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.
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.
This piece brings together four strands of thought: I have been hugely inspired by David Gray-Hammond’s recent writings about the metaphysics of neurodivergence, Robert Chapman’s historical and mad studies framing, Nick Walker’s neuroqueer theory as transformative praxis, and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Each offers a potential lens for us to reconsider what it actually means to be neurodivergent, how our identity is shaped and recognised, and how it might be reimagined beyond fixed categories and labels.
1. Neurological difference from the statistical norm: in structure, function, or developmental pattern.
2. Lived cognitive difference: a phenomenological divergence in perception, attention, or reasoning.
3. Social positioning as “different”: the recognition of these differences by ourselves or others, often in ways that create barriers or stigma.
This proposes that neurodivergence is neither purely biological nor purely social, but emerges in the interplay of embodiment and environment. Tracing through history, Robert Chapman’s Mad Pride in Revolutionary England: The Ranters as Mad Activism (2025) deepens this understanding by focusing on the Ranters in the 1640’s to show how categories of difference, from “mad” to recent terms such as “neurodivergent”, are shaped by power, capitalism, and state control. Labelling is never neutral; it has been used to regulate, exclude, and also to organise resistance throughout history and continues to do so, causing so much harm to marginalised people and anyone who is different.
Where Chapman maps the long shadows of how difference has been policed, Walker turns us towards neuroqueering acts that stretch those boundaries and enables cognitive, psycholgical and somatic liberty for everyone. Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies (2021), frames the act of neuroqueering as both a deliberate refusal of neuronormative conditioning and an emergent process that unfolds in everyday life, which has the potential to create radical systemic change to benefit the whole of society.
This is in parallel to a Deleuzian perspective, which sees identity as never being static but built from many connections, relationships, and processes. Neurodivergence is not a fixed thing, but a living mix of our fluid bodyminds entangled with our environment, constantly shaped by the social, political, and ecological worlds we move through and the relationships we have.
The Metaphysics of Neurodivergence
Neurodivergence is often treated as a fact, decided by a medical diagnosis or by self-identification. Neurological variation without lived difference might go unnoticed; lived difference without social recognition might remain unlabelled or misattributed. It is the interaction with norms, expectations, and power structures that creates and solidifies the socially constructed category of neurodivergence, even for those of us who are innately different from birth.
Gray-Hammond suggests the idea of neurodivergence rests on three intertwined dimensions. None alone fully defines it, but together, they create its lived reality, of these, being positioned as “different” or “weird” often shapes daily life most directly and affects our wellbeing and how well we can function and thrive. This raises their deeper question: Is neurodivergence defined by the way it is lived and experienced, or by an underlying difference that exists whether or not it is recognised?
From a Deleuzian perspective, differences are not static traits but elements of a shifting assemblage. Neurodivergence is not a fixed essence but an ongoing process of becoming, shaped by sensory and cognitive patterns, environments, and cultural narratives, all filtered through intersectional privilege and oppression. Difference is generative, producing new perceptions, movements of thought, and ways of living, even if it is temporarily somewhat stabilised or held through labels such as being Autistic or ADHD.
Gray-Hammond distinguishes between essential properties, those without which neurodivergence would not be what it means today and accidental properties, which can change without altering the underlying being. Essential properties might include monotropic attentional flow, sensory processing patterns, physical disabilities, or other health differences. Accidental properties might include diagnostic labels, learned coping strategies, or outward behaviours. This matters because it undermines claims that compliance-based behavioural interventions “cure” neurodivergence, it suggests that outward behaviour can be suppressed or reshaped, but our essential cognitive and sensory architecture often remains split, fractured by trauma and masking, leading to burnout and mental health crises.
In Empire of Normality (2023), Chapman reminds us that the notion of “normal” is not an objective truth but a social construct, shaped by cultural and historical contexts. Over time what is seen as “normal” and what is deemed as “pathological” have shifted, not because humans have changed dramatically, but because society’s priorities and systems have. These boundaries have often been drawn to serve industry, capitalism, and the institutions that sustain them, rewarding some ways of thinking and being while excluding or penalising others. A clear example is the behaviourist approach entrenched in the US & UK school systems, where reward charts and social stories enforce neuronormative behaviours, harming Autistic children and pushing them to deny their needs expecting them to fit in at all costs.
In this light, Gray-Hammond’s question, ‘who counts as neurodivergent, and under what conditions?’ is not only personal or diagnostic, but it is political. It invites us to question the shifting line between “different” and “acceptable,” “normal” and “abnormal,” and to consider whether this line can be moved, reshaped, challenged, or even erased.
Walker’s neuroqueer theory builds on this idea, framing neurodivergence not only as a site of vulnerability for stigma and oppression, but as a space of creative potential. Neuroqueering resists the idea that support or education should aim to make neurodivergent people “normal”. Instead, it treats difference as a strength, a way to stretch the boundaries of what is possible, to reimagine living, thinking, and relating. It holds space for diverging even further from the norm, for exploring new ways of being and learning, and for the radical possibility that anyone can become neurodivergent through the act of neuroqueering and by choosing to move away from normativity.
When we see neurodivergence as dynamic, shaped by relationships, environments, and histories rather than as a fixed list of traits, we can step beyond the rigid binary of “neurotypical” vs “neurodivergent.” This opens neuroqueering possibilities for a more fluid and liberating society, one that values diversity not as a box to tick but as a living, evolving force. It is an invitation to embrace difference, explore transformative ways of becoming, and continually reinvent ourselves, our work and the worlds we share. However, even as we reimagine neurodivergence in more fluid and relational ways, the language we use and the labels we inherit carry the weight of the histories that have shaped how difference is seen and treated.
Hidden History of Neurodivergent Labels
The words and language we use to describe people have never been neutral. They are shaped by politics, history, and power. Robert Chapman’s historical account of Mad Pride shows how labels for cognitive difference often come from systems built to manage and control people. In the 1640s, for example, radical groups like the Ranters challenged the strict religious and social rules of their time. They refused to conform, rejected rules imposed from above, and gathered in ways that disrupted the status quo. They didn’t use today’s words as being neurodivergent but they clearly didn’t fit into the expected norms of the time. Their defiance and solidarity can be seen as early acts of Mad Activism resisting the idea that there is only one “right” way to think, feel, or live.
Neurodivergent people have often been denied the right to name and define our own realities. For most of history, “official” knowledge about us has come from deficit-based medical models, shaped by institutions and used to serve those in power.
As I shared in my blog ‘Autistic Mental Health: Beyond the Pathology Paradigm‘ (Aug, 2025), research suggests that as many as 8 in 10 Autistic people have a mental health condition. Sadly, Autistic people have been found to have up to an eightfold increased risk of death by suicide compared to non-Autistic people (Brown et al., 2024). For Autistic children, the risk of thinking about or attempting suicide is 28 times higher than for their non-Autistic peers. These are not just numbers, they are lives cut short by systems that fail to meet our needs.
2,025 Autistic people and people with a learning disability are in mental health hospitals in England. Of these, 1,455 (72%) are Autistic.
240 under-18s are in inpatient units. Of these, 230 (96%) are Autistic.
The number of Autistic people without a learning disability detained in mental health hospitals has increased by 141% since 2015.
In 2015, Autistic people made up 38% of the total in hospital. Now it is 72%(National Autistic Society, 2025).
These statistics are not personal failings, they are systemic failures of education, healthcare, mental health services, and broader society to support Autistic people and those of us who are different in ways that affirm our needs, identities, and ways of being. This is epistemic injustice, as the people most affected are excluded from the conversation, and the words we need to describe our lives are often missing, invalidated or treated as problems. A clear example of this is neurodivergent experiences of burnout.
When a community lacks language for its own experience or our experiences aren’t believed, it is easier to cause harm. It’s not just about being misunderstood; it’s about blocking self-understanding, choice, and autonomy. Every label we inherit, from being “Autistic” or “weird,” “defiant’ or “disordered”, carries a built-in set of assumptions about how we should be seen and treated. Labelling can trap us in someone else’s story…..or it can be reclaimed and re-storyed to tell our own narratives.
The power to name and label, and use certain language shapes who is recognised as being fully human and “right” who is pushed to the margins. The meaning of labels is always shifting; institutions try to lock differences into fixed categories, diagnoses, risk labels, and lists of “deficits.” In response some communities are pushing back, reclaiming words like “Crip”, “Autistic” or “Mad” and filling them with their own values, histories, and pride. But changing words alone is not enough, real change needs systemic transformation, and neuroqueer theory offers ways to put that into practice.
Refusing Normal: The Practice of Neuroqueering
Neuroqueering can happen on many levels and in many different ways; from the small, everyday choices we make in how we use our bodyminds to the larger work of changing systems. On a personal level, it can mean moving, speaking, or sensing in ways that feel natural to us, even if they go against social expectations. On a collective level, it involves challenging and dismantling the systems that enforce able-bodiedness, demand constant productivity, and dictate narrow, “acceptable” ways of socialising and communicating.
However, living neuroqueerly by stimming openly, rejecting therapies aimed at making us “normal,” choosing to play, learn, work, or rest in our own ways can still lead to exclusion, discrimination. It is a risk without being in a safe environment with people who understand and accept your authentic self and ways of becoming.
Neuroqueer theory recognises that neurodivergence doesn’t stand apart from other forms of oppression. The same bodymind that pushes back against neuronormativity is also navigating intersectionality, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, class inequality, and the impacts of colonialism. True freedom for neurodivergent people means breaking down ableism and these other systems together. Deleuze, like Walker and Gray-Hammond, sees this refusal to “fit in” not only as resistance but as something full of creative potential. Embracing difference isn’t just about stepping away from the norm; it’s where new ways of living, relating, and imagining can begin and transformations can emerge.
Neurodivergence isn’t something that lives inside an individual’s brain; it takes shape in our bodyminds, who we are is inseparable from the rhizomatic networks of meaning and care, or their absence, that surround us and our environments. Liberation needs to be a collective flow: changing life for one means changing it for all of us. It needs to be co-created through the ways we think, feel, and act, shaped by how others respond to us, and vice versa.
Neuroqueer praxis is both personal and social, it is the daily choice to resist being pulled into the norm, while building community solidarity to challenge the systems that enforce neuronormativity. It’s about creating and sharing new ways of knowing, and about changing the very conditions that limit who we can be, moving beyond labels and expectations, so we can live as our authentic selves and build supportive, meaningful communities.
A neuroqueer politics of difference does not seek permission or validation from systems that marginalise. It works to build worlds where many ways of being are not only accepted but recognised as essential to our shared survival and joy. To live fully as ourselves is not just inclusion, it is the ongoing work of reworlding.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991)
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.
Seeing and feeling the blank looks and Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) at a really extreme DEEP level and still desperately trying to explain how you feel is exhausting!
Writing 100,000-word text messages to your friends and colleagues to try and justify and validate why you can’t do something or why you have done it the way you have because you’re monotropic and don’t want to miss out on any details is a very real thing!
Being with people who understand and “get it” is validating and important.
We all need a base camp. A base camp is a niche place of safety and radical inclusion. It is a safe place where you can be yourself and explore your identity, a space where people ‘get you’, where there is a more level playing field of shared life experiences from which to form friendships and explore new terrain. A base camp is a validating space where people encourage you to be you and even expand your version of yourself. A space where different ways of communicating, moving and different sensory experiences are validated and where co-regulation is a foundation stone that enables inter-dependence and independence.
Base Camps come in many forms: families, face to face community groups and also online communities.
In collaboration with Stimpunks, I have been exploring Neuroqueer Learning Spaces. These primordial learning spaces enable everyone to thrive in their own authentic, unique ways. They provide a basecamp from which to explore and learn with others in your own way in your own time and in a space that is comfortable.
The three primordial learning spaces comprise of Campfires, Watering Holes and Cave Spaces:
Caves:Space for quiet reflection, introspection and self-directed learning. A private space to transform learning from external knowledge to internal belief. Home of reflective construction.
Campfires: Space for learning with a storyteller, an elder or from others. Education facilitators need to subvert neuronormativity actively. They need to embark on their transformative neuroqueer journey so their re-storying can inspire neuro-cosmopolitanism.
Watering holes: Space for being with peers and social learning in validating neurodivergent ways by embracing parallel play and body doubling experiences. Community enables thoughts and ideas to expand rhizomatically. Valuing differences and unique strengths expands creativity into new horizons and can create a collective flow full of potential.
Find out more about Neuroqueer Learning Spaces and also discover Stimpunks Learning Pathways on their website. Learning Pathways are nestled within the online rhizomatic forest of the Stimpunks website. Learning Pathways is a free, open-access online tool set up to support and guide you on your journey of self-discovery. It provides the tools to help empower you as an autistic, disabled or otherwise marginalised person to self-advocate for your needs and promotes agency and autonomy.
A learning pathway is a route a learner takes through a range of pages, modules, lessons, and courses to build knowledge progressively.
Pathways don’t need to be traversed in order. Pick what looks interesting. Choose your own adventure.
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.
Milton (2012) defines the double empathy problem as follows:
“A disjuncture in reciprocity between two differently disposed social actors which becomes more marked the wider the disjuncture in dispositional perceptions of the lifeworld — perceived as a breach in the ‘natural attitude’ of what constitutes ‘social reality’ for ‘neuro-typical’ people and yet an everyday and often traumatic experience for ‘autistic people’.”
I feel we are moving further away from embodied connections with each other; we are losing our primordial affinity with nature and drifting further from coherence, harmony, and the humanised ecology of care that we need (Bettin). The double empathy problem feels extreme, it feels deep; it is what I have been describing with my peers as DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem).
