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  • Bathing in Colour: Mark Rothko, Monotropism and Neuroqueering the Body without Organs

    Bathing in Colour: Mark Rothko, Monotropism and Neuroqueering the Body without Organs

    A response to Liam Ren “Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming – A Reflection” (23rd March 2026), for the community project Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming
    https://bsky.app/profile/liamrenouf.bsky.social/post/3mhpsrfvsb22h

    Rhizomatic Memory and Neuroqueer Method

    Reading Liam Ren’s idea “of neuroqueering methodologies, or neuroqueering as methodology” ignited a memory, a re-emergence of an experience that I had many years ago. Liam describes neuroqueering as something unfinished, and shaped by intensive frequencies, something that ebbs and flows. This resonated with how my own learning journey has unfolded over time. Meaning has rarely developed through linear progression; instead, it has emerged through immersion in specific hyper-focused interests, through deep monotropic intensity, and often a return to a previous deep interest (like this article about the artist Mark Rothko), a constant spiralling movement, ebbing and flowing between past and present.

    Their reflections on the idea of a “synaesthetic art critic” and philosophical engagement beyond conventional academic structures brought me back to my student years studying History of Art and English Literature almost 30 years ago. Long before I had the language for words like monotropism, neurodivergence, or neuroqueer theory, I was already encountering art as a whole-body experience; as a field of sensation that reorganised bodily awareness. Art was something I felt, something I needed in my life, and still do. Abstract expressionist painting, particularly the work of Mark Rothko, became a place for me where perception, emotion, and bodily awareness seemed to merge, and I felt a bit more understood, it made me feel more complete in a way that only art, music, literature and poetry can.

    The Gallery as a Plane of Immanence

    One memory stands out with particular clarity: visiting Tate Modern in London to experience Rothko’s Seagram Murals, first-hand with my friend as part of our Uni course. The gallery space was dimly lit, quiet, and expansive. The paintings were monumental, not decorative objects hanging on the gallery wall, but immersive environments; I felt I actually entered in to them. The paintings were autonomous compounds what Deleuze describes as “blocks of sensations” that reorganised the gallery space. “The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (Deleuze, 1994).

    Looking back now, the gallery setting can be understood as what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a plane of immanence — a field of relations within which thought becomes possible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Thought does not arise solely within an individual’s mind; it emerges through material and affective conditions: architecture, colour, silence, bodily positioning, and social presence with our surroundings. This space helped shaped my perception of the art before any conscious interpretation began; it was something I felt before the words arrived. In fact, I still have no words to accurately describe my experiences, which is possibly why art is so important: it fills the gap where words restrict us.

    Plateaus of Attention: Monotropism and Sensory Duration

    My friend and I lay down on the gallery floor, surrounded by vast fields of dark red and maroon. I let the colours wash through me, as though I were bathing in them, held within an atmosphere that seemed to slow and thicken time itself. We must have stayed there for a long while, suspended in a quiet intensity that resisted any sense of conclusion. I have returned to the gallery many times since, always with the same feeling: that I never quite want to leave, as though the encounter is still unfolding and I am still making sense of it.

    This sustained immersive, monotropic experience could be understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a plateau: a continuous region of intensity that maintains experiential charge without moving toward resolution (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). My attention deepened rather than accelerated or reached any definitive answers about the work; my thoughts unfolded as time seemed to just slip away, and I felt I almost became part of the art itself. This narrowing of attention functioned as a temporary territorialisation of perception, through which sensory relations intensified rather than diminished.

    The theory of Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005), may help explain this experience further. When the attentional resources of Autistic and ADHD people become highly focused, engagement with sensory or conceptual environments can become immersive and nonlinear. In the Rothko gallery, this narrowing of my attentional field did not feel restrictive; instead, it enabled an expanded relational field in which colour, the sounds of the gallery, the architectural scale of the building and paintings, my memory, and shared presence formed a kind of temporary assemblage. The meaning and memories created there emerged slowly through my ongoing immersion with the art and the space I was in.

    Synaesthetic Encounter and the Body without Organs

    I experience synaesthesia, where sensory impressions begin to overlap and blend. While immersed in Rothko’s deep reds and maroons, I felt and heard a low vibrating internal hum. The colours did not stay at a distance as something to look at; they felt as though they entered my body, with an affective force and pull, creating an atmosphere that was both calming and intense. Experiences like this can challenge expectations about how we are supposed to engage with art. Rather than observing from the outside, perception becomes immersive, relational, and deeply felt, maybe more so if you experience synesthesia in this way, but I only have my own experience to draw from.

    I didn’t know it at the time, other gallery visitors probably thought I was a bit strange, but lying on the gallery floor also involved an unspoken disruption of normative spectator behaviour in a setting like this. Visitors are typically expected to stand, sit or move quietly, and observe from a respectful distance. By shifting bodily position — lying, sitting and walking around, I was unknowingly experimenting with perception itself and also neuroqueering the expectations of being in a formal public gallery space.

    Deleuze and Guattari describe the Body without Organs (BwO) as a process in which habitual bodily organisation loosens, allowing new intensities and relations to emerge (1987). The BwO is not the disappearance of the structure of our actual human bodies but an experimental reconfiguration of how our bodies connect and respond, and can reconfigure in different spaces.

    Within Tate Modern’s gallery, Rothko’s work disrupted and destaballised the boundary between me as a viewer and artwork. The gallery functioned as an assemblage in which colour, texture, depth, scale, sound, friendship and memory all combined to form a temporary field of relational intensity. In this reorganisation, my own perception of the art became more experimental. The pressure to interpret correctly when writing up my essay notes receded, and my attention plateaued into a state of sensation in which my identity and environment were mutually shaping each other as I let the colours flow through me, as I heard the sound of the deep reds, and felt as if I were becoming part of the art itself.

    Neuroqueering Methodology and Lines of Flight

    For many neurodivergent people, such intensive monotropic responses to art, literature, music, dance or poetry may be familiar. Through a Deleuzian lens, they could be understood as creative reorganisations of experience, minor reorganisations of affective and perceptual relations, subtle lines of flight that open alternative ways of being present in the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

    Liam Ren’s exploration of neuroqueering methodology helps frame these encounters as epistemologically significant. Neuroqueering challenges assumptions that knowledge must be produced through linear argument or normative cognitive performance. Instead, it recognises that understanding may emerge through affective immersion, relational environments, sustained attentional flow states, and our divergent ways of experiencing art and the world.

    Abstract art like Rothko’s can therefore function as a neuroqueer methodological space, a temporary territory where dominant expectations of productivity, legibility, and behavioural regulation loosen for the person who is engaging with the artwork.

    Becoming Through Colour

    Reflecting now, my time lying beneath Rothko’s paintings enabled a different way of thinking to emerge, one shaped by duration, sensory attunement, and relational presence. Memory itself operates rhizomatically, as a process of ongoing recomposition rather than recollection, returning unpredictably and forming new conceptual connections across time (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), as has happened when I read Liam’s blog.

    Such encounters suggest that philosophical becoming may occur not only in texts but also in embodied situations like this that loosen the organisation of the self and open new planes of relation. Neuroqueering methodology can therefore be understood as a lived practice of experimentation, a willingness to follow lines of sensation in our bodyminds into unfamiliar territories, to linger with the ‘what could this mean’, with the ‘what may happen if…’.

    Rothko’s murals continue to offer such plateaus for me. They create environments in which perception can deepen, bodyminds can reorganise, and thought can unfold through relational intensity with the artwork and the surrounding space when conditions feel safe. In Deleuzean terms, art is not primarily representational but intensive. As Deleuze and Guattari write;


    “the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself”

    (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 164).



    Encountering these fields of colour can therefore feel less like interpreting an image and more like entering a sensory event, one in which attention shifts, time gathers, and experience becomes widened with duration.

    Within such encounters, sensation may operate temporally as well as perceptually. Deleuze and Guattari describe how “sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant… what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears” (1994, p. 211). This contraction of vibration resonates with my own Autistic synaesthetic experiences of spiralling memories of sound, colour and physical sensations in my body, deep attention, and non-linear temporal flow. Art, in this sense, can become a way of inhabiting duration differently, allowing perception to loosen its usual coordinates and making space for alternative sensory epistemologies – creating new nodes on the rhizomes of our experiences and deepening our monotropic tunnels and interests.

    From this perspective, aesthetic encounters are not simply personal responses but ontological events. As Nabais (2010) observes, art involves the “capture of the force of life and also creation of a life which stands by itself” and the creation of autonomous zones of sensation that exist independently of subjective interpretation. Rothko’s paintings could be understood as environments in which sensation continuously re-composes these experiences. Rather than resolving the chaos of an abstract work of art, art can hold open a field of intensity through which chaos becomes composed into sensation.

    Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation” (1994, p. 204). If neuroqueering expands the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible, then philosophy may sometimes begin in these quieter aesthetic spaces and our relationships with a work of art — spaces where colour reshapes attention, duration transforms understanding, and sensory experience invites us to become otherwise.

    This piece forms part of the ongoing community philosophy project Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming on More Realms.

    Find out more here:

    Community Project
    Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming

    Notes on an Unfinished Encounter…

    Since writing this reflection, I have found myself thinking about how memory and theory shape the way we understand past experiences. What once felt like an open, personal sensory experience with art has become more organised through language and philosophy.

    I have also begun to wonder about the gallery space itself. The quietness, dim lighting, and cultural expectations of contemporary art created conditions where immersive attention felt possible and safe. Lying on the floor felt like a small disruption of usual behaviour, but it was also an action that the space could absorb. This raises questions about who is able to experiment with their perception in public spaces, and under what conditions difference becomes accepted or contained. These reflections also make me think about how public spaces quietly regulate behaviour, attention, and movement, shaping what kinds of sensory engagement are seen as appropriate or disruptive. I am also aware that not all people are granted the same freedom to move, pause, or experiment with perception in public spaces. What felt possible for me in that moment may not feel safe or permitted for others. For some people, moving or sensing differently in public can lead to misunderstanding, correction, or exclusion rather than quiet acceptance.

    Reflecting further, I notice an ongoing tension between using the theory of monotropism to understand deep attentional engagement, and engaging with philosophical ideas such as those of Deleuze and Guattari about becoming that resist fixed explanations. Neuroqueering methodology may live within this tension. It can help us name and affirm neurodivergent ways of experiencing the world, while also inviting us to remain open to change, uncertainty, and new ways of thinking, and to question the taken-for-granted standards of focus, composure, and productivity that shape how bodies and minds are expected to function in shared environments. Immersive sensory encounters can feel uncertain or overwhelming, reminding me that opening perception in this way involves a negotiation between curiosity, vulnerability, and the need for grounding.

