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“I cannot live without my soul”: An Autistic Exploration of Wuthering Heights

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.

References

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

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

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

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

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

4 May 2026
When the Ecology Fractures: Monotropism and Autistic Burnout (Part 2)
Part 1 : Re-worlding Neurodiversity: Monotropism, Ecological Belonging and Neuroqueer Futures

Part 3: Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly

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

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

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

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

Burnout as a fracture in relational life

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

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

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

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

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

The disruption of monotropic flow

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

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

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

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

Social and sensory worlds under pressure

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

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

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

The cost is often cumulative and can run deep.

Many people describe reaching a point where:
- communication becomes difficult
- noise, scents, lights, certain textures and even previously safe food may feel physically painful or overwhelming
- decision-making may slow down in a fog
- everyday routines and exectutive functioning tasks may feel too overwhelming
- trust in our environments and relationships with others can begin to diminish
These are not signs of personal weakness. They are signals that the relational conditions and environments supporting us have become unsustainable. Things need to change for us to survive.

Neuroqueer politics of burnout

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

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

Neuroqueer perspectives invite us to question these assumptions.
They ask:
- Who defines what counts as functioning?
- Who has the power to say what rest should look like?
- Whose attentional rhythms are recognised as valid?
- What forms of participation and engagement with the world are made possible or impossible?
Autistic burnout can be read as both a social, political, and personal phenomenon. It exposes the limits of environments organised around normativity.

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

Toward ecological re-assembly

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

This may begin with small shifts:
- lowering demands
- re-establishing sensory safety
- reconnecting with trusted people
- returning gently to meaningful interests or finding new glimmer of joy
- allowing time to move, communicate and experience the world at a slower pace
These changes can feel minor, yet they may help re-imagine and re-build the conditions and environments that allow attention and participation to re-emerge.

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

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

Find out more:

Part 3: Autistic Burnout Recovery as ecological re-assembly

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

We will consider:
- how sensory and attentional environments can be reshaped
- how communities can function as mycelial support networks
- how new rhythms of participation can emerge
- how re-worlding can begin in everyday practices
When the ecology fractures, survival is not the only possibility; new forms of life can take root.

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sins Invalid https://sinsinvalid.org

Stimpunks https://stimpunks.org/

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

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

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

Autistic Burnout Recovery as Ecological Re-assembly (Part 3)
12 March 2026
Neuroqueering in the Liminal Spaces

Neuroqueering in Liminal Spaces

“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)

**These blogs will also form part of the discussions and feed into the Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Project I am developing with Ryan Boren (Stimpunks)**

References

Adkin, T., & Gray-Hammond, D. (2023). Meerkatting — Emergent Divergence. Emergent Divergence. https://emergentdivergence.com/tag/meerkatting/

Boren, R. (2024, June 9). Campfires in dark Forests: Community brings safety to the serendipity. Stimpunks Foundation. https://stimpunks.org/2024/05/16/campfires-in-dark-forests-community-brings-safety-to-the-serendipity/

Edgar, H. (2024, June 15) The Double Empathy Problem is DEEP — MoreRealms — Medium. Medium. https://medium.com/@helenrealms/the-double-empathy-problem-is-deep-2364b3412c39

Edgar, H. (2023, June 27). Middle entrance — MoreRealms — Medium. Medium. https://medium.com/@helenrealms/middle-entrance-973dc06920b0

Gray-Hammond, D. (2023). Reclaiming Neurofuturism: Rhizomatic Communities and the Chaotic Self. Emergent Divergence. https://emergentdivergence.com/2023/04/30/reclaiming-neurofuturism-rhizomatic-communities-and-the-chaotic-self/

Gray-Hammond, D. (2023). Autistic rhizome — emergent divergence. Emergent Divergence. https://emergentdivergence.com/category/autism/autistic-community/autistic-rhizome/

Gray-Hammond, D., & Gray-Hammond, D. (2024, June 15). Reclaiming Neurofuturism: Responding to “The Double Empathy Problem is DEEP” by Edgar, 2024. Emergent Divergence. https://emergentdivergence.com/2024/06/16/reclaiming-neurofuturism-responding-to-the-double-empathy-problem-is-deep-by-edgar-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

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

Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (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.

16 June 2024