This is the plain language version about the origins of Neuroqueer Theory, where it comes from, what it means as an adjective, a verb and an identity, how it relates to neurodiversity, and what neuroqueering looks like for us. The longer, version is in my essay Neuroqueering from the In-Between. The free Neuroqueer Starter Pack by myself and David Gray-Hammond is available at the end of this blog.
Neuroqueer describes the act, and the result, of stepping outside the performance of a “normal” mind. Nick Walker, who coined the term with Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon and Remi Yergeau, defines neuroqueering as intentionally freeing yourself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity. It is a verb first (to neuroqueer), an adjective second (a neuroqueer practice, a neuroqueer learning space) and an identity for those who want one.
Where the word comes from
Neuroqueer grew out of the neurodiversity movement and queer theory in the late 2000s, and reached a wide readership through Nick Walker’s 2021 book Neuroqueer Heresies. The parallel with queer is deliberate. Queer theory showed that gender and sexuality are performances that society enforces and that people can refuse; neuroqueer theory says the same about neurotypicality. Nobody is born performing “normal” attention, movement, emotion and speech; we are trained into it, and some of us can never quite manage it however hard we try.
Neuronormativity: the thing being queered
Neuronormativity is the set of norms, standards and expectations that treat one way of thinking, feeling, moving and communicating as the right way, and everything else as deficit, disorder or bad behaviour. It lives in classrooms that reward sitting still and eye contact, in workplaces that prize multitasking, in clinics that measure us against a neurotypical baseline, and in our own heads, where it becomes masking and internalised ableism. Neuroqueering is the practice of noticing those demands and declining them, deliberately and on purpose.
What neuroqueering looks like
Unmasking. Letting your face, voice, body and interests do what they naturally do, instead of monitoring them for other people’s comfort.
Stimming freely. Rocking, flapping, humming, fidgeting and pacing as the embodied sensory language they are, not as behaviour to be extinguished.
Following monotropic attention. Going deep into what pulls you, living in monotropic time, and treating flow as rest rather than as a distraction from “real” work.
Refusing the deficit story. Describing yourself in your own words, with community concepts like glimmers, pebbling and spoons, rather than in the language of symptoms.
Making neuroqueer spaces. Classrooms, communities and gatherings designed around difference, such as the Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project with Stimpunks and the cave, campfire and watering hole of Cavendish Space.
Becoming. Treating your neurodivergence not as a fixed category but as something that keeps unfolding, which is where the rhizomes, liminal spaces and Deleuze that run through this site come in.
Who can be neuroqueer?
Anyone who neuroqueers. Walker is explicit that the word is not reserved for people who are both neurodivergent and queer, although many of us are both, and the overlap is not a coincidence: Autistic people are several times more likely to be LGBTQIA+, and both experiences involve refusing to perform a self that does not fit. A neurotypical person who deliberately loosens their own performance of normality is neuroqueering too. What the word does not describe is a diagnosis, a symptom, or anything a professional can confer or withhold.
Neuroqueer, neurodivergent, neurodiverse: the differences
Neurodiversity is the fact of human minds differing, and the paradigm that treats that as natural rather than pathological.
Neurodivergent describes a person whose mind diverges from the dominant norm, whether they do anything about it or not. (What does neurodivergent mean?)
Neuroqueer is active: it is what you do with the divergence, and the refusal of the norm itself.
Why it matters
Because the alternative is a lifetime of masking, and masking is one of the main roads into Autistic burnout. Neuroqueer theory gives language to what many late-identified Autistic and ADHD people arrive at on their own: that the problem was never the mind, but the performance demanded of it. It also changes what support means. If distress emerges between people, environments and systems, then that is where the work is: in the classroom, the family, the community, not in correcting the individual. That is the idea at the heart of Re-Storying Autism, and of this site.
Questions people ask
Is neuroqueer the same as being neurodivergent and queer?
No, though many neuroqueer people are both. Neuroqueer is about the practice of refusing neuronormativity; you can be neurodivergent and queer without ever neuroqueering, and you can neuroqueer without being either.
Is neuroqueer an identity or a verb?
Both. Nick Walker’s own ordering is verb first: neuroqueering is something you do. People who do it a great deal, or who have come to understand themselves through it, often take it as an identity as well.
Who coined the term?
Nick Walker, together with Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon and M. Remi Yergeau, around 2008; Walker’s essays and the 2021 book Neuroqueer Heresies set out the theory in full.
How is neuroqueer theory used in education?
As a frame for designing learning spaces around difference instead of compliance: freedom of embodiment, communication in every form, interest-led deep attention, and spaces to move between. See Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
Key Words, the More Realms glossary of neuroqueer theory and philosophy
Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Autonomous Press, 2021), and neuroqueer.com
Download the free Neuroqueer Theory Starter Pack I wrote with David Gray-Hammond
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
I spent the evening of sixth of August in Brigit McNeill’s Migration writing workshop with the Into the Woods writing group, in a session called The Living Page. We were invited to write from and with migration, as a movement to think inside of, inspired by Brigit’s own writing.
What follows is some of what I shared during the workshop and what I have been thinking about afterwards, threaded through with the ideas I keep returning to in my work on monotropism and neuroqueer theory.
Inner Compass
Birds cross oceans using a compass sense we still don’t fully understand. It may involve something in their eyes that responds to the Earth’s magnetic field, through a quantum mechanism that is still being worked out (Mouritsen, 2018). A bird doesn’t need a conventional map; it can orient by reading the world itself as a kind of felt knowledge.
As Brigit shared through her writing, salmon return to their birth rivers. Humpback whales cross hemispheres between calving and feeding grounds. Elephants can follow familiar routes across landscapes, including routes to water. Even a plant’s seed is carried by wind or on fur, migrating in its own way, landing on new ground.
The Inner Tug Of Migration
It’s easy to think of migration as recurring linear travel between fixed points — departure, journey, arrival and back again. The workshop pushed against that framing, and we discussed migration as a process of transformation across time, as much as displacement across distance.
I feel this is close to what Deleuze (1994) was exploring through the idea of ‘difference in repetition’. The idea that no repeated pattern is ever a true copy, that each turn carries its own small variation. Migration, read this way, isn’t a repetitive loop; it’s more of a spiral. With every movement, everything changes.
We discussed Brigit’s writing about what she calls the ‘tug’ of migration. It feels like there’s a bodily quality to how migration begins for all of us, whether crossing distance on the land as animals or in our human bodyminds. Before a bird sets off, something like a restlessness builds in its body. The pull comes from within, affected by seasons, seas, and time, and the sense of direction follows from that, in a very embodied, sensory tug.
I recognise that kind of tug or pull in my own way of being. Monotropism (Murray, Lesser, & Lawson, 2005) describes how Autistic attention tends to gather intensely around a small number of interests, rather than spreading more evenly across many. When an interest catches me, it feels closer to that restlessness in the birds, a tug like a magnet pulling me in and arriving before my actual cognition and thinking have caught up.
Following this tug or pull deep inside you, something opens up. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) described flow as the state that arises when attention and challenge align closely enough that the sense of separate effort disappears. It often comes with an undercurrent of wonder where the world briefly widens around whatever has caught you and opens up further into awe. I think that combination is close to what’s carrying migrating animals too: a sense of direction felt from the inside, trusted enough to move on and to see what will happen.
Following the inner pull and desire of flow, whether it is sensory or more cognitive, leads us to connect ideas, connect people, to move our bodyminds. Flow isn’t stillness; attention is moving, even when the body isn’t. It slowly transforms us: each new interest, each sensory experience, every connection with another being or environment shifts something inside us.
Many of us are taught early to override this feeling of going with the flow of what interests us and listening to our inner needs. We are conditioned to ignore our inner compass, to ignore our passions, our ideas, our sensory needs, especially if they fall outside of what is normally expected. We are taught to mask and suppress our flow and authentic migration.
Research on Autistic masking describes the suppression of natural Autistic ways of being in favour of alternatives judged safer and more acceptable by society (Pearson & Rose, 2021). The tug of monotropic passion and sensory feelings often gets read as being too much, having interests too narrow, and we learn to quieten ourselves or try to adapt to fit in. Over the years, we are moving further and further away from our own internal compass and needs until we may not even recognise our true self.
Trusting Our Inner Compass
Trusting our inner compass again isn’t easy, and there is definitely a certain amount of privilege involved in being able to unmask and be your real Autistic self with people. Neuronormativity, the assumption that more evenly distributed, easily legible attention is the ‘correct’ default way to be. It doesn’t just ask us to behave differently; it makes us distrust ourselves too. Neuroqueering (Walker, 2021) is an ongoing practice of subverting and resisting neuronormativity. It is not a final destination to become ‘neuroqueer’ or to have ‘neuroqueered’ your life — rather, I see it as an ongoing refusal to be ashamed of who you are.
This is where we need to re-learn to trust ourselves. Pernille Fraser’s poem “Can We Trust?” names this same rupture from the other direction: not what we lose faith in within ourselves, but what has to be earned from everyone and everything around us before that trust can return at all. The poem was written in 2019 and later shared through Stimpunks Foundation as part of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project. The poem repeats its central question across sensory load, pacing, correction, and the question of whether we’ll be believed and left to decide for ourselves, asking, “Can we trust the space you offer?” (Fraser, 2019/2024). The poem never resolves into an answer; it stays in the asking, leaving open questions of safety and possibility. The potential of trusting people in safe spaces to be ourselves, to keep moving and transforming.
That same question of trust doesn’t stop at ourselves. Once we’ve relearned to trust our own inner compass, we can start noticing that everyone and everything around us, human and otherwise, is following one too when we are able to feel safe.
Differences Of Being
If we stop assuming there is one right way for a human mind to move through the world, perhaps we can extend that generosity beyond humans too. Migration is only one expression of a much wider range of ways living things exist in and move through the world. Ethodiversity (Tarragnat, 2024) names the variability of behavioural and existential styles within and across species, developed to open neurodiversity beyond a purely human-centred and neurological framing. A bird’s compass, a salmon’s imprinting, a whale’s seasonal crossing, and a human’s monotropic pull aren’t the same mechanism in different bodies. They’re genuinely different ways of being, each one worth recognising on its own terms.
Difference here is already a form of connection. A migrating salmon doesn’t just pass through a river, its body becomes part of it. When Pacific salmon return to their home streams to spawn and die, their bodies carry marine-derived nutrients into freshwater and other ecosystems; they carry something from one world into another. Whales do something similar at an ocean scale: they help move nutrients such as nitrogen and iron back into sunlit waters, while their migrations redistribute nutrients across large distances. Neither salmon nor whale set out to feed a forest or an ocean, but each unique way of moving through the world is, at the same time, an act of shaping it, and being reshaped by it in turn.
That sits well alongside Milton’s (2012) double empathy problem, which invites us to notice that people communicate and experience the world differently from one another — and that no single way of being or relating needs to sit at the centre, with everyone else read against it. It sits well, too, alongside Barad’s (2007) idea of intra-action: that a self, or a species, or a migrating body doesn’t exist as a separate thing that then relates to its surroundings, but comes into being through the relating itself. There’s no “before” and “after” self on either side of a migration, only the shaping itself. The liminal space a migrating creature passes through isn’t a gap between two finished things. Self and field, self and current, self and interest, forming each other as they go.
Transformation and Trust
The workshop’s real gift was permission to stop treating change as the exception that needs explaining and to start treating it as the foundation through which everything else moves. Life doesn’t hold still and occasionally migrates; it is always in a constant state of flux and flow.
That reframing opens space for new stories to begin, not despite the shifting, but because of it. This sits alongside other threads I keep pulling on: the constellation-thinking in My Monotropic Galaxy on More Realms, and the Star Stuff work with Ryan Boren at Stimpunks, which starts from the same idea, that we are made of matter that has already migrated across unthinkable distances, reorganising itself into shape after shape after shape, connection by connection.
Migration, in that sense, isn’t a metaphor borrowed from birds and whales. It’s been true of us for longer than we’ve had words for, trusting our inner compass isn’t something any of us can do alone as people and may be especially as Autistic monotropic people.
Birds have the Earth’s magnetic field and the wider world around them to orient by. We need something a bit different: people and spaces willing to be trusted, willing to let us move, be, and communicate in our own way without demanding we prove it first.
Rediscovering our monotropic inner compass is only part of the migration. The rest is building spaces safe enough to trust it in, so we can shape and be shaped by the world around us, the way the salmon and the whale do, simply by being fully who we are.
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
Mouritsen, H. (2018). Long-distance navigation and magnetoreception in migratory animals. Nature, 558(7708), 50–59.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60.
Tarragnat, O. (2024). Biodiversity, neurodiversity, ethodiversity: Towards a more-than-human and more-than-neurological turn in neurodiversity studies. TRACE: Journal for Human-Animal Studies.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Courses, books and resources
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
Helen Edgar – Autistic Realms / More Realms June 2026
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
— Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961)
“Becoming is not imitating or identifying with something. It is producing a zone of proximity, of indiscernibility.”
— Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987)
You may know the feeling of being in a room and not being truly seen. You may be present, being spoken to by people who seem genuinely friendly towards you, yet you feel you are not truly being met. It is like the person next to you or across from you is responding to their idea of who they think you are rather than to who you actually are. There are norms and social conventions that people may feel they have to keep, and that can impact genuine presence and connection.
For many Autistic and neurodivergent people, this is not an occasional frustration but an often felt, sustained condition of our daily life. Over time, this teaches us that it is not safe to bring our whole authentic self into the room. You may suppress stimming, be hyper-aware of your body language and even how you communicate. You may find that you are constantly translating yourself into someone you hope will be more legible, more palatable, more aligned with the norms that were never designed around your experience. Masking, in this sense, is not a choice so much as a trauma response, a learned adaptation to a world that has made authenticity costly.
This piece draws together three threads of my recent thinking that I have been exploring: the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem — extended through my own Double Empathy Extreme Problem (DEEP) – Dynamic, Embodied, Ecological, and Politicalframework. I am also drawing on a recent paper by philosopher Kris Goffin (2026) that reframes the question of Autistic injustice in ways I find really helpful. Together, I think they can help us explore what the conditions for genuine belonging might actually be, so we can be supported in environments that value a process of ongoing becoming and neuroqueering.
Conditions of worth
Rogers began from a radical premise in the 1950’s: that people are not fundamentally broken, deficient, or in need of correction, but that they carry within them an innate drive toward growth and becoming more fully themselves. This is what he called the actualising tendency (Rogers, 1957). He thought of it as something like a seed’s instinct toward light: persistent, directional and always pressing toward expression. Growth cannot be destroyed, but it can be buried, become distorted and hard to surface.
What buries or distorts growth are what Rogers named conditions of worth (1959). These are the internalised messages, absorbed most powerfully in childhood, that love and acceptance are contingent on meeting certain conditions: being quieter, being less intense, doing whatever it takes to be accepted. These messages don’t usually come from a place of cruelty; they often come from concern, from guidance, from the reasonable expectations of people who themselves learned to perform belonging within the same system, such as parents, carers and teachers. However well-meant, their cumulative effect is to redirect the energy of genuine growth into the labour of self-management, into performing a version of the self that will be found acceptable, rather than becoming the self that is actually there. For neurodivergent people, this is not incidental but structural. The conditions placed on us are shaped by a world that measures worth against neuronormative standards from the outset.
For Autistic and AuDHD people, conditions of worth are not only relational but cultural and systemic. They are embedded in our education systems, healthcare settings, and workplaces; in every context that measures human value against the standards of neuronormativity. The message neurodivergent people often face in therapy or counselling is that the authentic self requires editing before it can be brought into a relationship with others, even when that therapy may be classed as person-centred as we are still living in the system that causes us harm.
Rogers believed that three relational conditions could begin to dismantle those blocks. The first is empathy, which he defined as the capacity “to sense the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ quality” (Rogers, 1957, p. 99) — presence without projection, attunement without merger. The second is congruence: authentic presence rather than performed warmth, which matters because many of us with heightened sensitivity to interpersonal nuance can sense the gap between what is presented and what is real, often more acutely than others might expect. The third is unconditional positive regard, which Rogers described as meaning “there are no conditions of acceptance, no feeling of ‘I like you only if you are thus and so’” (1957, p. 98) — being valued as you are, now, without needing to perform or justify yourself first.
When these conditions are genuinely present, something can shift. The energy previously devoted to self-protection becomes available for something else. The actualising tendency can begin to move again, and that movement can be quietly transformative.
However, I am wondering whether Rogers’ theory has a limit when it comes to meeting the needs of neurodivergent people in a world still dominated by neuronormativity. Rogers himself acknowledged that the therapeutic relationship is not a special case, but rather “a heightening of the constructive qualities which often exist in part in other relationships, and an extension through time of qualities which in other relationships tend at best to be momentary” (1957, p. 101). In other words, Rogers understood his practice as working within the existing relational world, extending and deepening what is already there. When the session ends, the person returns to the same schools, workplaces, and social structures that created the conditions of worth in the first place that led them to counselling. Rogers offers healing within the system, but he does not provide tools to examine or dismantle the systems that cause harm.