    Rather than reaching a conclusion, these reflections feel like a continuation. My encounters with Rothko’s paintings continue to unfold through memory, conversation, and ongoing sensory meaning-making. Perhaps neuroqueering is not about finding final interpretations or fixed language to define an experience or way of being, but about noticing how perception and understanding shift over time, opening space for new possibilities to emerge. These questions are not only personal but collective, connected to wider struggles over whose ways of sensing, thinking, and being are recognised as valid, and whose are overlooked, regulated, or misunderstood.

    To neuroqueer perception may therefore be not only to experience differently, but to gently challenge the norms that decide which experiences are allowed to matter.

    Next Blog: What may neurodivergent experiences reveal about how plateaus are lived, sensed, and sustained, and how might we neuroqueer them?

    What is a plateau?
    Not a peak to be reached, but a region where intensities sustain themselves.

    Plateaus are not entered so much as encountered, they are fields of relation where perception, time, and attention begin to shift.

    In my next blog, I will explore and unfold some more!

    References

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

    Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.

    Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.

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

    Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.

    Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. Continuum.

    Nabais, C. P. (2010). Percept, affect and micro-brains: Art according to Deleuze. In S. Di Marco, O. Pombo, & M. Pina (Eds.), Neuroaesthetics: Can science explain art? (pp. 165–175). Fim de Século.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331210652_Percept_affect_and_micro-brains_Art_according_to_Deleuze

    Ren, L. (2026). Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming – A Reflection. Substack.

    Rothko, M. (n.d.). Quotes. https://www.mark-rothko.org/quotes.jsp

    Tate Modern, Mark Rothko Seagram Murals: https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/in-the-studio/mark-rothko-seagram-murals

  • Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming

    Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming

    A Community Project

    Project Started: March 2026

    Beginning with Curiosity

    This journey begins with curiosity, and with transformation.

    Over the past few years, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari has become profoundly important to me. I am not a Deleuzian scholar and have no formal academic background in philosophy at all – the aim of this project is very much focused on community learning and expanding conversations.

    Through cycles of debilitating Autistic burnout, I found myself searching for language that could help me make sense of experiences that felt difficult to articulate — deep attentional flow, sensory intensity, nonlinear thinking, moments of rupture, the slow processes of recovery and new ways of becoming.

    Burnout, Deterritorialisation, and New Patterns of Becoming

    Concepts such as the rhizome, multiplicity, body without organs, planes of immanence, assemblage, and deterritorialisation, explored in works including A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and later reflections such as What Is Philosophy? began to resonate with my lived experience as an Autistic and ADHD (AuDHD) person. My monotropic attention often feels like it moves through constellation-like interconnected tunnels of intensity rather than along a single stable path. My cycles of burnout feel like a sudden loss of territory, a destabilisation of the structures that once enabled my participation in the world. In this sense, burnout sometimes resembled a form of deterritorialisation: a disorientation that disrupted familiar rhythms while opening uncertain possibilities for forming new connections. Recovery does not mean returning to a fixed state, but gradually composing different patterns of relation, energy, and belonging.

    Encountering Deleuze and Guattari’s work offered me ways of understanding these experiences not as personal failure, but as part of dynamic relational processes within the wider ecosystems I am part of. Their philosophy is helping me think differently about identity, learning, exhaustion, creativity, and the environments we inhabit. It is opening up a space to understand neurodivergent experience as movement, transformation, and ongoing becoming rather than as a deficit or fragmentation of a whole.

    Rhizomatic Thinking and Nonlinear Understanding

    At times, reading their work has felt disorienting, yet also strangely and comfortingly familiar. The nonlinear textures of their writing, moving through plateaus, building connections, going through the tides of intensities, and shifting conceptual landscapes, echo ways of thinking that many neurodivergent people may also recognise.


    Ideas do not always unfold in a straight line; instead, they branch, loop, and return, forming clusters of attention and moments of unexpected resonance. In this sense, philosophical engagement can feel rhizomatic: thoughts emerging in multiple directions, forming nodes of meaning that connect across time, experience, and environment.

    Rather than progressing step by step toward a single conclusion, understanding develops through community movement — through following lines of curiosity, pausing at plateaus of insight, and allowing connections to form gradually. Philosophy, for me, is therefore not only something to be interpreted, it is also something to be experimented with, inhabited, and lived through with repeated encounters with ideas, places, bodies, and other people. In this way, thinking becomes relational and ecological, shaped by the networks we are part of and the intensities that draw our attention.

    Neuroqueering Philosophy

    This project can therefore be understood as an act of neuroqueering philosophy and our ways of being in the world.

    Drawing inspiration from the work of neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker, neuroqueering involves approaching established concepts, systems and ways of being in ways that challenge normative assumptions about knowledge, cognition, identity, and relational life. In this sense, neuroqueering is not only about representation, it is also a practice of becoming, an active reworking of how we think, connect, and how we can re-create meaning together against neuronormativity and conformity.

    A Rhizomatic Community Project

    This community project — Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming — grows from this ongoing process of engagement and constant iteration, finding and creating difference through repetition.

    It is envisioned as a slow, collaborative exploration of philosophical ideas based primarily on Deleuze and Guattari, through neurodivergent lived experience, creative reflection, and relational dialogue. Philosophy does not only take place within academic institutions, it also unfolds in everyday life, through deep interests, sensory experiences, professional work, parenting journeys, community relationships, ecological awareness, and the rhythms of burnout and renewal that so often shape neurodivergent lives.

    The project itself is intentionally rhizomatic. Anchor posts from different people may introduce themes or conceptual entry points, but participants are invited to respond in ways that feel meaningful to them — dipping in and out as attention, energy, and curiosity shift. Engagement does not need to be linear or continuous; it may follow rhythms of monotropic flow, periods of rest, or moments of pause and return – there is no expectation in how you take part if this interests you. I am really just hoping to develop my own deeper understanding and connect with others who are also interested in exploring this.

    Contributions may take many forms: reflective essays, creative writing, visual work, dialogue, field notes, or theoretical experimentation. At times, there may be intense activity and connection; at other times, the project may enter quieter phases of reflection or renewal. These pauses ill not be seen as interruptions but part of the process itself, moments in which new insights gather, relationships deepen, and different possibilities for thought begin to emerge.

    Over time, the project may come to resemble an evolving assemblage, a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and lines of thought intersecting, diverging, and forming new connections. Rather than building toward a single conclusion (as I have no idea where this will lead!), the process itself becomes generative: a collective practice of rhizomatic thinking, sensing and becoming together.

    Practices such as linking to one another’s work, acknowledging influences, tagging shared themes, and responding across social media platforms are therefore not only practical but philosophical. Through shared hashtags — such as #NeuroqueeringDeleuze, #RhizomesOfBecoming, #NeuroqueerPhilosophy, and other evolving conceptual markers people can help form a visible network of ideas: a living rhizome of thought that evolves.

    These small acts of citation, iteration, responding, and relational engagement enable ideas to travel, intersect, and transform across different spaces and communities. In this way, the project becomes more than a collection of individual reflections. It becomes an ongoing process of collective becoming, shaped through collaboration, dialogue, and the emergence of new nodes of thinking together.

    Philosophical Lineages and Expanding Connections

    While this project begins with the collaborative philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, which I am personally very interested in learning more about, it also recognises that their work emerges from a wider philosophical lineage. Thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz shaped Deleuze’s explorations of affect, duration, multiplicity, and relational existence. As the project develops, we may move across a wide variety of philosophical and sociological spaces, tracing connections between historical ideas, contemporary neurodivergent theories, and emerging forms of post-human thought and More-Than Neurodiversity.

    This work is shaped not only by academic theory but also by us as members of the neurodivergent community. Through our lived experience, and by shared practices of reflection and care, it can grow through our neuroqueer writing, creative work, and grassroots spaces such as Stimpunks.

    I would like to draw attention to those who are currently influential in my own work, including Nick Walker, Robert Chapman, Julia Lee Barclay-Morton, David Grey-Hammond, Ryan Boren, and more recently Liam Ren.

    Post-humanist and new materialist perspectives also inform the project’s emphasis on relational ontology, movement, and ecological entanglement. The work of Karen Barad, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti may offer ways of understanding knowledge as something that is produced through relationships, between bodies, environments, and material conditions rather than as abstract theory alone. I have found Ombre Tarragnat’s concept of ethodiversity truly inspiring as it further expands this view, reminding us that diverse ways of perceiving, behaving, and relating are part of broader patterns of life beyond the human.

    Together, I hope these influences and others will help shape a project that understands philosophy through a neuroqueer lens as an unfolding project across communities, experiences, and environments, through collective processes of thinking, sensing, creating, and becoming.

    An Ongoing Process of Becoming

    This is a long-term journey. Ideas may return, shift, and deepen over months or years, I have no final destination. Only plateaus, places to pause, notice connections, and continue thinking and creating together.

    If these ideas resonate with you, I would like to invite you to take part. By sharing reflections, linking to one another’s work, and forming new connections, we can collectively expand this rhizome of thought, adding new nodes, pathways, and neuroqueer possibilities for becoming together.

    Let the rhizome keep expanding!

    References and Further Exploration

    This project grows through dialogue with a wide range of thinkers, writers, and community spaces. The following resources offer starting points for exploring neuroqueer theory, neurodiversity scholarship, post-human philosophy, and related conceptual work that may inspire you.

    Please do reach out to add to this evolving list!

    Neuroqueer and Neurodiversity Thought

    Ryan Boren — Neurodiversity advocacy, inclusive pedagogy, and neuroqueer learning environments.
    Stimpunks
    https://stimpunks.org/

    Robert Chapman — Critical neurodiversity studies, philosophy, and social justice perspectives on mental difference.
    https://criticalneurodiversity.com

    Helen Edgar — Autistic Realms
    Neurodivergent lived experience, monotropism theory, autistic burnout, relational wellbeing, and practical neuro-affirming resources for families, educators, and professionals.
    https://autisticrealms.com

    Helen Edgar — More Realms
    Creative neuroqueer writing, philosophical exploration, and posthuman ecological thought, with experimental reflections on identity, temporality, and relational becoming.
    https://morerealms.com

    David Gray-Hammond — Neurodivergent community building, neuroqueering practice, and collaborative learning spaces.
    NeuroHub Community
    https://neurohubcommunity.org/

    Julia Lee Barclay-Morton — Creative neurodivergent writing, Autistic identity, embodied healing practices, and reflections on burnout, difference, and artistic process. Their platform The Unadapted Ones explores neurodiversity through memoir, theatre, and relational approaches to wellbeing and creativity.
    https://www.theunadaptedones.com/

    Liam Ren — Collective, political, and materialist dimensions of neuroqueer thought and neurodivergent futures.
    https://liamrenouf.substack.com/p/from-neuroqueer-rhetoric-to-neurocommunism

    Nick Walker — Neuroqueer theory, Autistic self-advocacy, and transformative approaches to neurodiversity.
    https://neuroqueer.com/

    Melanie Yergeau — Neuroqueer rhetoric, authorship, and autistic embodiment.
    Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness
    https://www.dukeupress.edu/authoring-autism

    Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives

    Karen Barad — Agential realism, intra-action, and relational ontology in feminist science and philosophy.
    https://karinbarad.com/

    Rosi Braidotti — Posthumanism, nomadic theory, and ethical approaches to becoming in contemporary philosophy.
    https://rosibraidotti.com/

    Donna Haraway — Feminist technoscience, situated knowledge, multispecies relations, and posthuman storytelling.

