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  • From the Edge of the Gyre: Yeats, Symphrenia and the Centre that Cannot Hold

    From the Edge of the Gyre: Yeats, Symphrenia and the Centre that Cannot Hold

    Yeats, symphrenia and the centre that cannot hold

    Helen Edgar, October 2026

    Content note: brief mention of psychosis, psychiatric labelling and eugenics.

    Key words

    Autistic rhizome: Autistic community imagined as a rhizome, a root system with no centre that spreads in every direction, where any point can connect to any other (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, inspired by Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

    Ethodiverse: from ethodiversity, short for “ethological diversity”. The natural variation in behavioural and existential styles within and across species, in human and non-human animals alike. It includes neurodiversity but reaches beyond the brain and beyond the human (Tarragnat, 2025).

    Existential diversity: the idea that people differ in how they experience existence itself, and that these differences are natural variation, not distance from a “normal” centre (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, forthcoming).

    Mycelial network of care: care modelled on fungal mycelium, the underground threads that connect plants and share resources between them (Sheldrake, 2020 & Edgar, 2026a). Support that flows through many connections rather than from one central source.

    Monotropism: a theory of attention in which attention pools into fewer channels at a time and runs deep and intense in them, rather than spreading thinly across many (Murray et al., 2005).

    Neuronormative: treating one typical way of thinking, perceiving and relating as the standard everyone is measured against (Walker, 2021).

    Symphrenia: “connected bodymind”. A way of experiencing the world in which connections are felt with unusual monotropic depth and intensity, sometimes more than a person can hold. Symphrenic is an identity people can only choose for themselves (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, 2026).

    W. B. Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in January 1919, as the world seemed to be falling apart: the First World War was barely over, revolution was sweeping Russia, Ireland was edging towards war, and his wife, George, was pregnant and seriously ill with influenza. The poem draws on his theory of “gyres”, spirals of history turning in two-thousand-year cycles, and imagines one age ending as a “rough beast” slouches towards Bethlehem (Yeats, 1920/1989).

    For Yeats, a centre that cannot hold means catastrophe: order fails and “mere anarchy” follows. I want to read the line against that grain, through my own personal experience of burnout and madness.

    The widening gyre

    The poem begins: Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Yeats hears loss of control, I feel something familiar connected to my mental health. Symphrenia describes perception that spirals outward, taking in connections others do not perceive, sometimes more than a person can hold (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, 2026). From the centre, a falcon that far out looks lost, but it is still flying, listening to the wind, to other birds, to currents the falconer cannot feel. So I wonder: who is the falconer? Why should the falcon only ever hear one voice, and why should the human voice be the one that matters?

    Whose centre?

    In mental health spaces in our society, the centre defaults to neuronormative expectations: which connections count as reasonable, and whose accounts are believed. Fricker (2007) calls the lack of shared language to make your own experience intelligible hermeneutical injustice. Existential diversity, a concept David Gray-Hammond and I are exploring in our Wider Existence series, treats differences in how people experience existence as ethodiverse variation rather than distance from a fixed point (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, forthcoming; Tarragnat, 2025). Read this way, a centre that cannot hold is not only collapse, a centre too narrow for the range of human and non-human existence is always going to give way, we need a wider way of existing together.

    Who gets pushed to the edges and liminal spaces is not random it is governed by power and privelege. Yeats spent decades seeking connections beyond the visible: séances, symbols, a Spiritus Mundi of shared images, a cosmology built from automatic writing. As a celebrated Protestant Anglo-Irish man, he was read as a visionary. Similar experiences, described by a poor woman, a colonised person, or a Black man in a mid-century American psychiatric ward, were far more likely to be read as symptoms (Crenshaw, 1989; Metzl, 2009). I cannot call Yeats symphrenic; only a person can claim that for themselves, but his poem shows how much depends on who is speaking, who is believed, and why and intersectionality and social privilege shapes all of this especially maybe in Western developed countries.

    Perhaps as a way to control the ever-widening gyre, Yeats’s fear of disorder later drew him towards authoritarian politics and eugenic ideas (Yeats, 1939). It may have been a longing for the centre to hold him, to accept him. He longed for a society to control whoever does not fit it, which could arguably have included people like himself.