This is where I find myself reaching towards Erin Manning (2016), who offers a different register of thinking about relation and difference that attends to what she calls the “minor gesture.” The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. For Manning, the minor is a force that challenges received wisdom and common sense — what she calls “the major” — by offering potentially unlimited experiential variations that suggest alternative forms of being, knowing, and doing. Crucially, this framework directly challenges the ways in which the neuronormative image of being human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world which may be especially relevant to Autistic people who perceive the world differently.
Rogers asks what conditions within a relationship might allow a person to grow, Manning extends this by asking what small, acts and orientations might begin to shift the normative field itself. These are not competing frameworks so much as operating at different scales. Rogers is working at the depth of the relational encounter, and Manning is also attending to the texture and politics of the world in which the encounter is embedded. Together, they suggest that healing and belonging are not only interior processes, but are also shaped by whether the world around us leaves room for us to exist in our difference.
If a person leaves the therapy room and returns to a school that still rewards masking, a workplace that still pathologises their way of communicating, a healthcare system that still measures them against a neurotypical body, then Rogers’ conditions of worth are simply regenerated. Becoming, within Rogers’ framework, remains possible only within the structures that already exist; there is only growth in the space the system allows.
This is where Manning (2016) may become a useful companion to Rogers. Where Rogers works at the depth of the relational encounter, Manning attends to the texture of the world that the encounter is embedded within. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations, and it is in those small acts that some of the most important work can happen. For example, a teacher may restructure a task so that a student does not have to make eye contact to demonstrate understanding. A colleague who names in a team meeting that there are multiple valid ways of communicating, such as written or verbal, without making it about any one person. These are not grand systemic interventions; they do not dismantle the neuronormative ableist school or workplace, but the minor gesture introduces variation and genuine inclusion into experiences that would otherwise remain fixed or captured by norms, and that variation, however small, can be the difference between a person being able to remain themselves or once again contracting into a version of their self that the system will accept which can have severe impacts upon wellbeing.
Rogers gives us the conditions for healing within a relationship, whereas Manning reminds us that a relationship is never only between two people, it is always also between a person and the world they live in and must return to as well.
Creating New Maps
This is where the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Autistic scholar Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory can expand this discussion, as they point toward something Rogers’ framework doesn’t quite reach. Their works lead us not just to a space where you are allowed to become who you already are, but one that holds becoming itself as ongoing, never a fixed destination to arrive at. Where Rogers offers room to grow within existing conditions, in line with Manning, both Deleuze and Walker ask what it might mean to stop treating any version of the self as final, and what it could mean to build spaces that hold change itself as safe, rather than safety as something found only once change is finished.
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), social structures operate by carving grooves into the world and into us. I am using “grooves” as my own (hopefully!) accessible way into their concept of striated space: space that is measured, ordered, and directional, like the fixed threads of a woven fabric or the furrows of a ploughed field.
The word “grooves” feels important to me because it captures something embodied and cumulative, the sense that these structures do not only organise the world around us but wear pathways into us over time. What Walker (2021) calls neuronormativity is precisely this kind of deep striation, a system of assumptions often insisting there is one correct “normal” way to think, feel, communicate, and inhabit a human life. The problem, Deleuze and Guattari understood, is not just that the grooves constrain our movement, it is that the grooves are presented as natural, as simply the shape of reality and how society is, rather than as a constructed map that serves only particular interests, privileges some people over others, and erases the rest of us, with those most marginalised often left with no voice or support at the edges of society.
Rogers’ conditions of worth are themselves a kind of striation, grooves handed down to us before we were old enough to question them. From infancy, many of us were rewarded for playing, eating, talking, and moving in the expected ways, and those rewards became internalised as if we had drawn the lines ourselves. This is how ableism enters so quietly: not always as a rule imposed from outside, but as a shape we learn to become, often unaware that we have been masking throughout our lives — until burnout or a mental health crisis arrives and we can no longer sustain it. Rogers’ answer is to offer warmer, more accepting conditions, but still within that same tracing. It is perhaps a kinder version of the same map, rather than a genuinely different one.
Deleuze asks for something more radical, not a gentler, warmer copy of an existing outline, but a different map entirely, made in movement, drawn from where you actually are rather than where the tracing says you should be. This is not an abstract philosophical point; I think it is a deeply political one. The poet and theorist Audre Lorde reached a parallel conclusion, that the tools a structure provides can only ever renovate it from within, never dismantle it. In her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (Lorde, 1984), she argued that real belonging cannot be built from the instruments of the very structure it is trying to escape. It needs new tools, and a new starting point that never belonged to that structure in the first place.
Walker’s neuroqueer theory draws on Lorde’s insight, queer theory, and disability studies to make a related point: that the rules around what counts as “normal” thinking and those around what counts as “normal” gender are intertwined at the root. Walker goes further than simply critiquing the system. Inspired by Lorde, Walker does not call for destruction but for transformation, as David Gray-Hammond and I explored in our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces webinar with Stimpunks (Edgar, 2024), Walker’s position is that we should “queer the system, queer the tools and create new tools” (Walker, cited in Edgar, 2024).
Neuroqueering is not a tearing down; as I noted in that same webinar, “to neuroqueer is to transform, not destroy”. This feels important in a therapeutic context, too. The goal is not to abandon everything Rogers offered, but to queer it: to ask what new tools, what new language, what new relational conditions might be possible if we start from neurodivergent experience rather than mapping it onto frameworks built without us in mind.
Deleuze called this kind of departure a line of flight: a movement toward something that does not yet have a name within the existing system, because that system was never built to describe it. Rogers helps us become our best selves within the system we already have. Deleuze, Manning, Walker, and Lorde, arriving from very different places, all point toward something more: that we can find our way forward together, building our own ways of becoming, with our own language to describe what we actually experience. And it is then, perhaps, that we can become our true selves, and finally feel a sense of belonging.
The Gaps Between Us
This is where Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem (2012) becomes important. For a long time, the difficulty Autistic people experience in social interaction was located inside us, framed as deficit, as a failure of empathy, as something in need of fixing. However, Milton’s work reframes this entirely. Misunderstanding between everyone, including Autistic and non-Autistic people, goes both ways: each finds it genuinely difficult to read the other, because each is experiencing and communicating from a fundamentally different starting point. The problem is never inside one person; it lives in the gap between two people, and I think that changes everything about how we think about connection, belonging, and what good, affirming support actually looks like.
I have built on Milton’s theory with my own framework, DEEP — the Dynamic, Embodied, Ecological, and Political model of the Double Empathy Problem (Edgar, 2024). The gap Milton identifies isn’t just a one-off communication mix-up. It is felt throughout the whole bodymind, shaped by our nervous systems and sensory differences, and by the layered weight of intersectional difference. It is ecological too, shaped by the environments and communities around us, and it is political as it is tied to ableism and to every system that treats neuronormativity as the default, measuring everyone else against it and finding them lacking.
That gap wears people down; it leaves us chronically misread, exhausted from the constant work of translating ourselves, and slowly eroded from a steady sense of who we are. It is a significant factor in Autistic burnout, and it cannot be fixed by individual effort alone; it needs something structural. We need a change in the systems themselves, not just in us.
Affective Injustice
Philosopher Kris Goffin’s (2026) recent paper, “Autistic injustice as affective injustice: the double empathy problem is not about empathy,” pushes this further. Even framing the Double Empathy Problem as a two-way empathy gap, still locates the problem within individual psychology. Goffin argues that the real injustice is structural, and resonates to the political dimension of my DEEP framework.
What Goffin calls the emotional regime is a set of unspoken rules about how emotions should be expressed, which feelings count as appropriate, and whose emotional experience is taken seriously. Autistic ways of being — stimming, directness, sensory overwhelm, intensity — are routinely measured against these rules and found wanting: treated as irrational, excessive, or in need of suppression. This is not a failure of empathy on anyone’s part, it is the structural sidelining of Autistic emotional life by a culture that has never had to question its own assumptions, because those with power and privilege have always set the bar, without Autistic people having a voice.
Goffin names this affective injustice; it shifts the conversation from what is wrong with us as neurodivergent people to what is wrong with the system doing the measuring. Once we see the system as the problem, we can begin to make changes and queer the system. The emotional regime Goffin describes is not a neutral backdrop, it is actively constructed, historically maintained, and capable of being challenged.
Robert Chapman’s (2023) Empire of Normality helps us understand how we got here, Chapman traces how the very concept of the “normal” brain is not a natural fact but a product of capitalism, a system that transformed human minds and bodies into units of productivity, and measured everything that deviated from that standard as a deficit. The emotional regime Goffin identifies did not emerge from nowhere; it was built, and built to serve particular interests: to privilege those whose minds and bodies fitted the productivity model, and to pathologise, silence, and render invisible those of us who did not. Which means the question is no longer just about how we can help neurodivergent people cope better, but something more fundamental. We can start to consider who gets to decide what counts as normal in the first place, and what it would mean to dismantle that power and redistribute it.
To create real belonging, we need to sit with that question and ask whether normality is even a coherent concept, or simply a reflection of whose experience has historically been centred and whose has been erased. That question needs to be asked in classrooms, workplaces, therapy rooms, and healthcare settings alike. Autistic emotional life should not be something managed or judged against neuronormative standards.
Empathy, understood this way, is not simply a psychological capacity or a therapeutic skill. It is also a political commitment — the active refusal to allow one group’s emotional norms to function as the invisible, unquestioned measure of what it means to be fully human. And that, perhaps, is where Rogers’ vision and the neurodivergent rights movement meet: in the shared insistence that every person deserves to be met as they actually are, not as the system wishes they were.
A Space for Becoming and Belonging
This blog began with a question folded inside its title: what does it really mean to be met across difference — in our empathy, in our becoming, in our belonging? Rogers gave us a language for that meeting. Deleuze, Manning, Walker, Lorde, Milton, Goffin, and Chapman showed us why that meeting so rarely happens, and what it would take to make it possible not just in a therapy room, but in the world itself and for the infinite ways we can become and keep becoming.
So what would it actually take to build a space where that is possible?
Real change happens at multiple levels simultaneously, in the therapy room, in the classroom, in the workplace, in our families, in policy, in research, in the language we use, and in the minor gestures and choices about whose comfort we centre and whose we ask to wait. It is slow, often exhausting work, particularly for those of us who are neurodivergent and doing that work while also living inside the systems we are trying to change.
However, within the Stimpunks community, we are already queering the map, already building the spaces, the language, and the relational conditions that the thinkers in this blog have pointed toward. Cavendish Space, developed collaboratively by myself, Ryan Boren, and the Stimpunks Foundation team as part of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project, is a living example of what becoming and belonging can look like when they are built from neurodivergent experience outward.
Cavendish Space is a framework for designing environments around three kinds of space rooted in how human beings have always learned and connected.
The cave offers solitude, deep rest, and self-directed focus — space to go inward without apology. The campfire holds intimate shared meaning, storytelling, and connection in smaller, safer circles. The watering hole opens into energised, open community — the kind of space where ideas move freely and unexpected connections happen.
These are not accommodations bolted onto the edges of a space built for someone else. They are the space’s whole reason for being, shaped from the start around how neurodivergent people actually move, rest, connect, regulate, and think.
In Cavendish Space, every way of being belongs. The cave is held as carefully as the campfire. Stimming, directness, sensory sensitivity, the deep pull of monotropic focus, these are not quirks to be managed at the margins or quietly discouraged when others find them uncomfortable. They are exactly what the space was built to welcome. This is what Rogers’ unconditional positive regard looks like when it stops being confined to a single therapeutic hour and becomes the architecture of a whole environment and a new way of being for an entire community, when empathy, becoming, and belonging are no longer aspirations but the actual shape of the space itself.
Structural injustice, affective injustice, and the empire of normality Chapman describes require political change at a scale that no single framework can deliver alone. However, Cavendish Space offers something valuable that large-scale theory sometimes cannot: proof at a human scale that something different is already possible. Lorde told us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, and so we have built new ones.
Our small community of neurodivergent, disabled, and multiply marginalised people, holding between us many intersecting experiences of being othered, misread, and pushed to the edges, has created tools, languages, and spaces that were never handed to us, because they could not have been. They had to be built from the inside, from our own experience, in community with each other. When spaces are built from those experiences outward, people do not have to shrink themselves to belong. They arrive, and they are already home. This is not a utopian dream waiting for the right political conditions; we are already a living space, supported by interdependence and mutual aid, showing that it is possible to build something genuinely new, starting not from the centre of what has always been considered normal, but from the rich, complex, irreplaceable edges.
We began with the feeling of being in a room, not truly seen. A world where empathy is practised as a political commitment, where becoming is understood as a collective right, and where belonging is built from the edges inward, from our experiences, our languages, our tools, and our communities. Not a kinder version of the old world. The beginning of a genuinely different one. As the Cavendish Space framework reminds us, most environments are not built for us; schools, workplaces, and public spaces are designed for a norm that excludes neurodivergent and disabled people by default.
Cavendish Space is our offering; it names what we need and gives us a framework for building it, wherever we are, with whatever we have. Where you can walk into the room and feel, perhaps for the first time, that you belong here — and that from that belonging, your own possibilities and your own ways of becoming can begin to unfold.
Goffin, K. (2026). Autistic injustice as affective injustice: The double empathy problem is not about empathy. Philosophical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2026.2651512
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The double empathy problem. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103.
Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality, and interpersonal relationships. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science (Vol. 3, pp. 184–256). McGraw-Hill.
Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, Autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Yergeau, M. R. (2018). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neurological queerness. Duke University Press.
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
Helen Edgar — Autistic Realms | More Realms | June 2026
Spaces In-Between
I recently looked at the night sky, I was outside and cold, the sheer number of stars, the ones I could see and the knowledge of the ones I could not, shifted something in me that I did not have a word for at the time. It felt like an opening, a feeling of being very small and very connected at the same time, of the distance between me and the universe suddenly becoming less certain, of living in the in-between space. What I was experiencing is called awe, I also know, looking back, that awe may be one of the most distinctly Autistic experiences to feel.
This piece is about feelings of awe and wonder, my own Autistic ADHD experiences, and about the map I have tried to represent of my inner life using the language of the cosmos. It is called My Monotropic Galaxy: A Constellation of My Autistic Self. It is a deep-field image of space, overlaid with constellation lines, accompanied by an index of 20 named features of some of my monotropic experiences. Some of these constellations I have lived in for decades, others I have only recently been able to name. All of them are in relationship with each other, always in motion, always becoming something the map and myself has not yet caught up with.
Before I guide you through my galaxy of monotropic experiences, I will explain a bit about the theory of monotropism and why I feel it is so important for my own sense of self-identity as an Autistic ADHD person.
What Is Monotropism?
Monotropism is an attentional theory of autism developed by Autistic researchers Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser, and Wenn Lawson (2005). It describes how many Autistic people tend to have their attention drawn more strongly to fewer things at any given time, going deep rather than wide, concentrating rather than spreading their focus. Rather than framing this as a deficit — an inability to multitask or shift attention — monotropism understands it as a distinct attentional style with its own strengths and difficulties.
Discovering the theory of monotropism for the first time felt like being handed a map of a place I had always lived in but had never been able to describe. I was identified as Autistic and ADHD in my forties, while my children were also going through their own assessments. What followed was a long process of re-sense-making, a re-storying that went back through my entire life, understanding finally why things had been the way they had been, and finally being able to begin to understand my own neurodivergent identity a little bit better.
Awe and Wonder as a Way of Knowing
Let me return to the night sky and think about what awe actually is and why it may be especially relevant for monotropic people. Helen De Cruz (2024), in her book Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think, describes wonder as a form of epistemic opening, a way of relating to knowledge and how we have come to know things. The epistemic opening is the moment when the way we know expands; it is more than just a feeling. When we encounter something that is genuinely awe-inspiring, the usual categories we use to make sense of the world temporarily loosen. It is as if you are maybe seeing or sensing something for the first time; you may notice things you had previously learned to filter out. For De Cruz, wonder is not just a happy side effect of seeing something beautiful; it is a cognitive and moral orientation. It is how we stay genuinely curious about a world we might otherwise let ourselves assume we already understand, or are taught to ignore, as it doesn’t fit into how people expect us to perceive and respond.
