This blog has led on from the first episode of The Mycelial Mind: Neurokin Conversations hosted by David Gray-Hammond with Helen Edgar & Adele Murray and also forms part of the ongoing discussion for the community project Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming
We introduce NeuroHub Community’s ecological approach to community and wellbeing through philosophical concepts grounded in practical application.
When I first started thinking about ecological metaphors for neurodivergent experience, I kept returning to two thoughts: the underground fungal web of mycelium, and the sideways-spreading, rootless rhizome.
At first glance they can seem interchangeable as they both resist hierarchy, they both spread without a centre and they both connect things that might appear separate on the surface.
The more time I spent with these thoughts and through discussions with Neurohub Community and Stimpunks, the more I realised they are doing quite different things, and that difference matters for how we understand Autistic and neurodivergent life, community, and identity.
Mycelium helps us understand how care flows and survival becomes possible.
Rhizome helps us understand how a person grows, learns, and becomes.
Mycelium: A Network of Care and Mutual Sustenance
Mycelium is the vast underground fungal web that connects trees and plants across a forest ecosystem. It’s sometimes called the “wood wide web” and what makes it such a valuable metaphor for care is not just how it looks, but how it actually functions.
Mycelial networks redistribute resources — carbon, water, nutrients — from stronger nodes toward more vulnerable ones (Simard, 2021). Older, established trees send sugars through the network to seedlings growing in shade, where they cannot yet photosynthesize enough to sustain themselves. The network actively compensates for inequality of access, it notices where something is struggling and it responds.
There is no central command, there is no king or ruling tree that rules all the others and send out orders, no hierarchy issuing instructions about who receives what. Care flows through relationships and proximity, quietly and continuously, largely beneath the surface.
I think this maps powerfully onto disability justice frameworks and neurodiversity communities. Mia Mingus’s concept of interdependence and access intimacy (2022) is about the understanding that we all need care and we all have something to offer, it resonates deeply with mycelial logic. Care, in this framing, is not charity flowing downward from those who have the power to those who lack power. It is a web of mutual interdependent sustenance in which everyone is both receiver and contributor at different times and in different ways.
For Autistic community specifically, the mycelium metaphor holds to me because it values depth of connection over breadth. It recognises that the health of the whole of our community depends on the health of each node, each person — including, and perhaps especially, the most vulnerable. It is a model of community that does not ask anyone to need less, perform more, or earn their place in the network, everyone is accepted as they are.
Distress and burnout, from this perspective, are not signs of individual failure. They are signals moving through a system — signs that the network needs to respond, that resources need to be redistributed, that care needs to flow more evenly.
Rhizome: Person-Centred Becoming and Non-Linear Growth
Where mycelium is a metaphor for community and care, I am now moving towards the idea of the rhizome being more of a metaphor for personhood and becoming.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduced the rhizome as a philosophical concept in their work One Thousand Plateaus — drawn from plants like ginger or couch grass that grow horizontally, without a single root or trunk, branching in multiple directions simultaneously, without a fixed origin or a predetermined destination.
This stands in contrast to what they called the arborescent, or tree-like, model that David Gray-Hammond discusses in our podcast — the familiar image of a trunk (a normative baseline) from which branches spread outward (deviations, differences, deficits measured against that centre). The tree model underpins so much of how neurodivergent people have been previously and in many ways are still understood — as branching away from a correct developmental path, as requiring intervention to redirect growth back toward the trunk. The rhizome refuses this entirely.
The rhizome has no correct path and no normal sequence, there is no centre from which deviation is measured. You can enter it at any point and it connects anything to anything. It is about multiplicity and becoming rather than arriving at a fixed, finished identity – which all resonate with me and reflect how our online neurodivergent communities evolve and support each other.
Thinking of the Autistic rhizome in this way does not position any person as a deficient version of something else. Walker’s neuroqueer framework (Walker, 2021) draws on this kind of thinking, that neurodivergent people are not branching away from normal; we are differently rooted, growing differently, becoming differently, and that difference is not a problem to be corrected.
For monotropic people, where your attention flows deeply into fewer, more absorbing channels (Murray, Lesser & Lawson, 2005), the rhizome maps onto how interests and understanding and interdependent flow actually develop. It doesn’t develop through a linear framework moving from step to step, but through deep lateral (often omnidirectional) connections: one fascination, interest, shared story or struggle opening unexpectedly into another, knowledge spiralling and looping, meaning accumulating in ways that don’t follow prescribed paths.
Rhizomatic becoming may look like chaos but it is a different kind of order and reflects the Chaotic Self David Gray-Hammond has written about extensively.
The mycelium describes our community: how we hold and sustain each other across difference, how care flows laterally rather than downward, how no one person’s thriving is separate from everyone else’s.
The rhizome describes the person: that each individual body and mind is not a deficient version of a normative type, but a genuine multiplicity in process of becoming — with its own valid logic, its own valid direction, its own valid 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.
We need both to flourish.
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Listen to the podcast here:
This piece is part of the More Realms blog series Re-Worlding Neurodiversity: Monotropism, Ecological Belonging, and Neuroqueer Futures.
Part 1: Re-Worlding Neurodiversity — Monotropism, Ecological Belonging, and Neuroqueer Futures
Part 2: When the Ecology Fractures — Monotropism and Autistic Burnout
Part 3: Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-Assembly
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References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Mingus, M. (2022). You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence
https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com
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/
Simard, S. W. (2021). Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Knopf Publishing.
https://suzannesimard.com/finding-the-mother-tree-book/
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-an-introduction/