    The rough beast

    When the centre gives way inside me, the ground seems to fall away, literally fall, like I am spiralling down beyond the human world. It often feels as though I can’t quite hold on and reality is slipping away yet I am always some how held on by a few threads enabling me to work and function like this in some capacity. Unlike David, I have never had a full on psychotic episode, yet I am always feeling between worlds, seeing, hearing and perceiving things others say are not real or that I am just imagining. I have had to find new ways of grounding and regulating. For me, what helps has never been a firmer centre. It has not been the neuronormative route of social skills programmes, or learning to reason my thoughts and visions and voices away. Some people find those approaches helpful, and that is their choice to make, but my thoughts and visions don’t go away, they are a part of me and they also bring me joy and creative ways of being that I love.

    So I am learning to lean in. I now centre myself in a community with no centre, what David and I call the Autistic rhizome (2025). It is an ever-shifting space of kinship, rest and sensory safety. It holds people who can embrace chaotic, Mad, symphrenic ways of being without judging, stigmatising or trying to change us, while still supporting the hard reality of living this way.

    Perhaps Yeats’s rough beast is not the monster after all, perhaps it is what a centre calls monstrous when it meets something it cannot hold. We do not need the centre to hold. We need something that holds without one: a rhizomatic web, a mycelial network of care rather than a wheel.

    References

    Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

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

    Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.

    Edgar, H. (2026a, February 22). The Autistic rhizome: Community, liminal spaces and belonging. Autistic Realms. https://autisticrealms.com/the-autistic-rhizome-community-liminal-spaces-belonging/

    Edgar, H. (2026b, March 15). Expanding the mycelial network of care: Autistic community, safety, and rhizomatic futures. More Realms. https://morerealms.com/expanding-the-mycelial-network-of-care-autistic-community-safety-and-rhizomatic-futures/

    Gray-Hammond, D., & Edgar, H. (2026, October 7). Symphrenia. The Wider Existence. https://www.thewiderexistence.co.uk/p/symphrenia

    Gray-Hammond, D., & Edgar, H. (forthcoming). Existential diversity.

    Gray-Hammond, D. (2025, June 29). The Autistic rhizome: Reclaiming knowledge, rewriting reality. https://www.davidgrayhammond.co.uk/p/the-autistic-rhizome-reclaiming-knowledge

    Metzl, J. M. (2009). The protest psychosis: How schizophrenia became a Black disease. Beacon 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

    Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures. The Bodley Head.

    Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies. Autonomous Press.

    Yeats, W. B. (1939). On the boiler. Cuala Press.

    Yeats, W. B. (1989). The second coming. In R. J. Finneran (Ed.), The collected poems of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan. (Original work published 1920)

    Find out more:

    Read more at The Wider Existence

    This post is part of an ongoing exploration of symphrenia and existential diversity with David Gray-Hammond. To read our first essay, Symphrenia, and follow the series as it grows, visit The Wider Existence: https://www.thewiderexistence.co.uk/. If something here speaks to you, or misses something important, we would be glad to hear from you there.

    Wider Existence Substack with
    David Gray-Hammond
    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.

  • Migration & Trusting Our Inner Monotropic Compass

    Migration & Trusting Our Inner Monotropic Compass

    Inspired by Brigit Anna McNeill’s “The Living Page” Migration writing workshop, Into the Woods Writing Group, 6 August 2026.

    I spent the evening of sixth of August in Brigit McNeill’s Migration writing workshop with the Into the Woods writing group, in a session called The Living Page. We were invited to write from and with migration, as a movement to think inside of, inspired by Brigit’s own writing.

    What follows is some of what I shared during the workshop and what I have been thinking about afterwards, threaded through with the ideas I keep returning to in my work on monotropism and neuroqueer theory.

    Inner Compass

    Birds cross oceans using a compass sense we still don’t fully understand. It may involve something in their eyes that responds to the Earth’s magnetic field, through a quantum mechanism that is still being worked out (Mouritsen, 2018). A bird doesn’t need a conventional map; it can orient by reading the world itself as a kind of felt knowledge.