When I read De Cruz’s book in 2024, something in me recognised what she was describing at a really deep level. It was the most inspiring book I have read for many years. I took part in a brilliant reading group hosted by The Philosopher 1923, where we explored Helen De Cruz’s work in depth. In the final week, we were lucky to be joined by Helen herself, and I remember discussing Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory (2021) and the projects I was developing with Stimpunks, particularly the ways her ideas resonated with and helped shape our thinking. These conversations had a lasting impact, influencing our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project, helping to evolve the vision behind Cavendish Space, and continuing to inform much of my current writing and emerging ideas around the theory of monotropism.
Awe and Flow
When I am pulled fully into something that has truly captured my attention, not just my mind, but my whole body and nervous system is immersed. What opens is not simply focus; it is that first-ness quality of perception De Cruz describes, the sense of seeing and feeling something for the first time, even if I have encountered it a hundred times before. New connections become visible, and the boundaries between things soften. It feels like my nervous system, so often braced against a world not designed for me, can finally exhale in the in-between spaces as new connections form and I feel literally awe-some.
Keltner and Haidt (2003) describe awe as arising when we encounter something vast that challenges our existing mental structures, something that does not fit the categories we already hold, and that invites us to expand our ways of being rather than retreat or fold inwards. Awe can be humbling and expansive at the same time; it opens up possibilities.
I feel this resonates with what it feels like for me to be in monotropic flow. My self does not disappear, nor does it become more rigid or narrow; instead, it feels as though I open up, my whole bodymind becomes more porous. The boundary between me and what I am attending to becomes less fixed; I am both in the flow, and the flow is in me. The distance between those two things collapses and unfolds in a way that feels like both loss and arrival, and it can feel deeply liberating and joyful (and sometimes deeply troubling and anxiety-provoking!).
For many Autistic people, these experiences are undervalued, even stigmatised or shamed as we grow up. We are told to concentrate on what the teacher is saying, to focus on what our family and friends think really matters, and slowly, our own ways of perceiving the world are flattened as we learn to mask and stop trusting ourselves. The things we find awe-inspiring are treated as having no value: the joy of looking closely at a mushroom or an insect may be met with being told to hurry up and rejoin the group; the wonder of feeling the sea against your toes in the sand may be met with being told to just get in and swim and stop fussing.
This quality of experience, this awe and wonder, is represented by the Stellar Current at the heart of my galaxy: the deep flow state through which my whole system comes into coherence, and I move with the current of what matters most. It feels fitting that this current carries me toward a phrase that has become foundational to how I think about the Autistic community and a sense of belonging.
Love You Down to Your Star Stuff
The phrase Love You Down To Your Star Stuff grew out of collaborative work with Ryan Boren and Stimpunks Foundation (Boren & Stimpunks Foundation, 2026). It reaches back to something Carl Sagan observed: that the atoms in our bodies were forged in the interiors of stars that lived and died long before our sun existed. We are, quite literally, made of star stuff.
To love someone down to their star stuff is to locate love for their core way of being. Love is not conditional on performance, legibility, or being the kind of person the world finds easy to translate. Love should not be dependent on meeting neuronormative expectations, masking well enough or being productive enough or social enough. To love someone down to their star stuff is to love their way of being continuous with the universe and their authentic self.
Much of the lived experience of being Autistic for many people is weighed down by what I have called the Dark Matter Field in my galaxy. This is the heavy darkness of neuronormativity, reflected in the accumulated weight we carry around of a world that does not meet our needs, and does not love us down to our star stuff. The Dark Matter Field is everything that is harmful in our systems, behaviourism, ableism, racism and more. As Autistic people, we are constantly being measured against a map that was not ours.
The Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) highlights the mutual misunderstanding between people with very different experiences, where the gap of this map is often framed as ours to close; this sits at the heart of the Dark Matter Field’s weight. Decades of masking, so thoroughly embedded in me that I genuinely did not know for most of my life where the mask ended and where I began, meant I was always accommodating others to try to meet expectations.
Love You Down to Your Star Stuff is a different orientation entirely. It is the foundation of what I believe the constellation of the neurodivergent community is reaching toward. The Mycelial Stars — underground networks of care and interdependence. The Rhizome Array — the non-hierarchical community that creates something together that none of us could make alone. The Companion Stars — those who do not need me to perform. The Sanctuary Stars — where I do not have to translate myself. All of these are expressions of what it means to love someone for who they actually are and are part of the galaxy that many neurodivergent people may recognise or relate to.
The Implicate Order and the Autistic Bodymind
A concept from quantum physics has really inspired my thinking recently, helping me articulate my inner self and conceptualise my Galaxy of Monotropic Experiences. Physicist David Bohm (1980) proposed that beneath the explicate order, the world of distinct objects and separate events we can see and measure, there exists a deeper dimension he called the implicate order. In the implicate order, nothing is truly separate; everything is enfolded into everything else. What appears distinct at the surface is always an unfolding of something that, at a deeper level, was always entangled.
I am thinking about the implicate order through the lens of monotropism and flow theory. The surface of a river looks like separate ripples and currents, each one seeming to rise, curl, and vanish on its own, but beneath the surface, the water is continuous; there is no ripple that exists apart from the river. What appears as individual movement is always part of a larger, deeper pattern, momentarily folding into visibility before folding back into the whole.
This is something of what monotropic flow feels like to me from the inside. The attention tunnel is the explicate order: a single ripple, distinct and absorbing, everything else falling away from view, but the depth beneath it, the coherence, the sense that this particular focus is connected to everything I have ever cared about, is the implicate order surfacing, slowly emerging and connecting with other thoughts. The interest that pulled me in is and was never really separate from the rest of me; it only looks that way from above the waterline or from what others may perceive. When I am in flow, I am not narrowing myself down to one thing and losing everything else; it is more like I am going deeper beneath the surface ripples to the place where it was all one current to begin with, to where I feel whole.
This may be part of why monotropic flow can feel like both loss and arrival at once; the “loss” is the disappearance of the surface separations of events and experiences outside the attention tunnel, the distinct sense of me here and the world being there. The “arrival” is perhaps the recognition of what was really underneath all along, the boundary was an explicate-order appearance, and the implicate order beneath it was entangled the whole time. When I am in flow, I can feel that oneness and vastness at the same time creating a sense of awe.
The world tends to perceive Autistic people through the explicate order, through what is behaviourally visible, measurable, categorisable. But what drives and shapes and sustains Autistic experience is largely implicate, the enfolded pattern of sensory processing, attentional depth, emotional layering, temporal fluidity, and relational intensity that does not show at the surface, or shows in ways that are consistently misread by others.
When I am in a deep monotropic flow, I am living in the implicate order. Thoughts do not arrive in sequence; they arrive already feeling more like a constellation, in relationship with each other, already folded into a larger pattern I can sense before I can articulate it. This is the Tunnelling Nebula in my galaxy — the way monotropic attention goes deep rather than wide, concentrating and transforming everything it connects to, always making more connections beneath the surface. It is around this Emergence Point that ideas and connections surface, when something is finally ready, arriving in its own time. It is at this Emergence Point that things finally start to make a bit more sense, at least to me and enable me to keep moving and keep becoming.
Bohm’s framework has also helped me understand burnout being the result of what I have called the Dark Matter Field. The Supernova Remnant in my galaxy is like a new way of becoming that emerges after burnout, remnants of my old self entangled in new ways of being.
Burnout is not simply tiredness; it is what happens when the implicate order is violently disrupted and when the continuous process of unfolding is interrupted by sustained demand to operate exclusively in the explicate: to spread thin rather than deepen, to switch and fragment and present surface after surface with no return to the enfolded whole – it is flooded with the Dark Matter Field. Each significant burnout has remade me into a new version of myself; something changes at my core, and it gives rise to new constellations. The supernova scatters what I was, how I thought and my previous ways of being; in a way, it reforms me into an ongoing cycle of becoming.
Rhizomes and the Non-Hierarchical Mind
Alongside Bohm, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari offered me another framework that helped me name something I had always experienced but could not clearly articulate in the past.
In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), they introduce the concept of the rhizome. A tree has a single trunk, its roots descend from a fixed point, and branches grow outward in a discernible hierarchy. Everything can be traced back to a central point; a rhizome is completely different. If we think of how grass spreads, or how mycelium moves through soil, more laterally, reaching out in every direction at once, with no fixed origin, no central authority, no privileged direction of growth, it may feel relatable to the experience of being Autistic. A rhizome connects with anything it encounters, it can be broken at any point and begin again from that node. It has no archive in the traditional sense, but it is dense with the traces of everything it has connected to and possibilities of what may form in the future.
This is pretty much how I feel my mind works. I have spent much of my life feeling different and not understanding my own thought processes, my non-linear associations, the omnidirectional leaps, the way a thought about a star might become a thought about mutual aid that might become a thought about penguins, and all of it feels necessary and connected, even if the connections are only fully felt inside me. It makes relationships hard, it makes communicating harder, always seeing that look of confusion on people’s faces as they think ‘what is she on about’ as there may be no obvious link to others, unless they know me really well!
The Rhizome Array in my galaxy represents the Autistic community itself. It is non-hierarchical, constantly connecting, forming new nodes, creating something together that none of us could make alone. As David Gray-Hammond and I have written about extensively there is no centre for the Autistic Rhizome and our community. There is no single way in; people can connect, join and communicate in their own way. The mycelial network metaphor runs alongside this: Mycelial Stars represent the underground networks of care that sustain us, growing toward each other in ways that do not follow a straight line or a hierarchy, representing the community of mutual aid that often sustains life for disabled and neurodivergent people.
Both frameworks, Bohm’s implicate order and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, have helped me understand that the way my monotropic bodymind works has its own pattern, its own constellation, its own way of reaching toward others and toward the world and how the world works with me and in me.
The Constellation Index
What follows is an index of twenty constellations in my Monotropic Galaxy. These are not separate entries in a list; they are interdependent, entangled and always in relationship with each other and with everything around them. They are always in motion and always in flow.
Find what resonates with you from this, some of these constellations may feel immediately familiar, and others may not be part of your galaxy at all. This map is just my own constellation in a universe of infinite possible configurations of ways of Autistic being. You may find it sparks the beginnings of creating your own map or drawing your own constellation or galaxy.
1. Dark Matter Field is the weight of neuronormativity before I had words for it.
2. Supernova Remnant is burnout — the kind that arises when my monotropic attention is asked to spread attention thin, to split, to switch constantly and to mask. Each significant burnout has remade me and formed new constellations.
3. Stellar Current is the heart of my galaxy — the deep, flow states of being monotropic. When I am truly in flow, my whole bodymind system exhales and time dissolves. I am completely, wholly present, regulated and feel alive. I move with the current.
4. Tunnelling Nebula — monotropic attention goes deep rather than wide; it concentrates and transforms everything it connects to, always making more connections.
5. Warren Constellation are my rabbit holes of research. They reflect the joy of following a question, of feeling awe and wonder, and always expanding and reaching out.
6. Mycelial Stars represent the underground networks of connection that sustain the neurodivergent community of Autistic researchers, advocates, writers, families, and educators. It is our community network of care and interdependence, all growing toward each other in ways that don’t follow a straight line or a hierarchy. The foundation of mutual aid, care and well-being.
7. Pebbling Cluster is how I show love. Inspired by the way penguins offer pebbles to those they care for, this is my Neurodivergent Love Locution. Offering small glimmers, such as a twig I found or a meme or song I share as a way to say ‘I thought of you, I care’.
8. Clustering Cascade is my infodumping. The deep need to share my interests and passions, at considerable length and in detail, with those I feel safe with and to engage with others who want to share their joy.
9. Rhizome Array is the Autistic community itself — non-hierarchical, constantly connecting with other people and forming new communities and nodes. Creating something together that none of us could make alone.
10. Sanctuary Stars are the places, practices, and people where I do not have to translate myself or mask; it is where I feel safe and can simply be and know I will be accepted for who I am to regulate and communicate in my own ways.
11. Vortex Stars are the intensity of deep absorption I feel as a monotropic person. That pull into a single channel of interest that is so total it feels like a gravitational field.
12. Time Drift is my Autistic experience of time as non-linear, layered, fluid and felt. Where past and present merge into each other, and my lived time feels closer to superposition than sequence.
13. Companion Stars are the people who orbit close, who understand penguin pebbling, and the Neurodivergent Love Locutions. Those who don’t need me to perform and who just ‘get it’.
14. Gravity Well represents my monotropic looping and ruminating mind. Thoughts that circle and return, that find their way back to the same point regardless of how many times I try to leave them. It represents Autistic inertia and a feeling of being stuck.
15. Friction Field is the relentless exhaustion of having needs the world was not designed to meet, and of having to advocate for them, over and over, in systems not built with Autistic people in mind.
16. Signal Fade is the anxiety that rises when something or someone I care about moves outside my attention tunnel, the panic of object impermanence, the fear that what is out of sight may simply be gone.
17. Aurora Borealis is the joy and wonder of being Autistic — the profound aliveness that comes with deep engagement in sensory experiences. The way the world and my whole bodymind can suddenly blaze with meaning and feel beauty when I am fully with something that matters to me.
18. Limerence Nebula is the intensity of falling deeply into a connection with a person, a totality that can feel overwhelming and all-consuming.
19. Tidal Stars represent the porousness between myself, the environment I am in and the wider cosmos. The sense that my edges are less fixed than the world tends to assume. My pull towards nature, towards water, towards things that are ancient. A feeling of returning to something that was always within me.
20. Emergence Point is what surfaces from the liminal depths of my monotropic bodymind when something is finally ready to surface. It is the crest of an invisible process, trusted rather than forced, arriving in its own time, on its own terms. I am always being in a process of becoming.
Always Becoming
Our own Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars, and most have no name, only coordinates, or nothing at all. My own constellation feels similar, as some of my stars may dim; others may brighten, and they all have their own way of processing time. Some are still finding their way through the dark toward the light, still connecting with other stars, still discovering what they illuminate. The map I have created will never be finished, as it really only captures a moment in time, as it is always transforming, it is alive.
The Autistic rhizome keeps spreading, the implicate order keeps unfolding and the constellations keep reaching toward each other, forming new nodes, new patterns, new ways of knowing that none of us could arrive at alone. What lives beyond my twenty constellations is the infinity of Autistic ways of being, every way of knowing, sensing, connecting, and belonging that has not yet found its name, its language, its place in any map.
You may recognise some of these constellations as your own and others may not be part of your galaxy at all. We are each a unique configuration of matter, patterns and attention; we each have a particular way of being continuous with a cosmos that has been becoming itself for longer than we can even perceive.
We are not like the cosmos. We are continuous with it. In the infinite space beyond every map we have ever made, the phrase from our collaborative work at Stimpunks holds everything together: Love You Down to Your Star Stuff (Boren & Stimpunks Foundation, 2026). Every star belongs, every constellation has its place and every way of being Autistic is woven into the fabric of what this community is and is always becoming.
We are not fixed points.
We are in flux.
In flow.
In everything.
Enfolded.
Unfolded.
Alive.
References
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361305051398
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Invitation
I am delighted to share that I have a chapter in an upcoming book called UNIQUE. UNIQUE invites neurodivergent contributors to map themselves: their qualities, strengths, struggles, deep interests, and challenges, all held together as a constellation.
My chapter centres on my Monotropic Galaxy — the constellation map of my Autistic self, and this blog is an edited and expanded version of my forthcoming chapter submission. My own constellation is a small offering among many in what I hope will be a rich, diverse, and deeply affirming collection of neurodivergent people’s inner worlds and experiences.
The book is still open for contributions.
If you are neurodivergent — whether formally diagnosed or self-identifying — you are warmly invited to contribute your own constellation. No artistic skill is needed. No particular way of writing. Just your own unique map of who you are. The project is intentionally moving away from deficit narratives and toward something that reflects the full richness of neurodivergent experience and identity.
Contributors need to be over 18. If you’re interested to find out more, Mark and Lisa would love to hear from you at book@vicarious-traumatisation.com.
Courses, books and resources
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
I re-read Wuthering Heights last year and just watched the new 2026 film adaptation. This isn’t a blog about gothic romance, or a critique of the film. It is more of a personal reflection on Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship that is beginning to make more sense to me as I re-read and re-watch various adaptations of one of my favourite books ever. I am rethinking their relationship through a new lens as I learn more about my own Autistic identity.
When Catherine Earnshaw says “I am Heathcliff,” it really resonates with me. It captures a connection to an inner world so intense it loses all sense of boundaries. For me, it captures my Autistic way of being where I can feel myself becoming part of someone or something else entirely. An all-consuming, whole-bodymind way of experiencing life. That deep monotropic pull of being totally immersed in whoever or whatever my attention is drawn towards.
There’s a theory of Autistic attention called monotropism — developed by Murray, Lesser, and Lawson (2005) that I have written about extensively. It describes how many Autistic and ADHD people organise their attentional resources. Instead of spreading attention broadly across many things at once, monotropic people tend to go deep, very deep. We tend to pour everything we have into fewer channels, whatever is inside our tunnel of attention gets the full experience: full focus, full feeling, full presence.
