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 Connect CIC (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)
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.
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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.
Autistic burnout, monotropism, and living in the in-between
Fergus Murray posted a link in the Monotropism Discord today about Flowing-Afterglow Mass Spectrometry. The title pulled me in, even though I struggled to understand the specifics of the actual chemistry. It made me think of my own internal energy as an Autistic ADHD monotropic person, and how this may relate to burnout.
I think I’m living in the afterglow right now — and I’m noticing it has two different kinds of ember.
I have been ebbing in and out of a perpetual burnout my whole life. It intensifies periodically, the last time was in 2020-2023 when I completely crashed in a mental health crisis, and it hit a new intensity again earlier this year. The embers of that burnout always linger longer than I expect, a low burn that takes my energy, under the surface, long after I’ve supposedly “recovered” or it looks like I’m doing “better.”
There’s a second ember in this afterglow too. Despite occasional bursts of energy like this now, just writing my thoughts about what I am interested in — which I find really rejuvenating — the full tunnel of my highly focused, energetic monotropic flow isn’t open to me at the moment, but I’m not completely empty or in crisis either. Something is still glowing, like a flicker of my attentional resources, which sparks connections and thoughts when something pulls me in, like the title of this article.
My bodymind is in what Tanya Adkin describes as meerkat mode — alert, scanning, half-aroused. I think this is that second ember, still seeking flow and connections, still searching for something to hook into, but I just don’t have the energy to do much with it in a very productive way outside of writing. My executive functioning has been impacted recently, I am forgetful, struggling with basic tasks and have very little energy to communicate. I have had to cut back on my work just to get through my day and continue in a survival state.
On the Wikipedia page about Flowing-afterglow mass spectrometry, it describes afterglow as the plasma that lingers after the initial energy source is switched off. Ions keep colliding; they keep drifting through the flow tube, slowly thermalising and settling towards an equilibrium rather than snapping into it and fully engaging. Reading all this without understanding the actual technical side of the chemistry, all I could do was interpret the article in my own way; it felt like reading a poem that described how I am at the moment.
I have written a lot about living in the liminal, in the in-between states – socially, cognitively and systemically. I am not in a full crisis, not in a complete shutdown, but I know I am not flowing the way I sometimes do when I have more energy.
Perhaps a good word to use is ‘thermalising’. Things are still trying to connect and fuse, slowly, bit by bit, in my liminal state, without my usual intensity. I am conserving my energy; my attentional resources are being reallocated and redirected into a kind of survival mode.
The article notes that as the cost of helium rises, some researchers now use interrupted helium flow “to conserve gas” rather than a continuous stream. Reading that felt like it summed up my burnout. Not broken, not failed, more the result of monotropic split — the exhaustion of a monotropic bodymind repeatedly stretched past its limits trying to meet demands built for a polytropic world — and constantly having my natural flow interrupted day after day, because I need to function, do shopping, clean the house, cook food, care for my family – none of that can stop, it is life.
I don’t fully understand the chemistry about flowing-afterglow mass spectrometry, and I don’t think I need to for this (although sciencey people may argue against that!).
As an Autistic monotropic person, I think I understand the afterglow as the residue of interest still moving through me, unhurried, unforced, finding its own quiet equilibrium until there’s fuel enough for the flame to flow and grow, when I can return to my work again.
… For now, I am flowing in the afterglow…..
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Helen Edgar — Autistic Realms | More Realms | June 2026
Spaces In-Between
I recently looked at the night sky, I was outside and cold, the sheer number of stars, the ones I could see and the knowledge of the ones I could not, shifted something in me that I did not have a word for at the time. It felt like an opening, a feeling of being very small and very connected at the same time, of the distance between me and the universe suddenly becoming less certain, of living in the in-between space. What I was experiencing is called awe, I also know, looking back, that awe may be one of the most distinctly Autistic experiences to feel.
This piece is about feelings of awe and wonder, my own Autistic ADHD experiences, and about the map I have tried to represent of my inner life using the language of the cosmos. It is called My Monotropic Galaxy: A Constellation of My Autistic Self. It is a deep-field image of space, overlaid with constellation lines, accompanied by an index of 20 named features of some of my monotropic experiences. Some of these constellations I have lived in for decades, others I have only recently been able to name. All of them are in relationship with each other, always in motion, always becoming something the map and myself has not yet caught up with.
Before I guide you through my galaxy of monotropic experiences, I will explain a bit about the theory of monotropism and why I feel it is so important for my own sense of self-identity as an Autistic ADHD person.
What Is Monotropism?