The DEEP (DOUBLE EMPATHY EXTREME PROBLEM) arises from feelings of disconnect; not only from cultural, sexual, political, religious, neurodivergent, or any other cross-section of differences but also through embodiment, or lack thereof. The double empathy gap is non-linear; it is deep, multidimensional, rhizomatic, and holographic (Mirra, 2023). DEEP could be a huge contributing factor that leads to burnout and ill health. The DEEP gap can break people at their core, leaving them fragmented, disconnected, disoriented and disembodied, feeling like they’re in a void space.
Bodyminds is a term used to challenge the idea the body and mind are experienced separately (Descartes). Walker (2021) expands on this idea by explaining:
“Mind is an embodied phenomenon. The mind is encoded in the brain as ever-changing webs of neural connectivity. The brain is part of the body, interconnected with the rest of the body by a vast network of nerves. The activity of the mind and body creates changes in the brain; changes in the brain affect both mind and embodiment. Mind, brain, and embodiment are intricately entwined in a single complex system. We’re not minds riding around in bodies, we’re bodyminds.”
Phenomenologists believe that embodied attunement is an essential, core aspect of our experience of and in the world. Through embodiment, we are able to navigate the maps, the caverns, pleats, and folds (Edgar, 2023) of our lives and perhaps, create new maps in more meaningful ways.
“In phenomenology, embodied attunement refers to how individuals experience the world through their embodied interactions with the environment. This includes the physical, sensory, and emotional aspects of our interactions with the environment. Embodied attunement involves a reciprocal relationship between the body and the environment, where the body is attuned to the environment and the environment is attuned to the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 2017; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2020; Gallagher, 2022)”.(cited in: Hipólito, I. & White, B., 2023)
There is a gap between those who are intune with their own bodyminds and the bodyminds of those they are with and people who are dis-embodied, (regardless of any intersectionality and other empathy gap that may be present). As Walker (2021) says;
“Mind is inextricably entwined with brain, and brain with body; thus, mind is inextricably entwined with body in a single complex system and in a continuous dance of mutual shaping.We’re not minds riding around in vehicles of flesh and bone; we’re bodyminds, bodies that think and perceive. Experience, awareness, sense of self, psychological development, and capacities for feeling, knowing, cognition, connection, and action are all entwined with — and shape, and are shaped by — habits of bodily usage, including habits of movement, posture, breath, contact, consumption, tension and relaxation, gaze, gesture, and expression.”
I am learning to be more embodied through somatic practice and connecting with other people exploring these ideas across various communities. The work of Kay & Dan Aldred (2023) about Embodied Education demonstrates how embodiment is essential for individuals to thrive, we need somatic practice embedded into the ways our education and healthcare systems operate and evolve, we need people to be deeply intune with others, embodied, so they can transform and work more meaningfully.
We need to carve out time to embody ourselves in the world around us, reorient ourselves, realign ourselves, our past, connect with nature, embrace the rhythms and cycles in water, on earth and in the air and sky around us to fire and energize our bodyminds. We need to take moments to breathe so we can recharge and gather the force we need to move, to transform and to neuroqueer ourselves and our spaces.
Neuroqueering is a verb; it is an act of doing and transforming intentionally through the bodymind. To neuroqueer is to seek out the gaps, the in-between liminal spaces where disconnect lingers. We need to look for opportunities within the cracks of broken systems and broken relationships so we can transform. I am finding these spaces within various online communities in the Dark Forests (Boren, 2024) of the Autistic Rhizome (Gray-Hammond, 2023), where perhaps there is a natural gravitation towards exploring these ideas due to people feeling marginalised, disconnected, and disembodied from society because of the DEEP double empathy gap caused by neuronormative society, prejudice and ableist systems.
I am trying to find spaces of Ma (pauses of potential inbetween people, objects, places and experiences) to find creative ways to liberate my bodymind from neuronormativity, I am seeking potential in the spaces in between to make positive, radically inclusive change through my work with Ryan Boren (Stimpunks, 2024) as part of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Project. It feels like ripples are happening, slow change is occurring, conversations are opening up, serendipity is flowing, and the potential of a neuroqueer-embodied future is beginning to transform more spaces.
References:
Aldred, K. L., & Aldred, D. (2023a). Embodied education Creating safe space for learning, facilitating and sharing.
Walker, N., & Raymaker, D. M. (2021). Toward a Neuroqueer Future: An Interview with Nick Walker. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.29014.njw
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities.
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.
In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker (2021) describes embracing neuroqueering as a verb. When considering Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, we need to reinterpret, rethink, redefine, and reimagine what those spaces may look like and the journey required to be able to facilitate them. We are considering whether we can use the template Walker created for designing autism courses as a template for imagining neuroqueer learning spaces. It has prompted us to question the differences between being neurodiversity-affirming, having everyone’s needs met, and then stretching those possibilities into neuroqueer learning spaces that enable unknown potential to flourish. Once you are free from the reigns of neuronormativity, the learning possibilities of radical inclusivity with cognitive and somatic liberty will be endless.
Yunkaporta (Sand Talk, 2020) talks about being a ‘strange attractor‘ (pg82), which seems very much in line with neuroqueer ideology. To be a strange attractor in education means taking a risk and disrupting the order and current system. There is enormous negativity around words such as risk, anarchy and chaos, but as Yunkaporta reminds us, chaos means having no structure and being rhizomatic, and anarchy means having ‘no boss’. He asks if we could have a structure without a boss or management system. Neuroqueer learning spaces need to be de-hierarchical; we need a community of people, not masters and students. We need empathy, trust, and mutual respect for the uniqueness everyone can bring to adults and children’s learning environments. Deep learning is rhizomatic; it does not happen linearly.
The current education system is causing so much harm to so many young people whose needs are not being met; their mental and physical health is suffering as a consequence, with some having no access to any meaningful education at all. If the current system isn’t working, tightening the reigns further on behaviour and attendance policies isn’t going to help; it will cause more harm. We need to create spaces where words like normal, typical, and even divergent become irrelevant so children feel safe to be themselves and can learn in ways that enable their bodyminds to be liberated.
Audre Lorde (1982) says, “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses…”. Neuroqueer environments are spaces for everyone to be neurodivergent, to be constantly evolving and expanding and reimagining themselves. We need to look for the slightest opportunity to make a change and find possibilities for playing, learning, exploring and opening up curiosity.
Being engaged, curious, playful and able to explore and move freely are essential components of learning to which everyone should be entitled. This is also reflected in the work of Alexander (Play Radical), who wrote a beautiful and inspiring Playful Manifesto. Their aims echo what we’d like to include in our own Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Manifesto;
“Create space to celebrate and recognise the infinite ways we play, communicate, and relate to each other as children and adults. And, in particular, lift those types of play that are often unseen or ignored and ways of communicating or relating that are often not valued by wider society.“
We are forming the beginning of our Open Framework for Neuroqueer Learning Spaces on the work of Walker’s (2021, pg144–156) ‘Guiding Principles for a Course on Autism’ which asks:
“What if both the education of youth and adults and the training of educators included the explicit understanding that no neurocognitive style is more “correct” or “normal” than any other and that the work of mutual accommodation is both an essential part of a proper education and an essential preparation for being a participating citizen in a civilised society?”
An Open Framework for Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
(open for discussion, just the beginning…)
Balance
We don’t want to strike a balance between the neurodiversity paradigm and the pathology paradigm. We are wholly and intentionally rejecting the pathology paradigm as it has been shown to cause so much harm, especially to neurodivergent and marginalised groups. Nick Walker (pg 72) stated, ‘To create a better future, one must first be able to imagine a better future‘. Audre Lorde (1983) suggested we need to create tools not just to dismantle the education system but to build a new house (in this case, a learning space) that empowers educational facilitators and young people. We want to avoid rebuilding the same education, but just in a different way; we need something different and neuroqueer learning spaces.
Why Sheets — Anti-Behaviourism
We are deeply aware of the barriers young people and their families face in today’s education system. Families can not wait years for an education revolution; they need and deserve some tools to help their child tomorrow morning after breakfast when they may have to meet with a head teacher. We hope that by providing small steps such as ourWhy Sheets inspired by Alfie Kohn(2019), we can offer support and help families reclaim agency and autonomy for their children battling behaviourism, school-induced anxiety and systemic exclusion so they can self-advocate. These resources will also be invaluable for professionals who need well-researched neuro-affirmative resources to support their work. These are short-term answers and are more of a lily pad for the more radical reform needed.
2. Facilitators and Guides
Neuroqueer learning spaces should be nonhierarchical and rhizomatic. This means that we need to shift away from having teachers and students and instead need facilitators and guides. Guides walk alongside children, follow their leads and interests, and support them in developing curiosity and deeper learning. Mutual respect can be formed when there is no hierarchy when you are ‘in it together’; it also develops creativity and enhances communication.
We need to guide and facilitate young people’s movement between Cavendish learning spaces in their own time, as described in our previous writing (Cave, Campfire, Watering Hole). We need a diverse range of people as guides and facilitators. This includes people from all backgrounds, cultures, and needs groups. Other than safeguarding issues, there is no reason why anyone should be excluded. With the right support, everyone has something they can bring that could inspire others to learn more.
3. Adults must embrace the neurodiversity paradigm and be willing to explore neuroqueer theory with an open mind.
When designing an autism course, Walker (2021) suggests that it is “not enough for the instructor to be autistic; they need to be autistic with a substantial history of active participation in autistic culture and community, including autistic rights activism, resistance to oppressive cultural and professional practices based in the pathology paradigm, and a celebration of autistic pride”.
Everyone who facilitates neuroqueer learning spaces must fully embrace neuroqueer theory, as Walker (2021) defines it. Neuroqueering is open to everyone but requires a lot of unlearning, relearning, creating and recreating. There are likely many routes people have travelled and are travelling to get here. For those facilitating neuroqueer learning spaces, people will need to be neurodivergent; if not born neurodivergent, they will need to engage in neuroqueering to become neurodivergent, to diverge their bodyminds from culturally ingrained performance of neuronormativity. Those who are neurodivergent will need to be open to diverging further against neuronormative expectations and be willing to explore the potential of neuroqueer learning spaces.
4. Marginalised Voices Must Be Central
Marginalised voices must be central to the learning space so they can reclaim power and autonomy. Students’ resources also need to be more diverse and reflect indigenous cultures. Total communication systems and access to alternative and augmentative communication need to be standard, and the freedom to move indoors/ outdoors and between Cavendish Learning Spaces (cave/campfire and watering hole) at home, in educational settings, and multisensory environments is essential.
5. Truth Is Where It Is
Non-disabled people and non-neurodivergent people have primarily led the discourse about disability and neurodivergent people so far. Marginalised groups have largely been excluded, silenced or misinterpreted. By having a diverse range of educational facilitators and guides from marginalised communities, first-hand knowledge can be passed down and shared to challenge that narrative and promote a re-storying and validation of experiences.
6. Educational Facilitators / Guides Must Model Neuroqueering
Most educational settings “reflect ableist and neuronormative values of the dominant culture” (Walker, 2012). Students are rewarded for conforming, and those who don’t or are unable to conform are discriminated against. We need educational guides to declare their learning space as a ‘zone of freedom‘ away from neuronormativity. In the words of Audre Lorde (1983), ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
7. Educational Guides Must Model and Invite the Embodied Expression of Neuroqueering
Educational facilitators must embrace neuroqueer theory and have an embodied approach to education, such as that suggested by Aldred (2023). We need to expand potential and provide a safe space for self-liberation where adult facilitators can shed neuronormative habits and children can grow up without the need for that shedding. We want children to have the freedom to be and become who they want to be. Educational guides must declare the learning space a “zone for free experimentation with shedding habits of normative performance and actively exploring, practising, reclaiming and cultivating non-normative modes of embodiment.”
Merleau-Ponty (1945) stressed the importance of nurturing relationships and fostering a sense of belonging and connectedness in our communities. For communities to happen, we need to start with the relationships of those we are with and the children we work with in schools and other settings. All our children deserve to feel safe and valued so their differences, unique interests, and ways of being are celebrated with others in an embodied, connected way of being together.
McGreevey et al. (2024) research offers a humanistic framework for “An Experience Sensitive Approach to Care With and for Autistic Children and Young People in Clinical Services“, which we feel will provide a secure base for creating a neuro-inclusive setting. “The experience sensitive approach is a coherent, neuro-inclusive framework that promotes a dignified, respectful, personalized approach to care”, which we believe will be equally valuable and essential as a foundation for neuroqueer learning spaces to promote:
Insiderness
Agency
Uniqueness
Togetherness
Sense Making
Personal Journey
Sense of Place
Embodiment
As Walker suggests, “introducing the practice of neuroqueering embodiment into the classroom (learning space) is an excellent way to introduce neuroqueering as a concept.” We are embracing this and would love for you to share your ideas to help develop this concept.
This is a community project. Feedback welcome.
If you’d like to add your signature to support our anti-ABA/anti-PBS/ anti behaviourism WHY SHEET resources, then please follow the links below:
To find out why we are anti-behaviourism, click here: ANTI-BEHAVIOURISM
Adding your signature to our resources will help add weight and give families the extra confidence to use these to advocate for their young people. Please click here: ADD YOUR SIGNATURE.
If you have any questions or would like further information, please contact us Ryan Boren at Stimpunks or Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms.