I think Cathy and Heathcliff’s all-consuming love can be reimagined and perhaps better understood through the lens of monotropism. Being monotropic is not just about cognitive resources, it is everything! It is about how people move, sense, perceive, and relate to each other. In their case, they are the centre of each other’s attentional worlds; they are completely entangled, even after years apart, their souls are still looped and hooked into each other. The wild Yorkshire moors aren’t just a backdrop to their relationship; they’re an important part of the environment and the shared language and memories they have created together since childhood.
Everything else sits outside of their relationship and the moors; Edgar Linton, Nelly, the drawing rooms, in fact, the whole performance of social respectability and ways of being in the world at that time, is all at odds with Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship.
Life demands that Cathy split herself. In her attempt to try and make her marriage work with Edgar Linton, she tries to focus on her new life without Heathcliff, but it is impossible. The idea of monotropic split conceptualised by Tanya Adkin helps explain how hard dividing attention is for Autistic people. We don’t know whether Catherine or Heathcliff would now be identified as Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, but my own personal resonance with their characters makes sense.
Catherine has to divide her attention between the competing loyalties of Healthcliff and Linton and maintain a respectable status in the society she is in. She tries to mask and fit in, she tries for years to manage how much she feels, how much she shows, how much intensity is acceptable in polite company. The neuronormative demands, the pressure on people whose minds and bodies work differently as they try to reshape themselves into a form the dominant social world can accommodate is exhausting. The cost of that reshaping runs through Cathy’s entire life. It isn’t just social pressure; it slowly begins to unravel her from the inside.
Her famous declaration — “I am Heathcliff” — makes complete sense to me. It describes exactly what it feels like when my deepest attention and my sense of who I am become genuinely inseparable, when another person or event that isn’t just important to me, it is my everything that is woven into the fabric of how I experience myself and life. Something some may be able to relate to. When that person or interest is gone, you are not just bereft. The loss goes all the way down, into the core of the self, until the flow that once held your life together may feel utterly broken.
One of the things that strikes me most, reading the novel this way, is who actually understands either of them. Edgar doesn’t understand Cathy, and Nelly doesn’t understand Heathcliff. The people around them consistently misread them, misjudge them, interpret their intensity as threat or instability. Milton’s double empathy problem (2012) describes exactly this—the way that people with genuinely different experiences can find mutual comprehension difficult, not because either person is deficient, but because the gap between their ways of experiencing the world is so great. Cathy and Heathcliff are, for each other, the only exception to that. They are the only two people in the novel who experience each other from the inside. Their connection and their relationship is the only place either of them is fully legible and are able to be their true selves.
This makes what happens at her deathbed almost unbearable to read. Heathcliff doesn’t grieve quietly; he demands she haunt him, he asks her to stay in any form — just not to leave him in the void where he cannot reach her. He says he cannot live without his life. He cannot live without his soul. He can not live without Cathy.
And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe – I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’ He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.
Chapter 16
Where the words of human experiences run out to describe the intensity, Brontë turns back to nature, to the knotted tree trunk Heathcliff dashed his head against. The sound Brontë describes Heathcliff as exclaiming is something beyond the human, “not like a man, but like a savage beast”.
Brontë wasn’t writing a story about Autistic people and neurodivergent lives. She didn’t have this framework in 1847; it may be a leap to suggest that any of this is related to anyone else’s experience as a neurodivergent person but my own. However, she was writing about something she felt deeply, she is writing about what it looks like when a person cannot do things by halves. When people love the way they attend to everything: completely, in depth, with the whole of themselves, in a world that keeps asking them to be less.
When we read Wuthering Heights through the lens of monotropism, the double empathy problem, and neuroqueer theory, something can shift. Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is devastating, but it is also the most real thing in the novel — the only place either of them is ever fully known. The world Brontë placed them in was never built to hold their intensity and passion. Many of us may in some ways share and resonate with their world and perhaps find ourselves reflected in Cathy and Heathcliff — in the depth, the pull, the all-consuming way of loving, the trying to fit in and adapt.
What Cathy and Heathcliff never had, and what so many of us are still learning we deserve, is the safety to be fully known, and the freedom to stop pretending to be less than we are.
Brontë, E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1847).
Garau, V., Woods, R., Chown, N., Hallett, S., Murray, F., Wood, R., Murray, A. & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2023). The Monotropism Questionnaire, Open Science Framework. DOI:10.31219/osf.io/ft73y
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Courses, books and resources
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
From More-Than Neurodiversity to Ethodiversity: Sensory Climates, Monotropic Flow and Watery-Becomings (an exploration!)
I have been thinking about what it means to live as an Autistic person with a bodymind in a world organised around neuronormativity, speed, noise, and constant transition in often overwhelming environments.
This article explores how Autistic burnout and regulation can be understood as relational ecological reorganisations of monotropic attention with the wider environment, rather than solely individual neurological difficulties.
Drawing on Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory alongside Ombre Tarragnat’s concepts of Autistic weather-bodies and ethodiversity, Astrida Neimanis’s account of watery embodiment, and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs, this article reframes Autistic ways of being as forms of relational reorganisation rather than individual deficit.
This essay is exploratory and reflects an ongoing process of neuroqueering how my own attention, well-being, and belonging are understood. May be some of it will resonate with you?
Rethinking Neurodivergence in Neuronormative Societies
Autistic experience shows that well-being does not arise only from what happens within an individual. It develops through ongoing relationships between bodyminds, relationships, environments, and social expectations. Attention, sensory regulation, emotional rhythms, and energy flow are shaped through everyday encounters with the worlds we inhabit. When these relationships become strained or misaligned, experiences of burnout and fragmentation can occur.
Neuroqueer (Walker, 2021) and posthuman perspectives invite us to understand neurodivergence as shaped not only by individual neurology but also by sensory environments, social structures, technological systems, and political conditions.
A more-than-neurodiversity approach moves beyond helping individuals adapt to existing systems. Instead, it asks how those systems themselves might be re-organised to support diverse ways of sensing, attending, communicating, and relating.
These relational processes are not abstract. They are organised through school timetables, digital infrastructures of constant connectivity, and socio-political economic systems that prioritise speed and productivity. Such conditions shape how attention can move, how bodies regulate, and whose rhythms of participation are recognised as viable.
In societies organised around neuronormative values, difference only becomes visible through comparison with dominant norms. Neurodivergent individuals may therefore experience pressure to suppress sensory needs, split our natural monotropic attentional flow, or mask ways of being in order to remain socially legible. While these strategies can enable participation and may foster greater acceptance, the sustained effort required to maintain them can lead to exhaustion and burnout. Experiences such as meltdown, shutdown, and declining mental or physical health can be understood not just as individual difficulties, but as relational signals that our everyday environments and ways of being have become too intense, unpredictable, or unsustainable and that change is needed.
This article suggests that what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming a Body without Organs may help us understand Autistic experience as an ongoing neuroqueer ecological process. Through this lens, bodyminds are continually reorganising in response to changing relational climates. Drawing on Tarragnat’s ideas of Autistic weather-bodies and ethodiversity, Neimanis’s writing on watery embodiment, and Walker’s neuroqueer theory, I am reflecting on my own lived Autistic experience to explore how neurodivergent ways of sensing and relating can open new possibilities for ecological belonging and more liveable worlds.
Beyond the Brain: The Limits of “Neuro” Framing
While the language of neurodiversity has played a crucial role in reframing neurological variation as a natural and valuable aspect of human diversity, I think the growing emphasis on “neuro” as a primary explanatory framework also raises important questions. All humans have nervous systems and unique sensory and attentional patterns, all of which are shaped by our experiences and intersecting identities. When difference is understood mainly, or only through what are seen as brain-based (neurological) and diagnostic models, then understandings of divergence can become narrowed to recognised clinical categories, while the wider relational, cultural, political, and ecological conditions shaping experience remain less visible. This is not to deny the reality of neurological difference and being innately Autistic, but to argue that such difference is always lived through relational, cultural, and ecological conditions.
Neurodivergence may not always be a fixed identity or solely a neurological state of being. It can also emerge through different ways of sensing, relating, resisting, or reorganising participation in environments. For some, becoming neurodivergent becomes a conscious process of neuroqueering dominant expectations around productivity, communication, or emotional regulation. In this sense, divergence is not always bounded or stable, and it may not always be inherently positive. It can involve vulnerability, exclusion, uncertainty, and ongoing negotiation with social norms, the spaces we engage with, and the direction our neurodivergence leads us towards.
When divergence is measured primarily against socially constructed standards of independence, efficiency, social fluency, and normative regulation, important dimensions of human variation can be overlooked. Expanding the conversation beyond strictly neurological framings allows neurodivergence to be understood as emerging from interactions among the infinite experiences of different bodyminds shaped by intersectionality, environments, and also the systems of power we live within.
More-than-neurodiversity perspectives, including Ombre Tarragnat’s concept of ethodiversity (2025), further challenge hierarchical and human-centric assumptions about how difference is organised and valued. Instead of locating divergence solely within individual brains, these approaches understand embodiment as relational and ecological, a continual process of becoming shaped by sensory climates, technological infrastructures, social systems, and ecological conditions, it looks at our relations within a multi-species context, our way of being with the wider planet and all that it contains.
Exploring Autistic experience through ecological metaphors such as weather, water, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs offers one way of shining a light on how our bodyminds may reorganise themselves in response to shifting relational environments. These frameworks help widen the discussion from individual adaptation to collective transformation, opening the possibility of reimagining more liveable relational worlds.
Autistic Weather-Bodies: Sensory Climates and Masking
Ombre Tarragnat’s (2024) idea of the Autistic weather-body helps us understand how our experiences are shaped by the climates we live within. They suggest that our bodyminds are always responding to a “total climate” , not only the physical weather around us, but also biodiverse, sensory environments, social expectations, technologies, and socio-political conditions we live within.
These relational climates are not only social or human-centred; they are multispecies and more-than-human. Living beings, ecological communities, and so-called non-living forces such as air quality, light, temperature fluctuations, water, and seasonal rhythms all shape how bodyminds feel, focus, regulate, and relate. These dynamic conditions also respond to our presence and actions. Together, they influence the ecological possibilities through which different forms of life — human and non-human — can endure, adapt, and flourish. From this perspective, neurodivergent experience emerges within more-than-human ecologies rather than solely within and between humans, everything and everyone is connected!
For many Autistic people, changes in atmosphere are felt very directly and intensely; our bodies are perhaps more porous. Lighting, noise, other sensory input, unpredictability, digital pressures, and interpersonal tension and relationships can all influence our attention, energy, and capacity to regulate, and we may not always have control over this.
These shifts are not always dramatic; sometimes they are more subtle, a rising sense of pressure and anxixety in a crowded room, a flicker of fluorescent light that begins to feel painful, or even the bodily awareness of a storm approaching. I know that for me, changes in the weather can trigger migraines before the rain even arrives. These experiences remind us that our bodyminds are not sealed off from the world; we are not just humans in the world. We are continually sensing, adjusting, responding, adapting and connecting with the world.
Thinking about Autistic bodyminds as weather-bodies moves my thinking away from asking how people need to become more ‘resilient’ to change, trauma and ruptures of flow states. Instead, it invites us to consider how the climates of our everyday lives might become more liveable and flow more steadily and smoothly. We can consider what schools would feel like if they were organised around sensory comfort and intrinsically motivated attention tunnels of engagement rather than speed and constant transition? How might workplaces change if regulation and recovery were understood as necessary rhythms rather than signs of weakness?
Tarragnat also writes about how we actually weather environments too. All humans try to adapt, this may be more intense for Autistic people and a trauma response to the very climate we live in. We may sometimes mask or suppress our sensory needs when having a meal out with friends, push through our exhaustion to meet a deadline at work, or fragment our attention in order to try to stay socially acceptable and communicate in a busy cafe. Over time, this kind of acclimatisation can erode our sense of coherence, identity and well-being. Burnout, meltdowns or shutdowns may follow, often with severe mental health implications as we try to survive and function, and this pressure accumulates. These experiences are not personal failures; they are signals that our current relational climates have become too difficult to inhabit.
Like water, our Autistic weather-bodies are also fluid; our experiences move and change like atmospheric patterns. To deepen this ecological way of thinking, I think it could be helpful and interesting to turn to the watery metaphors of embodiment such as that proposed by Neimanis (2017). If weather shapes how we feel and function and how we may be weather-bodies, water also helps us understand how well our bodyminds can actually manage attention, emotion, and energy flow. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the plants and biodiversity around us and the ecosystems that grow within our world are all vital to our well-being and deeply entangled in a connected flow.
Understanding Autistic experience through these ecological metaphors may help us recognise that wellbeing is always relational. It depends not only on what happens inside our bodyminds, but on the climates and currents we all move within.
Watery Bodies: Monotropic Attention and Relational Flow
Posthuman feminist thinker Astrida Neimanis (2017) describes human beings as bodies of water, shaped by the flows that move through and around us. Water is not only something we drink, cook with, or wash in. It circulates through our blood and tissues, regulates temperature through sweat and breath, and connects us to wider ecological systems such as weather patterns, infrastructures, rivers, oceans and cycles in nature.
From this perspective, embodiment is not sealed within the skin. Bodies are permeable, porous, sponge-like, relational, and continuously responding to the environments they inhabit. We are not separate from the oceanic and atmospheric systems that sustain life. In a very real material sense, we are entangled with them, shaped by their rhythms, movements, and transformations. Our sensory and nervous systems are always responding and adapting to maintain a stable flow amid the different currents and energies around us.
For many Autistic people, whose perception often foregrounds sensory detail and pattern, this account of embodiment may resonate with lived experiences of permeability, intensity, and environmental attunement.
Monotropic attention, characterised by deep engagement with particular interests or sensory environments (Murray et al., 2005), can be imagined as a current that gathers depth and direction over time. When attention can move steadily toward meaningful activity, it may support learning, regulation, creativity, and a sense of coherence within the wider flow and environment a person is within.
However, many relational environments are organised in ways that disrupt rather than support these attentional currents. Educational settings often require rapid transitions between subjects, noisy corridors, and constant social negotiation. Workplaces often demand multitasking, immediate responses to digital communication, and participation in unpredictable meetings. Everyday life may involve sensory overload from traffic, crowds, bright lighting, smells, or competing demands at home and with our own health. These conditions can create what might be described as turbulent relational climates, in which the flow of attention is repeatedly interrupted and ruptured, leaving us without a safe anchor.
These turbulent relational climates are often produced and intensified through socio-political, economic, and technological systems that fragment attention and accelerate temporal demands. For example, constant news alerts on your phone may create a background sense of urgency or threat, pulling your attention and flow away from embodied rhythms and present-moment regulation. Algorithm-driven social media feeds, rapid email expectations at work, and productivity-monitoring apps can pressure people to respond immediately, compressing time and narrowing opportunities for rest or deep flow with our passions.
Economic precarity, shift work, and unstable housing conditions can further disrupt sensory and emotional regulation by creating unpredictability in daily routines and environments. Public transport delays, overcrowded urban spaces, and exposure to noise or poor air quality may also contribute to cumulative sensory load. At a broader level, climate-related events such as heatwaves, flooding, or seasonal disruption can reshape how people move, gather, and feel safe, while also affecting multispecies habitats and ecological stability.
Together, these forces create relational climates that are not only socially produced but materially and technologically mediated, shaping how bodyminds attend, connect, recover, and sustain participation in everyday life – which may all be felt more acutely if you are Autistic. Understanding burnout in this way highlights how neurodivergent distress is frequently structured by socio-political and material conditions rather than individual deficit.
From a hydrological perspective, responses such as overwhelm, shutdown, or withdrawal can be understood as the body adjusting to this turbulence. Just as rivers alter course when encountering obstacles, drought, or flooding, Autistic individuals may narrow their focus, find cracks and crevices to retreat into quieter spaces, or seek familiar routines in order to restore coherence and regain a smoother less distressing flow state, so our systems don’t get flooded or caught up in a storm. These adjustments are often misinterpreted as avoidance, lack of resilience, or disengagement. Yet they can represent adaptive attempts to conserve energy and re-establish sustainable regulatory pathways and streams of flow.
This shift from individual responsibility toward relational transformation raises a deeper philosophical question: how do bodyminds reorganise when familiar structures of engagement become unsustainable? Rather than understanding burnout as a breakdown, they may be read as processes of reorganisation. To explore this possibility, I am turning to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, which offers a way of thinking about how new patterns of regulation, relation, and participation can emerge.
Body without Organs: Autistic Becoming
I find Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the Body without Organs (BwO) helpful for thinking about how Autistic bodyminds may reorganise when everyday demands become overwhelming or unsustainable. The BwO does not refer to a literal physical state (!). Instead, it describes shifts in how attention, sensory experience, movement, and participation are organised and can become re-organised.