Monotropism is an attentional theory of autism developed by Autistic researchers Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, and Wenn Lawson (2005). It describes how many Autistic people tend to have their attention drawn more strongly to fewer things at any given time, going deep rather than wide, concentrating rather than spreading their focus. Rather than framing this as a deficit — an inability to multitask or shift attention — monotropism understands it as a distinct attentional style with its own strengths and difficulties.
Discovering the theory of monotropism for the first time felt like being handed a map of a place I had always lived in but had never been able to describe. I was identified as Autistic and ADHD in my forties, while my children were also going through their own assessments. What followed was a long process of re-sense-making, a re-storying that went back through my entire life, understanding finally why things had been the way they had been, and finally being able to begin to understand my own neurodivergent identity a little bit better.
Awe and Wonder as a Way of Knowing
Let me return to the night sky and think about what awe actually is and why it may be especially relevant for monotropic people. Helen De Cruz (2024), in her book Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think, describes wonder as a form of epistemic opening, a way of relating to knowledge and how we have come to know things. The epistemic opening is the moment when the way we know expands; it is more than just a feeling. When we encounter something that is genuinely awe-inspiring, the usual categories we use to make sense of the world temporarily loosen. It is as if you are maybe seeing or sensing something for the first time; you may notice things you had previously learned to filter out. For De Cruz, wonder is not just a happy side effect of seeing something beautiful; it is a cognitive and moral orientation. It is how we stay genuinely curious about a world we might otherwise let ourselves assume we already understand, or are taught to ignore, as it doesn’t fit into how people expect us to perceive and respond.
When I read De Cruz’s book in 2024, something in me recognised what she was describing at a really deep level. It was the most inspiring book I have read for many years. 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 Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory (2021) 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, 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 around the theory of monotropism.
Awe and Flow
When I am pulled fully into something that has truly captured my attention, not just my mind, but my whole body and nervous system is immersed. What opens is not simply focus; it is that first-ness quality of perception De Cruz describes, the sense of seeing and feeling something for the first time, even if I have encountered it a hundred times before. New connections become visible, and the boundaries between things soften. It feels like my nervous system, so often braced against a world not designed for me, can finally exhale in the in-between spaces as new connections form and I feel literally awe-some.
Keltner and Haidt (2003) describe awe as arising when we encounter something vast that challenges our existing mental structures, something that does not fit the categories we already hold, and that invites us to expand our ways of being rather than retreat or fold inwards. Awe can be humbling and expansive at the same time; it opens up possibilities.
I feel this resonates with what it feels like for me to be in monotropic flow. My self does not disappear, nor does it become more rigid or narrow; instead, it feels as though I open up, my whole bodymind becomes more porous. The boundary between me and what I am attending to becomes less fixed; I am both in the flow, and the flow is in me. The distance between those two things collapses and unfolds in a way that feels like both loss and arrival, and it can feel deeply liberating and joyful (and sometimes deeply troubling and anxiety-provoking!).
For many Autistic people, these experiences are undervalued, even stigmatised or shamed as we grow up. We are told to concentrate on what the teacher is saying, to focus on what our family and friends think really matters, and slowly, our own ways of perceiving the world are flattened as we learn to mask and stop trusting ourselves. The things we find awe-inspiring are treated as having no value: the joy of looking closely at a mushroom or an insect may be met with being told to hurry up and rejoin the group; the wonder of feeling the sea against your toes in the sand may be met with being told to just get in and swim and stop fussing.
This quality of experience, this awe and wonder, is represented by the Stellar Current at the heart of my galaxy: the deep flow state through which my whole system comes into coherence, and I move with the current of what matters most. It feels fitting that this current carries me toward a phrase that has become foundational to how I think about the Autistic community and a sense of belonging.
Love You Down to Your Star Stuff
The phrase Love You Down To Your Star Stuff grew out of collaborative work with Ryan Boren and Stimpunks Foundation (Boren & Stimpunks Foundation, 2026). It reaches back to something Carl Sagan observed: that the atoms in our bodies were forged in the interiors of stars that lived and died long before our sun existed. We are, quite literally, made of star stuff.
To love someone down to their star stuff is to locate love for their core way of being. Love is not conditional on performance, legibility, or being the kind of person the world finds easy to translate. Love should not be dependent on meeting neuronormative expectations, masking well enough or being productive enough or social enough. To love someone down to their star stuff is to love their way of being continuous with the universe and their authentic self.
