Hiraki Sawa’s Souvenir IV (2012) is a silent, black-and-white single-channel video set in an empty domestic room (this video has music on it, which I actually really like and seems to suit the mood for me but worth noting this was not the original as far as I can find out……).
It comes from a period of Sawa’s practice shaped by a friend’s sudden memory loss, in which rooms become mental landscapes where recollections linger like objects left behind (James Cohan, n.d.; Ota Fine Arts, n.d.).
Badger (2013) describes Sawa as an artist who “constructs beautiful video dreamscapes from pedestrian subjects” (p. 27), and here a plain room of patterned wallpaper, bare floorboards and a bright window becomes the site of a haunting. The title carries both meanings of souvenir: a keepsake we carry away, and the French word for ‘memory’ itself – it is a living distortion of may be how we perceive time, memory and feels exactly like my own burnout.
Writing on hauntology, Badger (2013) suggests that “the present perpetually contains within it ghosts of the past” (p. 32). Sawa’s figure embodies this, present several times over and thinner each time, each moment still carrying the ones before it. I
As I said, this is how my present state feels. Raymaker et al. (2020) define Autistic burnout as chronic exhaustion, loss of skills and reduced tolerance to stimuli, arising from the cumulative load of just trying to live in a world that values neuronormativity.
Buckle et al. (2021) describe Autistic inertia as difficulty starting, stopping or changing course, and the figure seems caught mid-movement, leaving the wall without reaching the window, moving but not getting anywhere. At the moment, my days feel broken, looping, and each pass leaves a fainter version of me behind. I seem to be struggling more and more with work and I know I need a rest – this is all very familiar, so no need to worry about me, I have support and am ok. – was just inspired by this when I saw it this morning!
The longer I look at this video, though, the more the fragments change their meaning. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) open A Thousand Plateaus by observing that “since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (p. 3).
Sawa’s figure is a bit like a small crowd in one person, in burnout, fragmentation can feel like being scattered across too many demands, and yet the same image can be held as plurality, where every trace is a self that was truly there and still real.
David Gray-Hammond: NeuroHub Community Ltd (2023) writes of the chaotic self, an AuDHD Schizophrenic self that grows rhizomatically and resists being shaped and restricted into a single tidy way of being. The distortion in Sawa’s image feels like it fits this chaotic self. The streaks of light record movement that a single, more in-focus frame would erase. Nick Walker Sensei’s neuroqueer theory invites exactly this willingness to let divergence from the expected form become generative, in my interpretation, to maybe open up more possibilities, to see what emerges from the liminal stuck states of burnout and the creation of new ourselves (Walker, 2021).
I have written before about being neuro-holographic a concept discussed with Dawn Prince-Hughes and CASY Physics , and Sawa’s figure seems to portray that. For me, being neuro-holographic describes a felt understanding more than a cognitive or intellectual resonance of how we are woven into one another and into the world, a state in which there is no division between us and our environment and wider comos – being intensely attunded to the fact we are all made of star stuff and multiple.
It is bound up with feeling like my sensory system is so wide open, creating heightened sensitivity and hyper empathy that leaves me exhausted and feeling trapped between worlds. I have also described that the word neuroholographic can perhaps only be felt or experienced in a luminescent, undefinable iridescent way, and the silvery threads trailing from Sawa’s figure come close to that luminescence. A broken hologram keeps an impression of the whole picture in each of its pieces. Seen neuro-holographically, each thinned copy of the figure still carries all of her, blurred and present, bleeding into the patterned wall and the light beyond it. Fragmentation becomes a way of being distributed across place, space, and time, distorted, still there but stuck.
Liminality holds these ideas together. Turner (1967) described liminal beings as “betwixt and between” (p. 93), suspended on a threshold after one form has been left and before the next is taken. In my previous blogs about neuroqueering liminal spaces I have wrtten about how living in the in-between, at the edges of social groups, has shaped my Autistic life, but also how liminal spaces can become thresholds where silenced parts of the bodymind can return transformed.
Burnout is often what that silencing costs us. Gray-Hammond (2024) similarly reclaims the liminal as a space of queer potential, somewhere possibility gathers precisely because nothing has settled. Sawa’s figure hovers on such a threshold, between wall and window, memory and presence, departure and arrival.
Autistic Burnout keeps many of us in that doorway far longer than we would choose. Held neuro-holographically, the threshold can also become a place of queering, where a self exists in several states at once, unfinished and whole, waiting for what grows next.
A souvenir, the title of this piece, is something kept from a place we have left. Burnout may ask for that kind of tenderness toward the selves we pass through: the tired ones, the looping ones, the ones that flicker at the edge of the frame like in this video. Perhaps we can keep them as Sawa keeps his figure, carefully and without hurry, holding them gently while we wait to feel solid again, reclaim our ways of resting – dive into our special interests and passions, the things that bring us joy and glimmers – for me writing about this is therapeutic. It helps – it may not be how people see rest and recovery but it is what I need and may be some others can relate to this too – in parts …..
References
Badger, D. I. (2013). Hauntings: A nodalist study [Master’s thesis, University of Huddersfield]. University of Huddersfield Repository. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/23291/
Buckle, K. L., Leadbitter, K., Poliakoff, E., & Gowen, E. (2021). “No way out except from external intervention”: First-hand accounts of autistic inertia. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 631596. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631596
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)
Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
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.