From my own experience, these shifts often become most noticeable during periods of burnout or intense overwhelm. At these times, familiar ways of focusing, communicating, or keeping up with daily life can begin to break down. For example, I might find that replying to messages or emails — tasks that once felt manageable — suddenly requires an enormous amount of energy, or that following conversations in busy environments becomes confusing and exhausting. Even simple routines such as preparing meals, travelling on public transport, or switching between tasks can feel disorientating, as if my attention is no longer able to stretch in the ways it once did.
It can feel as though the usual pathways for engaging with the world are no longer available. However, these moments are not only about loss or collapse. There can also be times when new ways of regulating and relating start to emerge as attentional resources redistribute in order to survive. For instance, I may begin to rely more on sensory anchors such as quiet spaces, repetitive movement, or focused creative interests. Communication might shift toward slower, more intentional exchanges, or toward written rather than spoken interaction. Daily life can reorganise around fewer but more meaningful connections and activities, allowing energy to be conserved and gradually restored. In this way, burnout can sometimes open space for different rhythms of participation and new forms of relational attunement to develop.
Reorganisation does not only happen in moments of crisis. It often unfolds through small, everyday neuroqueer choices. This might look like staying with a deep interest long after others have moved on, pacing or rocking to steady sensory overwhelm, wearing noise-cancelling headphones in busy spaces, or choosing solitude after social interaction in order to recover. Some Autistic people reshape their days so that activities happen in a predictable sequence, or protect uninterrupted stretches of time where attention can settle and flow.
What Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialisation can be felt here as a soft loosening of pressure, a step away from expectations to respond quickly, multitask constantly, or socialise in prescribed ways. As these pressures ease, different rhythms of living and participating can begin to take shape for others too and the ripples of change begin to take effect.
Many Autistic people recognise these processes in small but significant adjustments to how they move through the world. Erin Manning (2016) describes such shifts as “minor gestures” — subtle changes that reshape how we sense, focus, and relate within particular environments. This might involve rhythmic movement to steady sensory overwhelm, withdrawing into a meaningful interest after prolonged interaction, or becoming absorbed in creative or repetitive activity. These gestures can be understood as the mechanisms through which reorganisation happens. They are ways of actively redistributing sensory and emotional intensity, recalibrating attention, and gradually re-establishing a sense of coherence. Although often misunderstood as avoidance or dysfunction, such practices can help Autistic individuals re-climatise to demanding relational atmospheres and sustain participation over time.here.
As these processes are relational, they are shaped by the environments in which we live. Sensory-friendly spaces, predictable routines, flexible expectations, and collective care can make a significant difference. From this perspective, well-being is not something individuals achieve alone; it emerges collectively through interdependence with environments (beyond the human), that recognise and support diverse ways of focusing, recovering, and connecting.
For many Autistic people, reorganising routines and spaces becomes an intentional way of reducing neuronormative pressure. Creating sensory refuges, protecting uninterrupted time for deep focus, limiting unnecessary task-switching, or prioritising interest-led learning and creativity can support more sustainable engagement. These are not simply personal coping strategies. They are ways of experimenting with how attention, energy, and participation might be structured differently.
Neurodivergent becoming can therefore be understood as an ongoing neuroqueering process of adjustment and transformation, shaped by the continuous redistribution of attention, energy, and sensory intensity. Periods of immersion, withdrawal, or re-focusing are not simply signs that something has gone wrong. They may indicate that bodyminds are reorganising in response to pressures that exceed sustainable limits.
When these processes are recognised and supported, they can open pathways towards more liveable ways of being, not only for Autistic people, but within the wider relational ecologies we all share. In this sense, becoming a Body without Organs is not a final state but a dynamic practice: a way to loosen restrictive normative expectations, experiment with new rhythms of participation, and contribute to the gradual reshaping of environments so that diverse forms of attention, regulation, and connection can co-exist and keep transforming and flowing.
From Neurodiversity to Ethodiversity: Ecological Multiplicity
When Autistic reorganisations of attention and sensory When experiences of sensory intensity or overwhelm are understood as relational and ecological processes, rather than simply individual coping challenges, our perspective begins to widen. Instead of seeing regulation as something a person must manage alone, we can recognise how environments, relationships, technologies, and broader living systems all shape how attention, emotion, and energy flow.
From this viewpoint, neurodiversity is no longer only about differences between human brains. It becomes part of a wider story about how many forms of life sense, respond, adapt, and find ways to remain in the world. Ideas such as becoming a Body without Organs can be read as an invitation to notice these shifting patterns of connection and regulation, and to recognise the importance of ethodiversity (Tarragnat, 2025), or the diversity of ways living beings experience and engage with their environments.
Expanding neurodiversity toward the concept of ethodiversity strengthens this ecological understanding. Ombre Tarragnat (2025) uses this term to highlight how different perceptual styles, emotional intensities, and attention patterns contribute to the resilience of relational systems, including ecosystems and multispecies communities. For example, Autistic sensory attunement may make environmental pressures more noticeable such as persistent background noise, polluted air, or the stress of extreme weather changes.
Ethodiversity does not just build on neurodiversity by recognising additional forms of human difference. Instead, it draws attention to the diversity of ways living beings perceive, move, and participate in shared environments, as well as the impact of non-living things. From this perspective, neurodivergence can be understood as one expression of a wider ecological multiplicity of attentional rhythms, sensory attunements, and relational styles that help sustain more liveable worlds.
Understanding and embracing ethodiversity means creating relational systems that can support different rhythms of participation, perception, rest, and recovery. This includes recognising that people, other species, and environments do not all move, sense, or respond in the same ways or at the same pace. Designing spaces, communities, and policies with this diversity in mind becomes part of a wider ethics of planetary care.
When we value diverse forms of embodiment and ways of relating to the world, we also begin to recognise how closely human wellbeing is connected to ecological wellbeing. Sustaining multiplicity across cognitive, cultural, biological, and ecological domains is therefore not only a matter of social inclusion. It is also a condition for collective survival. For example, if water systems become polluted, this affects the health of entire ecosystems, and human communities are not separate from these impacts. In this way, caring for diversity in how life exists and adapts is part of caring for the future of the planet as a whole.
Cultivating Liveable Worlds: A Neuroqueer Ecological Future
Autistic experience highlights how wellbeing emerges through ongoing relationships between bodyminds, environments, and social expectations. Sensory overwhelm, burnout, fragmentation, and withdrawal can therefore be understood not simply as individual difficulties, but as signals that relational climates have become too intense, unpredictable, or unsustainable.
Thinking with concepts such as Autistic weather-bodies, watery embodiment, and the Body without Organs helps us recognise how bodyminds continually adapt and reorganise in response to these conditions. Practices of regulation such as retreating into focused flow, seeking quieter environments, experimenting with new rhythms of engagement, or stimming can be understood as efforts to restore coherence and sustain participation. Neuroqueering involves both resisting dominant expectations and actively reshaping environments to support different temporalities and sensory needs.
The concepts of Cavendish Space and Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, which I have been working on with Stimpunks, offer practical examples of how relational ecologies might be redesigned. By prioritising sensory accessibility, slower rhythms of participation, interest-led engagement, and collective care, these approaches shift the focus away from expecting Autistic individuals to adapt to rigid systems. Instead, they explore how environments themselves can become more responsive and sustaining.
Cultivating liveable relational worlds requires more than individual accommodation. It calls for collective transformation, reshaping educational, social, technological, and ecological systems so that diverse rhythms of sensing, regulating, and belonging can genuinely flourish. Supporting diverse modes of becoming is not only about inclusion within existing structures, but about reimagining those structures altogether.
Extending neurodiversity toward the broader horizon of ethodiversity invites recognition that multiplicity across perceptual styles, cultural practices, and environmental relationships contributes to more liveable shared futures. Practices that support sensory regulation, slower temporal rhythms, and sustainable participation may also align with wider movements toward ecological care and multispecies coexistence.
From this perspective, becoming what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a Body without Organs can be understood as an ongoing neuroqueer process of reorganisation. It involves loosening restrictive normative expectations, redistributing attention and energy, and experimenting with and queering new ways of participating and being in our relational worlds. Perhaps neuroqueering attention and sensory life is not only about Autistic survival, but about learning new ways of living together within the fragile ecologies we all share?
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. Bloomsbury.
Tarragnat, O. (2024). The personal is climatic: Autistic weather-bodies and posthuman feminism between weathering and (dis)acclimatisation. Sextant: Revue de recherche interdisciplinaire sur le genre et la sexualité, (41).
Tarragnat, O. (2025). Biodiversity, neurodiversity, ethodiversity: Towards a more-than-human and more-than-neurological turn in neurodiversity studies. TRACE Journal for Human-Animal Studies.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies. Autonomous Press.
Yergeau, M. (2018). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neurological queerness. Duke University Press.
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
Autistic community can function as a living ecology of support, growing rhizomes and mycelium networks of care through shared recognition, co-regulation and mutual understanding. Within education, healthcare and labour systems that often disrupt neurodivergent flow and safety, these relational networks help sustain belonging, support burnout recovery and create new possibilities for engagement and participation. Drawing on monotropism, masking research and neurodivergent design approaches developed through Stimpunks, this article explores how our collective Autistic spaces nurture survival, resistance and transformative futures.
The Autistic Rhizome
The Autistic community is often spoken about as a source of friendship and peer support – a place to find people who just ‘get it’ and accept us for who we really are in all of our weird and wonderful ways of being. Yet for myself and perhaps others, it also functions as something far more foundational, a relational ecology that enables actual survival within systems not designed for our ways of thinking, sensing, and being.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the rhizome offers a powerful lens for understanding this. Rhizomes grow laterally rather than hierarchically. They form networks of connection that adapt to changing environments and they persist even after rupture. In many ways, the Autistic community develops in similar ways, through shared flow states, shared recognition, and collective resistance to structures that fragment our attention and belonging.
This matters because our dominant systems, particularly education, healthcare, and capitalist labour structures, often operate through neuronormative assumptions about productivity, communication, and independence and ways of being which leads many of us into chronic burnout.
Education, Attention, and the Cost of Neuroconformity
Educational systems frequently prioritise standardised pacing, neuroconformity, and measurable outcomes over relational safety and cognitive and sensory diversity. For monotropic people (Murray et al., 2005), such environments can be profoundly destabilising. Constant transitions, sensory overload, and social performance demands can disrupt flow and contribute to experiences of masking, suppressing our need for sensory regulation, increasing anxiety and often leading to disengagement or exclusion.
Research on Autistic inertia highlights how difficulties with task initiation or switching are often misunderstood as defiance or lack of motivation (Buckle et al., 2021) rather than a redistribution of monotropic attentional resources. When these misunderstandings are embedded within institutions and systems, people may internalise deficit narratives or experience harmful interventions in order to try and fix or shape Autistic people into fitting into the neuronormative world. Trauma then accumulates over time, shaping later experiences of participation and safety and can lead to burnout and mental health difficulties.
Autistic community spaces (online and in person) can provide alternative ecologies for learning and care. where the neurodivergent love languages and the importance of interest-led exploration, flexible pacing, and co-regulation allow attention to stabilise and flow more evenly and a sense of belonging can emerge where we can be our authentic selves.
Healthcare, Misattunement, and Epistemic Injustice
Healthcare systems also frequently struggle to recognise Autistic communication styles, sensory realities, and embodied knowledge. The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) highlights how misunderstandings between neurotypes can shape diagnostic processes, treatment decisions, and therapeutic relationships. Autistic people may find their experiences dismissed, pathologised, or translated into frameworks that prioritise normalisation over wellbeing.
Such interactions can contribute to epistemic injustice — the marginalisation of individuals as credible knowers of their own lives. When healthcare encounters become sites of misattunement rather than support, relational safety is undermined. This may delay help-seeking or intensify distress.
Within Autistic community, shared narratives can restore legitimacy to lived experience. Collective knowledge and sharing stories offer alternative pathways for understanding burnout, coping, sensory regulation, and recovery.
Capitalism, Masking, and Burnout
Our labour structures and workplaces often reward speed, multitasking, social performance, and uninterrupted productivity. For many Autistic people, sustaining participation in such environments requires masking — suppressing natural behaviours or attentional rhythms to meet normative expectations (Hull et al., 2020; Mantzalas et al., 2022).
Over time, sustained masking combined with environmental mismatch can contribute to Autistic burnout (Raymaker et al., 2020). Burnout may involve loss of functional capacity, withdrawal from work or education, and profound exhaustion as all of our monotropic attentional resources go into survival mode. Framing these outcomes solely as failures of individual resilience obscures their structural roots. – it is a socio-political and ecosystemic problem.
Autistic community can act as a counter-space to these pressures. Rhizomatic networks of mutual aid, shared stories, advocacy, and shared pacing enable individuals to explore alternative participation models. Some may pursue interest-led work, flexible schedules, or collaborative creative projects. These movements can be understood as Deleuzian lines of flight — pathways through which individuals move away from restrictive assemblages and experiment with new ways of living (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Safety as Relational Infrastructure
Across education, healthcare, and employment, a common thread seems to emerge that safety is not only physical or psychological. It is sensory, attentional, relational, and political.
Safety involves being able to focus without constant interruption. It involves communicating without fear of misinterpretation. It involves participating without masking core aspects of identity.
The Autistic community often provides conditions for such safety through shared norms, slower rhythms, and recognition of diverse sensory and regulatory needs. Co-regulation and inter-dependence become possible when individuals do not need to defend their ways of being. Over time, these relational environments within the rhizome can support recovery from burnout and trauma.
From Resistance to Re-Designing Mycelial Networks of Care
Through collaborative work with Stimpunks, I have been involved in developing pattern language resources that articulate recurring neurodivergent experiences and their environmental contexts (Stimpunks, 2026a). These patterns form the basis for practical design “recipes” aimed at reshaping institutions and systems to support diverse cognitive and sensory ways of being (Stimpunks, 2026b, 2026c).
This work signals a move beyond simple neuro-affirming accommodation toward deeper neuroqueer transformation. It suggests a shift from approaches that seek only to make existing neuronormative systems slightly more tolerable, toward practices that fundamentally question how those systems are organised and whose ways of being they prioritise. Neuro-affirming accommodation can be important and often necessary in the short term, helping to reduce immediate barriers or harms. However, when accommodation is framed as the endpoint rather than part of a broader process of change, it risks leaving intact the underlying assumptions about productivity, communication, independence, and pacing that continue to destabilise Autistic attention, sensory regulation, and relational safety.
Neuroqueer transformation invites a more expansive reimagining. It asks what might happen if environments were not simply adjusted around the margins, but re-designed from the ground up to recognise diverse cognitive rhythms, sensory experiences, and ways of participating. This involves moving from reactive support toward proactive design, creating spaces where deep focus, flexible transitions, alternative communication styles, and interdependence are not treated as deviations to be managed, but as integral aspects of collective life. In this sense, neurodivergent design becomes both a practical and a political project: a process of reshaping institutions so that they can accommodate multiple modes of attention, embodiment, and relationality without requiring individuals to mask or fragment themselves to belong.
Rather than asking Autistic individuals to constantly adjust to environments that disrupt attention, safety, and well-being, neurodivergent design aims to reshape systems to support different ways of sensing, communicating, and participating. The knowledge that grows within rhizomatic Autistic communities plays an important role in this work. Through shared recognition, mutual aid, and collaborative experimentation, these communities generate situated understandings of burnout, regulation, pacing, and connection. Such knowledge does not remain purely theoretical; it informs new educational practices, healthcare approaches, creative collaborations, and models of participation that are more equitable and sustainable.
In this way, neuroqueer transformation is not only about resisting harmful structures, but also about cultivating alternative futures. It emerges through the gradual expansion of relational networks that support belonging, creativity, and recovery. As these rhizomatic forms of community continue to grow and adapt, they contribute to the ongoing redesign of social worlds, opening possibilities for ways of living together that honour neurodivergent difference as generative rather than problematic.
Expanding the Mycelial Network of Care: Rhizomatic Belonging and Collective Futures
Understanding Autistic community as rhizomatic reveals that belonging is not a fixed destination but an ongoing relational process. It emerges through shared attention, mutual recognition, and the gradual weaving of safer spaces within systems that often disrupt flow and participation. In this sense, community is not simply something we find; it is something we can actually grow together and shape for our diverse needs.
When burnout, trauma, or systemic exclusion make participation difficult, networks of care within Autistic communities can help us find new ways to stay connected and sustain ourselves. We re-root together, supporting one another and forming new points and nodes of connection within the wider rhizome. These journeys are rarely straightforward; they often involve slowing down, adjusting communication, and experimenting with ways of living that move beyond neuronormative expectations.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe this kind of movement as creating lines of flight, moments when people begin to move toward new possibilities and build different forms of support, creativity, and meaning. In many ways, this is what we are doing through spaces such as Neurohub 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
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0043
Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
In my previous blog, we explored how monotropic attention can create deep rhizomatic pathways of learning and belonging, and how mycelial networks of care help sustain neurodivergent lives.