    Further exploration:
    https://pact.egs.edu/biography/donna-haraway/
    https://cyberfeminismindex.com/project/donna-haraway/

    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.

  • Neuroqueering Relational Ecologies: Autistic Weathering and the Body without Organs

    Neuroqueering Relational Ecologies: Autistic Weathering and the Body without Organs

    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.

    Abstract digital artwork showing a glowing human-like figure dissolving into swirling cosmic patterns of colour and light. The body appears semi-transparent, merging with spirals, stars, fluid shapes, and network-like formations, suggesting movement, transformation, and connection between the human form and wider energetic or environmental forces. Created on Canva

    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

    Close-up, abstract photograph of rippling water in deep blue and teal tones. The surface shows small waves and circular ripple patterns in the foreground, with bright reflections and soft, out-of-focus light spots (bokeh) shimmering across the background. The overall mood is calm and fluid, with a slightly dreamy, atmospheric quality.

    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

    Close-up photograph of a small cluster of delicate, pale beige mushrooms with thin stems and softly ridged, bell-shaped caps emerging from a cushion of vivid green moss on a forest floor. Tiny plants, pine needles, and damp soil surround them, while warm sunlight filters through blurred woodland foliage in the background. The image evokes the idea of ethodiversity—the rich variety of ways living beings exist, grow, and relate within shared ecosystems—highlighting the interconnected rhythms of fungi, moss, soil, light, and moisture in a quiet, thriving microhabitat.

    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

    Soft-focus photograph of a delicate spider’s web suspended between plants, its fine threads dotted with tiny dew droplets that catch warm golden morning light. The background is a gentle blur of greens and yellows, suggesting foliage and sunlight filtering through a living landscape. The web appears both fragile and resilient, stretching across space in intricate patterns of connection. The image evokes the theme of “Cultivating Liveable Worlds: A Neuroqueer Ecological Future,” symbolising interdependence, relational networks, and the co-creation of environments where diverse ways of sensing, moving, and being can flourish.

    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?

    References

    Adkin, T. (2022). What is monotropic split? NeuroHub Community. https://neurohubcommunity.org/2022/07/14/guest-post-what-is-monotropic-split/

    Boren, R. & Edgar, H. (2022, July 26). Cavendish space. Stimpunks Foundation. https://stimpunks.org/glossary/cavendish-space/

    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.

    Relational Design
    Designing Neurodivergent Environments
    Cavendish Space
    Neuroqueer Learning Spaces
  • Expanding the Mycelial Network of Care: Autistic Community, Safety, and Rhizomatic Futures

    Expanding the Mycelial Network of Care: Autistic Community, Safety, and Rhizomatic Futures

    Autistic community can function as a living ecology of support, growing rhizomes and mycelium networks of care through shared recognition, co-regulation and mutual understanding. Within education, healthcare and labour systems that often disrupt neurodivergent flow and safety, these relational networks help sustain belonging, support burnout recovery and create new possibilities for engagement and participation. Drawing on monotropism, masking research and neurodivergent design approaches developed through Stimpunks, this article explores how our collective Autistic spaces nurture survival, resistance and transformative futures.

    The Autistic Rhizome

    The Autistic community is often spoken about as a source of friendship and peer support – a place to find people who just ‘get it’ and accept us for who we really are in all of our weird and wonderful ways of being. Yet for myself and perhaps others, it also functions as something far more foundational, a relational ecology that enables actual survival within systems not designed for our ways of thinking, sensing, and being.

    Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome offers a powerful lens for understanding this. Rhizomes grow laterally rather than hierarchically. They form networks of connection that adapt to changing environments and they persist even after rupture. In many ways, the Autistic community develops in similar ways, through shared flow states, shared recognition, and collective resistance to structures that fragment our attention and belonging.

    This matters because our dominant systems, particularly education, healthcare, and capitalist labour structures, often operate through neuronormative assumptions about productivity, communication, and independence and ways of being which leads many of us into chronic burnout.

    Education, Attention, and the Cost of Neuroconformity

    Educational systems frequently prioritise standardised pacing, neuroconformity, and measurable outcomes over relational safety and cognitive and sensory diversity. For monotropic people (Murray et al., 2005), such environments can be profoundly destabilising. Constant transitions, sensory overload, and social performance demands can disrupt flow and contribute to experiences of masking, suppressing our need for sensory regulation, increasing anxiety and often leading to disengagement or exclusion.

    Research on Autistic inertia highlights how difficulties with task initiation or switching are often misunderstood as defiance or lack of motivation (Buckle et al., 2021) rather than a redistribution of monotropic attentional resources. When these misunderstandings are embedded within institutions and systems, people may internalise deficit narratives or experience harmful interventions in order to try and fix or shape Autistic people into fitting into the neuronormative world. Trauma then accumulates over time, shaping later experiences of participation and safety and can lead to burnout and mental health difficulties.

    Autistic community spaces (online and in person) can provide alternative ecologies for learning and care. where the neurodivergent love languages and the importance of interest-led exploration, flexible pacing, and co-regulation allow attention to stabilise and flow more evenly and a sense of belonging can emerge where we can be our authentic selves.

    Healthcare, Misattunement, and Epistemic Injustice

    Healthcare systems also frequently struggle to recognise Autistic communication styles, sensory realities, and embodied knowledge. The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) highlights how misunderstandings between neurotypes can shape diagnostic processes, treatment decisions, and therapeutic relationships. Autistic people may find their experiences dismissed, pathologised, or translated into frameworks that prioritise normalisation over wellbeing.

    Such interactions can contribute to epistemic injustice — the marginalisation of individuals as credible knowers of their own lives. When healthcare encounters become sites of misattunement rather than support, relational safety is undermined. This may delay help-seeking or intensify distress.

    Within Autistic community, shared narratives can restore legitimacy to lived experience. Collective knowledge and sharing stories offer alternative pathways for understanding burnout, coping, sensory regulation, and recovery.

    Capitalism, Masking, and Burnout

    Our labour structures and workplaces often reward speed, multitasking, social performance, and uninterrupted productivity. For many Autistic people, sustaining participation in such environments requires masking — suppressing natural behaviours or attentional rhythms to meet normative expectations (Hull et al., 2020; Mantzalas et al., 2022).

    Over time, sustained masking combined with environmental mismatch can contribute to Autistic burnout (Raymaker et al., 2020). Burnout may involve loss of functional capacity, withdrawal from work or education, and profound exhaustion as all of our monotropic attentional resources go into survival mode. Framing these outcomes solely as failures of individual resilience obscures their structural roots. – it is a socio-political and ecosystemic problem.

    Autistic community can act as a counter-space to these pressures. Rhizomatic networks of mutual aid, shared stories, advocacy, and shared pacing enable individuals to explore alternative participation models. Some may pursue interest-led work, flexible schedules, or collaborative creative projects. These movements can be understood as Deleuzian lines of flight — pathways through which individuals move away from restrictive assemblages and experiment with new ways of living (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

    Safety as Relational Infrastructure

    Across education, healthcare, and employment, a common thread seems to emerge that safety is not only physical or psychological. It is sensory, attentional, relational, and political.

    Safety involves being able to focus without constant interruption.
    It involves communicating without fear of misinterpretation.
    It involves participating without masking core aspects of identity.

    The Autistic community often provides conditions for such safety through shared norms, slower rhythms, and recognition of diverse sensory and regulatory needs. Co-regulation and inter-dependence become possible when individuals do not need to defend their ways of being. Over time, these relational environments within the rhizome can support recovery from burnout and trauma.

    From Resistance to Re-Designing Mycelial Networks of Care

    Through collaborative work with Stimpunks, I have been involved in developing pattern language resources that articulate recurring neurodivergent experiences and their environmental contexts (Stimpunks, 2026a). These patterns form the basis for practical design “recipes” aimed at reshaping institutions and systems to support diverse cognitive and sensory ways of being (Stimpunks, 2026b, 2026c).

    This work signals a move beyond simple neuro-affirming accommodation toward deeper neuroqueer transformation. It suggests a shift from approaches that seek only to make existing neuronormative systems slightly more tolerable, toward practices that fundamentally question how those systems are organised and whose ways of being they prioritise. Neuro-affirming accommodation can be important and often necessary in the short term, helping to reduce immediate barriers or harms. However, when accommodation is framed as the endpoint rather than part of a broader process of change, it risks leaving intact the underlying assumptions about productivity, communication, independence, and pacing that continue to destabilise Autistic attention, sensory regulation, and relational safety.

    Neuroqueer transformation invites a more expansive reimagining. It asks what might happen if environments were not simply adjusted around the margins, but re-designed from the ground up to recognise diverse cognitive rhythms, sensory experiences, and ways of participating. This involves moving from reactive support toward proactive design, creating spaces where deep focus, flexible transitions, alternative communication styles, and interdependence are not treated as deviations to be managed, but as integral aspects of collective life. In this sense, neurodivergent design becomes both a practical and a political project: a process of reshaping institutions so that they can accommodate multiple modes of attention, embodiment, and relationality without requiring individuals to mask or fragment themselves to belong.

    Rather than asking Autistic individuals to constantly adjust to environments that disrupt attention, safety, and well-being, neurodivergent design aims to reshape systems to support different ways of sensing, communicating, and participating. The knowledge that grows within rhizomatic Autistic communities plays an important role in this work. Through shared recognition, mutual aid, and collaborative experimentation, these communities generate situated understandings of burnout, regulation, pacing, and connection. Such knowledge does not remain purely theoretical; it informs new educational practices, healthcare approaches, creative collaborations, and models of participation that are more equitable and sustainable.

    In this way, neuroqueer transformation is not only about resisting harmful structures, but also about cultivating alternative futures. It emerges through the gradual expansion of relational networks that support belonging, creativity, and recovery. As these rhizomatic forms of community continue to grow and adapt, they contribute to the ongoing redesign of social worlds, opening possibilities for ways of living together that honour neurodivergent difference as generative rather than problematic.