    As Brigit shared through her writing, salmon return to their birth rivers. Humpback whales cross hemispheres between calving and feeding grounds. Elephants can follow familiar routes across landscapes, including routes to water. Even a plant’s seed is carried by wind or on fur, migrating in its own way, landing on new ground.

    The Inner Tug Of Migration

    It’s easy to think of migration as recurring linear travel between fixed points — departure, journey, arrival and back again. The workshop pushed against that framing, and we discussed migration as a process of transformation across time, as much as displacement across distance.

    I feel this is close to what Deleuze (1994) was exploring through the idea of ‘difference in repetition’. The idea that no repeated pattern is ever a true copy, that each turn carries its own small variation. Migration, read this way, isn’t a repetitive loop; it’s more of a spiral. With every movement, everything changes.

    We discussed Brigit’s writing about what she calls the ‘tug’ of migration. It feels like there’s a bodily quality to how migration begins for all of us, whether crossing distance on the land as animals or in our human bodyminds. Before a bird sets off, something like a restlessness builds in its body. The pull comes from within, affected by seasons, seas, and time, and the sense of direction follows from that, in a very embodied, sensory tug.

    I recognise that kind of tug or pull in my own way of being. Monotropism (Murray, Lesser, & Lawson, 2005) describes how Autistic attention tends to gather intensely around a small number of interests, rather than spreading more evenly across many. When an interest catches me, it feels closer to that restlessness in the birds, a tug like a magnet pulling me in and arriving before my actual cognition and thinking have caught up.

    Following this tug or pull deep inside you, something opens up. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) described flow as the state that arises when attention and challenge align closely enough that the sense of separate effort disappears. It often comes with an undercurrent of wonder where the world briefly widens around whatever has caught you and opens up further into awe. I think that combination is close to what’s carrying migrating animals too: a sense of direction felt from the inside, trusted enough to move on and to see what will happen.

    Following the inner pull and desire of flow, whether it is sensory or more cognitive, leads us to connect ideas, connect people, to move our bodyminds. Flow isn’t stillness; attention is moving, even when the body isn’t. It slowly transforms us: each new interest, each sensory experience, every connection with another being or environment shifts something inside us.

    Many of us are taught early to override this feeling of going with the flow of what interests us and listening to our inner needs. We are conditioned to ignore our inner compass, to ignore our passions, our ideas, our sensory needs, especially if they fall outside of what is normally expected. We are taught to mask and suppress our flow and authentic migration.

    Research on Autistic masking describes the suppression of natural Autistic ways of being in favour of alternatives judged safer and more acceptable by society (Pearson & Rose, 2021). The tug of monotropic passion and sensory feelings often gets read as being too much, having interests too narrow, and we learn to quieten ourselves or try to adapt to fit in. Over the years, we are moving further and further away from our own internal compass and needs until we may not even recognise our true self.

    Trusting Our Inner Compass

    Trusting our inner compass again isn’t easy, and there is definitely a certain amount of privilege involved in being able to unmask and be your real Autistic self with people. Neuronormativity, the assumption that more evenly distributed, easily legible attention is the ‘correct’ default way to be. It doesn’t just ask us to behave differently; it makes us distrust ourselves too. Neuroqueering (Walker, 2021) is an ongoing practice of subverting and resisting neuronormativity. It is not a final destination to become ‘neuroqueer’ or to have ‘neuroqueered’ your life — rather, I see it as an ongoing refusal to be ashamed of who you are.

    This is where we need to re-learn to trust ourselves. Pernille Fraser’s poem “Can We Trust?” names this same rupture from the other direction: not what we lose faith in within ourselves, but what has to be earned from everyone and everything around us before that trust can return at all. The poem was written in 2019 and later shared through Stimpunks Foundation as part of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project. The poem repeats its central question across sensory load, pacing, correction, and the question of whether we’ll be believed and left to decide for ourselves, asking, “Can we trust the space you offer?” (Fraser, 2019/2024). The poem never resolves into an answer; it stays in the asking, leaving open questions of safety and possibility. The potential of trusting people in safe spaces to be ourselves, to keep moving and transforming.