But what happens when these pathways become blocked? What happens when the networks that once supported us begin to strain or collapse? Or we don’t have the support networks there to begin with?
Many Autistic people describe burnout not only as exhaustion, but as a more fundamental disruption, a loss of flow, safety, and connection, a seismic shift that transforms our entire way of being.
Burnout is not simply “doing too much.” It can feel like the ground of our known experience itself has shifted and fallen through the cracks.
Burnout as a fracture in relational life
Burnout often unfolds gradually, and the buildup may go unnoticed for some of us; we may suddenly find ourselves in the depths, drowning. Attention may become harder to sustain. Sensory tolerance may narrow, social interaction and communication may feel increasingly effortful. Activities that once brought joy may feel distant or even unreachable.
The body may signal distress through meltdowns, shutdowns, pain, disruptions in sleep and eating patterns, or even difficulty initiating movement beyond wanting to curl up under a weight blanket in bed.
Time can feel slowed, fragmented, or just utterly overwhelming and confusing as it isn’t lining up with the neuronormative expectations of the world around us. These experiences are not isolated symptoms. They are signs that the flow between body, attention, our relationships, and the wider environment is under strain.
Rather than viewing burnout as a personal deficit, it can be understood as a fracture within a wider relational ecology.
When environments demand constant masking, rapid task-switching, or sensory endurance, the deep attentional flows that support our ability to engage in life can begin to fracture.
The disruption of monotropic flow
For many Autistic/ ADHD people, interests are more than hobbies. They are passions that provide structure, regulation, identity, and meaning. Burnout may involve losing access to these sustaining pathways and flow states.
A person who once found comfort in researching Tudor history, coding, drawing, gaming, building collections, or walking familiar woodland routes may suddenly feel unable to engage. Attention slips away, motivation may feel brittle, and even small tasks can require more effort and capacity than we actually have available.
This disruption can feel frightening and disorientating. Without stable attentional anchors, the world may become unpredictable and difficult to navigate. Burnout is therefore not only physical or emotional fatigue. It can be experienced as a collapse in the ecology of attention. We need to re-map and re-world our lives to navigate through burnout.
Social and sensory worlds under pressure
Burnout is socio-political and also emerges within overwhelming sensory contexts of the very spaces we need to live in to exist – our homes, education and work place settings and even in healthcare, the very places that are meant to understand and support us.
Open-plan noisy offices, bright, busy classrooms, bureaucratic systems, and performance-driven cultures can create chronic friction with our neurdivergent monotropic flow states. Over time, the effort required to adapt may exceed our available energy.
Masking, consciously or unconsciously adjusting behaviour and communication to meet normative expectations, can intensify this strain.
The cost is often cumulative and can run deep.
Many people describe reaching a point where:
communication becomes difficult
noise, scents, lights, certain textures and even previously safe food may feel physically painful or overwhelming
decision-making may slow down in a fog
everyday routines and exectutive functioning tasks may feel too overwhelming
trust in our environments and relationships with others can begin to diminish
These are not signs of personal weakness. They are signals that the relational conditions and environments supporting us have become unsustainable. Things need to change for us to survive.
Neuroqueer politics of burnout
Understanding Autistic or neurodivergent burnout in ecological terms shifts responsibility away from individuals and toward systems.
Speed, productivity, and independence are often treated as neutral values. In reality, they reflect specific cultural priorities that privilege certain cognitive styles while marginalising others.
Neuroqueer perspectives invite us to question these assumptions. They ask:
Who defines what counts as functioning?
Who has the power to say what rest should look like?
Whose attentional rhythms are recognised as valid?
What forms of participation and engagement with the world are made possible or impossible?
Autistic burnout can be read as both a social, political, and personal phenomenon. It exposes the limits of environments organised around normativity.
Recognising this does not remove the pain of burnout, but it may help to reduce shame and open space for collective change.
Toward ecological re-assembly
If burnout represents fracture, our recovery is not just restoration of previous capacity; it is often a process of re-assembling life differently.
This may begin with small shifts:
lowering demands
re-establishing sensory safety
reconnecting with trusted people
returning gently to meaningful interests or finding new glimmer of joy
allowing time to move, communicate and experience the world at a slower pace
These changes can feel minor, yet they may help re-imagine and re-build the conditions and environments that allow attention and participation to re-emerge.
Recovery is rarely linear. It unfolds through experimentation, adaptation, and relational support.
In this sense, burnout can become a liminal threshold, not only of loss, but of potential transformation to new ways of being and relating.
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
With thanks to Nick Walker and Andrew Reichart for their recent conversations with me. This piece is independent of their work, and Nick has not read this blog prior to publication. My understanding of the neuronormative paradigm and its implications might differ from theirs. Andrew has helped me understand that the normative paradigm is what drives and enforces neuronormativity and systemic injustice. It is only by critiquing and dismantling this that we can expose the harm and move forward. Nick will write more about the neuronormative paradigm in their upcoming Neuroqueer Theory Anthology, in which I will have two chapters (one of which I co-authored with Ryan Boren, Stimpunks, who also kindly provided editing feedback for this blog).
In a recent webinar workshop Neurodiversity 101: You Are Not Broken (19th Sept, 2025), Andrew Reichart used a term conceptualised by Nick Walker that instantly resonated with me: the neuronormative paradigm. It was one of those lightbulb moments that brought immediate clarity; it gave a name to something I had felt and tried to articulate for years but had never had the words for. Through exploring the neuronormative paradigm, I hope to bring some clarity to why it matters to name the systems that harm, so we can start to see how deeply neuronormativity is woven through our schools, workplaces, healthcare settings, and even our shared ideas of what it means to be human.
Walker has been using the term neuronormative paradigm in their work since the publication of Neuroqueer Heresies (2021) as a replacement for the term pathology paradigm, which they have since said they “regret ever introducing, because it’s too easily misinterpreted and some of the misinterpretations have caused considerable harm”. With permission from Nick Walker (Walker, 2025, personal communication), I am exploring this concept and its relevance to understanding how society and systems define what is considered “normal”, especially here in the UK, US and other Western cultural landscapes.
The term neuronormative paradigm builds on and moves beyond Nick Walker’s earlier concept of the pathology paradigm. According to Walker (2021), “The pathology paradigm starts from the assumption that significant divergences from dominant sociocultural norms of cognition and embodiment represent some form of deficit, defect, or pathology. In other words, the pathology paradigm divides the spectrum of human cognitive/embodied performance into “normal” and “other than normal,” with “normal” implicitly privileged as the superior and desirable state..” It describes a view in which neurological differences, such as being Autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent are medicalised and seen as deficits, disorders, or abnormalities that need to be corrected or cured. It locates the problem within the individual, assuming there is one “right” or “normal” kind of brain and behaviour.
The neuronormative paradigm, creates and enforces the social, cultural, and political systems that uphold the very ideas of normality. It sees neurodivergent people as broken or deficient. Us having the concept “the neuronormative paradigm, helps us name and challenge the power structures and systems that determine who is valued and who is pathologised. It enables us to challenge the foundations of a society that privileges certain ways of thinking, being, and communicating while marginalising others. This shift reframes the issue as the problem not being within neurodivergent people, but within the systems that define and uphold “normality” itself. By having a term for this, we can critique it, expose the harm, shift our thinking and move towards the neurodiversity paradigm.
The neuronormative and neurodiversity paradigms offer fundamentally different worldviews; one demands uniformity, while the other celebrates diversity. Language is powerful and can help make things visible. Until we can see how neuronormative domination has shaped our lives, we cannot dismantle the structures that bind us and move towards the neurodiversity paradigm, where all bodyminds (Dychtwald, K, 1977) are recognised as vital to the living ecology of human diversity.
What is the neuronormative paradigm?
The neuronormative paradigm creates and enforces the social, cultural, and political systems that assume there is one “right” way to be, one “correct” way to think, feel, sense, and move through the world. It privileges particular ways of learning, knowing, sensing, communicating and even resting and regulating while dismissing neurodivergent forms of being. Within this framework, neurodivergence is often treated as a problem to be corrected rather than as a meaningful expression of being human.
Neuronormativityrefers to the dominant system of norms and practices in society that not only define but also enforce how attention should function, how senses should be regulated, how emotions should be expressed, and how we should act within society. These hierarchies produce profound epistemic injustice, positioning neurodivergent people as unreliable narrators of our own lives. Its power intersects with systems of ageism, racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and colonialism, reinforcing structures that determine who is dismissed or erased. Within the neuronormative paradigm, value is measured through capitalist notions of productivity and conformity, while other ways of being and relating are devalued and pathologised, leaving us disabled by the very environments we live in.
By contrast, theneurodiversity paradigm views neurological differences as a natural and valuable form of human diversity, part of the broader spectrum of biodiversity and cultural diversity. It sees Autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent ways of being as integral to the richness of human experience, not deviations from it. From the perspective of the neurodiversity paradigm, our value is reframed through an ecological and relational lens, one that honours dignity, identity, inter-dependence and embraces the richness of all ways of being rather than being valued purely for adhering to neuronormative expectations for capitalist gain. This shift also opens space for neuroqueering(Walker, 2021) and invites us to imagine new possibilities for how minds, bodies, and relationships can form, embracing the potential to be in a constant state of becoming and transformation, both personally and collectively, as we rebuild society.
Moving between paradigms
To move meaningfully towards the neurodiversity paradigm, we must first understand, critique, resist and dismantle the neuronormative paradigm. Until we do this, we risk remaining stuck, with many people speaking the neurodiversity-lite language of inclusion while reproducing the same hierarchies of neuronormativity that cause harm. Recognising the dominance of neuronormativity enables us to name the pressures of minority stress (Botha and Frost, 2018) not as personal failings, but as social injustices. Once we recognise this, we can begin to rebuild environments and systems where everyone can live in their wonderfully diverse ways, and we can all get the support we need to thrive.
Where Neuronormativity Shows Up: Examples of communication and attention
Within the framework of the neuronormative paradigm, spoken language, eye contact, and small talk are generally treated as the “right” and expected ways to connect and communicate. An Autistic person who communicates differently, those who use AAC, are nonspeaking, or express themselves differently, may be seen as lacking social skills, or even be seen as less competent and less intelligent than they really are.
“When the rights of abled people take precedence over those of disabled people, our great shame is evident, and we must not consider ourselves a modern, progressive society.”
Sabrina Guerra (2022)
Guerra’s words remind us that when society only favours certain forms of expression as valid language, it silences and can dehumanise those whose voices emerge differently. Her experiences of being presumed less capable, infantilised, and excluded expose the harm of the neuronormative paradigm in action.
When systems are built around verbal, cognitive, and behavioural conformity, it harms everyone. People with complex and higher support needs, or with profound and multiple learning disabilities, are too often left out of this picture altogether and even more deeply marginalised. They are often denied autonomy, agency, and meaningful participation in decisions about their own lives. For these individuals, the weight of neuronormative domination can fall even more heavily.
Neuronormativity doesn’t only dictate how we should communicate; it also defines how we are expected to pay attention, manage our sensory systems, regulate and use our bodies. Our ways of resting, recharging, stimming, and seeking sensory comfort are often misinterpreted as pointless or disruptive rather than recognised as natural forms of self-regulation that carry great meaning and support our wellbeing.
An Autistic or ADHD child who becomes deeply immersed in a single topic or sensory interest is often labelled as inattentive, obsessive, or even defiant. Within the neurodiversity paradigm, such focus could be recognised as a form ofmonotropic flow and could be better understood through the theory of Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005 & Heasman et al., 2024). These authentic ways of being are often pathologised within neuronormative systems. Instead, they need to be reframed and supported as valid ways of being, through neuro-affirming adjustments to both the environment and the ways our relationships are formed and evolve.
When we reframe neurodivergence within the neurodiversity paradigm, communication is understood as diverse, relational, and embodied. This perspective enables us to embrace authentically neurodivergent love locutions such as infodumping, penguin pebbling, and supportive relational strategies likebody doublingand parallel play. It validates Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people’s natural ways of connecting, through shared interests, flow, repetition, sensory attunement, movement, silence and interdependence as authentic and deeply meaningful. However, even as we begin to recognise these authentic and relational forms of communication, they still continue to exist within systems governed and dominated by neuronormative standards and expectations.
Neuronormative Dominantion
Neuronormative dominationis the measure through which human competence, compliance, rest, productivity, and even belonging are judged. This doesn’t just shape how difference is perceived; it also determines who gets to belong and thrive and who gains access to care. Those whose bodyminds align most closely with neuronormative ideals are generally rewarded with social status, employment, and safety, while those who diverge are more likely to experience poverty, exclusion, institutional harm and also greater health concerns. Neuronormativity can be seen to be reinforcing the existing hierarchies of class, race, gender, and disability as it embeds inequality deep within our economic and social systems.
Schools reward those who can sit still and divide their attention to focus on work, often in busy and overwhelming environments. Workplaces generally value multitasking, tolerance of sensory overload, and social compliance. Healthcare systems privilege people who can articulate distress in what is deemed as acceptable and expected ways, often dismissing how alexithymia and interoception may affect neurodivergent people. They rarely consider the overlapping needs of those who are multiply neurodivergent and also have additional physical, health or learning needs.
For those of us whose bodyminds work differently, the systems we have are not neutral. They are constantly reminding us that we are too much, too little, too fast, too slow, too sensitive, too emotional, or not enough or sometimes just ‘not right’! It leaves us marginalised not because of how our bodyminds function, but because the world has been built around such a narrow idea of what a “functional” or “normal” person should be like. There is no room for different ways of being without the risk of being stigmatised or it affecting our well-being. This is why our neurodivergent community is so important, it provides that space and sense of belonging where we can feel safer with other people who just ‘get it’ (Botha, Dibbs & Frost, 2022).
Minority Stress and Systemic Harm
The minority stress model, extended to include Autistic people’s experiences by Botha & Frost (2018), helps explain why neurodivergent people experience disproportionately high rates of anxiety, depression, burnout and death by suicide (Moseley et al., 2025). Minority stress arises when people from marginalised groups face chronic prejudice, discrimination and a lack of safety. For Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people, this stress is sustained by the systems that uphold neuronormativity itself.
As Milton (2012) describes in his concept of theDouble Empathy Problem, these challenges are not rooted in a lack of social or emotional understanding within Autistic people, but in a mutual misattunement between differently embodied communicative worlds and lived experiences. The problem lies in the cultural expectation that neuro-normative modes of relating and communicating are the best.
In my own work, I have argued that this problem isDEEP ( Double Empathy Extreme Problem; Dynamic, Embodied, Ecological, and Political) (Edgar, 2023). It operates through the power dynamics of whose communication counts, whose distress and ways of expressing joy is recognised (Wassell, 2025), and who is deemed acceptable. When neurodivergent people are constantly required to translate ourselves for neuronormative comfort, we carry a chronic social and sensory load that erodes our well-being and leaves us in burnout.
Living in a world that continually questions, corrects, or punishes our natural ways of thinking and sensing creates both external stressors (exclusion, stigma, systemic barriers) and internal ones (masking, self-doubt, hypervigilance). For multiply marginalised people, those who are also racialised, queer, economically excluded, or otherwise disabled, the value placed on neuronormativity compounds existing systems of oppression, further amplifying harm. Burnout, isolation, and masking are not intrinsic parts of being neurodivergent (Pearson and Rose, 2021); they happen when our ways of being come up against a neuronormative world that doesn’t understand or make space for our needs and constantly tries to ‘fix’ us, or worse just exclude us.
Empire of Normality
InEmpire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (2023), Autistic philosopher and researcher Robert Chapman traces how the idea of a “normal” person emerged alongside industrial capitalism. Chapman argues that normality is not neutral; it’s a tool of economic and political control.
Under capitalism, the ideal person is someone who works predictably, productively, and efficiently. Education and healthcare settings, as well as workplaces, have always rewarded people who align with this model and marginalised those who don’t. Chapman demonstrates how this empire of normality continues to govern our institutions, where people prioritise compliance over creativity, speed over sustainability, and uniformity over humanity. As Chapman notes, normality serves as a biopolitical tool, disciplining populations to conform to capitalist ideals.
Neuronormative domination thrives in Capitalist societies; however, the consequences for many neurodivergent people mean we may be left trapped in “stuck states”, exhausted, feeling fragmented and in perpetual burnout. The effects of the neuronormative paradigm are costing lives. Sadly, Autistic people have been found to have up to an eightfold increased risk of death by suicide compared to non-Autistic people (Brown et al., 2024) and up to 66% have experienced suicidal thoughts. There are 2,025 Autistic people and people with a learning disability currently in mental health hospitals in England, and of these 72% are identified as Autistic. These should not be inevitable consequences of being different; it shows how the system is failing to meet our needs.