Lorde A. (1984a). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Comments at the “The personal and the political panel,” Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979). In Sister outsider (pp. 110–113). Sister Visions Press. (Original work published 1979) (LittleRad.org also has a copy of the original source)
McGreevy, E., Quinn, A., Law, R., Botha, M., Evans, M., Rose, K., Moyse, R., Boyens, T., Matejko, M., & Pavlopoulou, G. (2024). An experience sensitive approach to care with and for autistic children and young people in clinical services. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678241232442
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. Phenomenology of Perception. London : New York :Routledge & K. Paul; Humanities Press, 1974.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperCollins.
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.
“Intentionally liberating oneself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity can be thought of as neuroqueering” (Walker, 2021).
More Realms has always been a space for me to push the boundaries of Autistic Realms and explore other ideas, theories, and possibilities of learning in different contexts by drawing on more diverse materials, including art, literature, and philosophy. Inspired by Stimpunks’ idea for Cavendish Learning Spaces, I invited Ryan Boren (Co-Founder and Creative Director of Stimpunks) to join me on a path to explore Neuroqueer Learning Spaces as a way of transforming education away from the enforced ideas of normality. This is forming part of my neuroqueering journey and to potentially form part of a chapter submission for Nick Walker’s upcoming Neuroqueer Theory and Practice Anthology.
This feels like a natural evolution and a bridging of Autistic Realms, More Realms and finding possibilities in the gap, the ‘ma’ that I began this blog series with. Often, within the gaps, the caverns, pleats and folds of spaces, we can shapeshift and find other meanings; connections can be formed. A collective flow can bring new possibilities, open up potential and allow us to find the ‘magic’ (Walker, ITAKOM Presentation, 2023).
Once again, I have started the beginning of this project in the middle of everything else! We dived in deep and realised our project had been underway for many years, but neither of us had the vocabulary of ‘neuroqueer’ and ‘neuroqueering’ (Nick Walker, 2021) to describe our thoughts and help us understand our journey. Now we have that vocabulary; it has opened up another world within a world. It enables us to connect and learn from others who are also interested in the neurodiversity paradigm and postnormal possibilities. It is carving out a pathway for us to expand our community networks and help facilitate a shift in the way education is currently structured. It is helping us move towards what Kay and Dan Aldred (2023) describe as an Embodied Education, which could be seen to be the golden thread that runs through Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
We know the vocabulary surrounding new concepts like this can be tricky to wrap your head around. It has taken us some time to unlearn and relearn, and we are still learning! We have created a brief summary (below) of some of our main concepts that may not be familiar to everyone. A more in-depth version of this is available on Stimpunks’ website, with further references and ideas to open up discussion.
Embodied education is a concept we will return to and weave through our work alongside other emergent ideas about being a ‘space holder’ to allow the freedom of creative learning to take place. We believe, ‘There is no learning without the body.’ Aldred (2023). To deepen our understanding of this, we will collaborate with different communities to discover what an embodied, neuroqueer education and learning space may mean for those facilitating education and how it could support young people and what it means for the young people and families.
Drawing on the work of Octavia Butler and Adrienne Maree Brown, “The idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others, and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralise our idea of where solutions and decisions happen and where ideas come from. We have to embrace our complexity. We are complex.” (Adrienne Marie Brown, 2017.
Within an educational context, this means decentralising education, or at least making attempts within our own lives to change the way learning spaces are set up and used, moving away from the hierarchical model of ‘Master’ and ‘Student’. As (Audre Lorde, 1979) says, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
We need safe spaces tobe witheach other in embodied, meaningful, collaborative, and responsive ways. Our children deserve to feel cared for, understood and safe to explore. We believe we needradical inclusivity to prevent the continuation of the severe mental health crisis our young people are experiencing today.
Over the past few years, I have discussed the current education and mental health crisis in the UK that has led to so many children experiencing burnout and living with the impact that the barriers of our UK education have created. This education crisis is also echoed in other countries, including America, where Stimpunks is based. Many of the issues are highlighted in Gray-Hammond’s (2024) CAMHS in Crisis, which I recommend for further insight into these problems.
It feels like we have reached a point where no one is happy or benefiting from our current education system. Fisher’s (2023) ‘Changing our Minds’ work highlights this from the perspective of teachers, students, and parents/carers. It has made me question our educational aims and what our schools are trying to achieve; it feels like we have lost our way. We no longer need workers for factory production lines; children are becoming more ‘disembodied’ as time passes, and teachers and students have even less autonomy than ever.
We are teaching children to be proud of what they know yet also ashamed of not knowing, teaching children that there is somehow a ‘right’ way to learn through reward charts and positive behaviour support programmes and revising for prescriptive exam criteria. However, it is by having a sense of wonder, curiosity, and unknowing that real learning takes place. This is why we chose the white rabbit symbol for our project. Our white rabbit (also known as Space Bunny) symbolises playfulness, curiosity, wonder, hope and the possibility of expanding learning potential. We use this as a symbol for people to follow us on our Neuroqueering Learning Spaces adventures. We are starting off down the rabbit hole, learning about the three Primordial Learning Spaces as theorised by Thornburg (2013).
Cavendish Learning Spaces are Neuroqueer Learning Spaces
Lorde (1979) declared, “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses…” Ourtriskelionmotif reflects this, with the golden thread of embodiment (being with yourself and being with others) weaving between the three primordial learning spaces. We will be exploring this in more detail as the project evolves. This allows children the opportunity to flow between their cave, watering hole and campfire spaces as needed and be in a perpetually evolving spiral of new learning possibilities by revisiting and expanding on thoughts, ideas and play processes to keep building on connections.
Without information and training, many teachers are likely unaware of the different paths and the need to DE-SCHOOL their learning spaces, UN-LEARN their training and embrace radical inclusivity. A quote often credited to Maya Angelou reads, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” We hope this project will allow people to learn from others so we can all ‘do better together’. Teachers can not take that ‘small opportunity’ if they don’t know where to look for it or even understand why it is needed.
When I was working in class as a teacher, I was often far too busy with the day-to-day planning to think too far outside of my next lesson. Only now, with the privilege of time and hindsight, I have discovered new possibilities by connecting with other communities. Likewise, families also need time to explore and space to connect, validate experiences and learn together. Time is often something many families do not have; family life is generally busy! However, everyone deserves the opportunity to access practical information about different educational pathways and support for their children and to be able to advocate for their needs. Education does not and should not only happen inside a school building between 9 am-3 pm sat behind a desk. We are passionate about expanding learning opportunities and neuroqueer spaces for learning to take place and giving families and educators some ideas and resources to be able to do this.
We want to create a campfire experience by bringing community networks together; we want to share stories, knowledge and create connections to be with each other. We want to provide a space that brings agency and autonomy back to families and school staff. Educational settings and families need freedom for niche construction so children can move seamlessly and weave between different learning spaces. For families opting for alternative learning routes, these pathways need to be made more accessible, and the journey and support need to be much smoother and more empowering for families.
We aim to provide practical resources for professionals and families to support them. For families this may include resources to support them in being able to advocate for their child (such as template letters and signposting to research). For educational settings this will include practical ideas to launch their neuroqueer learning spaces in their own setting.
Caves:Space for quiet reflection, introspection and self-directed learning. A private space to transform learning from external knowledge to internal belief. Home of reflective construction.
Campfires: Space for learning with a storyteller. Education facilitators need to actively subvert neuronormativity. They need to embark on their transformative neuroqueer journey so their re-storying can inspire neuro-cosmopolitanism.
Watering holes: Space for being with peers and social learning. Community enables thoughts and ideas to expand rhizomatically. Embracing unique strengths expands creativity into new horizons and a collective flow full of potential.
A radical change to learning spaces is needed to enable children to be embodied, feel safe and feel liberated enough to explore and be curious about the world around them. We can work and learn in infinitely creative ways, but we need to be embodied in order to do that and connected within ourselves and with the world and people around us. To feel embodied, you need feelings of safety; people need to value strengths, validate difficulties, and provide support where needed. The neurodiversity-affirming work by McGreevey et al.(2023) based on the Life World Model by Todres et al. (2009) applies equally to health care and education. It offers a humanising framework for everyone, not just autistic people. Everyone deserves to feel a sense of togetherness and have their journeys make sense so they have agency and autonomy over their learning journeys.
We have created alilypadto launch our project by inviting discussion around the following ideas:
“Cavendish Spaces” are based on flexibility, interaction, movement, and the role of embodied responsive experiences. They reject the boundaries of traditional classroom settings and examine how they restrict embodied experiences and lead to disembodied experiences and harm. Our project is multidimensional, non-linear and de-hierarchical. We need to deconstruct, dismantle and un-learn as part of the neuroqueering process to lift the burden of neuronormativity that is weighing our children down. We are exploring the idea of an embodied education. We are exploring how learning spaces may impact neuroqueer learning potential and radical cognitive and somatic liberty. Inspired by Ira Socol who suggestsZero-Based Design as part of this process which means children will be no longer be trapped in your past. It will enable us to:
“Reimagine the Learner Experience. Reimagine the Learning Spaces. Reimagine How Professionals Learn”. (Ira Socol)
We are looking at neuroqueering from all angles across the community. We are looking at ways to give agency and autonomy back to families and support those working in educational settings that facilitate and guide learning experiences. Importantly, we want to offer children timeless learning and neuroqueer space to be with others, be themselves and ‘become’ and ‘become what they are’ (Watts, 1955).
The path to escape the box of a sick society involves rediscovering timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating creative collaboration.
NeurodiVentures are a concrete example of an emerging cultural species that provides safe and nurturing environments for divergent thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction. NeurodiVentures are built on timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating trusted collaboration that predate the emergence of civilisation.
“The global mono-cult pretends that all aspects of life can be categorised and understood in terms of normality — by the hump of the bell curve. But the living planet does not conform to anthropocentric normality; it is chaotic, but it is beautifully and awesomely diverse.” Bettin (AutCollab, 2024)
We are documenting the neuroqueering process of our journey as a live- stream across Stimpunks website as the project unfolds. It is a reflection of the kaleidoscopic rhizome of Stimpunks, which is a beautifully awesome and diverse learning space in itself.
Our project shows an example of a neuroqueering workflow transformation, which we will expand on in future blogs. Stimpunks is a virtual space holder for my personal neuroqueering process and the community joining us. As a space holder they provide safety to explore, try out new ideas and work collaboratively towards a mutual goal without fear of judgment.
To neuroqueer, you have to un-learn. I visualise my neuroqueering as being like fractals in a kaleidoscope. It is a process of turning, changing and becoming by un-learning and re-learning and time-less learning from others in a campfire space, having time for self-reflection and self-directed learning in a cave space, joining in with and alongside others and celebrating diversity in a watering hole space. We are not perfect, and the project may be chaotic and messy in places. However, we feel passionate that we are heading in the right direction and want to celebrate the ‘beautifully and awesomely diverse’ potential of neuroqueer learning spaces with you.
Created Serendipity
“Seemingly serendipitous events are also based on our willingness to create connections and be in the space, and to put in the effort in the first place. I often tell people that if you start connecting with others in online spaces, you won’t just find great ideas, but the great ideas will find you.” (George Couros)
Created Serendipity is a beautiful thing. We would love for you to join us and expand the potential of neuroqueer learning spaces!
We’re requesting community writing and art about neuroqueering education, play, and learning spaces. “Cavendish Space” is the first piece in our “Neuroqueer Learning Spaces” project. It’s also our explainer for the project. The campfires in the “Cave, Campfires, and Watering Holes” concept introduced in “Cavendish Space” are places for storytelling. They are places for elders and experts to pass along knowledge. We want to weave campfire wisdom into community storytelling. Community storytelling is part of our neuroqueer journeying and becoming.
For each section of the “Cavendish Space” piece, we’d like to have a “Campfire Wisdom” (working title) callout box featuring submitted writing and art. We want to highlight the wisdom of experts and elders in our community and associate it with the campfire primordial learning space and the storytelling and cultural transmission it facilitates. We’ll integrate submitted writing and art into “Cavendish Space” and other pieces created by this project. The writing might be included in a chapter we’re working on for a neuroqueer anthology. We’ll also publish standalone pieces of your work. Anything of any length is welcome. A poem, a paragraph, a painting, a plea, a blog or any other inspiration you may have for Neuroqueering Learning Spaces.
“…human nature is to nurture and be nurtured” Immordino-Yang (2023)
All submissions will be attributed and linked to you whenever used. We plan on writing up this project and submitting a chapter for Nick Walker’s new Neuroqueer anthology.
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 growing cracks in the thin veneer of our “civilised” economic and social operating model are impossible to ignore”, Jorn Bettin (2020).
As a late-diagnosed autistic person, I feel a massive disconnect with the world around me. I am living in the ‘gap’ between so many spaces but also feel the potential of neuroqueering and transforming what could be voids into ‘Ma’, a space for neuroqueer potential. I have lived through cycles of autistic burnout caused by systemic unmet needs and seen the effects of an education system that is not meeting the needs of my children and the many children of the many families I support as an education professional. (I will expand on the terms Ma and neuroqueering throughout this blog).
Neuroqueer has a verb form, unlike neurodivergent or neurodiversity. Nick Walker (2021) defines neuroqueering as “intentionally liberating oneself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity ”. Neuroqueering has helped me navigate and transition through a difficult period of my life and given me hope for myself, my family, and also those I support. ‘Anyone can neuroqueer. Neurodivergent or neurotypical. Gay or straight. Anyone can neuroqueer and be neuroqueer” (Ryan Boren, Stimpunks 2024). Neuroqueering is a form of embodied shapeshifting; it is an internal process that helps you discover potential in the spaces in between in Ma.