Much of the lived experience of being Autistic for many people is weighed down by what I have called the Dark Matter Field in my galaxy. This is the heavy darkness of neuronormativity, reflected in the accumulated weight we carry around of a world that does not meet our needs, and does not love us down to our star stuff. The Dark Matter Field is everything that is harmful in our systems, behaviourism, ableism, racism and more. As Autistic people, we are constantly being measured against a map that was not ours.
The Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) highlights the mutual misunderstanding between people with very different experiences, where the gap of this map is often framed as ours to close; this sits at the heart of the Dark Matter Field’s weight. Decades of masking, so thoroughly embedded in me that I genuinely did not know for most of my life where the mask ended and where I began, meant I was always accommodating others to try to meet expectations.
Love You Down to Your Star Stuff is a different orientation entirely. It is the foundation of what I believe the constellation of the neurodivergent community is reaching toward. The Mycelial Stars — underground networks of care and interdependence. The Rhizome Array — the non-hierarchical community that creates something together that none of us could make alone. The Companion Stars — those who do not need me to perform. The Sanctuary Stars — where I do not have to translate myself. All of these are expressions of what it means to love someone for who they actually are and are part of the galaxy that many neurodivergent people may recognise or relate to.
The Implicate Order and the Autistic Bodymind
A concept from quantum physics has really inspired my thinking recently, helping me articulate my inner self and conceptualise my Galaxy of Monotropic Experiences. Physicist David Bohm (1980) proposed that beneath the explicate order, the world of distinct objects and separate events we can see and measure, there exists a deeper dimension he called the implicate order. In the implicate order, nothing is truly separate; everything is enfolded into everything else. What appears distinct at the surface is always an unfolding of something that, at a deeper level, was always entangled.
I am thinking about the implicate order through the lens of monotropism and flow theory. The surface of a river looks like separate ripples and currents, each one seeming to rise, curl, and vanish on its own, but beneath the surface, the water is continuous; there is no ripple that exists apart from the river. What appears as individual movement is always part of a larger, deeper pattern, momentarily folding into visibility before folding back into the whole.
This is something of what monotropic flow feels like to me from the inside. The attention tunnel is the explicate order: a single ripple, distinct and absorbing, everything else falling away from view, but the depth beneath it, the coherence, the sense that this particular focus is connected to everything I have ever cared about, is the implicate order surfacing, slowly emerging and connecting with other thoughts. The interest that pulled me in is and was never really separate from the rest of me; it only looks that way from above the waterline or from what others may perceive. When I am in flow, I am not narrowing myself down to one thing and losing everything else; it is more like I am going deeper beneath the surface ripples to the place where it was all one current to begin with, to where I feel whole.
This may be part of why monotropic flow can feel like both loss and arrival at once; the “loss” is the disappearance of the surface separations of events and experiences outside the attention tunnel, the distinct sense of me here and the world being there. The “arrival” is perhaps the recognition of what was really underneath all along, the boundary was an explicate-order appearance, and the implicate order beneath it was entangled the whole time. When I am in flow, I can feel that oneness and vastness at the same time creating a sense of awe.
The world tends to perceive Autistic people through the explicate order, through what is behaviourally visible, measurable, categorisable. But what drives and shapes and sustains Autistic experience is largely implicate, the enfolded pattern of sensory processing, attentional depth, emotional layering, temporal fluidity, and relational intensity that does not show at the surface, or shows in ways that are consistently misread by others.
When I am in a deep monotropic flow, I am living in the implicate order. Thoughts do not arrive in sequence; they arrive already feeling more like a constellation, in relationship with each other, already folded into a larger pattern I can sense before I can articulate it. This is the Tunnelling Nebula in my galaxy — the way monotropic attention goes deep rather than wide, concentrating and transforming everything it connects to, always making more connections beneath the surface. It is around this Emergence Point that ideas and connections surface, when something is finally ready, arriving in its own time. It is at this Emergence Point that things finally start to make a bit more sense, at least to me and enable me to keep moving and keep becoming.
Bohm’s framework has also helped me understand burnout being the result of what I have called the Dark Matter Field. The Supernova Remnant in my galaxy is like a new way of becoming that emerges after burnout, remnants of my old self entangled in new ways of being.
Burnout is not simply tiredness; it is what happens when the implicate order is violently disrupted and when the continuous process of unfolding is interrupted by sustained demand to operate exclusively in the explicate: to spread thin rather than deepen, to switch and fragment and present surface after surface with no return to the enfolded whole – it is flooded with the Dark Matter Field. Each significant burnout has remade me into a new version of myself; something changes at my core, and it gives rise to new constellations. The supernova scatters what I was, how I thought and my previous ways of being; in a way, it reforms me into an ongoing cycle of becoming.