Dismantling the neuronormative paradigm: Enabling everyone to thrive
As awareness of neurodiversity grows, the language of neuro-affirming practice has become more common. Yet this shift can sometimes be superficial and many people and organisations may sound progressive whilst they are still operating within neuronormative frameworks that prioritise conformity over authenticity and compliance over genuine inclusion. It can be difficult to know who to trust when words of acceptance are used to mask practices that continue to pathologise or control. These “neurodiversity-lite” approaches soften deficit language and adopt inclusive terms without creating the structural change needed to support real neurodivergent flourishing.
Dismantling the neuronormative paradigm means recognising neurodiversity-lite and calling it out, resisting the deep cultural and political systems that define human worth and behaviourist practices that seek to control the ways we use our bodies and restrict our potential. We need to unlearn and restory the narrative that only values and rewards us through compliance, productivity, and proximity to a myth of normality. Actively rejecting the neuronormative paradigm means accepting that there is no single, universal norm, no one right way to be. We need to reimagine and redefine our notions of value, ability, and worth, as well as what it truly means to be human, beyond the confines of neuronormativity.
When we begin to unlearn these patterns, we can create space for a living ecology of bodyminds, an interdependent, intertwined web of diverse ways of communicating, sensing, moving, thinking, and relating that have always existed beyond the limits of a supposed normality. We need to build spaces where difference is not seen as a deviation but a vital part of a collective whole.
Dismantling the neuronormative paradigm and embracing the neurodiversity paradigm means moving from correction to connection, from conformity to reciprocity. It invites us to expand our bodyminds, to neuroqueer ourselves and our societies, to subvert the assumptions of normality and open new ways of being, knowing, and belonging. To neuroqueer is to live in ways that resist neuronormativity and enable us to reclaim autonomy, agency and creativity. It isn’t just about inclusion; it’s about liberation. It’s about cultivating a society where everyone can grow and flourish together.
By naming the systems that harm, we can embrace neurodiversity, transform our systems and rebuild our worlds so that everyone can thrive.
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Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autism, and cognitive liberty. Autonomous Press.
Walker, N. (19th Sept, 2025). Personal communication with Helen Edgar re: Neuronormative Paradigm.
Jacobsen, K. (2025). “I had this fear that as an autistic person, they would take me less seriously”: Trans autistic experiences of epistemic (in)justice in gender-affirming care. International Journal of Transgender Health, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2025.2566190
Catala, A., Faucher, L. & Poirier, P. Autism, epistemic injustice, and epistemic disablement: a relational account of epistemic agency. Synthese199, 9013–9039 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03192-7
Zaks, Z. (2025). Moving to a neurodiversity-affirming paradigm in the support system: Autistic professionals As paradigm change. Neurodiversity, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330241294138 (Original work published 2025)
Annamma, S. A., Connor, D., & Ferri, B. (2012). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511
Marya, R., & Patel, R. (2022). Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Penguin Press.
Bruno, G., Lindblom, A., Tupou, J., Kewene, F., Waisman, T., & Magiati, I. (2025). Decolonizing autism research: Integrating Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing. Autism, 29(11), 2637-2643. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613251382398 (Original work published 2025)
Bruno, G. (2024). Decolonizing Autism: An Exploration into the Experiences of First Nations People in Canada. In University of Alberta Library. https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-k592-zc85
Bruno, G. (2023) Indigenous Perspective On Building Inclusive Autism Practices (presentation)
oJhansson, Anna M. (2025) “The Intersectionality of Indigenous and Neurodivergent Identities in American Indian Education,” Access*: Interdisciplinary Journal of Student Research and Scholarship: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 7. Available at: https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/access/vol9/iss1/7
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
The word resilience is often used as a weapon, especially against parents/ carers whose children are different, who may be neurodivergent and who are more likely to need accommodations in school to succeed. I have found the word ‘resilience’ triggering for a long time, it has been used against me as a parent, against my children and against many of the families and young people I support. Being told you need to harden up and be ‘more resilient’ shows a lack of understanding and a lack of openness as to the reasons why a person may be struggling. It doesn’t enable curiosity or for people to share their story, it is a closed statement, a dead end that can only lead to more harm for many people.
The word resilience is often used as a judgement. It is used as a word to shame parents/carers and to imply they are not good enough at parenting; they aren’t parenting in the ‘right way’ in the ‘normal’ way. It is often implied that low-demand parenting styles are about ‘giving in’ and one of the root causes of neurodivergent children being more ‘needy’ and unable to fit in; neurodivergent needs can be hugely misunderstood. However, if people were more understanding and schools more neurodiversity-affirming, perhaps those struggling wouldn’t be told that they needed to be ‘more resilient’ to survive – let alone given the chance to thrive?
Being told, ‘your child needs to be more resilient’ implies that they are not good enough as they are, they need to be better. It is often suggested that in order to do that, we need to teach our children that needing extra reassurance, using comforters, needing specific routines, needing extra time, and needing things done in a certain way are not important and that children should just ‘get on with it’; children should be ‘more resilient’ and it is our fault as parents if they are not. Using the word resilience in this way is ableist and denies needs.
As parents / carers of neurodivergent children (such as Autistic, ADHD and PDA) we are often told we need to be firmer and stronger in our parenting approach. In the UK, many parents whose children are struggling with their mental health or having difficulty in education are often invited onto parenting courses, essentially with the aim of learning to be a ‘better parent’. A few of these courses may be helpful and neuro-affirming, but the majority are currently ableist and harmful; they are shaming and stigmatising for the parents of neurodivergent children (whilst they also don’t acknowledge that many of the parents of neurodivergent children are more likely to be neurodivergent themselves).
To make our children more resilient, it is frequently suggested that we should enforce more rules; we need to adopt a behaviourist approach and not be such a pushover. There is often a huge misunderstanding of the benefits of a flexible, compassionate, low-demand approach, especially for PDAers. We are expected to teach our children to fit in at almost any cost to their well-being and our well-being as parents/carers.
It is very common for neurodivergent children to struggle with transitions, especially the transition into school and new settings or when meeting new people. One example of a common scenario where we may be told we need to be more resilient as parents, and our children need to be more resilient, too, is that of children who get upset at the school gates when leaving their carers. Children who are struggling or being ‘difficult’ are often bribed into school with reward charts, their needs are then left unmet and trauma cycles can begin to grow. Over time, this gives a message to children that they need to mask, build up their armour, and if they can make it through to the next star on their reward chart, it will all be okay. However, masking is exhausting, denying and not having needs met can eventually lead to burnout and ill health.
Teaching people they need to be resilient to be accepted and fit in is harmful.
A parent whose child may be crying and clinging onto them as the school bell rings is a child who needs more connection with their safe person (not less) and it shows they aren’t yet ready for the transition. Parents are told things like, ‘Oh, they will be fine once they are in; stop fussing, you are making this worse for them’.
Many parents are told to be more resilient, to be firmer, to not let emotions get in the way of how we ‘should parent’. It is suggested we need to ignore our gut instincts and pain as our child is being peeled off us and escorted into school crying – with the words ‘they will be fine in a bit’ thrown back at us, even though we know they won’t, not really. We know they may settle down eventually, but the fallout from that trauma and needing to mask all day will be released after school when they get home. Meltdowns and shutdowns will likely be triggered when children are once again in their safe space at home and trying to process and regulate after a day of masking and trying to be ‘resilient’.
Blame and shame are often attributed to parents who ask for accommodations to make transitions (such as the above) easier for their neurodivergent children. Children often need support plans for accommodations as simple as needing a comforter or a more relaxed start of the day. Such accommodations should be available for all in neuro-affirming settings and not seen as an ‘extra’, just as a ‘difference’.
Teachers may says things like; “No comforters are allowed in school, if we did it for one child we’d need to allow it for everyone….We can’t have a class full of teddy bears or blankets’. Or you may hear things like; “They are too old for a comforter now, you should have got rid of that years ago!”. We are often told as parents; “you need to stop fussing and giving in, it isn’t helping your child, you are making this situation worse”. It is implied that if parents parented ‘better’ and were more resilient themselves, their children wouldn’t have so many issues. The word resilience becomes heavy with shame when used in this way. It is neuronormative society that needs to embrace resilience, not that neurodivergent or disabled people need to be more resilient.
The word ‘resilience’ has been used against many people and neurodivergent or disabled families I know, including their children and young people, to suggest that they are not doing enough, they are not strong enough, not mature enough, not mentally well enough and that they need to build up some armour to make themselves stronger. We are told we need to be more resilient so we can then fit into society and conform to neuronormative ideals. If neurodivergent people could only be more ‘resilient’, it would save other people making accommodations.
When used in this way, the word resilience puts the blame on the person (often the disabled, neurodivergent person), and it reinforces the uneasy and unfair power dynamic and denies the need to make environmental and societal changes.
I am suggesting a reclaiming and reframing of the word resilience.
Radical Resilience
Radical resilience is about using our resilience, our strength, to challenge the systems and advocate for our neurodivergent and disabled needs in a society that predominantly values neuronormativity, at all costs.
Resilience can be a powerful tool against the systems and people who try to use the word to shame and make neurodivergent and disabled people feel like they are not good enough, not mentally well enough, too weak, too soft and those who are not learning, working, or parenting in what is expected to be the ‘right way’.
We shouldn’t have to become more resilient to fit in; we shouldn’t need to deny our needs and teach our children that they can only survive. We shouldn’t need to mask, suppress and deny our authentic selves to thrive.
We need to change environments, not fix people.
Autism + Environment = Outcome
(Beardon, L. (2022). What works for autistic children. Sheldon Press. P.22
Neurodivergent and disabled people don’t need to be more resilient to fit in, but we can use our resilience to advocate and make change. I am not suggesting this is easy, and there is a great deal of privilege in being able to do this in a safe space—race, gender, and many other factors will impact a person’s ability to advocate and be taken seriously, but when we can, we need to try to shift the narrative.
If people’s needs were met, there would be no need for the word “resilience.” I think we need more softness and flexibility, more acceptance and understanding of differences, better communication between people, and less of a double empathy gap (Milton, 2012). We shouldn’t need to keep fighting ableist systems we need neuro-affirming practice and care for everyone. Our children shouldn’t need to be told that they need to be stronger and that they should be more resilient. We are enough.
Radical resilience involves reclaiming the word resilience, embracing change, facing difficulties head-on, and not just surviving but thriving in the face of adversity. It also involves thinking outside the box, being open to new possibilities, and adapting to difficult circumstances in innovative neuroqueer ways.
To be radically resilient, we need to find possibilities in between hard spaces to transform the landscape and enable more neuro-affirming environments for people to flourish. In the right environment, resilience isn’t a word of shame; it can be used to create new ideas and pathways for change and strengthen people’s advocacy skills to enable a neurodiversity-affirming society.
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
Rest can become a radical act in a world that often equates our worth with productivity, especially for Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people navigating the tides of burnout, where even our ways of resting may look different. I have been really inspired by Tricia Hersey’s wonderful writing and their recent book, We Will Rest! The Art of Escape from Nap Ministry (2024).
The Tides of Burnout and Monotropism
Following on from my blog Tides of burnout and being monotropic I believe Autistic burnout is more than exhaustion; it’s a profound depletion of mental, emotional, physical and sensory resources. Burnout is often caused by prolonged masking, sensory overload, and the relentless demand to conform to neuronormative standards.
From my own experience of Autistic burnout, I think the theory of monotropismis key to helping us understand why and how burnout happens and can also support better ways for us to move on through burnout. Monotropism is a theory developed by Autistic people in the late 1990s and resulted in the paper Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism (2005) by Dinah MurrayMike Lesser, Wenn Lawson. Monotropism is a neuroaffirming theory of Autism (and many ADHD people resonate with it too!) where a person’s attentional resources are focused deeply on a limited number of interests/ events or experiences at any one time. While this deep focus and flow can enrich our experiences, things like shifting attention can be really challenging, especially when external demands pull us away from our areas of interest.
The dynamics between the theory of monotropism and societal expectations can create a cycle for Autistic people. Intense focus can lead to overexertion, and difficulties with interoception may mean you aren’t even aware of when you need a rest or when you are tired, and it may mean you miss some of the signs of reaching a burnout crisis. The immersive, joyful feeling of being in deep flow can mean that you want to carry on and on as time passes quickly, 5 hours may feel like 15 minutes, and you may not have eaten, drunk or moved. Alternatively, not being able to engage in flow and battling systems and trying to fit in to your place of work can be utterly draining, even if you enjoy your job! Often being around other people, having multiple demands at any time, and having to socialise and communicate in ways that fit into other people’s frameworks can leave us feeling more than depleted at the end of the day.
When you are in a flow state, external demands can feel painful, they take even more energy, and may leave you in a state of inertia, unable to do anything and feeling paralysed. Balancing the needs of wanting to immerse yourself in your interests and things that bring you joy, and the demands of work and family that may pull against your inner needs, means you may have even less capacity and even less energy to even know what you need to rest in a meaningful way. The feelings of needing to mask to fit in and juggle and balance your innate inner Autistic monotropic needs with the demands of neuronormative expectations can feel like you are trying to swim upstream; it is exhausting. Meltdowns, shutdowns, or reduced responsiveness can be a form of enforced rest when your body and mind are overwhelmed. Meltdowns and shutdowns are your body and mind in survival mode; they are a sign you need deep, authentic, meaningful rest.
Rest as Resistance
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, advocates that rest is not a luxury but a form of resistance against oppressive systems that devalue our well-being. She asserts, “Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.”
For Autistic individuals, embracing our authentic ways of resting challenges the internalised narratives that equate our self-worth with neuronormative ideals.
Reframing Rest
Rest isn’t solely about sleep, yoga or other mindfulness-type activities; it’s about creating spaces, creating physical and emotional spaces, and meeting our sensory needs so we can exist without the pressure of performing to society’s expectations and suppressing ourselves. For monotropic people (Autistic/ ADHD), this might involve engaging deeply with our special interests, spending more time stimming, spending more time in your sensory den or simply allowing yourself more moments to be yourself without judgment.
How Autistic & Monotropic Rest May Look Different
The most restful spaces are often those where we don’t have to mask or justify our needs and where we feel safe.
Deep focus on special interests and passions
Society may see this as “work” or “obsession,” but for many monotropic people, being immersed in your flow state with something you are passionate about can be regulating and restorative.
Stimming
Stim vocalising and stim movement, such as rocking, tapping, flapping, or pacing or dancing may seem active, but they are often soothing and regulating, helping to release stress and maintain flow. Stim listening and stim watching can make you feel cosy and safe. They bring predictability and comfort, especially when the world feels chaotic. Resting in motion and stimming can give you back energy and give you more capacity to manage.
Solitude
Rest might mean being completely alone or managing to do your work by using body doubling strategies to help you focus your energy resources more easily and effectively, without the pressures of socialising or working in more conventional ways.
Monotasking (doing one thing deeply)
While multitasking is often celebrated, sustained single focus is how many of us find flow and peace, even if that feels more like a constellation type of thinking, with your mind diving in a million directions as you connect so many things together and doesn’t feel very ‘mono’ at all !
Spending time in dark, quiet, or low-stimulation environments
This sensory rest is vital for decompressing from overload, even if it looks like “doing nothing.” Using this like weighted blankets, ear defenders, and fidget tools are often essential for flow states, not optional extras as they can help you feel safe, regulated and rested.
These are not distractions but often meaningful ways to self-regulate and can be a great way to embrace flow independently or alongside or with others.
Delaying or avoiding communication (texts, calls, emails)when you can
Social expectations can be draining; rest might mean letting people know you prefer to text rather than speak verbally, or you can manage an online meeting instead of in-person.
Non-traditional sleep-wake cycles
Monotropic focus may shift sleep patterns; rest might come at unconventional hours, and that’s okay if you have supportive people who understand you. Find out more about monotropic time in my recent blogs.
Withdrawing from roles, routines, or expectations temporarily
Stepping back from responsibilities may look like avoidance, but it can be intentional self-preservation and help reduce the severity of a burnout crisis.
Talk therapy may not feel restorative.
Many Autistic people find traditional therapy approaches overly verbal, which can further drain energy. Many Autistic people need extra time and space to process thoughts or emotions by ourselves, outside of the demands of conversation and social expectations. Restorative therapy care might look more like body-based, creative, or activities with less emphasis on verbal support (e.g. art, or nature-based therapy may help).
“Going out with friends” may be socially draining, not restful
Socialising, even with people we love, can sometimes increase stress and add to burnout. Rest might mean not attending and connecting in quiet, low-demand ways instead.