Ma: The Inbetween
I love this description of Ma from Ghibliosophy as it captures everything I am trying to convey within the context of neuroqueering, a journey which I began almost 25 years ago before I had the vocabulary of neuroqueering or even knew I was autistic; I have recently revisited these themes in my blogs in Middle Entrance and Caverns, Pleats and Folds:
“Ma’ is a captivating Japanese philosophy that finds beauty in the spaces between — the pauses, the silence, the emptiness. It’s like the breath between words, giving rhythm and depth to our experiences. Embracing Ma is not just about appreciating the void; it’s about understanding its potential. It invites us to pause, breathe, and find richness in moments of stillness. By integrating Ma into our daily lives, we open ourselves to a world of mindfulness and creativity, where every pause is an opportunity for growth and a deeper connection with the world around us. In the art of Ma, we learn that sometimes, what we don’t do or say can be as powerful as what we do.”
I have felt the burden of trying to be linear when my mind and body are anything but. Trying to conform and fit into the rigid boundaries of neuronormative society for so long has left me feeling shattered. I have taken a lot from Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk (2020). He has helped me realise why things have felt so hard and why I have felt so heavy and weighed down. Re-storying my own life through the lens of monotropism (Murray et al, 2005) and the neurodiversity paradigm has helped explain repeated cycles of burnout cycles to the point where I crashed entirely and would likely still be crashing if I had not found support and ways to move on through the neurodivergent community over the past few years.
Yunkaporta (2020, pg. 97) has drawn a symbol with two circles adjacent to each other and another line joins them to form a circle, this is enclosed within a hexagon shape. Yunkaporta suggests that the left-hand circle represents the abstract world of mind and spirit, and the right represents the concrete world of land, relationships and activity. The lines above and below, joining the circles, represent communication. Below is my reinterpretation of this image, with the flow of embodiment between the circles in Ma, where neuroqueering can happen and evolve and keep expanding and evolving and connecting with other spaces.
Yunkaporta explains the importance of metaphors being the ‘language of the spirit’, the language of ritual and magic. Transformative processes can create change in people. One way is through sharing stories and building connections, comparing stories and developing ever greater understanding as more connections and stories are shared and the story rhizome expands. As Yunkporta says (2020, pg 114), “We don’t want our stories to be used at bedtime to put children to sleep; we need an exchange of stories to be awake and grow.” I think the lines Yunkapoeta draws in the sand (see image above) could also be seen to representing the importance of embodied relationships, the flow of connections between people and their surroundings, the transformative process that enables people to continuously unfold and reform, to be creative and find joy in between neuroqueer theory and practice, in Ma.
Meaning in Ma and Connections
I have recently read The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (2017) and Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta (2020). These are two texts, one about trees and one about Indigenous cultures questioning how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation and how we may be able to do things differently. I enjoy reading, but I often find more joy in discovering meaning in my thoughts that appear between texts. The shared message between these books is that we need to be more in tune with the world around us, make meaningful connections, and support our communities and stories from those around us and our elders from the past. We need to create time and space to be with each other in a more embodied way; we can find meaning in the spaces and the gaps in the inbetween-ness of Interaction as described in my previous blog, ‘Being With’ and within and between the Cavendish Spaces of our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
“People today will mostly focus on the points of connection, the nodes of interest like stars in the sky. But the real understanding comes in the spaces in between, in the relational forces that connect and move the points”. (Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 2020)
People, like trees, need each other; we need to focus on the ‘points of connection, the nodes of interest’. as mentioned in the above quote by Yunkaporta (2020). I find it valuable to be a part of an online community; it is currently one of the few spaces I can access where I can connect with people. The connections I am making are essential and allow me safe spaces to explore conversations with others, mostly about monotropism, the neurodiversity paradigm and neuroqueer potential, as described in Connections and Becoming. However, communities can be formed in many different ways. Just as trees can form woodlands and forests and protect each other, people also need to create more caring communities that work with the flow of people’s needs and interests and not against them, which can liberate them so they can thrive.
There is an ever-expanding network of online spaces that are evolving and branching out like a rhizome and connecting with other networks where more nodes and connections form and spiral out again and again from each point; this is repeated endlessly, and we have just added another with our Discord Server to explore Neuroqueering Learning Spaces. A rhizome, as conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and studied in my previous blog, ‘Middle Entrance,’ is a network with no central point of origin. It also has no dependency on other networks and can keep evolving and expanding.
Rhizomatic Potential
David Gray-Hammond and I discussed the concept of the Autistic Rhizome last year. The rhizomatic potential of online spaces enables people to explore different topics and interests, including neuroqueering learning spaces, a community project by Autistic Realms and Stimpunks, which we hope will transform future learning spaces. As more people show an interest and more connections are formed, the online rhizome keeps expanding, adding new potential and even more possibilities. Katie Munday came up with the concept ‘Neuro-Anarchy” and with David Gray-Hammond they co-wrote the blog “Neuroqueer neuro-anarchy and the chaotic self (2023). They suggest that most people are arriving in these spaces ‘by existing on the fringes of their communities and challenging the politics within them’. This appears to be the case for the majority at the moment, but also a significant proportion of the people who have been in contact with us via Stimpunks are parents and professionals who do not identify as neurodivergent themselves but are advocating for their children or those families they support professionally, they want a safe neuro-inclusive space so they feel less alone and more connected with others that hold the same ideals and beliefs.
It has been shown that single trees planted alone often grow less well and live shorter lives than those amongst other trees in a community. Trees connect through a nourishing network deep in the soil. They use this network deep underground to communicate and care for each other. Wohlleben shares how he discovered that trees could communicate by scent, share food, and nourish other trees struggling or in danger. We can learn much from forests and trees and what Simard et al.(1997) called the ‘wood wide web’ in our human communities and within the rhizomatic online networks of the emerging community exploring neuroqueering. Gray-Hammond (2024) reminded me that “we are not all trees”. Humanity is rich and diverse, and we all have our ecosystems that need to coexist and grow.
Gray-Hammond (2024), in response to my first draft of this article, wrote;
“Our mind can be thought of as rhizomatic. Each neuron is connected to the others through intricate paths. Each experience and thought is linked to the others. Each point is like the atoms of the wave. My human life takes form. Neuroqueering allows me to change the behaviour of that rhizomatic thought structure, moving freely between solid, liquid, gas, Earth, water, and air.”
This builds on the quote from Yunkaporta (2020) and emphasises that the only restrictions on neuroqeer potential are our minds; we are all human, but what that means for each individual is unique and can be transformed. Buddhist Teacher Daisaku Ikeda suggests that we could imagine life as a wave. A wave takes form within the ocean, follows its path, and eventually crashes into the shore before returning to the ocean. To neuroqueer is to consider what we may need to do to change the wave’s trajectory within us; this may mean going deeper within ourselves and allowing our bodyminds to expand further. Online spaces offer opportunities to make connections, form friendships and be with people in ways that will enable freedom to be and communicate in ways that work for them and in ways that fit into their day and lifestyle, with no demands and no expectations — other than to be accepting of differences and be kind.
The concept of creating primordial Cavendish Caves spaces, which we are exploring in our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project, are spaces of quiet contemplation. They offer a chance to reflect and recover; for some people, this may involve listening to music, watching TV programmes on repeat or online gaming. For others, the Cave space may provide an opportunity to embrace the sound of silence. For me, it is within this silence that neuroqueer potential may be found, the bodymind replenished and new ideas created. It is within a silent space filled with Ma that I can breathe in safety and comfort and breathe out and expand ideas, to shapeshift and transform myself and my thoughts,
I see ‘Being With’ as a process of coming together. Deleuze’s (1987) concept of the line of flight allows us to explore meaning between created spaces and through our connections with people. It is a way of moving beyond and between the gaps of the often preconceived ideas of what ‘being with’ people may mean and what our roles as educators and care facilitators may be. ‘Being With’ creates an opportunity for an embodied sense of belonging and wonderful, meaningful shared experiences. ‘Being With’ is a process of coming together and being full of potential. ‘Being with’ means being willing to explore the unknown and benefit from Cavendish Learning Spaces (cave, campfire, and watering hole), as we have described in our previous blogs.
Yunkaporta (2020) suggests that we must diversify, connect, interact, and adapt. “Diversity is not about tolerating differences or treating others equally and without prejudice. The diversification principle compels you to maintain your differences…you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and sustainable.” I think this is important for neuroqueering; we need to seek out differences, work with diversity and connect with others to benefit from the potential that can bring for people in their learning spaces and those facilitating learning spaces.
According to Yunkaporta (2020), “Interaction is the principle that provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. This principle facilitates the flow of living knowledge. You must transfer knowledge (and energy and resources) with as many other agents as possible, rather than trying to store it individually.” The final guideline they suggest for sustainable communities is adaptation; within a neuroqueering context, this is not about adapting to the society that we already have that is breaking so many people; it is not about adding more accommodations into children’s care plans. There has to be a point where if a child needs so many accommodations, people should start to question whether the setting or provision is even suitable; nobody wants to feel different and like a burden. If there is no defined ‘normal’, there will be no need for accommodation, everyone will be different, and everyone’s needs will be met.
Instead, I feel Yunkaporta’s idea for adaptation is more about adapting ourselves, allowing ourselves to change and transform. For this, we need safe spaces online and in the community. Yunkaporta describes this as taking on the role of a “strange attractor’ to “facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system” In my mind, this all has excellent neuroqueer potential to explore further and ties in beautifully with Bettin’s (2021) work where he suggests that we need to “Grow competency networks and catalysts rather than leadership and leaders — to get things done and distribute decision making to where the knowledge resides.”
Collective Flow
Connections create communities, and as described in my previous blogs, communities can generate a collective flow and potential for people to ‘become’ and for society to be shaped by us for our future. For flow to happen, there has to be intent, and people have to want their intention to lead somewhere positive, even if that endpoint is the unknown, in Ma. Knowing and feeling the energy and potential of others who also want to explore neuroqueer learning spaces is exciting. Not having an exact end destination or prescribed route to get there is still more exciting. We will all have to neuroqueer ourselves to begin reimagining education and consider neuroqueer learning spaces.
Looping back to Yunkaporta’s (2020) Sand Talk and connecting this with Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies, we can learn a lot from focusing on the things people usually ignore and being able to discover the unknown potential in learning spaces. We need to neuroqueer ourselves from within to have an effect and even begin neuroqueering learning spaces.
In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker describes what it means to embrace neuroqueering as a verb. In learning spaces, we need to reinterpret, rethink, redefine, and reimagine what those spaces may look like and the journey required to facilitate them. I am considering if we can use Nick Walker’s template for designing autism courses as a template for designing neuroqueer learning spaces. It has made me think of the differences between being neurodiversity affirming and having everyone’s needs met and then neuroqueering those spaces to enable unknown potential to bloom; once you are free from the reigns of neuronormativity, cognitive and somatic liberty and learning potential are endless.
Yunkaporta talks about being a ‘strange attractor’ (2020, pg82), which feels to me as if it is in line with neuroqueer ideology. To be a strange attractor in education means taking a risk and creating chaos. There is enormous negativity around words such as anarchy and chaos, but as Yunkaporta reminds us, chaos means no structure, like a rhizome, and anarchy means ‘no boss’. He asked if we could have a structure without a boss or management. If the current education system is causing so much harm, we must move away from it and create something new. We need to make something where words like average, typical, and even divergent become irrelevant, as everyone will be diverging to and from each other, constantly evolving and expanding.
Walker (2021) posed a question that I think we need to consider for our learning spaces:
“What if both the education of youth and adults and the training of educators included the explicit understanding that no neurocognitive style is more “correct” or “normal” than any other and that the work of mutual accommodation is both an essential part of a proper education and an essential preparation for being a participating citizen in a civilised society?”
Family is important, but not everyone has a loving family that they can depend on, and even if you have a loving family (for which I am grateful), then found or chosen extended family and friends can still play a hugely important role in life. Whānauis a Maori term for an extended family group, as written by Jorn Bettin & Ulku Mazlum(2022). “Whānau is much more than the Western notion of “family”. It is a deep connection, a bond that you are born into that no one can take away from you.”
There is so much we can learn from other cultures. Adults and children need time and space to co-create Whānau in our neuroqueer learning spaces. As Bettin (2021) reminds us, “In many indigenous cultures, children with unique qualities are recognised, are given adult mentors with similarly unique qualities, and grow up to fulfil unique roles in their local community, connected to others with unique knowledge and insights, perhaps even in other communities. If we are embedded in an ecology of care, we can thrive and share the pain and the joy of life.” (Bettin, 2021)
The Magic Is Open
The magic of neuroqueering is open to everyone; it embraces the neurodiversity paradigm and celebrates the endless variation and potential of unique body-minds in our society and beyond as we learn from other Indigenous cultures. To neuroqueer is to become neurodivergent and to expand, unfold, create and recreate continuously. To neuroqueer is to explore the magic between spaces and discover possibilities that can emerge from Ma and be transformed into new spaces. We hope that by providing some ideas for neuroqueer learning spaces and opening up conversations about what neuroqueer learning spaces may be like, we will continue to expand the community rhizome. We are adding another node to the rhizome by opening up conversations for others to contribute so we can create more possibilities.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism (London), 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Simard, S. W., Perry, D. A., Jones, M. D., Myrold, D. D., Durall, D. M., & Molina, R. (1997). Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field.Nature, 388(6642), 579–582. https://doi.org/10.1038/41557
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities.Autonomous Press.
Wohlleben, P. (2017). The hidden life of trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World. William Collins.
Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. HarperCollins.
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.
What would it mean to build a hearth that welcomes not only diverse minds, but diverse ways of sensing, relating, and becoming across human and more-than-human lives?
