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  • Folding Worlds: Monotropism & Neuroqueering Attention

    Folding Worlds: Monotropism & Neuroqueering Attention

    by Helen Edgar — More Realms

    “The whole world is only a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it endows itself with representation of the enclosed world.” — Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (1993, P. 24).

    Thoughts…..

    I am exploring how Deleuze’s ideas in The Fold entwines with the theory of monotropism and the lived textures of Autistic perception and attention through a neuroqueer lens.

    What if monotropic attention and perception is folded, what happens when we unfold?

    What if Autistic time moves in spirals, not lines?

    Folding Worlds

     “The world is an infinite series of curvatures” 

    Sometimes, when I’m deeply absorbed, following the rhythm and flow of an idea, a line of flight, or feeling sound ripple through air the world seems to bend inward. Time loosens, boundaries blur and my mind folds into the moment until it feels like my thought, body, and world are all moving together as one continuous curve.

    Deleuze, in The Fold, imagined reality itself as endlessly pleated, an intricate fabric of curves and contours where inside and outside are never truly separate, each perception and experience establishes ‘folds in the soul’. (p. 112) As Autistic people our sensory systems are more porous, each life, each experience, each moment, is a fold within this larger flow of existence, all entangling together with the environment around us.

    As an Autistic person, you may feel like I do, that you live in the liminal spaces, the in-between. The world doesn’t divide neatly into subjects and objects but moves almost as if it is a single and multiple simultaneously, perhaps holographic , a folded plane of becoming.

    Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005) is the theory that explains how Autistic and ADHD experience is shaped by deep, focused attention. Instead of our attention spreading thinly across many things, our attention folds inward, gathering tightly around may be just one or a few single streams or tunnels of interest or sensation at any given time. It’s not a limitation, it’s a different rhythm, it is how we experience flow and can be a really energising and regulating experience when we are looped into something positive that helps us. Our minds tend to curve toward what holds meaning, creating a rich, textured world from within that fold where our attention dwells.

    Where neurotypical attention might skim across multiple channels of attention, monotropic attention lingers and has capacity to stay focused for long periods, especially when in the right supportive environments. Monotropic attention inhabits, it listens deeply and it is in these moments of flow, the world is not distant as some may think, rather the world is inside us, rich and intense. It is like it is folded through our senses, our language, our movement to such intensity we become-with our surroundings.

    Unfolding

    “A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern”. (P.6)

    Folds can be fragile, like origami. When too many demands pull at once, such as sensory input or social expectations, it is like the fold can’t stretch without straining and something has to give before it breaks. Overload, fragmentation, and burnout emerge when the world presses too hard against our natural curvature and forces the fold to carry more than it has capacity for. We may experience more meltdowns or shutdowns and over a longer period could enter a full burnout. Burnout, in this sense, isn’t failure of our body minds; it’s like a wound in the fold. It happens when we are forced to unfold too quickly, without time or gentleness and without the right support.


    Liminal Folds

    The space between inside and outside, that delicate threshold in the liminal zone, is where I live and perhaps many other Autistic people live too. It’s the edge of sensory, emotional and social attunement, where the world can feel both too near and too far at the same time. Safety, trust, and co-regulation allow the fold to breathe, it gives space to expand and recover. To unfold safely, enables us to unmask ‘to increase and grow’.

    When others meet us at our own tempo and in our own authentic ways, our fold can open slowly, naturally, toward a node of connection with others. It strengthens the vulnerable liminal spaces in-between, it can be empowering and gives us energy to follow that curve of a fold and see where it takes us, to resist neuronormative linear ways of being.

    Neuroqueer Curvatures

    To neuroqueer is the act of living otherwise, resisting the norms that demand sameness, linearity, and temporality. It invites us to honour different ways of moving through the world: curved, recursive, and rhizomatic.

    Through this lens, embracing your Autistic/ADHD monotropicness can become a neuroqueer ecology. It is a way of being that disrupts the assumption that we must flow in straight lines and contort ourselves and fold and contort ourselves to fit into heirarchies and systems. To embrace the liminal and the Autistic fold is an act of quiet defiance, a refusal to flatten complexity or to perform productivity and neuronormative expectations at the expense of our own well-being.