    Expanding the Mycelial Network of Care: Rhizomatic Belonging and Collective Futures

    Understanding Autistic community as rhizomatic reveals that belonging is not a fixed destination but an ongoing relational process. It emerges through shared attention, mutual recognition, and the gradual weaving of safer spaces within systems that often disrupt flow and participation. In this sense, community is not simply something we find; it is something we can actually grow together and shape for our diverse needs.

    When burnout, trauma, or systemic exclusion make participation difficult, networks of care within Autistic communities can help us find new ways to stay connected and sustain ourselves. We re-root together, supporting one another and forming new points and nodes of connection within the wider rhizome. These journeys are rarely straightforward; they often involve slowing down, adjusting communication, and experimenting with ways of living that move beyond neuronormative expectations.

    Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe this kind of movement as creating lines of flight, moments when people begin to move toward new possibilities and build different forms of support, creativity, and meaning. In many ways, this is what we are doing through spaces such as Neurohub Community and through collaborative work with Stimpunks: actively creating and living within alternative networks of belonging.

    Expanding the mycelial network of care therefore becomes both a personal and collective practice. Each conversation that validates lived experience, each redesign of an educational space, each act of co-regulation within community contributes to strengthening these underground systems of connection. Through collaborative work such as the development of neurodivergent pattern languages and design approaches (Stimpunks, 2026), Autistic people are actively reshaping the environments and structures that have always required us to adapt or “fit in.” This work reflects an ongoing process of transformation. Neuroqueering our ways of being, and our relationships with others and with the environments we inhabit. This becomes a continual practice of reimagining participation, safety, and belonging.

    These networks enable forms of engagement and participation grounded in safety rather than performance, in interdependence rather than isolation. They support new imaginaries of play, work, rest, learning, and socialising where our diverse ways of being are not merely accommodated but genuinely recognised as generative and transformational. Rhizomatic community creates a sense of belonging that becomes a form of re-world-building — expanding the possibilities for how our Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent lives can unfold.

    Like mycelium sustaining forest ecosystems, these relational infrastructures often remain unseen by dominant neuronormative systems and are dismissed as meaningless. Yet they continue to grow, adapt, and nourish. We continue to grow as a community, even after rupture, new connections emerge. Through expanding networks of care, Autistic communities are not only surviving within existing structures but we are also gradually transforming them.

    Autistic Rhizomes and Mycelial Infrastructures of Collective Care: How the Autistic Community Is Already Changing the World

    The Autistic rhizome does not stop at the boundaries of the present and the here and now. It continues to grow through expanding mycelium networks of care, relational systems that spread quietly yet persistently beneath the surface of dominant neuronormative structures. These networks are not only symbolic of future possibility; they are already being lived, practiced, and cultivated in some community spaces today. Through shared recognition, co-regulation, mutual aid, and collaborative creativity and solidarity sessions, Autistic people are actively generating new conditions for safety, participation, and belonging.

    This transformation is not in some distant horizon or unattainable future. It is unfolding now within spaces such as Neurohub Community and Stimpunks, where neurodivergent design approaches, pattern language resources, and collective learning, story sharing and support are reshaping how we understand care and what participation and engagement really look like. Within these rhizomatic spaces, knowledge and care move laterally rather than hierarchically. People reconnect after rupture, re-root after burnout, and experiment with new rhythms of engagement that honour our diverse communication, attentional and sensory needs.

    Autistic mycelium networks of care function as living infrastructures of change. They nourish us while simultaneously influencing wider systems, always creating new nodes on the rhizome, new points to engage or disengage, demonstrating that alternative ways of organising education, healthcare, work, and community life are both necessary and possible. By growing together through shared experience and relational trust, these networks challenge deficit and neuronormative-dominated narratives and open pathways toward more equitable and sustainable neuroqueer futures.

    The Autistic rhizome reaches forward and outwards, not only through imagination, but through action. Each moment of co-regulation, each redesign of an environment, each collaborative act of resistance, and each shared story, meme, or gif can contribute to an ongoing process of collective re-world-building.

    I feel deeply grateful to be part of this transformation alongside communities such as Stimpunks and David Gray-Hammond’s Neurohub Community — spaces where the expansion of Autistic rhizomes and mycelium networks of care is not just envisioned, but really lived and enabling me to survive….. may be beginning to thrive……

    References

    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

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

    Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398

    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

    Stimpunks. (2023). Rhizome and mycelium. https://stimpunks.org/rhizome-mycelium/

    Stimpunks. (2026a). Pattern language. https://stimpunks.org/patterns/

    Stimpunks. (2026b). Pattern recipes. https://stimpunks.org/patterns/recipes/

    Stimpunks. (2026c). Neurodivergent design field guide. https://stimpunks.org/design/

  • Autistic Burnout and Liminal Sleep Threshold: Hypnopompic and Hypnagogic Experiences

    Autistic Burnout and Liminal Sleep Threshold: Hypnopompic and Hypnagogic Experiences

    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.

    Dreamlike blue cosmic scene with two mirrored human faces emerging from clouds and stars. Overlaid text discusses Autistic burnout, liminal sleep threshold states, and hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences. Autistic Realms neurodiversity-affirming logo appears in the bottom corner.

    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.

    References

    Adkin, T. (2022, July 14). What is monotropic split? NeuroHub Community.
    https://neurohubcommunity.org/2022/07/14/guest-post-what-is-monotropic-split/

    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.

    Edgar, H. (2025). Mingling with the universe: Autistic perception. More Realms.
    https://morerealms.com/mingling-with-the-universe-autistic-perception/

    Edgar, H. (2025). Monotropism, spiral time and the rhizome of memories. More Realms.
    https://morerealms.com/monotropism-spiral-time-and-the-rhizome-of-memories/

    Grey-Hammond, D. (2026). The AuDHD burnout–psychosis ecosystem.

    https://neurohubcommunity.org/2024/06/12/the-audhd-burnout-to-psychosis-cycle-a-personal-experience/

    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.

    Monotropism, Spiral Time, and the Rhizome of Memories
    Mingling with the universe: Autistic Perception
    Re-worlding Neurodiversity: Monotropism, Ecological Belonging and Neuroqueer Futures (Part 1)
    When the Ecology Fractures: Monotropism and Autistic Burnout (Part 2)
    Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly (Part 3)
  • Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly (Part 3)

    Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly (Part 3)

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

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


    Reconnecting attention, care and becoming

    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

    Nature-themed infographic titled “Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly.” A peaceful night landscape with mountains, trees, and a lake forms the background. In the centre, a person sits cross-legged facing the water, surrounded by plants, books, a warm drink, a blanket, and sensory objects, symbolising rest and recovery. Below the ground, glowing interconnected roots spread outward like mycelium networks, representing rebuilding attention, connection, and safety. Small mushrooms and soft golden lights appear throughout the soil. Three labelled sections describe stages of recovery: Healing Actions (rest and recuperation, gentle nourishment, sensory safety), Inner Re-growth (emerging new growth and restored energy), and Cultivating Connection (nature connection, shared experience, mutual support). At the bottom, a pathway reads: “Care & Rest → Renew → Re-connect → Regrow Ecology.” The overall style is warm, hand-drawn, and earthy, using forest colours and glowing light to symbolise healing and ecological restoration.

    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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sins Invalid https://sinsinvalid.org

    Stimpunks https://stimpunks.org/

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

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



    Parts 1 & 2

    Re-worlding Neurodiversity: Monotropism, Ecological Belonging and Neuroqueer Futures (Part 1)
    When the Ecology Fractures: Monotropism and Autistic Burnout (Part 2)
  • When the Ecology Fractures: Monotropism and Autistic Burnout (Part 2)

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

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

    Part 3: Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly

    In my previous blog, we explored how monotropic attention can create deep rhizomatic pathways of learning and belonging, and how mycelial networks of care help sustain neurodivergent lives.

    But what happens when these pathways become blocked?
    What happens when the networks that once supported us begin to strain or collapse? Or we don’t have the support networks there to begin with?

    Many Autistic people describe burnout not only as exhaustion, but as a more fundamental disruption, a loss of flow, safety, and connection, a seismic shift that transforms our entire way of being.

    Burnout is not simply “doing too much.” It can feel like the ground of our known experience itself has shifted and fallen through the cracks.

    Burnout as a fracture in relational life

    Burnout often unfolds gradually, and the buildup may go unnoticed for some of us; we may suddenly find ourselves in the depths, drowning. Attention may become harder to sustain. Sensory tolerance may narrow, social interaction and communication may feel increasingly effortful. Activities that once brought joy may feel distant or even unreachable.

    The body may signal distress through meltdowns, shutdowns, pain, disruptions in sleep and eating patterns, or even difficulty initiating movement beyond wanting to curl up under a weight blanket in bed.

    Time can feel slowed, fragmented, or just utterly overwhelming and confusing as it isn’t lining up with the neuronormative expectations of the world around us. These experiences are not isolated symptoms. They are signs that the flow between body, attention, our relationships, and the wider environment is under strain.

    Rather than viewing burnout as a personal deficit, it can be understood as a fracture within a wider relational ecology.

    When environments demand constant masking, rapid task-switching, or sensory endurance, the deep attentional flows that support our ability to engage in life can begin to fracture.



    The disruption of monotropic flow

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

    For many Autistic/ ADHD people, interests are more than hobbies. They are passions that provide structure, regulation, identity, and meaning. Burnout may involve losing access to these sustaining pathways and flow states.

    A person who once found comfort in researching Tudor history, coding, drawing, gaming, building collections, or walking familiar woodland routes may suddenly feel unable to engage. Attention slips away, motivation may feel brittle, and even small tasks can require more effort and capacity than we actually have available.

    This disruption can feel frightening and disorientating. Without stable attentional anchors, the world may become unpredictable and difficult to navigate. Burnout is therefore not only physical or emotional fatigue. It can be experienced as a collapse in the ecology of attention. We need to re-map and re-world our lives to navigate through burnout.

    Social and sensory worlds under pressure

    Burnout is socio-political and also emerges within overwhelming sensory contexts of the very spaces we need to live in to exist – our homes, education and work place settings and even in healthcare, the very places that are meant to understand and support us.

    Open-plan noisy offices, bright, busy classrooms, bureaucratic systems, and performance-driven cultures can create chronic friction with our neurdivergent monotropic flow states. Over time, the effort required to adapt may exceed our available energy.

    Masking, consciously or unconsciously adjusting behaviour and communication to meet normative expectations, can intensify this strain.

    The cost is often cumulative and can run deep.