This blog emerged from a conversation with Stimpunks during our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project planning, where we explored what it truly means to create spaces that sustain neurodivergent people, rather than simply include. We found ourselves returning to the image of the hearth, the Cavendish Campfire, a warm, relational centre where ethodivergence is held, honoured, and co-regulated. This piece reflects on ethodivergent hearth building as a neuroqueer practice of community care and more-than-human kinship.
Ethodivergence speaks to the richness of relational, sensory, and affective difference. It’s about how we move, connect, feel, and attend, how our rhythms and responses don’t always align with dominant norms. Drawing from Ombre Tarragnat’s (2025) concept of ethodiversity, this expands neurodiversity beyond the human brain into relational ecology, honouring the full range of our inter-being ways with the world across all species of living and non-living things.
More-than-human refers to the interconnected ecology of life that includes not just humans but also animals, plants, weather systems, seasons, fungi, rivers, stones, moon cycles, and sensory environments. It’s a way of recognising that our ways of being, knowing, and healing are shaped by more than just other humans and that these entanglements are vital, not peripheral.
The hearth is a warm centre, a gathering space, a site of return and regeneration. It holds history, presence, and possibility, it’s where people tend the fire together, share stories, and learn from one another, a rhythm of shared becoming. To build ethodivergent hearths is to make room for new forms of kinship, ones that honour slow attunement, deep presence, and non-normative ways of sensing, being, and knowing. It’s an invitation to live otherwise, interdependently, in communities shaped not by conformity but by relational integrity and care.
Beyond its physical form, the hearth also holds sensory and emotional resonance, it is a centre, part of the basecamp, that may not be an actual campfire fire or a room, but a feeling. Sometimes it lives in the softness of our favourite weighted blanket, the texture of moss under our fingertips, the familiar paths we may return to in the woods or our local park, the stillness shared with our chosen family and pets. In ethodivergent hearth building, these sensory and relational centres become vital anchors, places to return to without performance, where our difference is held with warmth rather than shame or stigma.
Cavendish Spaces and ethodivergent hearths are built slowly, relationally, through co-regulation, sensory consideration, and access intimacy. There is room for fallow rest time, stim time, quiet time, time that bends to our bodyminds rather than our bodyminds being twisted into neuronormative time constraints that lead us into burnout and mental ill health. These are spaces that reject extraction and standardisation and instead, they welcome divergence and difference through shared rhythms, bodily autonomy, and relational consent, psychological and sensory safety. Cavendish spaces are like ethodivergent hearths for the soul where people gather not to fix or scrutinise, but to sit alongside, validate, and co-exist.
To think about and create ethodivergent hearths is to imagine what it means to design for difference, to centre care and safety for those of us often left out in the cold, on the edges and in the liminal spaces. It’s about making space for monotropic attention, sensory flow, and nonlinear emotional rhythms. It’s about pacing together through co-regulation, glimmers, multi-modal ways of communicating and attuned silence. It’s about giving permission for slow grief, spiralling joy, or messy recovery.
Ethodivergent hearth building means:
Not centring only human and normative ways of relating and knowing.
Honouring sensory, affective, and relational exchanges between people and natural or material environments.
Acknowledging that Autistic, disabled, and neurodivergent people often form deep attunements with non-human kin, sometimes more sustaining than traditional social models.
It might look like mutual aid networks, or shared rest practices, it might mean building more flexible time-structures that go beyond our clocks. This kind of hearth holds our queertime, our difference, our interdependence, without trying to fix, mask, explain, or justify. It’s a way of living gently with difference, and tending the fire that can help sustain us.
Ethodivergent hearth building invites a shift from thinking of community as exclusively human, towards something more ecological, embodied, and expansive, a shared hearth where difference is relational, and care ripples outward beyond species boundaries. Ethodivergent hearth building is a neuroqueer practice of relational community rooted in presence, divergence, and shared becoming where everyone can thrive.
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.
In the online memorial event (24th June 2025) to celebrate the philosopher and writer Helen De Cruz’s life, Georgi Gardiner who hosted the session asked the question:
“If Helen designed a campus/university, what would it look like?”
I didn’t know Helen personally but have been deeply inspired by her writing and art. I wanted to write something to honour her work and share some ideas about how her philosophy has enriched our ideas for learning spaces.
(It is a coincidence the Learning Space Project I developed with Stimpunks is called Cavendish – this is unrelated to Helen’s set of beautiful illustrations for The Blazing-World, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Stimpunks’ Cavendish Space is named after Henry Cavendish, a scientist from the 1700’s).
Awe, Wonder and Different Ways of Knowing: Cavendish Space and Helen De Cruz
There’s something powerful about creating space for people to think and learn in their own unique ways. Whether it’s the sensory-friendly Cavendish Spacethat is the foundation stone of Neuroqueer Learning Spaces that I have developed with Stimpunks or the thoughtful, creative work of philosopher Helen De Cruz that may be shared around our campfires; both invite us to imagine how learning and knowledge can work for everyone.
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 neuroqueer theory 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 , deeply 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.
Stimpunks’ Cavendish Space is named after Henry Cavendish, a scientist from the 1700’s who lived a very unique life. He was quiet, sensitive to sound, and followed his own routines, but he also made important scientific discoveries. For us he’s a symbol of what’s possible when people are allowed to think and learn in ways that work for them, when Autistic people are free to follow their monotropic passions and flow. Cavendish is proof that deep focus, quiet curiosity, and different minds can lead to wonderful things and ways of connecting with our true selves and others. Cavendish Space is all about creating places where people can follow their interests, feel safe, and get absorbed in what they love with people they trust, where there is also time to regulate, re-set and re-energise by ourselves.
Cavendish Space is a welcoming, flexible environment designed for everyone but especially beneficial for neurodivergent people to explore their interests. It honours sensory needs and bodily autonomy, creating a foundation where individuals can learn, reflect, and connect in ways that feel natural and safe. This approach aligns closely with Helen De Cruz’s work, which like Cavendish Space is grounded in the values of curiosity, care, and deep respect for expansive and divergent ways of thinking and being.
In her book Wonderstruck, De Cruz explores how moments of awe and wonder can open up our minds, inviting us to ask questions, be curious and see the world differently. For her, wonder isn’t just an emotion it is magic. Magic is wonder and power, it’s a vital way of thinking, of paying attention, and of forming meaningful connections with ideas, people, and the world around us.
Honouring Helen De Cruz’s work within Cavendish Space is about more than referencing her work, it’s about embodying the values she brings to philosophy and the wider world. She offers a deep respect for wonder, a commitment to epistemic humility, and a belief in the richness of diverse minds. Her philosophy invites us to reimagine thinking as something playful, relational, and open to all, not limited by conventional rules or hierarchies.
By weaving her influence into the fabric of Cavendish Space, we affirm that curiosity, care, and difference are not only welcome, they are essential to how we learn, grow, and imagine new futures together and can inspire awe and wonder.
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 quote, “Attention without feeling, is only a report.” from Mary Oliver — Upstream: Selected Essays (2016) resonates with me as a deeply monotropic person. It summarises what happens whenever I find myself pulled into a moment so fully and immersively that the boundary between noticing and becoming begins to dissolve, and time melts away. These moments will be different for everyone, they happen when our monotropic bodyminds are pulled towards something, it returns when I am in woodlands and when I see moss, fungi, flowing water.
There’s something about moss, it’s soft resilience, its quiet deep greenness of a million shades, the way it persists and thrives on forgotten land and inbetween stones, on forest floors and brings old things back to a new life. Moss doesn’t demand to be seen, but when we do look, really look, really feel, and really give ourselves time to sense and be with moss, it offers a different kind of presence and an almost different kind of knowing and connecting and Autistic Joy.
I am exploring the idea of moss as an invitation to consider monotropism, ethodiversity, and neuroqueering our spaces as a way of creating belonging. Drawing from the work of Popova, M. (2023). The Magic of Moss and what it teaches us about the art of attentiveness to life at all scales, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and others, alongside my emerging neuroqueer and holographic ideas, I am considering if moss (like mushrooms and water which I have written about before!), could offer not only a symbol and metaphor for neurodivergent thriving but a methodology to reclaim creative practice and ways of being that resists the fast, extractive modes of dominant neuronormative culture.
Monotropism (Murray et al, 2005) is a neuro-affirming theory of Autistic experiences. It describes a tendency to enter flow states of deeply focused attention, to move inward towards just one or a few connected interests, sensations, or patterns at anyone time and to dwell there. This is not just a cognitive style; for myself being monotropic it is a whole-bodymind sensory way of being. For many Autistic/ADHD people, monotropism underpins and helps to make sense of our sensory experiences, ways of learning, communication styles, and creativity. If you are Autistic / ADHD the theory of monotropism may resonate and help explain how you process and relate to the world.
In environments dominated by neuronormativity ,which are structured around multitasking, high demands, quick-switching of attention tunnels, and surface level engagement, monotropic people can be often misread as being obsessive, inflexible, or disengaged. If we reframe this deep-focus not as deficit, but as capacity and energy, it offers a more affirming lens of Autistic experiences as being a form of attunement with attentional resources, a way of giving attention feelingly and holistically.
For me, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss(2003) exemplifies monotropic attentional ecology. Her writing spirals and notices what others may overlook such as the micro-patterns of bryophytes (group name for any non vascular, rootless plants like moss) , the webs that cover forest floors and emerge through cracks and over sleeping objects. Kimmerer just doesn’t describe moss she enters into relationship with nature, her science and writing is guided by care, her noticing is lived, it feels very monotropic much like Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2023).
To attend like this, monotropically, with feeling and deep attention is not just to extract facts, but to stay present with complexity, multiplicity and connect with nature and our environment rhizomatically, completely and become deeply absorbed in greenness and texture. As Mary Oliver reminds us, “without feeling, attention becomes mere reporting“. For some monotropic people their perception may offer a different kind of report / blog writing/ creative experience, one filled with sensory details and emotional resonance, there are no barriers between the body and the environment, the moss, nature.
Nature Positivity: We Are Not Outside the Ecosystem
Nature positivitywas a term only recently introduced to me on Barbara Melville’s writing course. It made me think about how as a neurodivergent person I am not disconnected from nature but often deeply and almost painfully attuned to it, inseparable, we are a part of nature. We do not need to be brought back into the natural world; we need to be recognised as already being part of it. Our sensory experiences, our flows of attention, our non-normative experience of time, memories and rhythms, aren’t deviations from a natural or ‘normative’ baseline, they can be seen to be part of biodiversity and our wider ethodivergent ways of being (Tarragnat, 2025).
Ethodiversity is a term developed by Ombre Tarragnat (2025) to describe the variability of behavioural and existential styles within and across species. Ethodiversity invites us to move beyond a purely neurological model of divergence and into a more-than-human framework of difference. It reminds us that there are many ways to live, relate, and thrive not only for humans, but for all living things.
Moss embodies ethodiverse wisdom. It rejects hierarchy and human time, it forms webs, it’s value is in its interconnectedness and the spaces inbetween. We can learn from all non-human beings and living things, we are all interconnected and if we give our selves more time to tune in to the natural world we could perhaps can expand our ways of thinking, not just as humans for humans, but as part of nature. We can help to recreate a world where every living thing can thrive (non-human and human). It creates a space to think about our relationship with the wider planet we are in, the importance of environmental sustainability, not just focusing on our human-centric needs (Solarpunk ideas).
In this sense, moss, like many other aspects of nature, becomes a kind of kin, we are interdependent. I think lots of us are trying to survive from the edges, in the liminal spaces, trying to grow in shade and darkness through cycles of burnout. I live in the dark-mode, underground settings of Discord servers, it is where I feel at home, inbetween the reality of life outside my front door and where I really feel safe and a sense of belonging. Moss grows across ruins, rooftops, gravestones and inbetween the places and objects people normally tread over or overlook. It softens hard spaces and it survives and thrives on it’s own terms, in it’s own way much like our online community spaces.
Mushrooms and fungi, like moss, offer a metaphor of hope and an opportunity to think about how we can create a life from capitalist ruins which invalidates and overlooks neurodivergent needs and potential. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the Worldreminds us that life persists in the ruins of Capitalism, not in spite of disruption, but through it and can flourish through adversity. Like matsutake mushrooms thriving in disturbed forests, neurodivergent people often live in the edges of systems, through adversity, in fractured spiral time, outside of centralised blueprints and neuronormativity, however hard these systems try to contain us and pressure us to mask. This resonates deeply with monotropic ways of being, our ability to create our own Autistic rhizomes and communities, how our senses sometimes form unlikely but radically resilient connections in overlooked spaces.
Tsing’s emphasis on precarity, interdependence, and multi-species assemblages mirrors the sintered ways neurodivergent communities form: not through uniformity, but through shared friction and feeling. Our creative practices become more than self-expression, they are part of what Tsing calls the “arts of noticing,” where we document life not for control or mastery, but as a way of staying with complexity and multiplicity and to create shared meaning. It is a way to honour our entangled, emergent, sensory ways of being as ecologically vital. It reminds us that even in fragmented systems and broken ground, we can reclaim ourselves, find connection, and grow into something whole, be together and create something new.
Sintering
In Sintering: Neurodivergent Community Building(2025), I explored the metaphor of sintering. Sintering is the process through which individual snow grains gradually begin to bond. Tiny necks form between them, bridging the gaps, making the snowpack stronger, more resilient, and more resistant to collapse.
In Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead(2025), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers this as a metaphor for collective becoming. “Sintering is a joining,” she writes, “It is a communal transformation that creates a fabric of former snowflakes bonded to each other… Sintering is bonding, it’s building coalitions with your neighbours” (p. 18).