    Our monotropic deep focus isn’t a deficit, it’s an orientation, it is a different way of being and living. To embrace flow and see where the fold takes us. It reveals a world that thrives on depth and immersion rather than breadth. To move with with the flow of our monotropic attention, along the fold is to inhabit curved time, the slow, spiral rhythm of a mind that folds toward what matters most to us.

    Folding Time

    For many of us, life doesn’t move in a straight sequence. It curves back, loops, and gathers around moments of attention. This is folded time, neuroqueer temporality or what others have called mad time, time as felt texture rather than moving like clockwork.

    When I am in deep flow, the past and future dissolve into the intensity of an ever expansive ‘now-ness’, when the fold releases, I spill gently back into a wider space, I always need time to recalibrate, to find the edges again and to find something to loop and back hook into before I can move on.

    To live through folded time is to understand that attention has its own seasons. Some days are for spiralling inward, composting thoughts and gathering energy and others may be for stretching outward, connecting, creating and reaching new nodes.

    Folding with the World

    “Perception establishes the folds in the soul” (P. 112)

    In the folds of Autistic attention and perception lie whole worlds of knowing and becoming. Through monotropism and neuroqueer theory, we can reimagine these folds not as constraints, but as living spaces of creativity, connection, and a different temporality.

    Within these curvatures, difference becomes depth, a way of sensing the world through texture, rhythm, and relation rather than conformity. Our attention moves like tidewater, folding and flowing inward to nourish the self and unfolding and rippling outward to meet the world again.

    When we are allowed to move at our own pace, these folds open into more realms of possibility, spaces where curiosity can root, where safety and belonging can take form.

    To live within the Autistic fold is to recognise that we are not separate from the world, but continuous with it, each of us a unique curvature in the greater flow of being. By embracing our folds and natural flow of monotropic attention, we can honour the quiet sensory moments, our rhizomatic ways of being, and the beautifully entangled ways we come to know, feel, and create within our selves and connect with others.

    Reflections

    How does your attention fold?

    What might unfold if your natural rhythms were met, not resisted?


    References


    Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. U of Minnesota Press. (quotes from Continuum edition, The Athone Press, 2006).

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

  • Ethodivergent Hearth Building: A Relational Neuroqueering Community Practice

    Ethodivergent Hearth Building: A Relational Neuroqueering Community Practice

    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.

  • Neuroqueering Monotropic Time: A short summary

    Neuroqueering Monotropic Time: A short summary

    Autistic/ADHD people are more likely to be monotropic and resonate with the theory of monotropism. Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser developed the theory of monotropism in the late 1990s. It is typically described as a neuro-affirming theory of Autism, but I think it is also a temporal mode.

    I am considering whether being monotropic is not just about using attentional resources differently, but could also be about experiencing time differently due to how we use our attentional resources.

    If you’re monotropic you may notice that:

    Time is immersive and fluid.

    Transitions may feel disruptive because they pull us out of durational temporal coherence and flow.

    How you use your attentional resources may feel like being in a tunnel, and the world outside of that tunnel may feel like it is melting away or completely disappearing.

    Temporal markers (like deadlines, calendars or clocks) may lose meaning or become really stressful and cause intense dysregulation.

    Transitions may feel disruptive because they pull us out of durational temporal coherence and flow.

    Autistic people often have to mask to fit in, we may struggle to be understood due to differences in our lived experience with other people. This mismatch of ways of experiencing the world is not just a communication gap and difference, as described in the Double Empathy Problem (Milton 2012) it may also be a Double Temporality Problem. Perhaps the world and the majority of people run on neuronormative time (temps), but monotropic people live and experience life more in felt experiences (durée) – in fluctuating flow states, a different internal rhythm that is unique to each person.

    The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) distinguished between two kinds of time:

    Temps: spatialized, quantitative, clock-measured time.

    Durée: lived, qualitative, and immersive duration. This is the rhythm of consciousness itself and FELT experiences.