    Many people describe reaching a point where:

    • communication becomes difficult
    • noise, scents, lights, certain textures and even previously safe food may feel physically painful or overwhelming
    • decision-making may slow down in a fog
    • everyday routines and exectutive functioning tasks may feel too overwhelming
    • trust in our environments and relationships with others can begin to diminish

    These are not signs of personal weakness. They are signals that the relational conditions and environments supporting us have become unsustainable. Things need to change for us to survive.

    Neuroqueer politics of burnout

    Understanding Autistic or neurodivergent burnout in ecological terms shifts responsibility away from individuals and toward systems.

    Speed, productivity, and independence are often treated as neutral values. In reality, they reflect specific cultural priorities that privilege certain cognitive styles while marginalising others.

    Neuroqueer perspectives invite us to question these assumptions.
    They ask:

    • Who defines what counts as functioning?
    • Who has the power to say what rest should look like?
    • Whose attentional rhythms are recognised as valid?
    • What forms of participation and engagement with the world are made possible or impossible?

    Autistic burnout can be read as both a social, political, and personal phenomenon. It exposes the limits of environments organised around normativity.

    Recognising this does not remove the pain of burnout, but it may help to reduce shame and open space for collective change.

    Toward ecological re-assembly

    If burnout represents fracture, our recovery is not just restoration of previous capacity; it is often a process of re-assembling life differently.

    This may begin with small shifts:

    • lowering demands
    • re-establishing sensory safety
    • reconnecting with trusted people
    • returning gently to meaningful interests or finding new glimmer of joy
    • allowing time to move, communicate and experience the world at a slower pace

    These changes can feel minor, yet they may help re-imagine and re-build the conditions and environments that allow attention and participation to re-emerge.

    Recovery is rarely linear. It unfolds through experimentation, adaptation, and relational support.

    In this sense, burnout can become a liminal threshold, not only of loss, but of potential transformation to new ways of being and relating.

    Find out more:


    Part 3: Autistic Burnout Recovery as ecological re-assembly

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

    We will consider:

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

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


    Further Reading



    Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Pluto Press (UK).

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

    Deligny, F. (2013). The Arachnean and other texts. Univocal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sins Invalid https://sinsinvalid.org

    Stimpunks https://stimpunks.org/

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

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

    Re-worlding Neurodiversity: Monotropism, Ecological Belonging and Neuroqueer Futures (Part 1)
    Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly (Part 3)
  • Folding Worlds: Monotropism & Neuroqueering Attention

    Folding Worlds: Monotropism & Neuroqueering Attention

    by Helen Edgar — More Realms

    “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 Fold entwines with the theory of monotropism and 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

  • Neuroqueer Revolutions: Difference, Becoming, and the Politics of Refusal

    Neuroqueer Revolutions: Difference, Becoming, and the Politics of Refusal

    This piece brings together four strands of thought: I have been hugely inspired by David Gray-Hammond’s recent writings about the metaphysics of neurodivergence, Robert Chapman’s historical and mad studies framing, Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory as transformative praxis, and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Each offers a potential lens for us to reconsider what it actually means to be neurodivergent, how our identity is shaped and recognised, and how it might be reimagined beyond fixed categories and labels.

    David Gray-Hammond’s Beyond Definition: A Metaphysical Inquiry into Neurodivergence (2025) asks what makes someone neurodivergent in the first place. He identifies three intersecting dimensions:

    1. Neurological difference from the statistical norm: in structure, function, or developmental pattern.

    2. Lived cognitive difference: a phenomenological divergence in perception, attention, or reasoning.

    3. Social positioning as “different”: the recognition of these differences by ourselves or others, often in ways that create barriers or stigma.


    This proposes that neurodivergence is neither purely biological nor purely social, but emerges in the interplay of embodiment and environment. Tracing through history, Robert Chapman’s Mad Pride in Revolutionary England: The Ranters as Mad Activism (2025) deepens this understanding by focusing on the Ranters in the 1640’s to show how categories of difference, from “mad” to recent terms such as “neurodivergent”, are shaped by power, capitalism, and state control. Labelling is never neutral; it has been used to regulate, exclude, and also to organise resistance throughout history and continues to do so, causing so much harm to marginalised people and anyone who is different.

    Where Chapman maps the long shadows of how difference has been policed, Walker turns us towards neuroqueering acts that stretch those boundaries and enables cognitive, psycholgical and somatic liberty for everyone. Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies (2021), frames the act of neuroqueering as both a deliberate refusal of neuronormative conditioning and an emergent process that unfolds in everyday life, which has the potential to create radical systemic change to benefit the whole of society. 

    This is in parallel to a Deleuzian perspective, which sees identity as never being static but built from many connections, relationships, and processes. Neurodivergence is not a fixed thing, but a living mix of our fluid bodyminds entangled with our environment, constantly shaped by the social, political, and ecological worlds we move through and the relationships we have.

    The Metaphysics of Neurodivergence



    Neurodivergence is often treated as a fact, decided by a medical diagnosis or by self-identification. Neurological variation without lived difference might go unnoticed; lived difference without social recognition might remain unlabelled or misattributed. It is the interaction with norms, expectations, and power structures that creates and solidifies the socially constructed category of neurodivergence, even for those of us who are innately different from birth.

    Gray-Hammond suggests the idea of neurodivergence rests on three intertwined dimensions. None alone fully defines it, but together, they create its lived reality, of these, being positioned as “different” or “weird” often shapes daily life most directly and affects our wellbeing and how well we can function and thrive. This raises their deeper question: Is neurodivergence defined by the way it is lived and experienced, or by an underlying difference that exists whether or not it is recognised?

    From a Deleuzian perspective, differences are not static traits but elements of a shifting assemblage. Neurodivergence is not a fixed essence but an ongoing process of becoming, shaped by sensory and cognitive patterns, environments, and cultural narratives, all filtered through intersectional privilege and oppression. Difference is generative, producing new perceptions, movements of thought, and ways of living, even if it is temporarily somewhat stabilised or held through labels such as being Autistic or ADHD.

    Gray-Hammond distinguishes between essential properties, those without which neurodivergence would not be what it means today and accidental properties, which can change without altering the underlying being. Essential properties might include monotropic attentional flow, sensory processing patterns, physical disabilities, or other health differences. Accidental properties might include diagnostic labels, learned coping strategies, or outward behaviours. This matters because it undermines claims that compliance-based behavioural interventions “cure” neurodivergence, it suggests that outward behaviour can be suppressed or reshaped, but our essential cognitive and sensory architecture often remains split, fractured by trauma and masking, leading to burnout and mental health crises.

    In Empire of Normality (2023), Chapman reminds us that the notion of “normal” is not an objective truth but a social construct, shaped by cultural and historical contexts. Over time what is seen as  “normal” and what is deemed as  “pathological” have shifted, not because humans have changed dramatically, but because society’s priorities and systems have. These boundaries have often been drawn to serve industry, capitalism, and the institutions that sustain them, rewarding some ways of thinking and being while excluding or penalising others. A clear example is the behaviourist approach entrenched in the US & UK school systems, where reward charts and social stories enforce neuronormative behaviours, harming Autistic children and pushing them to deny their needs expecting them to fit in at all costs.

    In this light, Gray-Hammond’s question, ‘who counts as neurodivergent, and under what conditions?’ is not only personal or diagnostic, but it is political. It invites us to question the shifting line between “different” and “acceptable,” “normal” and “abnormal,” and to consider whether this line can be moved, reshaped, challenged, or even erased.

    Walker’s neuroqueer theory builds on this idea, framing neurodivergence not only as a site of vulnerability for stigma and oppression, but as a space of creative potential. Neuroqueering resists the idea that support or education should aim to make neurodivergent people “normal”. Instead, it treats difference as a strength, a way to stretch the boundaries of what is possible, to reimagine living, thinking, and relating. It holds space for diverging even further from the norm, for exploring new ways of being and learning, and for the radical possibility that anyone can become neurodivergent through the act of neuroqueering and by choosing to move away from normativity.

    When we see neurodivergence as dynamic, shaped by relationships, environments, and histories rather than as a fixed list of traits, we can step beyond the rigid binary of “neurotypical” vs “neurodivergent.” This opens neuroqueering possibilities for a more fluid and liberating society, one that values diversity not as a box to tick but as a living, evolving force. It is an invitation to embrace difference, explore transformative ways of becoming, and continually reinvent ourselves, our work and the worlds we share. However, even as we reimagine neurodivergence in more fluid and relational ways, the language we use and the labels we inherit carry the weight of the histories that have shaped how difference is seen and treated.

    Hidden History of Neurodivergent Labels

    The words and language we use to describe people have never been neutral. They are shaped by politics, history, and power. Robert Chapman’s historical account of Mad Pride shows how labels for cognitive difference often come from systems built to manage and control people. In the 1640s, for example, radical groups like the Ranters challenged the strict religious and social rules of their time. They refused to conform, rejected rules imposed from above, and gathered in ways that disrupted the status quo. They didn’t use today’s words as being neurodivergent but they clearly didn’t fit into the expected norms of the time. Their defiance and solidarity can be seen as early acts of Mad Activism resisting the idea that there is only one “right” way to think, feel, or live.

    Neurodivergent people have often been denied the right to name and define our own realities. For most of history, “official” knowledge about us has come from deficit-based medical models, shaped by institutions and used to serve those in power.

    As I shared in my blog ‘Autistic Mental Health: Beyond the Pathology Paradigm‘ (Aug, 2025), research suggests that as many as 8 in 10 Autistic people have a mental health condition. Sadly, Autistic people have been found to have up to an eightfold increased risk of death by suicide compared to non-Autistic people (Brown et al., 2024). For Autistic children, the risk of thinking about or attempting suicide is 28 times higher than for their non-Autistic peers. These are not just numbers, they are lives cut short by systems that fail to meet our needs.

    The latest Assuring Transformation NHS Digital data (April 2025) paints an equally troubling picture:

    • 2,025 Autistic people and people with a learning disability are in mental health hospitals in England. Of these, 1,455 (72%) are Autistic.
    • 240 under-18s are in inpatient units. Of these, 230 (96%) are Autistic.
    • The number of Autistic people without a learning disability detained in mental health hospitals has increased by 141% since 2015.
    • In 2015, Autistic people made up 38% of the total in hospital. Now it is 72%(National Autistic Society, 2025).

    These statistics are not personal failings, they are systemic failures of education, healthcare, mental health services, and broader society to support Autistic people and those of us who are different in ways that affirm our needs, identities, and ways of being. This is epistemic injustice, as the people most affected are excluded from the conversation, and the words we need to describe our lives are often missing, invalidated or treated as problems. A clear example of this is neurodivergent experiences of burnout.