Rhizomes and the Non-Hierarchical Mind
Alongside Bohm, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari offered me another framework that helped me name something I had always experienced but could not clearly articulate in the past.
In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), they introduce the concept of the rhizome. A tree has a single trunk, its roots descend from a fixed point, and branches grow outward in a discernible hierarchy. Everything can be traced back to a central point; a rhizome is completely different. If we think of how grass spreads, or how mycelium moves through soil, more laterally, reaching out in every direction at once, with no fixed origin, no central authority, no privileged direction of growth, it may feel relatable to the experience of being Autistic. A rhizome connects with anything it encounters, it can be broken at any point and begin again from that node. It has no archive in the traditional sense, but it is dense with the traces of everything it has connected to and possibilities of what may form in the future.
This is pretty much how I feel my mind works. I have spent much of my life feeling different and not understanding my own thought processes, my non-linear associations, the omnidirectional leaps, the way a thought about a star might become a thought about mutual aid that might become a thought about penguins, and all of it feels necessary and connected, even if the connections are only fully felt inside me. It makes relationships hard, it makes communicating harder, always seeing that look of confusion on people’s faces as they think ‘what is she on about’ as there may be no obvious link to others, unless they know me really well!
The Rhizome Array in my galaxy represents the Autistic community itself. It is non-hierarchical, constantly connecting, forming new nodes, creating something together that none of us could make alone. As David Gray-Hammond and I have written about extensively there is no centre for the Autistic Rhizome and our community. There is no single way in; people can connect, join and communicate in their own way. The mycelial network metaphor runs alongside this: Mycelial Stars represent the underground networks of care that sustain us, growing toward each other in ways that do not follow a straight line or a hierarchy, representing the community of mutual aid that often sustains life for disabled and neurodivergent people.
Both frameworks, Bohm’s implicate order and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, have helped me understand that the way my monotropic bodymind works has its own pattern, its own constellation, its own way of reaching toward others and toward the world and how the world works with me and in me.
The Constellation Index
What follows is an index of twenty constellations in my Monotropic Galaxy. These are not separate entries in a list; they are interdependent, entangled and always in relationship with each other and with everything around them. They are always in motion and always in flow.
Find what resonates with you from this, some of these constellations may feel immediately familiar, and others may not be part of your galaxy at all. This map is just my own constellation in a universe of infinite possible configurations of ways of Autistic being. You may find it sparks the beginnings of creating your own map or drawing your own constellation or galaxy.
1. Dark Matter Field is the weight of neuronormativity before I had words for it.
2. Supernova Remnant is burnout — the kind that arises when my monotropic attention is asked to spread attention thin, to split, to switch constantly and to mask. Each significant burnout has remade me and formed new constellations.
3. Stellar Current is the heart of my galaxy — the deep, flow states of being monotropic. When I am truly in flow, my whole bodymind system exhales and time dissolves. I am completely, wholly present, regulated and feel alive. I move with the current.
4. Tunnelling Nebula — monotropic attention goes deep rather than wide; it concentrates and transforms everything it connects to, always making more connections.
5. Warren Constellation are my rabbit holes of research. They reflect the joy of following a question, of feeling awe and wonder, and always expanding and reaching out.
6. Mycelial Stars represent the underground networks of connection that sustain the neurodivergent community of Autistic researchers, advocates, writers, families, and educators. It is our community network of care and interdependence, all growing toward each other in ways that don’t follow a straight line or a hierarchy. The foundation of mutual aid, care and well-being.
7. Pebbling Cluster is how I show love. Inspired by the way penguins offer pebbles to those they care for, this is my Neurodivergent Love Locution. Offering small glimmers, such as a twig I found or a meme or song I share as a way to say ‘I thought of you, I care’.
8. Clustering Cascade is my infodumping. The deep need to share my interests and passions, at considerable length and in detail, with those I feel safe with and to engage with others who want to share their joy.
9. Rhizome Array is the Autistic community itself — non-hierarchical, constantly connecting with other people and forming new communities and nodes. Creating something together that none of us could make alone.
10. Sanctuary Stars are the places, practices, and people where I do not have to translate myself or mask; it is where I feel safe and can simply be and know I will be accepted for who I am to regulate and communicate in my own ways.
11. Vortex Stars are the intensity of deep absorption I feel as a monotropic person. That pull into a single channel of interest that is so total it feels like a gravitational field.
12. Time Drift is my Autistic experience of time as non-linear, layered, fluid and felt. Where past and present merge into each other, and my lived time feels closer to superposition than sequence.
