensely attunded to the fact we are all made of star stuff and multiple.

    It is bound up with feeling like my sensory system is so wide open, creating heightened sensitivity and hyper empathy that leaves me exhausted and feeling trapped between worlds.
    I have also described that the word neuroholographic can perhaps only be felt or experienced in a luminescent, undefinable iridescent way, and the silvery threads trailing from Sawa’s figure come close to that luminescence. A broken hologram keeps an impression of the whole picture in each of its pieces. Seen neuro-holographically, each thinned copy of the figure still carries all of her, blurred and present, bleeding into the patterned wall and the light beyond it. Fragmentation becomes a way of being distributed across place, space, and time, distorted, still there but stuck.

    Liminality holds these ideas together. Turner (1967) described liminal beings as “betwixt and between” (p. 93), suspended on a threshold after one form has been left and before the next is taken. In my previous blogs about neuroqueering liminal spaces I have wrtten about how living in the in-between, at the edges of social groups, has shaped my Autistic life, but also how liminal spaces can become thresholds where silenced parts of the bodymind can return transformed.

    Burnout is often what that silencing costs us. Gray-Hammond (2024) similarly reclaims the liminal as a space of queer potential, somewhere possibility gathers precisely because nothing has settled. Sawa’s figure hovers on such a threshold, between wall and window, memory and presence, departure and arrival.

    Autistic Burnout keeps many of us in that doorway far longer than we would choose. Held neuro-holographically, the threshold can also become a place of queering, where a self exists in several states at once, unfinished and whole, waiting for what grows next.

    A souvenir, the title of this piece, is something kept from a place we have left. Burnout may ask for that kind of tenderness toward the selves we pass through: the tired ones, the looping ones, the ones that flicker at the edge of the frame like in this video. Perhaps we can keep them as Sawa keeps his figure, carefully and without hurry, holding them gently while we wait to feel solid again, reclaim our ways of resting – dive into our special interests and passions, the things that bring us joy and glimmers – for me writing about this is therapeutic. It helps – it may not be how people see rest and recovery but it is what I need and may be some others can relate to this too – in parts …..

    References

    Badger, D. I. (2013). Hauntings: A nodalist study [Master’s thesis, University of Huddersfield]. University of Huddersfield Repository. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/23291/

    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, Article 631596. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631596

    Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

    Edgar, H. (2024a, June 23). Neuro-holographic thoughts. More Realms. https://morerealms.com/neuro-holographic-thoughts/

    Edgar, H. (2024b, June 16). Neuroqueering in the liminal spaces. More Realms. https://morerealms.com/neuroqueering-in-the-liminal-spaces/

    Gray-Hammond, D. (2023, April 30). Reclaiming neurofuturism: Rhizomatic communities and the chaotic self. Emergent Divergence. https://emergentdivergence.com/2023/04/30/reclaiming-neurofuturism-rhizomatic-communities-and-the-chaotic-self/

    Gray-Hammond, D. (2024, June 22). Reclaiming neurofuturism: The liminal as a space of queer potential. Emergent Divergence. https://emergentdivergence.com/2024/06/22/reclaiming-neurofuturism-the-liminal-as-a-space-of-queer-potential/

    James Cohan. (n.d.). Hiraki Sawa. https://www.jamescohan.com/artists/hiraki-sawa

    Ota Fine Arts. (n.d.). Hiraki Sawa, Souvenir IV, 2012. https://www.otafinearts.com/artworks/2269-hiraki-sawa-souvenir-iv-2012/

    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

    Turner, V. (1967). Betwixt and between: The liminal period in rites de passage. In The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual (pp. 93–111). Cornell University Press.
    https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/1147806/mod_folder/content/0/Turner%20Betwixt%20and%20Between%20The%20Forest%20of%20Symbols.pdf

    Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.

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    Courses, books and resources

    If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.

  • We Are Star Stuff: Being Autistic, Ethodiversity and Cosmic Connection

    We Are Star Stuff: Being Autistic, Ethodiversity and Cosmic Connection



    My physical body is your physical body, and just as the sun and stars are present in you, they are also present in me. […] we are all made of stars.

    Vietnamese Buddhist monk: Thich Nhat Hanh

    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.

    Animated square graphic with a glowing purple, pink, and teal orb slowly morphing and rotating against a star-filled galaxy background. White text reads: “The Star Stuff Of Being Autistic.” Below: “The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself — in every color, key, and frequency of neurodiversity.” Stimpunks and Autistic Realms Logos appear in the lower corners.

    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

    LYSS: https://stimpunks.org/star-stuff/



    “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

    Love You Down To Your Star Stuff



    References



    American Museum of Natural History. (n.d.). We are stardust. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/the-universe/stars/a-spectacular-stellar-finale/we-are-stardust

    Boren, R. Stimpunks Foundation. (2026). Love you down to your star stuff. https://stimpunks.org/star-stuff/

    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

    Howell, E. (2017, January 10). Humans really are made of stardust, and a new study proves it. Space.com. https://www.space.com/35276-humans-made-of-stardust-galaxy-life-elements.html

    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

    Tarragnat, O. (2025, February 25). What is ethodiversity? https://ombretarragnat.com/2025/02/25/what-is-ethodiversity/

    Discover more

    Courses, books and resources

    If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.

  • When the Ecology Fractures: Monotropism and Autistic Burnout (Part 2)

    When the Ecology Fractures: Monotropism and Autistic Burnout (Part 2)

    Part 1 : Re-worlding Neurodiversity: Monotropism, Ecological Belonging and Neuroqueer Futures

    Part 3: Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly

    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

    Illustrated ecological scene showing autistic burnout as a cracked landscape with exposed roots and glowing fractures. Sensory objects like headphones, books, tea and a blanket sit near a broken ground labelled “flow disruption,” symbolising loss of attention, safety and connection.

    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.

    Find out more:


    Part 3: Autistic Burnout Recovery as ecological re-assembly

    In the next blog, we will explore what recovery can look like when approached as a process of ecological rebuilding rather than individual fixing.

    We will consider:

    • how sensory and attentional environments can be reshaped
    • how communities can function as mycelial support networks
    • how new rhythms of participation can emerge
    • how re-worlding can begin in everyday practices

    When the ecology fractures, survival is not the only possibility; new forms of life can take root.


    Further Reading



    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.

    Edgar, H. (2026). The autistic rhizome: Community, liminal spaces & belonging. https://autisticrealms.com/the-autistic-rhizome-community-liminal-spaces-belonging/

    Gray-Hammond, D. (2025). Mental health as an ecosystemic process. NeuroHub Community.

    https://neurohubcommunity.org/2025/12/21/mental-health-ecosystemic-model

    hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center (Chap. 2). South End Press.

    Lorde, A. (1977). The transformation of silence into language and action. In Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 40–44). Crossing Press.

    Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.

    Milton, D. E. M. (2013). ‘Clumps’: An autistic reterritorialisation of the rhizome.

    Sins Invalid https://sinsinvalid.org

    Stimpunks https://stimpunks.org/

    Tarragnat, O. (2025). What is ethodiversity? https://ombretarragnat.com/2025/02/25/what-is-ethodiversity/

    Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.

    Re-worlding Neurodiversity: Monotropism, Ecological Belonging and Neuroqueer Futures (Part 1)
    Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly (Part 3)
    Discover more

    Courses, books and resources

    If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.