    When a community lacks language for its own experience or our experiences aren’t believed, it is easier to cause harm. It’s not just about being misunderstood; it’s about blocking self-understanding, choice, and autonomy. Every label we inherit, from being “Autistic” or “weird,” “defiant’ or “disordered”, carries a built-in set of assumptions about how we should be seen and treated. Labelling can trap us in someone else’s story…..or it can be reclaimed and re-storyed to tell our own narratives.

    The power to name and label, and use certain language shapes who is recognised as being fully human and “right” who is pushed to the margins. The meaning of labels is always shifting; institutions try to lock differences into fixed categories, diagnoses, risk labels, and lists of “deficits.” In response some communities are pushing back, reclaiming words like “Crip”, “Autistic” or “Mad” and filling them with their own values, histories, and pride. But changing words alone is not enough, real change needs systemic transformation, and neuroqueer theory offers ways to put that into practice.

    Refusing Normal: The Practice of Neuroqueering

    Neuroqueering can happen on many levels and in many different ways; from the small, everyday choices we make in how we use our bodyminds to the larger work of changing systems. On a personal level, it can mean moving, speaking, or sensing in ways that feel natural to us, even if they go against social expectations. On a collective level, it involves challenging and dismantling the systems that enforce able-bodiedness, demand constant productivity, and dictate narrow, “acceptable” ways of socialising and communicating.

    However, living neuroqueerly by stimming openly, rejecting therapies aimed at making us “normal,” choosing to play, learn, work, or rest in our own ways can still lead to exclusion, discrimination. It is a risk without being in a safe environment with people who understand and accept your authentic self and ways of becoming.

    Neuroqueer theory recognises that neurodivergence doesn’t stand apart from other forms of oppression. The same bodymind that pushes back against neuronormativity is also navigating intersectionality, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, class inequality, and the impacts of colonialism. True freedom for neurodivergent people means breaking down ableism and these other systems together. Deleuze, like Walker and Gray-Hammond, sees this refusal to “fit in” not only as resistance but as something full of creative potential. Embracing difference isn’t just about stepping away from the norm; it’s where new ways of living, relating, and imagining can begin and transformations can emerge.

    Neurodivergence isn’t something that lives inside an individual’s brain; it takes shape in our bodyminds, who we are is inseparable from the rhizomatic networks of meaning and care, or their absence, that surround us and our environments. Liberation needs to be a collective flow: changing life for one means changing it for all of us. It needs to be co-created through the ways we think, feel, and act, shaped by how others respond to us, and vice versa.

    Neuroqueer praxis is both personal and social, it is the daily choice to resist being pulled into the norm, while building community solidarity to challenge the systems that enforce neuronormativity. It’s about creating and sharing new ways of knowing, and about changing the very conditions that limit who we can be, moving beyond labels and expectations, so we can live as our authentic selves and build supportive, meaningful communities.

    A neuroqueer politics of difference does not seek permission or validation from systems that marginalise. It works to build worlds where many ways of being are not only accepted but recognised as essential to our shared survival and joy. To live fully as ourselves is not just inclusion, it is the ongoing work of reworlding.

    References

    Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of Normality, Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Pluto Press.

    Chapman, R. (2025). Mad Pride in Revolutionary England: The Ranters as Mad Activism. [Manuscript in preparation].

    Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)

    Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991)

    Gray-Hammond, D. (2024, March 21). The metaphysics of neurodivergence. Emergent Divergence.
    https://emergentdivergence.com/2024/03/21/the-metaphysics-of-neurodivergence/


    Walker, N. (2019). Transformative Somatic Practices And Autistic Potentials: An Autoethnographic Exploration. (Doctoral dissertation). California Institute of Integral Studies.

    Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press.

  • Monotropism, Spiral Time, and the Rhizome of Memories

    Monotropism, Spiral Time, and the Rhizome of Memories

    *“Memories scatter like shards of seaglass along a fractured spiral, the centre always slipping just beyond my grasp. Hazy images and sensations drift in and out of the fog, sometimes offering sharp glimpses, but rarely staying long enough for me to hold. Most pass by shrouded in a soft mist, like half-formed echoes trapped within a labyrinth. Sounds, images, smells, and feelings blur and merge, tangling into an ever-expanding rhizome, sprawling in all directions, folding in on themselves. Memories come more as felt impressions than as concrete events. Remembering isn’t straightforward for me; it’s less recall and more a process of re-navigation. I have to trace uncertain paths, try and find a thread to hook into to regain my flow, often sensing that what I’m reaching for is just out of reach if trying to recall a specific event, but my sensory memories are more clear and vivid as they are felt sensations – which is hard to explain to people who may not experience their memories in this way. ”

    I am currently on a Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice course led by KR Moorhead, Marta Rose and Meg Max. This week we were exploring time and memories, which felt very apt given my recent monotropic outpourings about time. In this week’s session I wrote the above piece about how I experience memories.

    Memory may not be linear for neurodivergent people. It may feel like a spiral of felt sensations. Being monotropic shapes how I re-sense moments, navigating echoes and threads of sensory experiences rather than always recalling events. I felt validated that some other people seemed to relate and share similar experiences of their time not being linear and also being quite hazy recalling specific events but having really vivid recollections of more sensory experiences.

    Monotropism and Memories

    Monotropism is a theory of Autism (Murray et al 20025) that describes a way of focusing attention that tends toward deep but fewer channels. For those of us who experience the world monotropically, attention locks in and tunnels can form like portals. These attention tunnels can lead to intense engagement and immersive sensory experiences, but they may also shape how we encode, retrieve, and relate to our memories.

    Memory for me is not a fixed archive of past events filed neatly on shelves. It is alive, constructed in the present, woven from threads of past focus, emotion, embodiment, and attention. For monotropic people, those threads may be less linear and deeply context-bound in our sensory experiences. We may not remember when something happened in conventional, sequential neuronormative time but we may vividly feel how we experienced something, we may recall the sensory landscape, the tone, the rhythm of presence or absence.

    Spiral Time and Felt Time

    I’ve written previously about monotropic experiences of time as being like ever expanding rhizomatic spirals like rather than a linear A-B or 9am to 10pm of time as lived by the clock and conventional calendar. I think this also shapes how memory functions, rather than stretching out along a clear chronological line, time for me feels like it folds back in on itself and experiences and memories happen and are stored within the folds (a concept from Deleuze that I have written about at length). A moment from years ago might feel right now, while a conversation from yesterday may feel distant or unretrievable unless there is something to hook me in and brings it back into focus so I can retrieve the thread and follow the flow.

    In monotropic spiral time, memories don’t behave like neurotypical people may expect or how we may have been brought up to understand how memory works. My memories don’t line up neatly, they tangle, twist, merge and drift like mist through a forest. Sometimes I feel I’m not remembering in the traditional sense at all, but kind of re-sensing, like I am trying to feel my way through a fog of echoes and impressions, a texture, a tone of voice, the way the light fell. It makes my memories of concrete events feel hazy and fuzzy but my experiences feel vivid and it can be quite confusing and frustrating at times.

    Labyrinths and the Rhizomes

    For monotropic people our minds and memories may feel less like walking through an album of neatly arranged photos and more like navigating a vast, living labyrinth. I can’t easily “go back” and retrieve a memory, it feels like I have to wander, I have to reach out and try and sense where the thread of recall might catch and hook onto something, what I often find is not a single event but a tangle, a rhizome of multisensory experiences that I have to unravel.

    This rhizomatic quality of navigating time means my memories don’t live in isolation, they’re not strictly filed under “birthday, age 9” or “Monday morning, March 3rd.” Instead, they seem to connect through shared emotions and sensory patterns. One feeling or sensory experience might loop me back to three seemingly unrelated moments, a smell might pull on threads across decades and I don’t always know why. This can be disorienting in a world that expects time and memory to be neat and logical but it’s also a kind of richness, a depth of connection that linear systems seem to often miss. It can make conversations with friends and family hard as it seems like I am not interested enough in people to have created a core memory like in the Disney film Inside Out, my memory of real life events feels like a sieve where things happen then disapear but they are all there, it is just perhaps that they are stored differently.

    It brings me back to my first blog I wrote on More Realms (2023), Middle Entrance. In 1943, T.S. Eliot’s collection of four poems were collated to form Four Quartets. The final poem in this series Little Gidding (1942), continues Eliot’s exploration of time and our connections with each other through generations and current society.

    “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

    My memories, relationships and ways of being are like constantly evolving spirals that spin in and out in multidimensional ways. Different connections and experiences add to and contribute to a wider, deeper fluid rhizomatic network of potential that is always in a constant state of flux. This idea of an evolving spiral, hooking onto a node of the rhizome and returning to a new beginning in the middle, liminal spaces, within the folds is how I experience memory. I need time to process, time to rlect and for memories to and beautifully reflected in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:

    “We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.
    Through the unknown, remembered gate
    When the last of earth left to discover
    Is that which was the beginning;
    At the source of the longest river
    The voice of the hidden waterfall
    And the children in the apple-tree
    Not known, because not looked for
    But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
    Between two waves of the sea”    .

    — T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”

    Navigating Memories

    Memory for me feels less like recall, I am not able to press a button and retrieve a file (unless it is related to my own special interest about Autism research or teaching in which case my filing cabinet seems to ping open!). It is more like a re-navigation, I have to find the right entry point and node of the rhizome, I need to feel for the thread, follow it gently and try not to tug too hard in case it disappears back into the fog. I often know I know something, but I can’t get to it directly. I need the right conditions or sensory cue to draw it out and that takes time and and can make me appear distant or uninterested when the opposite is true.

    This is why questions like “What did you do last weekend?” can feel like demands rather than simple curiosity. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention, it’s that the question doesn’t align with how my memory map works or how I perceive time. If you ask me what the light looked through my window like as I sat reading in bed, or how the air felt when we stepped outside I might have a more instant response but I probably won’t be able to recall the chronological sequence or events and relate things in an easy to understand order, it is like that gets lost in the spiral. It can be frustrating at times just to have fleeting impressions of memories that I know mean a lot to me but I can’t easily retrieve.

    Understanding and Support

    Understanding memory through a monotropic lens may helps us honour our different ways of knowing, recalling, and connecting with events and people. For those supporting Autistic individuals, whether as educators, therapists, or family members this means shifting assumptions and instead of assuming memory is absent or deficient it may be better to consider asking things like:

    • How do memories show up for you?
    • What helps you reconnect with something you felt or experienced?
    • Is there a sensory or emotional thread that brings it back?

    This may also be empowering for those of us who live and experience life monotropically. It validates the experience of having a different bodymind, of perhaps remembering more through attention tunnels of sensation rather than facts or dates. It recognises that memory is not a failure when it doesn’t fit neurotypical expectations it’s perhaps just a different kind of map that we have to navigate.