13. Companion Stars are the people who orbit close, who understand penguin pebbling, and the Neurodivergent Love Locutions. Those who don’t need me to perform and who just ‘get it’.
14. Gravity Well represents my monotropic looping and ruminating mind. Thoughts that circle and return, that find their way back to the same point regardless of how many times I try to leave them. It represents Autistic inertia and a feeling of being stuck.
15. Friction Field is the relentless exhaustion of having needs the world was not designed to meet, and of having to advocate for them, over and over, in systems not built with Autistic people in mind.
16. Signal Fade is the anxiety that rises when something or someone I care about moves outside my attention tunnel, the panic of object impermanence, the fear that what is out of sight may simply be gone.
17. Aurora Borealis is the joy and wonder of being Autistic — the profound aliveness that comes with deep engagement in sensory experiences. The way the world and my whole bodymind can suddenly blaze with meaning and feel beauty when I am fully with something that matters to me.
18. Limerence Nebula is the intensity of falling deeply into a connection with a person, a totality that can feel overwhelming and all-consuming.
19. Tidal Stars represent the porousness between myself, the environment I am in and the wider cosmos. The sense that my edges are less fixed than the world tends to assume. My pull towards nature, towards water, towards things that are ancient. A feeling of returning to something that was always within me.
20. Emergence Point is what surfaces from the liminal depths of my monotropic bodymind when something is finally ready to surface. It is the crest of an invisible process, trusted rather than forced, arriving in its own time, on its own terms. I am always being in a process of becoming.
Always Becoming
Our own Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars, and most have no name, only coordinates, or nothing at all. My own constellation feels similar, as some of my stars may dim; others may brighten, and they all have their own way of processing time. Some are still finding their way through the dark toward the light, still connecting with other stars, still discovering what they illuminate. The map I have created will never be finished, as it really only captures a moment in time, as it is always transforming, it is alive.
The Autistic rhizome keeps spreading, the implicate order keeps unfolding and the constellations keep reaching toward each other, forming new nodes, new patterns, new ways of knowing that none of us could arrive at alone. What lives beyond my twenty constellations is the infinity of Autistic ways of being, every way of knowing, sensing, connecting, and belonging that has not yet found its name, its language, its place in any map.
You may recognise some of these constellations as your own and others may not be part of your galaxy at all. We are each a unique configuration of matter, patterns and attention; we each have a particular way of being continuous with a cosmos that has been becoming itself for longer than we can even perceive.
We are not like the cosmos. We are continuous with it. In the infinite space beyond every map we have ever made, the phrase from our collaborative work at Stimpunks holds everything together: Love You Down to Your Star Stuff (Boren & Stimpunks Foundation, 2026). Every star belongs, every constellation has its place and every way of being Autistic is woven into the fabric of what this community is and is always becoming.
We are not fixed points.
We are in flux.
In flow.
In everything.
Enfolded.
Unfolded.
Alive.
References
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361305051398
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Invitation
I am delighted to share that I have a chapter in an upcoming book called UNIQUE. UNIQUE invites neurodivergent contributors to map themselves: their qualities, strengths, struggles, deep interests, and challenges, all held together as a constellation.
My chapter centres on my Monotropic Galaxy — the constellation map of my Autistic self, and this blog is an edited and expanded version of my forthcoming chapter submission. My own constellation is a small offering among many in what I hope will be a rich, diverse, and deeply affirming collection of neurodivergent people’s inner worlds and experiences.
The book is still open for contributions.
If you are neurodivergent — whether formally diagnosed or self-identifying — you are warmly invited to contribute your own constellation. No artistic skill is needed. No particular way of writing. Just your own unique map of who you are. The project is intentionally moving away from deficit narratives and toward something that reflects the full richness of neurodivergent experience and identity.
Contributors need to be over 18. If you’re interested to find out more, Mark and Lisa would love to hear from you at book@vicarious-traumatisation.com.
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 introduce NeuroHub Connect’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 Connect 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/
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.
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
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.
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/
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.
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 Connect 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Connect 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 Connect 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 Connect — 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
Botha, M., Dibb, B., & Frost, D. M. (2022). Autism is me: An investigation of how autistic individuals make sense of autism and stigma. Disability & Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2022.2031829
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
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
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. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0043
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Connect 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.
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.
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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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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Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autism, and cognitive liberty. Autonomous Press.
Walker, N. (19th Sept, 2025). Personal communication with Helen Edgar re: Neuronormative Paradigm.
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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
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Yergeau, M. R. (2018). Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke University Press Books.
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.
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
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.
“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.
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.