This analogy resonates deeply with my own experiences of the neurodivergent community and the Autistic rhizome. Many of us begin our journeys alone trying to discover our real identity under the layers of masking and internalised ableism, realising we are caught in systems not made for us and that is why life has felt SO hard! Discovering I was Autistic was life changing for me. In my 40’s I suddenly had access to a whole world of new vocabulary to describe my experiences. It has been through connecting with other neurodivergent people through various online communities and sharing stories that my life has begun to make more sense. When we find each other across difference, across shared experiences, we can start to build bridges, rhizomes. Through conversation, care, and solidarity, we can begin to sinter.
Neuroqueering from the Liminal
InNeuroqueering Liminal Spaces (2024), I wrote about the spaces where categorisation breaks down between identities, between disciplines, between states of being. Neurodivergent people often find ourselves in these thresholds, not quite fitting in, living in the margins, I am suggesting that liminality can be a fertile and exciting place to neuroqueer and evolve from.
Moss is liminal, it exists between. It mediates, connects and holds and brings things together. In many ways it could be seen to reflect what neuroqueer creative practice can be, something that isn’t fixed, something that moves away from dominant frameworks, it is textured and radically relational and multidimensional.
To write from moss is to write from the in-between spaces, attune to our environment, to feel safe and at home. It is to resist linearity, binary ways, hierarchy and to embrace multiplicity, to value the process of becoming and connecting.
Moss offers a model for neurodivergent thriving, one that honours attention with feeling, presence without performance and growth without urgency. It teaches us to notice differently, to value slowness, to dwell in the cracks and embrace neuroqueering,monotropic felt time.
Our creative practice can be moss-like, it can be sintered through our shared stories and experiences. To attend with feeling and lean into monotropic time can be a lifeline for many people who are experiencing burnout. It is a way of reclaiming our authentic ways of resting and being.
Monotropic attention, a different ecology
In the Writing the Dawnworkshop I took part in this week, Barb Melville encouraged us to begin our writing with a nature-positive message. She asked us, not just what we notice, but why it matters. For me, moss represents a kind of quiet kinship, it is soft, slow and often overlooked and fills me with sensory joy. As a neurodivergent person, I see myself reflected in its persistence, its texture, its need for quiet, shaded places to thrive. In protecting nature and moss we are also protecting our sensory environments, the liminal spaces, and the overlooked ecologies that support neurodivergent ways of being and feeling safe.
This reflection can become call to action which Barbara invited us to think about. It enables us to think about reimagining ways of connecting, not just with nature but in the way we create our communities, educational spaces and care settings. We need to design practices that honour differences, not pathologise. Like moss, neurodivergent people thrive with more time and space, gentleness and connection in spaces like our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
My home is in the mossy, liminal spaces that we create together, in our reaching toward one another. Our strength is in radical resilience and sintering, our refusal to face the world alone, valuing interdependence and not conforming to harmful systems based only on neuronormative values.
Radical resilience does not come from hardness or conformity, but from mossy softness, it comes from flow and fungi like rhizomatic community networks and the cumulative strength of many unique connections forming bonds to offer support to each other. As Bruno Lataur summarised, “Learning to live in the ruins of capitalism means learning to do without the notion of projects and, finally, moving on to an attentive description of situations that cannot easily change scale…..With her dog Cayenne, Donna Haraway had proved how far one could take analysis of relations between species. With her matsutake (mushroom), Anna Tsing proves that we can go still further, modifying not only the landscape to be described but what we should expect of meticulous description.”
Mossy, messy, monotropic ways
Nature-positive writing what ever the focus – mushrooms, moss, trees, water can be a radical act of reclamation, helping us grow cultures and communities that are ecologically aware. Neurodivergent spaces are rhizomatic, soft, mossy, fluid, flowy, webby and spirally and entangled. They allow space for dwelling, noticing, interdependence and omnidirectional growth.
‘To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into light.’ pg 155 (Tsing)
Let’s keep growing spaces that honour slowness, texture, and sensory ways of knowing and feeling, where monotropic ways of being are not just accepted, but celebrated. Spaces where infodumping, deep focus, stimming, and sensory richness are recognised as meaningful ways of connecting and building interdependence between humans, non-human beings and our wider environments.
Monotropism lets us sink into and experience the world with our full-bodymind presence, not just noticing, but flowing and feeling with the world in ways that bring resonance, validation, and a sense of belonging. Mary Oliver wrote “Attention without feeling, is only a report.”, for monotropic people how we use our attentional resources helps to explain everything, it is how we experience life in all it’s joyful mossy, messy ways.
“Next time the bus is late, take those waiting minutes to look around for signs of life….. amidst the noise and fumes and elbowing crowds, there is some small reasurance in the moss between the cracks.” (Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, pg 105)
References & Further Reading
Kimmerer, R. W. (2003). Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Oregon State University Press.
Oliver, M. (2016). Upstream: Selected Essays. Penguin Press.
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. https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/144936
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
Tsing, A. L. (2021). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Haraway, D. (2007). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. In Springer eBooks (pp. 117–158). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4
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.
I believe that the DEEP (Double Empathy Extreme Problem) is at the heart of all the systemic ableist issues we have in our education, social and healthcare systems. The lack of an embodied presence and connection between people being together as humans is causing harm. It is leaving marginalised people further on the edges and at an even further disadvantage socially, financially, politically, and in every other dimension possible.
(Original blog written August 2024, edited March 2025)
DEEP Disconnect
The disconnect, lack of understanding and gaping hole where a sense of belonging should be is creating huge mental health problems, especially for our neurodivergent young people who are the focus of my Autistic Realms work. Many young people are now left with no accessible education; they are slipping through the cracks of a broken education and mental health system and getting stuck between systems that value neuronormativity and ignore or misunderstand neurodivergent needs.
We don’t want people to be ‘falling through the net’, feeling like they are ‘treading water in unchartered seas’, feeling adrift’ and ‘weathered like sea glass’ (Shepherd et al., 2024). As Gray-Hammond (2024) has highlighted, this impact stretches far beyond the young person; it can break family and professional relationships in multidimensional ways, and it is painful. Helen Mirra (conceptual artist) responded to my last post about DEEP with her insightful thoughts:
“I almost sense a space of opportunity being described — that while being in double empathy tangles unaware can be disorienting, that an awareness of the double empathy problem could rather have a potential for orientation — with a consciousness that Double Empathy needs to be recognised and acknowledged — maybe something like DEAP — Double Empathy Awareness Potential? Practice?”
I love trying to harvest something positive, to try and find potential in the in-between of things, the shattered systems, and our fragmented relationships. I feel eternally optimistic that things can change for the better; we can work towards radical inclusivity and embrace neuroqueer theory to find a space to breathe, re-connect, deconstruct and reimagine new possibilities. If we are embodied, tuned in, and have wide-open sensory gates, we can acknowledge the empathy gap and create a new plateau, a new space to rise above the disconnect. “Queer space is a space of somatic and cognitive discovery, made possible by the space between. It is through that discovery that we make connection with others possible” (Gray-Hammond, 2024).
Monocultures
I have had a few amazing and inspiring meetings this week, one with Jorn Bettin (AutCollab) and another with Dawn Prince-Hughes (CASY), both alongside Ryan Boren (Stimpunks). We all feel the DEEP gap of disconnect due to the domination of neuronormativity. Jorn has captured this within his writing about monocultures. Dawn is exploring similar avenues with the groundbreaking work being carried out by the Cultural Autism Studies Programme at Yale (CASY). Dawn has described this as people being;
Unable to see shades of lived nuance and constitutionally lacking organs of exquisite sensitivity, the truncated, neurotypical gaze rakes over the bodies of (neuro-holographic) life — whether designated autistic, animal, any other undesirable caste, or nature itself — they assess them only in terms of cost, threats, or utility. They can’t or won’t see them.
Modern, connectively truncated influence has driven an obsession with homogeneity and increasingly raised a maniacal rejection of inward and outward difference to a hellish art form. The lives (and deaths) of sentient, (neuro-holograhpic) beings is foundational to daily life and underscores the danger of using gifts evolutionarily tooled for a better, more compassionate future are pressed into service for the structure we were put here to change. (Dawn Prince Hughes, 2023) *neuro-holographic = my edits.
Ecology of Care and Transforming Spaces
Jorn Bettin (2024) wrote about Life in the compost heap of industrialised monoculture. He echoes my experience of burnout caused by systemic unmet needs. Jorn agrees that neurodivergent and other marginalised groups are often left out, alienated, and at the bottom of the compost heap. However, we can help people thrive; we can change our personal and institutional landscapes. Jorn, through their work with AutCollab, suggests that we need to embrace an ecology of care.
The emergence of ecologies of care is the emergence of a beautiful diversity of human scale cultural species and organisms in the cultural compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult. (Jorn Bettin, 2024)
Dawn suggests;
We can start a new, inclusive movement by leading the way back to the primal awareness, the connective wisdom, we were born with, because we are first and foremost, in all ways that matter, neuroexpansive minds. (Dawn Prince Hughes, 2023)
Through our discussions this week, we realised our vision and aims for Neuroqueer Learning Spaces (Boren and Edgar, 2024), reach far beyond education and the small communities we are already involved with. There is an energy-driving created serendipity that is dancing between our shared spaces and bringing like-minded people together. We all have our own stories and history, and for many neurodivergent people, we all have layers of trauma that live within our bodies, spreading back over generations and impacting our sensory way of being in the present and impacting our ways of moving forward. As David highlighted by drawing upon Nick Walker’s (2021) work;
The master’s house represents a dominant paradigm. In the context of neuroqueer theory, this would be the pathology paradigm. A paradigm within which deviation from normative embodiment is seen as disordered. The liminal represents a space outside of the paradigm. It is a pinnacle of queer space in that its potential is one of unbounded queening; in the liminal, the very meaning of being human may be called into question. (Gray-Hammond, 2024)
Helen Mirra (2023) expands on this idea of human potential in her concept of holotropism, which I have explored in my previous blogs. She writes;
“To be holotropic is to have wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence. A sense of wholeness occurs through both of these processes — less consciously in hyperfocus, more consciously in coherence”. (Helen Mirra, 2023)
David Gray-Hammond is bringing the conversation further forward and exploring my original idea of the potential of Neuroqueering in the In-between. He shares that;
The queer liminal space allows for connection and expansion because there is no axis to follow. There is no map to trace. The pathology paradigm seeks to arborify rhizomes, reducing them to roots and radicles. In liminal space, lack of structure allows for the organic development and joining up of rhizomes. It is in the liminal where minority silos come together. To the master’s house, it is an existential threat. To the oppressed minority, it is a place where what we were taught to be impossible becomes not only possible but probable. With infinite liminal space and infinite time, queer improbability becomes queer realisation. That which we are told can not happen is subverted into existence. (Gray-Hammond, 2024)
Neuro-Holographic
When people connect at a deeper level, going beyond any social, cultural, racial or gender differences, meaning can be found where words are not needed; we can be with each other as human souls. To have ‘wide open sensory gates’ is to be innately hyper-sensitive and hyper-empathetic. However, I do think everyone can work towards this regardless of differences in neurology. We can all become more embodied through somatic practices and having a willingness to open your sensory gates, to de-armour, un-mask and by being prepared to be vulnerable when it is safe to do so. Being embodied enables deeper more meaningful connections to form, it creates resonance and vibrations, vibrations are pregnant with energy, and energy is transformative, it has neuroqueering potential.
The word neuro-holographic has emerged from within the neurodivergent community, “a buried treasure of our culture that used many hands to lift up into the light”. As Dawn suggested, ‘We belong to the term, rather than the term belonging to us’.
So, what does neuro-holographic mean?
Dawn helped draw some light on what neuro-holographic means in the CASY Facebook Group (March 2025) and wrote, “So many autistic people are aware of, and affected by, the reality that there is no division between them and their environment — whether it is the person next to them, the dog running in the park, the plant in the windowsill, or the star at the edge of the universe.” Dawn shared a quote from Brian M Sabourin, which helps to explain the link between neuro-holographic thoughts and Autistic Physics a bit further:
“According to quantum physics a particle vibrating due to your sound when you speak can affect a molecule inside a star at the edge of the Universe instantly. This phenomenon is known as quantum entanglement. The greatest illusion of this Universe is the illusion of separation.” (Brian M Sabourin, Jan 2025)
When Dawn, Ryan and I discussed the term neuro-holographic, there was an instant shared resonance and affinity with the word, we were all on the same plane, the same plateau. We all experienced and felt validation from a shared understanding of quantum entanglement through our experiences of being Autistic and a different sensory system, feeling tuned into a wider energy with the environment around us. We shared a rhythm and way of being as neurokin, and the double empathy problem that persists in so many other spaces was somewhat dissolved – an experience echoed by many within the thriving CASY community group and within our online events, too. There is a sense of togetherness, belonging, and a shared intention to work against harmful neuronormative practices and instead to work together towards transformative neuroqueer possibilities.
To embrace being neuro-holographic is to embrace opening up spaces within our souls so we can work together and transform society and support each other.
Bodies Without Organs and The Plane of Immanence
In their work, One Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari discuss the idea of a body without organs. The body without organs is not a hollow body; rather, I see and feel that it is the plane where dwelling and possibility are, a kind of “liquid matrix” (Theoretical Puppets, 2021); it is primordial, a place where you aren’t restricted by your organs (literally your body in real terms, i.e. freedom of movement) or the organs (machines) of society. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that networks and connections are made possible through the body without organs as it liberates you from Capitalism and the knots of neuronormativity. It allows people to be free from control, free to follow our desire lines, free to be affected (experience affects).