Unstructured time without expectation
Just having a safe space where nothing is expected of you can be deeply restful, even if it “looks” unproductive. Rest means breaking free from the pressure to always say yes, even when you’re running on empty.
Rest is More Than a Nap: Reclaiming Rest as Autistic Liberation
Rest, as Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry reminds us, is about more than naps. It is a radical, embodied act of refusal. Rest is a disruption of neuronormative grind culture, capitalism, and all the systems that treat human beings as machines. Hersey reminds us that:
“Rest pushes back and disrupts a system that views human bodies as a tool for production and labor. We know that we are not machines.” — Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance
For many Autistic people, especially those of us navigating burnout, masking, and a world that often misunderstands our rhythms of being, means that our ways of resting are often misunderstood, denied and even stigmatised. We have been taught to ignore our bodies, to push through overload and to meet neurotypical expectations at the cost of our well-being.
Rest is often more than sleep. It’s more than self-care routines or sensory tools marketed as solutions. Rest is anything that reconnects us with ourselves.Anything that brings our monotropic attention gently back to flow, safety, stillness, or regulation.
Rest for Autistic people might look like silence, repetition, solitude, immersion in a special interest, and a withdrawal from speaking and other expectations. Although society may not recognise these forms of rest as valid, I think they are deeply necessary. They are a reclamation of our authentic Autistic monotropic selves from systems that expect us to perform, conform, and endure.
When we begin to honour our need for rest, not just to “recover” from burnout but to resist the conditions that cause burnout, we can begin to move. Rest becomes liberation. Rest becomes connection. Rest becomes our right.
As Tricia Hersey urges:
“Find ways to connect back to your body and mind. Find ways to intentionally slow down… It is your divine and human right to do so. WE WILL REST.”
Tricia Hersey gives us permission to slow down and let go of shame. She urges us to create community. When you are in safe spaces with people who ‘get you’ and allow you to be your true self, rest comes easier. It can feel like a mutual collective flow that is validating and empowering.
“Create community. Build community. Be community. Community care can seem impossible when you are exhausted. It is possible. Community is anywhere two or more are gathered……don’t rush to do anything alone. To be an escape artist is to. being the collective. Supported in rest, care, and love. Demand the collective as a source of inspiration and change. Real change comes from the people” Hersey, T. (2024). We will rest!: The Art of Escape. Little, Brown Spark. Pg 35
Let us rest.
Let us resist.
Let us reclaim our unique ways of being Autistic.
Some things to reflect on….
1. What does rest mean to you beyond sleep?
How do you define rest in your own life?
Are there certain activities or sensory experiences that help you feel rested?
2. How does being monotropic influence your need for rest (or those you support)?
In what ways does deep focus on specific interests affect energy levels?
Can engaging with your passions serve as a form of rest? Do you feel it helps restore your energy? Can you find ways to make more time for activities and experience that enable you to engage in flow more often?
3. What societal expectations make it challenging for you to rest?
Are there pressures to be constantly productive or social that impact your ability to rest in ways that feel meaningful for you?
How do these expectations conflict with your personal needs for real, authentic Autistic rest?
4. In what ways can rest be an act of resistance for you?
How does choosing to rest and embrace your monotropic ways of being challenge societal norms or expectations?
Can you view rest as a form of self-advocacy or empowerment?
Do you think positions of power and privilege and intersectional issues also affect your ability to rest in meaningful ways?
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005a). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
When Autistic people are in burnout, we’re often told to “rest”, to slow down, take time off and pull back from pressure.
These suggestions don’t work for me as rest doesn’t feel restful when it’s a demand and disconnected from how I naturally think, feel, and process the world as a monotropic person. When I am in burnout I tend to go deep, I worm hole into Deleuzean philosophical podcasts, I read texts that I actually don’t always understand, I dive even deeper to try and make connections and sense. It is a way of regulating, it helps me feel good, I feel immersed and restored, it gives back energy when other things feel like they strip my spoons away. In former years I may have gone on long runs, very long runs, pushing my body and not my mind to it’s limits but my body is now tired…… Ways of resting like this are often shamed. We may be told we are a work-a-holic, indulging in pointless activities and disconnecting with ‘real life’.
For many Autistic people the type of rest that helps us isn’t about switching off, or trying to re-align with other people’s expectations of what rest ‘should’ look like. It’s about going deeper, into the things that hold meaning for us, into the flow of our interests, into the tunnels that carry us back to our temporal monotropic home. Our rest may be more sensory or related to art, crafts, lego, gaming, making slime, splashing in puddles, rearranging collections, or something else, but it is all valid how ever it looks, deep diving into things that we are passionate about helps regulate flow and can bring some joyful glimmers into a life that often feels VERY hard!
Why “rest” doesn’t always feel like rest
Burnout for Autistic people is real, complex, and often invisible due to things like interoception differences, until it hits, intensely. It can come from sensory overload, constant masking, everyday demands that chip away at our energy, and the pressure to keep up with expectations that were never designed with us in mind. When we reach burnout, when we have no more energy or spoons left to mask or push through anymore, well meaning friends often tells us to ‘rest’ and take time off work, but resting isn’t always as simple as stopping. If I can’t do the things that are pulling my attention at that time I am left really dysregulated and it prolongs and intensifies burnout.
Unstructured time can feel disorienting, especially when usual routines fall away, being told to “just relax” or “do something gentle” can feel like more pressure and another demand to mask, especially if those things don’t match how we truly regulate. Sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out how to rest in a way that actually helps you regulate your monotropic flow and needs.
Structure inside unstructured time
In burnout, we often can’t tolerate external demands, but we still need something to hold on to, a sense of structure and a rhythm that gives us coherence when everything feels scattered and chaotic. For myself, that structure often doesn’t come from schedules or to-do lists, it comes from deep immersion.
Many Autistic (and ADHD) people are monotropic, meaning our attention naturally flows toward a small number of interests at a time. When we follow those interests, we’re not just focusing, we’re making sense of the world, finding comfort, and reconnecting with who we are and our authentic needs. It can be rejuvenating and restorative spending time with your passions and leaning into sensory experiences, activities and interests that help you feel good.
In burnout, these interests can become even more important, they give us a place to go when everything else feels too much. They give us structure insidethe unstructured and can help make life a bit more manageable.
Tunnelling
It can be easy to misunderstand what this looks like from the outside. When we tunnel into something , watching the same video on repeat, reading long philosophical texts, researching something niche for hours, people might think we’re avoiding life, or that we’re shutting down. Instead of seeing this as a disconnection with the world and feeling shame, I am trying to reframe it as a way of re-connecting.
Monotropic tunnelling can be a way to feel safe, to make sense of our experience, to process what’s happened in a way that feels manageable. It can be a way of caring for ourselves without needing to explain or perform. It’s a way of resting through depth, we aren’t switching off, we’re switching into something meaningful that holds space for us.
Monotropic time
Time doesn’t always move in straight lines for Autistic people. We don’t all experience time as linear or predictable. It loops, it spirals, it stretches and contracts depending on our energy, our environment, and our focus.
In burnout, time can feel strange, my days blur together, some moments drag endlessly and others disappear quickly. Trying to rest by the clock is hard and stressful. Leaning into monotropic spiral time opens up something different, it gives us permission to return to the same place again and again, to revisit, re-watch, re-read, re-iterate our thoughts and activities. It allows meaning to emerge slowly, even if it doesn’t look productive to others and you may not feel like you are making progress yourself you likely will be. We need to look at wider time frames, look back on weeks ago, years ago and it is then we may be able to see the difference in our repetition.
Reclaiming rest
For some of us, rest comes in the form of lying still, wrapped in silence under weighted blankets with fairy lights and candles burning. For others, rest may be movement, of our bodies, of thoughts, patterns, language, sounds. For many we may combine all of this and fluctuate between various states trying to get all the points on our spiky profiles aligned .
Regulation doesn’t always mean quietness or disengagement from work or traditional mindfulness activities that are so often suggested by therapists. Here are a few examples of how rest might look different for Autistic/ ADHD/ Monotropic people:
Immersing in a deep interest or sensory experience
Stim-watching or stim- listening to something familiar over and over
Revisiting a thoughts, questions, wanderings and half done projects
Researching a niche topic until the world feels more coherent and you feel that ‘just right’ sensation
Stimming and letting the rhythm bring calm and regulate flow
These aren’t distractions from rest or healing, they are rest and can help us heal, especially when they’re done on our own terms, at our own pace. Rest doesn’t have to mean stepping away from everything that matters to us. It can mean stepping more fully into it. It can mean honouring what actually restores us, even if it looks different from what others expect.
We can rest by allowing ourselves to spiral, to tunnel, to be nonlinear. To return to what we love without guilt, to make space for our bodyminds to move the way they want to move. We shouldn’t need to explain why something feels regulating, if it works, it works, and if flow feels good then embrace it!
We need to reclaim neurodivergent ways of resting from a system that doesn’t understand our rhythms. We need to create spaces where rest isn’t something separate from who we are, it’s something woven into the way we live through our in -person and on-line communities in practices such as body doubling, co-regulation and interdependent ways of being.
Embracing deep flow
Burnout can feel like everything is falling apart, but it could also be seen as a threshold , a place where we can pause, listen, and reconfigure, not to become someone else or mask to fit in, but to return to ourselves. We may need to stay in our monotropic flowy attention tunnels even longer than others expect, we may need to go deeper. We may need to let go of timelines, checklists, and expectations that don’t fit.
If you’re in burnout and feeling like conventional neuronormative based advice doesn’t work for you, you’re not failing, you’re not broken, you’re moving with a different rhythm, one that makes sense to your body, your mind, your way of being and that is valid.
Sometimes rest isn’t about pulling away, it’s about going deeper in and embracing our monotropic flow.
Courses, books and resources
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
“By silencing our bodyminds, they (neurotypical society) have halted the growth of a chaotic self. We are no longer able to move fluidly through our experience, instead frozen like ice on an arctic tundra” (Gray-Hammond, 2023)
David Gray-Hammond (Emergent Divergence) and I are responding to each other’s blogs to help expand the Autistic Rhizome. We are adding nodules to the webs of discussions happening in the Dark Forests (Boren, 2024) of the online communities and creating an open-source bank of writing to carve a path for community discussion about neuroqueering.
David is continuing his ‘Reclaiming Neurofuturism’ series and has responded to my post The Double Empathy Problem is DEEP. He explored the litigious nature of disabled embodiment and questioned the intentional creation of minority silos via the double empathy divide (Milton, 2012). In support of my own thinking, David also suggests that we need to embrace the healing power of liminal spaces.
I am writing extensively about the in-between, liminal spaces and Ma as a potential chapter for Nick Walker’s new Neuroqueer Anthology (struggling to write it coherently so that it may make sense to others, but it is slowly forming!). Liminality has been a long term passion of mine, tunnelling back over 30 years. As an autistic person, I feel I have lived my entire life in the liminal. I have always been in-between or on the edges of social groups, always struggling with an internal battle due to the effects masking has on my sensory system. Being monotropic has meant the in-between is felt intensely; it has led to cycles of burnout and impacts my mental, physical and sensory health.
I am still living in the liminal, on the edges, often in spaces filled with anxiety and uncertainty. However, I have gone through a huge and difficult process of unlearning and relearning over the past few years since I realised I was autistic, rejecting the deficit ways of thinking about neurodivergence and dismantling my own ableist thought patterns. Patterns that have been reinforced over decades by the weight of neuronormativity. I am grateful for the autistic communities I am part of for supporting me and providing cushioning to help me navigate my way through this messy process whilst trying to prevent myself heading into a deeper burnout cycle. However, I still feel like I am living on the edges, even within the most caring and supportive neurodivergent communities.
The years of masking, the impact of living in a neuronormative ableist-driven society and going through cycles of burnout has, in many ways resulted in my bodymind being ‘silenced’, getting stuck. David echoed this feeling as he explained;
“By silencing our bodyminds, they (neurotypical society) have halted the growth of a Chaotic Self . We are no longer able to move fluidly through our experience, instead frozen like ice on an arctic tundra.”
Tundras are cold and harsh environments, but biodiversity adapts to the landscape and the short growing seasons, plants and animals transform their ways of being to survive. Tundras offer some hope that life can exist even in the cruellest of environments.
However, we don’t want people feeling frozen, stuck on an arctic tundra, trapped in endless freeze/thaw/burnout cycles. People deserve more than a life in survival mode where they are constantly on high alert for danger and in looping patterns of sensory regulation-seeking behaviour, living in Meerkat Mode (Adkin, 2023). In Walker’s inspiring presentation, ‘Expanding the Creative Potentials of Human Neurodiversity’ at ITAKOM (It Takes All Kinds of Minds Conference, March 2023), she explored how we need to work together so we can flourish so that the;
‘creative synergy, the chemistry that is between and among different minds’ can emerge…so the magic happens’.
We need our beautifully different bodyminds to work together; we need to develop a common language and be open to different ways of thinking, more accepting and inclusive. Radical inclusivity is a concept Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) and I have been exploring as part of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Project. There is no single path to radical inclusivity; it begins with being embodied, of being open to connecting with yourself and others, it is cultivated by ongoing neuroqueering efforts to meet needs, it is a confrontation with normativity. Radical inclusivity is more than accommodating needs; it is about fostering cognitive and somatic liberty to enable the potential of neuroqueering to open up new, as yet unknown possibilities.
Radical Inclusive spaces would benefit everyone. They are embodied spaces of deep connection and safety where people can tune in and be responsive to the needs of others. They offer a deeper connection, and they close the DEEP double empathy gap that I feel is at the root of so much hurt, pain, disconnect and disorientation. For radical inclusion, we need to work together. We need connections, a shared deep understanding, an embodied presence, a sense of meaning, and a sense of belonging. We need community, love and kindness to expand the rhizome.
Deleuze and Guattari’s One Thousand Plateaus (1980) explores the concepts of the rhizome and also the importance of plateaus being transforming spaces that resist the linear hierarchy of neuronormativity and embrace the potential of the multiplicity of rhizomatic connections. The possibility to use these concepts to explore neuroqueer theory shines through One Thousand Plateaus, it is like a sunbeam bringing hope in Ma, inbetween the doorways of the liminal spaces that so many of us may feel we are living in.
Rhizomes are open-ended; they have no middle, they have no start and there is no end. (Much like this series of blogs between David and I, I am again beginning in the Middle Entrance, again. You are joining conversations that have been evolving over the past two years in David’s Emergence Divergence Discord server, a node of the autistic rhizome, Open invite to join us there!).
In summary:
Rhizomes are interconnected networks of shared ideas and experiences filled with potential. Much like neuroqueer theory, rhizomes have multiple entry points, they are non-heirarchical. Anyone can neuroqueer, and anyone can enter a rhizome at any point, at any time, if the desire and intent are inside them to want to transform and explore neuroqueering.
Smooth Spaces challenge the idea of traditional hierarchy. They are continuous spaces where the theories of Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005) and Flow Theory (Heasman et al., 2024) can flourish and open up creative neuroqueer potential, an emerging way of being. I experience smooth spaces as the spaces in the gaps of the rhizome; they are the liminal spaces.
Plateaus are spaces of stability; they offer balance and equilibrium, equity, potential for awe and wonder and further expansion and transformation.
Liminal Spaces provide smooth, open plateaus, spaces to connect, transform, and neuroqueer from the safety of our rhizomatic communities.
This new series of blogs will provide a plateau for discussion, a space where the intensity you may feel of being stuck at or between a node point of the rhizome can gain some stability and grounding. We are seeking to expand our bodyminds as we write and connect with others, exploring the dynamics and discord of the DEEP Double Empathy Extreme Problem. As Walker (2019, pg 283) suggested in her thesis;
“we need to “look beyond social cues to the deeper dynamics of interacting bodies, exceptional tactile and kinesthetic sensitivity, and affinity for what I’ve termed the aesthetics of emergence”
We are opening discussions to explore the endless possibilities of an awe-inspiring neuroqueer future, to help bridge the DEEP empathy gap so many people are experiencing and to work towards a radically inclusive society.
“To recognise our responsibility to each other lies in our power to create better futures for each other. Connection is the striking surface of a hammer on the walls of the masters house.” (Gray-Hammond, 2024)
Heasman, B. et al., Towards autistic flow theory: A non-pathologising conceptual approach. Journal for Theory of Social Behaviour, https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12427
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005c). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Nick Walker. (2023, March 19). Dr Nick Walker • Expanding the Creative Potentials of Human Neurodiversity • ITAKOM Conference 2023 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOITXkj5bqM
Walker, N. (2019). Transformative Somatic Practices and Autistic Potentials: An Autoethnographic Exploration. California Institute of Integral Studies ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019. 27665905.
Courses, books and resources
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