    “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

  • Neuroqueering Time: Bergson, Deleuze, and Monotropism (an exploration)

    Neuroqueering Time: Bergson, Deleuze, and Monotropism (an exploration)

    By Helen Edgar – Autistic Realms

    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:

    • Temps: spatialized, quantitative, clock-measured time.
    • Durée: lived, qualitative, and immersive duration. This is the rhythm of consciousness itself and FELT experiences.

    Temps divides time into identical units, i.e., seconds, minutes, and hours. Durée is felt time. It is how we experience time from the inside, and for Autistic/ADHD people, that may be more sensory and dependent upon the environment and how safe we feel. Bergson saw durée not as a subjective illusion but as the real nature of time, with clock-time being the abstraction.

    Clock-time has been constructed by society. It is what Freeman (2010) in their book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, called chrononormative time. Chronomormative time is an understanding of time set up by society for the purpose of production. It makes an ideal framework for capitalist society to thrive, but potentially goes against the natural rhythm of many neurodivergent people and causes harm and stress, and can lead to burnout, as I described in my last blog, Monotropic Time.

    For many Autistic people, durée may actually feel more like our authentic way of being than temps. This duality of time may help explain some of the difficulties we experience (feeling of always rushing, being overly early or ending up late to events, stressed with deadlines, juggling diaries and executive functioning tasks – ending up either late or early to events!). Autistic/ ADHD people’s difficulties with time may be due to our internal sense of time not being innately aligned with external clocks and calendar time. In many ways, neuronormative time goes against the natural flow of monotropic time perception. Monotropism is defined by having an intense focus on a limited number of interests. I think this generates a different temporal experience, one that often resists fragmentation as it breaks up flow.

    Fragmenting time into minutes, hours, and days is needed to physically function in the world today, but it can also cause many problems for monotropic people and needs to be carefully managed. It takes huge amounts of energy to navigate my way through every day. I have to set many alarms, I have reminders up everywhere, and task manager apps to keep myself on task and to ensure my work and family life functions, but this also has its downsides. It can be highly dysregulating to have my monotropic flow and time upset by alarms, unexpected events and interruptions, as all I want to do is live in my monotropic time and deep dive and remain in a flow state (often by myself or with intermittent parallel play/body doubling way of working and existing)! It is when I am experiencing monotropic time and completely engaged and absorbed that several hours can pass by unnoticed and feel like minutes. Alternatively, when in states of overwhelm, every minute can feel stretched and unbearable, and it feels like it is lasting hours.

    Rather than living by the ticking of a clock, I feel I do better and feel better when I am living my life in monotropic time, it supports my natural way of being, but real life demands – family, work, household chores make that hard at times, really hard! Monotropic time is deep and rhizomatic; it doesn’t flow easily across a calendar of events, it is almost as if it is multidimensional or neuro-holographic. A monotropic way of being is not measurable by using a 24-hour clock or regular calendar and is unique to each individual. It is shaped by emotional salience, sensory flow, and what I could describe as interest gravity (the weight and pull of attentional resources towards certain things that draw us into flow states), not by ticking hands or digital countdowns.

    Flow States: Restorative Time for Monotropic BodyMinds

    Flow is the psychological state of full immersion in a task or activity. This concept is not limited to neurodivergent people; everyone benefits from flow. I think flow is deeply aligned with both durée and monotropism. Coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), flow involves things like:

    • Intense focus,
    • A distorted sense of time,
    • A merging of self and action,
    • And deep emotional reward.

    Monotropic people often enter positive flow states with ease, especially when we’re able to follow our interests without interruption and when we are in neuro-affirmative supportive environments. This is when we thrive as monotropic people. Flow is not just about work and productivity, it is about sensory experiences. Flow can be joyful, rejuvenating, restorative and balance the bodymind (it can of course have it’s flipside though, especially for those experiencing OCD as discussed in my blog Monotropism, Autism and OCD (2024).

    For myself, monotropic flow isn’t just a productive state, it’s a healing one. It brings regulation, coherence, and balance. However, when I am forced into chrononormative routines, my access to flow is often denied. Flow, for my monotropic mind is like a temporal home, it is my basecamp. Being outside of flow and battling with neuronormative time has significantly contributed towards my repeating cycles of burnout.

    Deleuze, Becoming, and Neuroqueer Temporalities

    From my limited understanding of the philosophy of Deleuze and Bergson’s thinking, I see Deleuze as having expanded Bergson’s concept of time a bit further. As I have previously written, I feel that Deleuzean concepts fit Neuroqueer theory really nicely, as described by Nick Walker in their book Neuroqueer Heresies, (2021). Deleuze in his book The Fold (2006), describes time as being folded, and nonlinear. I explored this in more detail in my writing about Caverns, Pleats and Folds (2023).

    It is in these folds and liminal spaces that perhaps monotropic people can find flow, as the spaces outside of the liminal are so hard to fit into. If we lean into the folds and gaps in society, we can create our own spaces and ways of being that really meet our needs, so we don’t need to mask, reduce or suppress ourselves to fit into society’s expected ways of being, including fitting into neuronormative time. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze proposed that time is not simply a container for events, but an active process of becoming, it is a ceaseless unfolding where past, present, and future interweave. It is in these in-between spaces that we can unfold and be our authentic selves and be expansive.

    It is perhaps when we find our safe people and safe spaces that we can engage in flow, live in monotropic time and neuroqueer time, further opening up more possibilities for ways of being and ways of living. An example of this is how my sleep has always been seen as dysregulated and somehow ‘wrong’. I have naturally always been awake more in the early hours of the day and late hours of the night, even as a young child – maybe because the world is quieter then and I can just be myself in flow. No amount of sleep training advice or medication over almost 50 years has ever really had an impact. Battling against this to live and work in neuronormative time has been hard and led to burnout and mental health difficulties. Now that I am no longer working as a teacher and restricted to set hours, I have more flexibility with time. I am able to plan my day around my own attention tunnels and children’s needs to enable a smoother flow that is more in line with my monotropic perception of time. I carve out pockets in my day for monotropic time and flow as I juggle against the reality of needing to keep to appointments and other work commitments, and meet my children’s needs. It is a bit of a balancing act, but being aware of this helped enormously.

    Deleuze wrote of time being “out of joint,” embracing it as a space for new potentialities. Many neurodivergent people live in this “out-of-jointness”: in liminal, quantum, speculative time. We are not delayed or broken; rather, we may be differently temporal. Understanding this and having a more flexible approach to time and managing flow could be really helpful and support the well-being of many Autistic/ ADHD people.

    Neuro-Holographic Time: Folding Time and Memory

    In Quantum Neuro-Holographic Thoughts from a Liminal Space, I explored how my Autistic perception often feels layered, recursive, and multidimensional, like a hologram where each part contains the whole and is deeply entangled and resonating with the space around me.

    I think this matches Bergson’s view of memory as something durational, not stored data but rather a living resonance. A smell can collapse decades, a sensory pattern can echo across timelines and dimensions of time (neuronormative time and monotropic time). Many Autistic people may not live in a rigid timeline but instead live more in a temporal field, one that is sensitive, porous, and entangled and could be described as being neuro-holographic.

    Neuro-holographic time is not fragmented; it’s folded and can be unfolded and expanded. Time may be experienced differently within a fold. Folds hold memory, emotion, and sensory perception as simultaneous experiences. In this folded time, our sense of identity itself becomes fluid, unfolding in nonlinear rhizomatic omnidirectional ways. We are not fixed selves on a schedule; we are more like events in motion resonating with our environment.

    Neuroqueering Time: Time Travelling

    To neuroqueer time is to resist the assumption that there is one correct way to be on time, or one right way to live, to grow, to succeed. Chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010) is the cultural pressure to conform to timelines of productivity, milestones, and life stages. But for many Autistic/ ADHD people, these timelines feel alien and can cause stress and lead to burnout as neuronormative time goes against monotropic people’s natural flow and use of monotropic attentional resources. It can feel like we are maybe time travellers going between neuronormative time and monotropic time, time travelling is exhausting (and misunderstood!)

    By embracing felt time or monotropic time (durée ), we can engage in flowy, spiraly time, embrace the intensity, and find restoration and rejuvenation in the liminal spaces where we can be our authentic selves. We can begin to liberate ourselves from neuronormative time constraints and structures. When we stop forcing ourselves to match neuronormative ideals, time frames and rhythms that exhaust us can be liberated. We can reclaim our own unique sense of time, a different way of resting, a different way of working and managing our days. I didn’t choose to be measured by neuronormative time frames, it has actually caused me harm. I am starting to lean more into my authentic monotropic ways of being, which includes a more spirally, expansive, flowy perception of time too, which is supporting my well-being.

    By neuroqueering ourselves and neuroqueering time, anyone and everyone can break free from the neuronormative time structures that bind us all to capitalism and restrict and cause harm to lives in so many ways. We may be able to live more attuned to our own temporalities and more at one with our environment and those around us if we liberate ourselves from the ticking hands of the clock and find more flexible ways to manage our flow and our own time.

    Like Bergson’s idea of duree, monotropic time is FELT. It is immersive, expansive, flowy, omnidirectional and deeply rhizomatic. Let’s dwell in our natural flow and rhythms, actively resist neuronormative time, find spaces to neuroqueer time further in the liminal spaces and embrace our own unique rhythms and monotropic time.

    References

  • Caverns, Pleats and Folds

    Caverns, Pleats and Folds

    Cartographers are people who create maps, and they transform physical geography into an accessible format so people can navigate in and through the spaces of the world. I recently watched a National Geographic documentary about caving ‘ Explorer: The Deepest Cave | Disney+ (disneyplus.com’). It led me to consider the underground maps inside the earth, the connections, pathways and hidden caverns that have not yet been explored. There is a whole space deep below the ground where you are currently that offers new possibilities, and it is within these folds of rocks that form the earth there are even more folds and spaces full of potential to explore. Whilst watching this film, I related it to the potential for people and thinking about how we need time and space to explore and discover what is inside us, time and space to make connections with others to give our lives meaning and time to explore the spaces within our folds, pleats, caverns and channels.

    A particular moment in the documentary sparked my imagination. Around 11 minutes into the film, the cavers were trying to find the best route to go next. They created a small amount of smoke as they explained that ‘the stronger the smoke, the bigger the spots between the rocks are,’ which would indicate a path for them to explore. They said, ‘The wind can go places that we can’t. So the question is, can we follow the wind?’

    ‘Can we follow the wind’?

    This leads me to Deleuze and his work around The Fold (1993). ‘A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold…’ (pg. 6). A fold is like a continuous curve; there is always a deeper element. I see this as much like a cave with pleats in its geography, where there are ‘folds of winds, of waters, fire and earth’. As I sat watching this programme with my son, I began to think about the infinite nature of our bodyminds and how caving could work as an analogy to describe the internal process of neuroqueering that is expressed outwardly on a cartographer’s map.