To use the analogy in the webinar delivered by Theory & Philosophy (2020), to be a body without organs could be interpreted as us being similar to an unfertilised field. If no seeds are planted, if there’s no relational pull or movement, then the field will likely remain a field; it will never transform, it will never produce an outcome beyond itself, and there will be no crops. This could be positive or negative for a field, but when we talk about people, we don’t want people to remain static, unchanged or stuck or to stagnate, and we don’t want other people and systems to be deciding our use and destiny without our consent or input.
We need people to have agency, autonomy, and control over their own lives, enabling them to keep on transforming and being responsive, organically moving with the seasons and inviting natural processes. We need an attunement with nature so we can all morph in time and space organically, embodied, and as whole beings.
Returning to our primordial ways of being and being intune with the natural rhythms of the world around us allows people’s sensory gates to expand, it enables created serendipity to form further connections, adding luminescent nodes to the autistic rhizome. When connections develop in shared holographic space/time, it also creates deeper (perhaps, holographic?) connections of shared meaning, the potential for safe unmasking and bodily liberty; it enables neuroqueering potential and ideas to form more creatively.
In our meeting, Dawn, Ryan and all perceived and felt the word neuro-holographic at a deep inner level, in our core, it was a ‘felt’ understanding more than a cognitive or intellectual resonance. I am considering if using Deleuze and Guartari’s idea of being “bodies without organs” could help people understand the experience of being neuro-holographic. Neuro-holographic is a felt perception, an open ‘One-All’ that is perhaps more likely to be experienced when people are not tied down by neuronormativity and they have unravelled themselves and lived wholly in the in-between spaces.
To become a body without organs you need to have safe spaces and time to explore, you need to want to actively seek and find alternative ways, new paths, new plateaus and horizons and to change yourself and the wider systems, planes and spaces around you. There is definitely an element of privilege in finding safe spaces and communities to be able to do this and also to have the time to explore. If I hadn’t resigned from my teaching career, I would very likely have not had capacity to even dip my toe into reading about all this, I would have likely been left feeling very stuck. Exploring takes time, and it also takes time to neuroqueer your bodymind, My neuroqueering journey has been rhizomatic, chaotic but I have also found coherence as I connect with others on the plane of immanence as human souls all trying to find meaning in places where perhaps words and concepts are not even needed or relevant and cease to make sense.
The Plane of Immanence, as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (1994), discusses philosophical concepts as “fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another”. They continue to explain;
They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of the dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the ways introduces a powerful Whole aining open, is not fragmented; an unlimited One all….it is a plateau, it is a plane of immanence of concepts’ (they also stress that the plane of immanence is not a concept). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p35)
On the plane of immanence, there are rhizomatic networks or connections, becomings and energy. In their book One Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari explain that on the plane of immanence;
“There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds. There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. … We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a plan(e) of organization or development).”
I have intentionally used a hyphen between the words neuro and holographic to represent the in-between of neurology and holographic ways of being and experiencing the world, a pause for tuning in, an embodiment, a space of Ma. I have resisted using the word “neuro-holographism as that could imply another new theory or concept. Neuro-holographic is not a concept; rather, I feel like it IS the plane of immanence on which neuroqueer theory breathes and lives; it is the ‘wave that rolls and unrolls’ other concepts (Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy, 1994, p36). To resonate with the term neuro-holographic is to resonate as souls, with your core self, perhaps with your spirit.
To be part of society is to be part of a community and to live meaningfully. It means connecting as human souls and having a sense of belonging and a sense of togetherness with others. For many neurodivergent and marginalised people, this lack of connection and shared meaning is where disconnect and further stigmatisation often hits and breaks people. For a radically inclusive neuroqueer future, we need radical acceptance and to embrace liminal spaces, the plateaus, the sometimes painful caves, pleats, and caverns where we may become stuck in our lives. As David suggests,
The liminal space, then, is not a place of stagnation, but one of growth and evolution. It is the site of plasticity in the world’s communities. All communities exist within liminal spaces, much as planets exist in empty space. A community was once a nothing that became a something, liminality provided the potential to become.
Being Neuroholographic and Embracing Liminal Space to Neuroqueer
To be neuro-holograpic, to resonate with holotropism and embrace neuroqueer theory means that the weight of neuronormativity may be felt so painfully that it feels like it is piercing through the bodymind. This light can flow, it can move between the smallest of spaces and opening and shines through liminal spaces to offer some hope in previously dark void spaces. It allows light to enter Ma, a space where we can pause and breathe and act upon neuroqueer thoughts that can transform our bodyminds. It can enable new nodes on the rhizome to form from within our communities as we connect with others and transport us to new planes, new spaces to become and keep on becoming. Once DEEP is dissolved or there is a bridge or line of flight to rise above and support understanding of the differences between people, it allows for responsiveness without imposing on each other to change into something we aren’t (we don’t go from a barren field to a crop field ). We can transform within ourselves and create our own destinies by creating new paths. The impact of our inner transformation can lead to even more connections and so further expand the rhizome towards other bodies without organs to keep evolving, transforming and becoming.
Once we grasp and intentionally embrace the plateaus of liminal spaces, the smooth spaces, then the DEEP gap can dissolve and melt away, rising above the liminal disconnect. We can take a breath, be responsive to our environment and our relationships, and (in theory) ‘become bodies without organs’ to transform further. We can become neuroqueer in a phenomenological sense. Instead of the machines of capitalist society filling the spaces, if we embrace neuroqueer theory through the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs idea, then we can actively choose to subvert and queer the direction we travel in and neuroqueer ourselves and the spaces and relations around us, neuro-holographically.
Holographic Bodyminds
Dawn, Ryan and I tried to define the word and experience of being neuro-holographic, but we couldn’t; we just shared excited nods and stimmy responses of mutual agreement and joy at our connection. Perhaps the beauty lies in the way that the word neuro-holographic can only be felt or experienced in a luminescent, undefinable iridescent way, which creates a holographic energy of light and vibration that expands and ripples beyond our singular bodyminds to connect with other bodyminds, it creates multiplicity from the friction between us as humans. Connecting with others enables an expansion of our community rhizomes in exciting ways full of radical inclusive neuroqueer possibilities.
Dawn Prince Hughes works with Dr. Roger Jou, who founded CASY (Community Autism Socials at Yale) in 2014. This has now transformed into CASY (CULTURAL AUTISM STUDIES AT YALE). CASY offers a new way forward for Autism studies; they are a community that is truly pushing beyond the boundaries of normative hegemony but also stretches the potential of Neuroqueer Theory. CASY is based on a completely egalitarian and neuro-holographic model that stretches worldwide and involves many languages and cultures! If you’d like to find out more, please check out the links below:
Shepherd, J., Sutton, B., Smith, S., & Szlenkier, M. (2024e). ‘Sea‐glass survivors’: Autistic testimonies about education experiences. British Journal of Special Education. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12506
Theoretical Puppets. (2021, March 28). Gilles Deleuze on Gilbert Simondon, Synesthesia, and The Body Without Organs [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2yyW3ml6nM
Theory & Philosophy. (2020b, August 4). What is the Body Without Organs? | Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari | Keyword[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irrNcRPGr8Q
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.
“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.
A behind-the-scenes look into the collaborative workflow between Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms) and Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) as we write about Neuroqueer Learning Spaces (NQLS) and continue our neuroqueering journeys, connecting with awe-inspiring people and discovering new ideas to explore along the way.
Liminal Spaces
Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) and I are neuroqueering ourselves and the spaces we work in as we write about NQLS. We met online in 2022 in the liminal spaces between various online neurodivergent communities, both constantly feeling on the edge of things, even in the most neuro-inclusive settings and groups we could find.
We are both autistic and multiply neurodivergent and deeply passionate about working towards radical inclusivity. Due to our lived experience as parents and professionals, we have seen first-hand the harm that the heavy burden of cisheteronormativity, neuronormativity and neuro-essentialism is causing, especially to neurodivergent people. Normativity is breaking people’s mental and physical health and severely destroying the tremendous potential that is inside everyone. We need to find caring spaces to connect with others, to create an ecological system of care (Bettin, AutCollab), a responsive space that enables authenticity and values the potential of everyone, regardless of neurology, disability, race, gender or any other intersection that is marginalised.
Liminality
by Carrie Newcomer (2021)
So much of what we know Lives just below the surface. Half of a tree Spreads out beneath our feet. Living simultaneously in two worlds, Each half informing and nurturing The whole. A tree is either and neither But mostly both.
I am drawn to liminal spaces, The half-tamed and unruly patch Where the forest gives way And my little garden begins. Where water, air and light overlap Becoming mist on the morning pond.
I like to sit on my porch steps, barn jacket and boots In the last long exhale of the day, When bats and birds loop in and then out, One rising to work, One readying for sleep.
And although the full moon calls the currents, And the dark moon reminds me that my best language Has always emerged out of the silence, It is in the waxing and waning Where I most often live, Neither here nor there, But simply On the way.
There are endings and beginnings One emerging out of the other. But most days I travel in an ever present And curious now. A betwixt and between, That is almost, But not quite, The beautiful, But not yet.
I’ve been learning to live with what is, More patient with the process, To love what is becoming, And the questions that keep returning.
I am learning to trust The horizon I walk toward Is an orientation Not a destination And that I will keep catching glimpses Of something great and luminous From the corner of my eye.
I am learning to live where losses hold fast And grief lets loose and unravels. Where a new kind of knowing can pick up the thread.
Where I can slide palms with a paradox And nod at the dawn, As the shadows pull back And spirit meets bone.
Our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project is born largely from trauma, grief and a shared passion for challenging, deconstructing and re-imagining what our education and healthcare system could be like if people were prepared to unlearn and unleash their bodyminds from the weight of conforming to neuronormative, socially constructed ways of being. The pressure to ‘fit in’ is real and intense, and neuronormativity is limiting for everyone (not just neurodivergent people).
The pressures and barriers to education and health care we have endured and are still battling against are heavy. It has left us, like so many other people in our situation,feeling broken and ‘weathered like sea glass’ (Shepherd et al.,2024). As part of NQLS, we have created a community-driven NQLS Manifesto and an NQLS Open Framework of Guidance. We are also in the process of developing anti-behaviourism resources to help parents/carers and professionals and those they support to challenge harmful practices, such as (Applied Behaviour Analysis) ABA and (Positive Behaviour Support) PBS. These WHY SHEET resources are free open license and can be edited and used to help self advocate for young people who may be facing barriers accessing education.
If you value this project, please consider signing our WHY Sheet endorsement page along with many other parents/carers and professionals to help give confidence, agency and autonomy to those needing these resources.
Where my voice has often felt dismissed as a parent, it is often validated, listened to and sought as a professional. Trust is an issue. Different voices are trusted by different people, in different places. Safe spaces are needed to develop trust, and time is needed to be with people to gain trust. Reaching out and connecting takes courage; there is always a doubt as to whether you are really in a safe space where you can truly trust and be trusted. There is a vulnerability in admitting things aren’t working, exploring what is under the surface, finding people to connect with who share your struggles and ethos, and having a shared hope for change to find a way out of difficult situations. We need spaces where we feel safe and where there is trust so that we can unlearn and relearn and continue to neuroqueer.
As a white professional person, being a part of both the neurodivergent parent/carer communities and the professional education and healthcare communities, I am aware I am in a unique and relatively safe position of privilege to even write and explore this topic. Enforced hierarchy and the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) are at the root of so many difficulties and often result in the voices of neurodivergent or disabled people being dismissed. At best, voices may be silenced, and at worse, lived experience can be so deeply misunderstood and misinterpreted it can lead to accusations of not parenting ‘right’, being sent on courses to try and make families conform to neuronoramtive ideals, or in some of the most severe cases we have seen lead to accusations of neglect, FII and safeguarding concerns (Shona Murphy).
Trust, safe spaces, and community are vital to NQLS and our own personal neuroqueering journeys. When the world feels unsafe, you need to create your own spaces and make your own connections. We think creating neuroqueer learning spaces is one possibility that is worth exploring.
Can we trust the space you offer? Can we trust the words you utter?
Can we trust the time decided? Can we trust the form provided?
Can we trust your singular view? Can we trust the treatment we receive from you?
Can we trust the way you perceive? Can we trust you to sit, listen and receive?
Can we trust you not to leave another dent……in us….again? Can we trust the system you’ve decided and provided … will it actually be in our best interest… … with our knowledge and guide?
Can we trust you to understand that sound is once, twice, three times as loud? Can we trust you to understand that light, ‘that light’… there is burning, burning our eyes?
Can we trust you to provide the space to breathe? Can we trust you to understand that our senses are more involved- BIGGER? Can we trust you to let us move away from you… that you cause the trigger?
Can we trust you not to deplete our hard fought for energy and vigour? Can we trust you to listen when we say we are tired…. and let us leave the room?
Can we trust you to give us time to form……form our own words…..it our way and not yours?
Can we trust you not to constantly correct when we misspell or stutter? Can we trust you to say what you are going to do and not just assume?
Can we trust you to understand that your correction……. may only be correct for you?
Can we trust you to not magnify difference and constantly question our existence? Can we trust you to leave us and let us decide?
Our work has taken place in the dark forests of online communities, “Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity”. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, Element, Discord and a myriad of other interconnected platforms that people are seeking because they are “spaces where depressurised conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.” The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet — OneZero via The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. This dark forest metaphor fits nicely with the NQLS idea of primordial learning spaces such as our Cavendish caves, campfires, and watering holes.