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

    Monotropic time is FELT. It is immersive, expansive, flowy, omnidirectional and deeply rhizomatic. Monotropic time is like a temporal home.


    I believe we need to release ourselves from the grip of neuronormative time. To neuroqueer time is to subvert expectations of how you think you should be living according to the unwritten rule book of society’s norms set out by the majority of the population. Neuroqueering time isn’t just for neurodivergent people; it could benefit everyone. 

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

    Let’s dwell in our natural flow and rhythms, actively resist neuronormative time, find spaces to neuroqueer time further in the liminal spaces and embrace our own unique rhythms and monotropic time.

    Further reading and a more in-depth exploration can be found in my blog:

    Bergson, H. (1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.

    Bergson, H. (2022). Creative Evolution. Routledge.

    Edgar, H. (2025, April 21). Neuroqueering Time: Bergson, Deleuze, and Monotropism (an exploration). Autistic Realms. https://autisticrealms.com/neuroqueering-time-bergson-deleuze-and-monotropism-an-exploration/

    Edgar, H. (2024). Quantum Neuro-Holographic Thoughts from a Liminal Space. Autistic Realms. https://autisticrealms.com/quantum-neuro-holographic-thoughts-from-a-liminal-space/

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

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

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



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

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

    By Helen Edgar – Autistic Realms

    In my previous blogs, Monotropic Time and Neuroqueering Temporalities (2025) and Quantum Neuro-Holographic Thoughts from a Liminal Space (2024), I explored how Autistic and other neurodivergent experiences often unfold outside of neuronormative frameworks. I am AuDHD and deeply resonate with the theory of monotropism. Through the lens of monotropism, I experience time as a multidimensional holographic spiral, immersive, shaped by deeply focused attention tunnels and being engaged in fluctuating states of flow. I am considering if our sense of time perception as monotropic people is different as we find ourselves on the edges or in the in-between liminal spaces of society, trying to fit into neuronormative time frames, which go against our innate, authentic ways of perceiving time.

    I am on the edge of a new monotropic interest (time perception) and want to loop back to some of the thoughts I have been exploring over the past 2 years about the neuroqueering potential of Deleuzean philosophy and bring in some of the main concepts from the philosophy of Henri Bergson who I am just beginning to explore. Both thinkers profoundly reimagined what time is. Rather than seeing time as an objective, linear sequence of moments, like many neurotypical people may perceive time using conventional clock-time and calendar time, both Bergson and Deleuze highlight that time is not linear; it is experiential, fluid, and heterogeneous in nature. Both of their concepts of time seem to fit into how many neurodivergent people experience time and my own experience of time.

    I can only write about my own experience of time as an AuDHD, monotropic person. My time is not linear; it stretches, loops, pulses, collapses, and dilates in tune with my fluctuating energy, capacity and attentional resources, depending on my environment and access to flow states. My time is measured in sensory experiences, moments and patterns rather than calendar events. I find it really hard to recall specific memories and events unless I have a photo to ground something. I have only recently begun to realise that the theory of monotropism may also help to explain how my recall and memories may be different from those of other people who are not Autistic/ ADHD due to a more fluid sense of time. I find memories really hard to pinpoint as my memories are often not based on time but on sensory experiences and patterns of thoughts, events and situations. It can make joining in conversations hard with others who don’t experience this, and I am only just beginning to understand why that may be, for me at least!

    “Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.”
    ― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

    Post-Human Theory and Being Part of the Environment



    I resonate with Ombre Tarragnat’s post-human theory, where they discuss Subverting the autistic bubble metaphor (I): the Umwelt Theory (2025). Autistic people are not in a bubble where we can’t be reached and can’t reach out. Jakob von Uexküll’s (2010) concept, the Autistic Umwelt, has traditionally been described as Autistic people being bounded, bubble-like, and even sealed off from the world; unapproachable or unable to be a part of the ‘real’ functioning world where neuronormativity rules. This view is painfully inaccurate and really harmful.