    Neuroqueering and being a part of the neuroqueering community is the equivalent of trying to work your way around a rhizome, another concept Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss in their book One Thousand Plateaus. The outward map of how we live our lives in society reflects how we present ourselves and our bodies. This map can also reflect the journey our bodyminds take over time as we age. Increasingly, people are leaving digital trails of their thoughts all over the internet. They are making connections within these spaces, leading to an ever-increasing multidimensional map between cyberspace and the reality of where we are physically.

    Choosing to neuroqueer your bodymind can be seen as an act of rebellion. However, I see it more as an act of seeking connections at a much deeper level with those in a similar space to you rather than needing to outwardly represent ‘queering’ in the way perhaps the punk movement did in the 1980s. Maps are a way we navigate paths as we head towards a destination, or they are used to reflect on past journeys and movements. If you choose to neuroqueer, you may find an intersection where the digital paths of the internet communities meet the folds inside your bodyminds. Within these rhizomatic communities, meaning is potentially being created for so many people who are otherwise unable to connect or feel a connection with people outside of these spaces in their local communities.

    There is a natural human need to feel understood and connected; connections build relationships and support good mental health. For some people, those connections and relationships may not look different from the more conventional norms the majority of society holds but are equally valuable. For people who feel marginalised either by neurodivergence, disability or by being in another minority group, there is often no space already carved out for support and building connections in local communities. This can cause feelings of isolation and disconnection. Yet, the need to find people who understand and can connect within the same folds, with similar interests and values, can lead people to create their own communities.

    It feels like a rabbit warren of underground tunnels and caves where people meet, mainly through online social media platforms. The continuous physical growth of these spaces where people are connecting is slowly creating ripples and heading into real family spaces and showing a genuine need for change in our education system as more and more children are showing how the current frameworks are just not meeting needs and resulting in school attendance difficulties and mental health concerns. There is a rise in the UK in families actively seeking alternative pathways through home education or alternative provision routes. Neuroqueering is not just a philosophical theory; it is about actively looking for positive change and creating new paths in your life and for your family towards a happier future.

    Deleuze considers if ‘the world is infinitely cavernous if worlds exist in the tiniest bodies, it is because everywhere there can be found a spirit in matter’ (1993, p.7). This supports the idea of energy flow and the importance of the soul as a subject if we want to go beyond any boundaries and evolve and improve our mental health and that of our families. If this is the case, we need to unfold ourselves; this could be linked to a much deeper concept of autistic unmasking, where you find ‘some little opening’ of possibility within yourself to expand your body-mind; it is a space within a tiny fold / unfolding that we may be able to begin to neuroqueer. Much like the cavers who have to physically twist, turn and contort their bodies to fit through the gaps to find new caverns, we can find new spaces within and between the folds of our bodyminds through neuroqueering.

    The potential to neuroqueer is inside us all, within a fold in a cavern. This may feel much deeper within some people than others due to the heaviness of neuronormativity, adding its layers and creating tighter folds for some people. It would be interesting to discuss if the concept of folds and caverns within autistic people is more porous or open to the possibilities of neuroqueering than non-autistic people.

    Neuroqueering could enable a metamorphosis, a transformation process from within a fold. This is like how Deleuze describes a butterfly being ‘folded into the caterpillar that will soon unfold’. Deleuze finishes his first chapter by describing how ‘ the Fold is always between two folds’. Neuroqueering offers the potential to explore what is between the multiple folds and creases we live in and that are within us.

    Let’s ‘follow the wind’ and see where neuroqueering takes us.

    Find out more:

    https://stimpunks.org/glossary/autistic-rhizome/

    https://emergentdivergence.com/2023/04/21/neuro-anarchy-and-the-rise-of-the-autistic-rhizome/

  • Exploring ‘Being With’

    Exploring ‘Being With’

    I experience and interpret ‘Being With’ as a process of be-coming together. Deleuze’s concept of the line of flight allows us to explore and follow meaning together. This article will explore these ideas in a bit more detail.

    This post is a pulling together of several discussions I have had online over the past few weeks that were initially inspired by Joanna Grace and her team of researchers (all of whom have profound and multiple learning disabilities). Joanna Grace has been sharing the progress of their PhD project across social media, exploring the idea of ‘Being with and Identity’.

    Some discussions here about slow pedagogy and conversations around Deleuze’s line of flight and created serendipity have also recently been reflected on Stimpunk’s website.

    The 3-minute YouTube video of ‘Being With’ was part of The Research Methods e Festival (an online event organised by NCRM) looking at identity and ‘Being With’. There are two videos I’d like to share that I feel capture the wonderful potential and essence of what I believe should be at the heart of care and educational experiences for everyone celebrating the potential of:

    *togetherness

    *sense of embodied belonging

    *shared experiences

    * safe spaces

    Video 1

    Video 2

    Bridging a Gap

    Up until now, people with profound and multiple learning disabilities have been the “missing voices of inclusive research” (Walmsely, J). They have been the people others have researched on or for but not with (Nind, M. (2017), Practical Wisdom of Inclusive Research). This new research is helping to bridge that gap, not just by finding the voices of those with profound and multiple intellectual and learning disabilities but by providing space for them to share their way of being collaboratively. By being with people, we can create a space of shared experiences; there is potential and possibilities for a more enriching time together. This may be felt as an experience, a shared engagement rather than an event that can be easily captured in words or put into a lesson plan in school. It involves trust, not only between the people involved but within a school setting it also involves trust within the education system that those facilitating learning know the people they are working with.

    Creating a Space of Being

    Joanna Grace’s research team includes a girl called Felicity. In the video below, Joanna Grace talks about ‘creating a space of being with Felicity so that space can become a research encounter. This is an intended becoming of togetherness and enables a creative shared meaning that can only be experienced in a space of safety which is built up over time.

    Giving time and ‘being with’ enables a deep connection to grow. I am familiar with intensive interaction and think it’s a truly wonderful approach. However, at the same time, having something called an approach can be a way of ‘othering’ those we are trying to include. This new research builds on intensive interaction in many ways, but I also resonate with this perspective shift and the simple potential of ‘being with’. These videos are only a glimpse of the wonderfulness that can happen when people are with each other in an embodied way, tuned in, sharing a flow state and rhythm together. To truly understand it, you have to ‘be with’.

    “The concept of ‘being with’ is linked to finding the rhythm of the children but also attention to the ‘rhythm’ of colleagues, materials and ideas.” (Clark, A. (2023), Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child).

    Felicity-ness

    By creating space and time to be together, Joanna describes how it “enabled the Felicity-ness” of her “dancing fingers” so they could “dance together!”. I love the phrase ‘Felicty-ness’ as it sums up what can only be experienced in person with a unique individual. It is a feeling created between two people that may occur through dancing fingers, a vocalisation, an eye movement, or a different body movement. It is a moment that only happens in response to each other’s presence, a togetherness. The Felicity-ness of Felicity was able to shine through the space in what could have been missed in a busy classroom or by being preoccupied with everything else going on in life.

    “A person’s ability to communicate is not dependent on their being able to master certain skills; it is dependent on our ability to listen and communicate responsively” (Grace, J. (2017), The Sensory Projects, Supporting People with PMLD Core & Essential Service Standards).

    Learning and Being Together

    Working with children with profound and multiple learning and intellectual disabilities felt like my happy place to be. We shared and created sensory experiences together. Within the structures of a school setting, I aimed to ensure the children led our time together as much as possible and I tried to work as a facilitator to help enrich and develop those experiences in some way as a ‘teacher’ along with the class team. Sometimes things worked well, and other times less well. It was always a learning curve for me, too.

    Tuning in and Togetherness

    My Autistic Realms work is advocating to ensure learning environments are as neurodiversity-affirming as possible. I am not just talking about being inclusive practically or functionally and providing access to educational resources and differentiated meaningful learning opportunities; this should be a given. We need to be inclusive in our bodies and minds to be with each other. Being a teacher in the often stressful environment of a UK school system where everyone has targets to meet, and teachers are accountable for ‘progress’, I feel we are sometimes missing the essence of what ‘being with’ people is about in our role as teachers. If we focus more on ‘being with’ people, that narrative shifts slightly; there is less hierarchy and more equal opportunity to learn together.

    To ‘be with’, you need to slow down and have time to tune in to a togetherness. It is very much in line with some of the core concepts of what has been described as ‘Slow Pedagogy’, an understanding of the need to value the present moment, the sensory needs and the pace and flow of the person you are with.

    Line of Flight

    Deleuze and Guattari (1980) explore the concept of the ‘line of flight’ in their work One Thousand Plateaus. Their work is helping me understand the neurodiversity paradigm and very fixed ideas we often have of people’s identities, systems in society and ways of being. Deleuze opposes the ideas of fixed identities, ‘normality’ and offers a way of embracing the differences and ways of being for everyone. I am still reading through much of their work, (definitely no expert on this) but I feel there is a strong connection between Deleuze and the neurodiversity movement and the process of ‘becoming’.

    If we make spaces to be with people, we can follow a line of flight and have an embodied connection of ‘dancing fingers’ together. This could lead to a whole new, wonderful sense of belonging and a more meaningful connection and communication between people that can grow and ‘become’.

    Collective Flow

    Being together allows people to join in a collective flow state, a line of flight, which can lead to new possibilities for individuals but also impact rhizomatically within a classroom and lead to more learning opportunities. However, I would argue that actually ‘being with’ is not necessarily about learning ‘more’ in the traditional sense of the next steps of a curriculum and mastering skills. Instead, transcending those preconceived ideas of what being a teacher means, what being a student is, and what being a person with profound and multiple learning disabilities may mean is a way of also reframing of identities. For me, ‘being with’ is about going deeper into the folds between people, embracing the shared feeling of belonging, being understood in the moment, and seeing where that takes you together.

    Being-with and Be-coming

    Deleuze’s concept of the line of flight allows us to explore meaning between created spaces and through our connections with people. It is a way of moving beyond and between the gaps of the often preconceived ideas of what ‘being with’ people may mean, what our roles as teachers educators, care facilitators may be.

    ‘Being with’ creates an opportunity for an embodied sense of belonging and wonderful, meaningful shared experiences. ‘Being with’ is a process of be-coming together and full of potential.

    Thank you to Joanna Grace and research team, including Felicity and Senen (in videos above).

    Further Reading:

    Aldred, K & D. (2023), Embodied Education: Creating Safe Space for Learning, Facilitating and Sharing

    Clark, A. (2023), Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child

    Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980) A Thousand Plateaus

    Grace, J. (2018), Sensory-Being for Sensory Beings