** Caves are spaces for quiet reflection, introspection, and self-directed learning.
**Campfires are spaces for learning with a storyteller — teacher, mentor, elder, or expert.
**Watering holesare spaces for social learning with peers.
Intermittent collaboration = group work punctuated by breaks to think and work by ourselves.
The golden thread of being a “space holder” has been inspired by Kay and Dan Aldred (2023) and is woven through our NQLS ideology. It is within the forests of online community spaces that the role and value of being a virtual “space holder” is valued. It allows the exploration of thought and the creation of connections within connections — rhizomes within rhizomes.
As a community, Stimpunks has a unique way of working; they have created and are nurturing the role of ‘space holder’. This has enabled me to safely explore, take risks and expand my ideas of how workspaces can be transformed. Stimpunks is a living example of how a neuroqueer learning space can work and is working .
Stimpunks offers various online platforms and spaces in their local community. They offer;
watering holes for collaborative work and parallel play,
campfires to learn from others & share resources
caves to rest, and have independent time to reflect.
Our Journey
Ryan’s IT skills have been embraced and expanded as we collaborated with people across various countries and communities, merging projects and ideas, which is something we will be continuing to develop. This is in line with AutCollab’s NeurodDiventures project where our “evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human”. NQLS aim to create radically inclusive, non-hierarchical spaces that are safe, nurturing environments for divergent (and neuroqueer) thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction. We believe NeuroDiventures is a wonderful structure for NQLS to build upon.
This has been, and continues to be a fairly intense, immersive roller coaster of a journey. Ryan and I are both Autistic, multiply neurodivergent and monotropic. We dived into this project with our entire bodyminds, leaving little space for other work, which has sometimes been tricky to navigate and manage, switching attention tunnels as monotorpic people is exhausting. Our shared interest, passion and seemingly endless capacity for neuroqueering our bodyminds and education has made our workflow fairly prolific. Whilst Ryan has created new additions to Stimpunks neuroqueering webpages, I have infodumped my thoughts as I have read through 100’s of pieces of work (academic research papers, blogs and books) related to the barriers of education our young people are experiencing and ideas for more humane progressive neuroqueering ways forward. Ryan has been diving into his own reading lists and also sharing with the Stimpunks team along the way. We have a mountain of materials; what we have reflected upon and written about so far is only the tip of the iceberg. We are trying to weave in emergent thoughts as we go along, creating a neuroqueering tapestry of ideas which is reflected via Stimpunks website and our blogs and social media posts.
Writing
As with all projects, there have been hurdles and obstacles to overcome and crashes along the way where we have just become ‘stuck’; this has been no exception. The ebbs and flows of our own mental and physical health have had an inevitable impact. We have had to find ways between our time zone differences, family demands, lifestyles and different workflow patterns to try and resolve things along the way. One of our biggest stumbling blocks was the actual process of writing. This was a significant issue given that our project needs to be reflected online through words and the spaces between our words to bring meaning to others.
We needed to find ways to write and work together in a shared space, which involved neuroqueering my own ways of working and collaborating. It has made me reflect upon previous projects, taking the positives and negatives and bringing some of those ideas into our shared new online spaces and neuroqueering them in the way we communicated and socialised in multiple online watering hole spaces where we discussed what we had learnt from others in our meetings (campfire spaces) and reflected by ourselves (in cave spaces) in our own niche constructed sensory dens at home.
The progress of my IT skills have been lying dormant since the late 1990s. Ryan is a former WordPress and Automattic lead developer with a very efficient workflow system fully embedded into Stimpunks running of their organisation. I worked as an early years and primary teacher in the UK, supporting those with profound and multiple learning disabilities. I learnt the importance of listening and being there even when verbal words aren’t used, the value of connecting in shared spaces, and the potential of guiding learning by following and building on children’s personal interests to deepen their learning through play to provide more meaningful experiences. These were all valuable experiences for NQLSs, but my tech and writing skills were not developed beyond the needs of class planning and report writing.
Collating vast amounts of research and creative writing using either my trusted Word or Google Docs was not working for Ryan; it was proving to be a huge barrier to any successful collaboration. While our independent work was carried out in its own fairly reliable way, our collaborative chapter for Nick Walker’s upcoming new Neuroqueer book, which we hope to submit a chapter towards, was very stuck.
I defaulted to multicoloured pens and paper and laboriously retyped my thoughts onto my laptop, transferring them to our websites, whilst Ryan was magically transforming our many conversations on a live stream via Stimpunks.
Due to the distance of around 5000 miles separating us, these conversations took place and continue to take place across multiple online platforms, often simultaneously, as we move between our many open tabs of Discord, Element, Word- Press, Facebook, Twitter and a myriad of other apps and spaces within the same conversations, often resting in HyperBeam for co-regulation and to share music and videos with other Stimpunks family peers, creating a sense of togetherness and belonging.
Whilst the conversations continued to flow, our collaborative chapter remained static as a 20k word draft of my stream of consciousness lay in Ryan’s inbox with hyperlinks to a vast amount of research to try and validate and justify (some of) my thinking (some of it is just my thoughts, and I am hoping they may resonate with others?!).
We called on the support of a member of the Steampunks team to help bridge the gap, but it soon became evident we needed an entirely different system to work. Being a tech person at heart, Ryan needed Markdown as a part of his creative writing method (Markdown gives documents semantic structure without specifying formatting at all). We have now transferred our working documents to GitHub, enabling a flow to resume, and I am quickly seeing the benefits of adopting Stimpunks workflow thinking and moving on from 1997. (However, I still use my multicoloured pens and paper to make notes as I go!)
We are approaching an extended deadline date for Nick Walker’s chapter submission, but with a neuroqueering workflow in place and the evolution of our ever-expanding Cavendish online spaces, we are making progress, hurrah!
Onwards
Living within Stimpunk’s myriad of primordial Cavendish Cave, Watering Hole, and Campfire spaces in the forests of the online community is proving to be an epic journey. I have found spaces where I can finally breathe, explore, have some me-time, continue my own neuroqueering journey and intermittently collaborate with others. I feel fortunate to be meeting some amazing people along the way. I am having fun, diving between and venturing out from the edges of liminal spaces to create and explore neuroqueer learning possibilities with others who share this passion and know the potential of Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.
If you want to learn more, here are some codes to Markdown and plain text and the workflow thinking they enable.
If you’d like to learn more about collaborating, please contact us via Stimpunks. (PS, we accept submissions and collaboration from everyone in all formats and languages, including handwritten work using paper and pen, voice recordings/ podcasts, photography, art and all forms of Alternative and Augmentative Communication……all welcome, Mardown skills are not a requirement!).
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.
Neuroqueer Learning Spaces Webinar — A summary and reflection
Neuroqueer Learning Spaces is a community project led by Ryan Boren (Stimpunks) and Helen Edgar (Autistic Realms). More information is available on Stimpunks’ website.
To support this project and open up further discussions about neuroqueering education and learning spaces, David Gray-Hammondhosted a live webinar, “Explore Neuroqueer Learning Spaces,” with Dr. Nick Walker on 6 May 2024. This is available to watch via David’s Emergent Divergence website and on Facebook & YouTube.
All quotes are taken directly from this webinar unless otherwise stated.
What is neuroqueering?
Nick began the webinar by reminding us that ‘Neuroqueer theory is an extension of queer theory into the realm of neurodiversity”. Everyone can neuroqueer. Neuroqueering is not limited to people who are innately neurodivergent and also queer; neuroqueering is open for everyone to explore.
Neurodivergent people can neuroqueer and diverge themselves into ever-expanding neuroqueer ways of being. Neurotypical people can engage in neuroqueering to diverge their bodyminds further and liberate themselves from socially instilled norms.
Neuroqueering is an act; it has intent; we can neuroqueer how we live and how we experience, interact, engage and respond to the world around us. Within our neuroqueer learning spaces, we are exploring how neurotypicality, which is socially constructed, can be queered to liberate bodyminds. As part of our Stimpunks Learning Spaces project, Ryan and I are also exploring the benefits and potential of embracing an embodied education within our neuroqueer learning spaces. An embodied education is also something that Nick expanded upon and stressed the importance of as she shared some examples of her practice within this webinar.
“Neuroqueer theory is about creative neurodivergence” (Nick Walker)
What if…?
“Neurotypicality is limiting” (Walker). Neuroqueering involves engaging with life and opening up possibilities. Neuroqueering expands potential, questions boundaries and subverts normality. It enables us to explore, to try, to be curious; it opens up questions and the potential of ‘What if…?’
The potential of ‘What if?’ is often found in children’s excitement, awe and wonder as they playfully explore the world around them. They may excitedly run up to you with a twig or shiny stone they have found, wanting to share that moment of finding something that fills them with joy and curisoity and is reflective of the pure magic of being alive and discovering the wonder of the world. Over time, the awe of finding the ‘Marvellous in the Real’ (Grand, 1978) often becomes eroded in people due to the neuronormative expectations that weigh down on our bodyminds to behave, act, talk and even only show joy in certain ways.
Nick and David expanded on this by referring to Nick’s writing about hand movements and stimming, which is also explored in Neuroqueer Heresies (2021, p183–191). There are often enforced school rules based on neuronormative values and expectations for having “quiet hands”, doing “good sitting”, doing “good looking” (making eye contact with the teacher in class) and demonstrating attention skills in specific ways. The use of Positive Behaviour Support(PBS) plans and Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) to reinforce certain behaviours and actions, such as ‘quiet hands’ has been proven to cause considerable harm and trauma, especially for autistic people as it aims to suppress and eradicate their innate need to regulate by stimming and expressing themselves authentically. There is a comprehensive resource list about the harm of behaviourism on Stimpunks website. We are also creating “Why” sheets to help parents and professionals advocate and provide neurodiversity affirming alternatives to support young people.
Many other questions were posed throughout the webinar, including:
How do we queer neuronormativity?
How do we queer our bodyminds?
What does this look like in a learning space?
(We hope to expand these webinars so we can loop back to some of these questions and the comments raised in the text chat. )
Systems
Nick and David briefly (it is a huge topic!) talked about systemic oppression and agreed that education needs a system of some kind. We can not just destroy the education system; it is not practical or realistic. Some parts can be used or at least transformed. We can neuroqueer the education system.
People need structure; routines are as important in neuroqueer learning spaces as they are everywhere else. Routines provide feelings of safety and reduce anxiety. More flexibility is needed for people to be responsive and open to change and transformation. We need to ask what our routines look like, what purpose they have, and what use are they? How responsive and adaptable are they? Are they created in collaboration with others?
Inspired by the quote from Audre Lorde (1984), “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, Nick said that we don’t need to burn the system down; instead, we should:
“Queer the system, queer the tools and create new tools.” (Nick Walker)
David highlighted that contemporary approaches to research looking at the oppressive structures of our education system are often reactionary, suggesting systems are torn down; however, this could be a barrier in itself to neuroqueering. If you are focused on tearing down the system, you are not neuroqueering. Neuroqueering is not destructive; it is transformative.
To neuroqueer is to transform, not destroy. (Helen Edgar)
Based on the work of Stafford Beer’s cybernetic principles, Nick suggests that it is not necessarily the idea of systems and hierarchy that are the problem; instead, it is the way neuronormative ideals currently enforce them. We need more flexibility and collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches.
To what extent are some parts of the current system repurposable?
Can we remake the tools, and create new tools?
What do we want to dismantle, and what do we want to reshape?
Space
How can we queer our physical learning spaces to free the body?
Nick shared her experiences as a professor, and she emphasised the importance of being a facilitator of learning. She shared with us how she values adopting a collaborative approach to learning where students are not passive recipients but are co-creators. She asks her students to question what knowledge they bring to their learning space so everyone can learn together.
Nick provides a liberating neuroqueer space for students to express their ways of sharing the knowledge they have gained and collaborating with others. Not enforcing neurotypical ways of demonstrating t ways (tests or enables people to express themselves in ways that suit them, whether through art, poetry or other forms of self-expression. This way of working leans nicely into the courses Nick delivers and facilitates. It would be interesting to know what neuroqueer learning spaces could look like for other subjects, younger age groups, and those with different needs and interests.
Based on her own experiences, Nick suggested a few practical ideas for neuroqueering the physical layout of learning environments. Even small changes can make a difference; instead of having desks in rows, she suggests having circles and a variety of other places that enable freedom of movement and embrace different learning styles.
In our Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project, Ryan and I are looking at the potential of Cavendish Space based on the three primordial learning spaces advocated for by David Thornberg.
“Cavendish learning spaces are based on flexibility, interaction, movement and the role of embodied responsive experiences. There is no learning without the body. The boundaries of traditional neuronormative classroom settings not only restrict embodied experiences but lead to disembodied experiences and can cause harm”. (Boren and Edgar, Stimpunks, 2024)
Cavendish spaces are psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction. They have a golden thread of an embodied education running through them, and there is endless scope for learning the potential of the body, mind and soul. (Boren & Edgar, Stimpunks, 2024)
”Enabling autonomy of movement and acknowledging the different ways people learn best through their bodies needs to be considered. It is essential to allow people to move around, pace, stim, sit on the floor, and adopt positions and movements that are comfortable for them and have the freedom to change”. (Nick Walker)
This is only the start of our journey exploring neuroqueer learning spaces. If you are interested in our project and would like to learn more, please get in touch with us at Stimpunks.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate” — Carl Jung.”*
Thank you to David Gray-Hammond for hosting this event and thank you to Dr. Nick Walker for your support and the fabulous webinar.
* a quote often attributed to Carl Jung (nb. there is no reference we can find for this but Dr. Jung did say: The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Christ: A Symbol of the Self, Pages 70–71, Para 126.)
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.