    I like and need my time alone, in my cave space, but what may seem like an Umwelt for me is more like a porous, shimmering neuro-holographic bubble, shaped not only by perception but by constant affective, sensory, and cognitive entanglement with my environment. I am not an ‘other’ in my own bubble, separate from real life. I feel I am deeply entangled and part of the environment, not separate from it, but living in it. I am in a constant process of folding and unfolding from the liminal in between spaces of my bodymind, trying to navigate the reality of society’s expectations for how I should be and my day-to-day life as a mum, trying to juggle family needs, work needs, and manage my own Autistic ways of being.

    As Autistic/ADHD people, we may be, as Tarragnat suggests, practising “worldmaking where the boundaries between the subject and the world dissolve”. In many ways, we have to create our own spaces and live in our own timeframes to survive (and hopefully thrive)! I think it was James Baldwin who said, ‘The place we need does not exist, we must create it’. Tarragnat, in their blog,  From the Autistic Umwelt to Autistic Worldings, drew my attention to the work of Stacy Alaimo (2016), who, in line with post-human feminists, suggests that Autistic people are not   ‘in the world…. but we are of the world’. We need safe spaces to be our authentic selves and be of the world and accepted.

    My relationship with my environment is fluid, porous, and deeply relational. This profoundly shapes how I live, perceive, and manage my time. I connect strongly with the theory of monotropism, yet I also see value in layering a post-human and neuroqueer lens to help frame my temporal experience.

    As an Autistic person, subverting neuronormative time often feels essential for my survival, even more so now after repeated cycles of burnout. I need to find ways to help prevent another burnout cycle or at least lessen the impact, if I can. I feel I need more space to honour my own monotropic rhythms and energies, more space to go with my flow, rather than against it, as described in my recent blog about my Map of Monotropic Experiences, Stuck States vs Flow States.

    I believe this kind of release from the grip of neuronormative and capitalist time isn’t just for neurodivergent people; it could benefit everyone. By neuroqueering ourselves and time, anyone and everyone can break free from the neuronormative time structures that bind us all to capitalism and restrict our lives in so many ways. Instead, we may be able to live more attuned to our own temporalities and more at one with our environment and those around us.



    Bergson’s Durée and Monotropic Time

    Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser developed the theory of monotropism in the late 1990s. It is typically described as a neuro-affirming theory of Autism, but I think it is also a temporal mode. I am considering whether being monotropic is not just about using attentional resources differently but could also about experiencing time differently due to how we use our attentional resources, and this impacts us.

    If you’re monotropic you may notice that:

    • Time is immersive and fluid.
    • How you use your attentional resources may feel like being in a tunnel, and the world outside of that tunnel may feel like it is melting away or completely disappearing.
    • Temporal markers (like deadlines, calendars or clocks) may lose meaning or become really stressful and cause intense dysregulation.
    • Transitions may feel disruptive because they pull us out of durational temporal coherence and flow.

    I think this may be why neurotypical expectations around punctuality, deadlines or “moving on” often feel unnatural and sometimes even painful for monotropic bodyminds. I am suggesting these aren’t signs of being too rigid or an innate dysfunction; instead, they may reveal a mismatch between temporal systems, different ways of perceiving time.

    Monotropic people may innately value and resonate more deeply with continuity and internal flow. Neuronormative time, which the majority of the population live by, values and prioritises a more fragmented, externally governed time (that of the clock) that fits into workplace demands much more easily. This conflict of time perception can cause a lot of pain and is a constant tug-of-war and hard balancing act to maintain.

    It dawned on me whilst listening to Absurd Being today that this mismatch of experiencing the world is not just a communication gap and difference, as described in the Double Empathy Problem (Milton 2012) it’s also a Double Temporality Problem. Perhaps the world and the majority of people run on neuronormative time (temps), but monotropic people live and experience life more in felt time (durée) – in fluctuating flow states, a different internal rhythm that is unique to each person.

    The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) distinguished between two kinds of time:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Flow States: Restorative Time for Monotropic BodyMinds

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

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

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

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

    Deleuze, Becoming, and Neuroqueer Temporalities

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

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

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

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

    Neuro-Holographic Time: Folding Time and Memory

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

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

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

    Neuroqueering Time: Time Travelling

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

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

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

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

    References