    That same question of trust doesn’t stop at ourselves. Once we’ve relearned to trust our own inner compass, we can start noticing that everyone and everything around us, human and otherwise, is following one too when we are able to feel safe.

    Differences Of Being

    If we stop assuming there is one right way for a human mind to move through the world, perhaps we can extend that generosity beyond humans too. Migration is only one expression of a much wider range of ways living things exist in and move through the world. Ethodiversity (Tarragnat, 2024) names the variability of behavioural and existential styles within and across species, developed to open neurodiversity beyond a purely human-centred and neurological framing. A bird’s compass, a salmon’s imprinting, a whale’s seasonal crossing, and a human’s monotropic pull aren’t the same mechanism in different bodies. They’re genuinely different ways of being, each one worth recognising on its own terms.

    Difference here is already a form of connection. A migrating salmon doesn’t just pass through a river, its body becomes part of it. When Pacific salmon return to their home streams to spawn and die, their bodies carry marine-derived nutrients into freshwater and other ecosystems; they carry something from one world into another. Whales do something similar at an ocean scale: they help move nutrients such as nitrogen and iron back into sunlit waters, while their migrations redistribute nutrients across large distances. Neither salmon nor whale set out to feed a forest or an ocean, but each unique way of moving through the world is, at the same time, an act of shaping it, and being reshaped by it in turn.

    That sits well alongside Milton’s (2012) double empathy problem, which invites us to notice that people communicate and experience the world differently from one another — and that no single way of being or relating needs to sit at the centre, with everyone else read against it. It sits well, too, alongside Barad’s (2007) idea of intra-action: that a self, or a species, or a migrating body doesn’t exist as a separate thing that then relates to its surroundings, but comes into being through the relating itself. There’s no “before” and “after” self on either side of a migration, only the shaping itself. The liminal space a migrating creature passes through isn’t a gap between two finished things. Self and field, self and current, self and interest, forming each other as they go.

    Transformation and Trust

    The workshop’s real gift was permission to stop treating change as the exception that needs explaining and to start treating it as the foundation through which everything else moves. Life doesn’t hold still and occasionally migrates; it is always in a constant state of flux and flow.

    That reframing opens space for new stories to begin, not despite the shifting, but because of it. This sits alongside other threads I keep pulling on: the constellation-thinking in My Monotropic Galaxy on More Realms, and the Star Stuff work with Ryan Boren at Stimpunks, which starts from the same idea, that we are made of matter that has already migrated across unthinkable distances, reorganising itself into shape after shape after shape, connection by connection.

    Migration, in that sense, isn’t a metaphor borrowed from birds and whales. It’s been true of us for longer than we’ve had words for, trusting our inner compass isn’t something any of us can do alone as people and may be especially as Autistic monotropic people.

    Birds have the Earth’s magnetic field and the wider world around them to orient by. We need something a bit different: people and spaces willing to be trusted, willing to let us move, be, and communicate in our own way without demanding we prove it first.

    Rediscovering our monotropic inner compass is only part of the migration. The rest is building spaces safe enough to trust it in, so we can shape and be shaped by the world around us, the way the salmon and the whale do, simply by being fully who we are.


    Explore more in my Cosmic Connections collaborative project with Ryan Boren Stimpunks: Star Stuff Earth.

    A Field Guide to the Ways of Migrating

    Always Migrating Zine


    References

    Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

    Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

    Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

    Fraser, P. (2019/2024). Can we trust? [Poem]. Stimpunks Foundation. https://stimpunks.org/2024/04/27/can-we-trust/

    McNeill, B. (2026, August 2). Links to lovely things [The Living Page: Migration]. Into the Woods with Brigit Anna McNeill (Substack). https://brigitannamcneill.substack.com/p/links-to-lovely-things

    Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.

    Mouritsen, H. (2018). Long-distance navigation and magnetoreception in migratory animals. Nature, 558(7708), 50–59.

    Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.

    Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60.

    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.

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

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  • 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/

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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.