Inspired by our collaborative Stimpunks work, and my own neuroqueering Deleuze project, I’ve been thinking about the connections in-between — physics, philosophy and my own life as an Autistic ADHD person. This is me following that thread.
2. I’m not a fixed thing
A little while back I wrote about something called relational quantum mechanics — a way of thinking about physics where tiny particles don’t have fixed qualities all on their own. They only become something in relation to whatever’s around them (Rovelli, 1996). I’m not a physicist — it’s one idea among several, and physicists argue about it.
As a multiply neurodivergent person, that’s always been closer to how I experience myself — not as a fixed, separate being moving through the world, but as something that shows up through my relationships and encounters with everything around me (Edgar, 2026a). I’m still working through what that means.
Physics, philosophy, and my own life keep circling the same ideas about being interconnected, unfixed, always transforming.
3. My Monotropic Galaxy
The oldest light we can see is called the cosmic microwave background — it’s the afterglow of the Big Bang, and it’s almost perfectly smooth. It only varies by about one part in 100,000 across the whole sky — almost uniform, but only almost.
Those tiny variations — slightly denser here, slightly thinner there — were the beginning of everything. Gravity pulled the denser bits together, and over billions of years they became stars, galaxies, planets, you, me, all of it.
If the universe really had been perfectly uniform, it would have stayed a flat, empty fog forever. Nothing to see, no one to see it. Structure only exists because that near-sameness broke.
That’s the same shape I recognise in my own monotropic attention — energy pulled gravitationally into a few bright points, rather than spread out in an even, undifferentiated glow. And yet it’s exactly that unevenness, that refusal to flatten, that so many of us — anyone who’s ever been called too much, not enough, or too different — have been measured against.
4. Measured Against Neuronormative Time
I’ve spent a lot of my life being measured against a flat line. Nobody always said it in those words, but that’s what was happening — a standard chart, a “typical” way of communicating or paying attention or experiencing the world, treated as the baseline everyone should be smoothed toward. I was positioned as the deviation that needed explaining, or fixing, or at least accounting for.
That flat line was never just about behaviour — it was also about time: a single approved tempo, a single approved rhythm, everyone expected to arrive and finish and transition together, in step with a clock that was never actually neutral.
So there’s something that genuinely steadies me in learning that the universe itself never once managed that.
What was already there, moving
The “typical” baseline
You = “deviation”
A straight line, laid over what was already moving
The grid comes after the field, not before,
Uniformity was never the achievement. It’s the thing that would have stopped everything before it even started.
5. There Is No Normal or Baseline
Gilles Deleuze, working with Félix Guattari, made a version of this same argument. Deleuze noticed that a lot of Western thinking treats difference as secondary — judged by how much it resembles some ideal, some average, some “normal” category. All of that quietly assumes the baseline came first, and difference is just a deviation from it.
The baseline is the thing that got built. The idea of normality is what has shaped our capitalist society (Chapman, 2023) and is what we are judged against (Deleuze, 1994). Difference is what’s actually there, first — and identity is what eventually forms out of it, temporarily and locally, the way a crystal settles out of a solution along the gaps and spaces in between — the places where those of us most marginalised live, and where we build our own networks, our own solidarity.
This is where Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of smooth space becomes useful (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Smooth space is full of local, variable difference — it hasn’t had a fixed grid laid over it yet. Striated space is what happens when that grid arrives: when a field gets measured, divided, standardised. Difference doesn’t get smoothed into existence by that process. Smoothing is what a system does afterward, only if it insists on it — striation laid over what was already smooth.
Nothing gets smoothed into existence. Smoothing is what happens to something afterward — only if a system insists on it.
6. Smooth doesn’t mean flat
Smooth space isn’t empty of movement — it’s just ungridded. It cuts against how regulation usually gets talked about, as though it means being still, quiet, zen: a flat line of its own. But smooth space is defined by what it lacks — a grid — not by what it’s doing. It can be full of movement and still be smooth — which is closer to how neurodivergent regulation actually works: through stimming, through bodily autonomy, through movement rather than stillness.
That’s closer to what I recognise when I try to describe my own attention — my porousness to my environment, the way my sensory system stays open to everything around it, the way time folds back on itself instead of running in a straight line. Not flat. Not gridded. Full of shape that never quite resolves into one measurable thing.
7. What ethodiversity means
This is where Ombre Tarragnat’s work on ethodiversity has become important to me. Ethodiversity is the variety of ways of being and behaving, across humans and other animals — and Tarragnat is precise about where it actually lives: not inside any one person, but as a property of the relationships between us, the way biodiversity belongs to a whole ecosystem, not to any single creature in it (Tarragnat, 2025).
Ethonormativity, in their framing, is the unwritten rule about which ways of being are allowed to count as normal in a given room. Put next to Deleuze, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say ethonormativity simply is that grid — applied to how we’re allowed to behave. A fixed grid laid over a field that was already full of variation before the grid ever showed up.
Ethonormativity reaches further than neuronormativity, though. Neuronormativity is about which neurotypes get treated as the default — Autistic brains judged against non-Autistic ones, for instance. Ethonormativity is the wider grid underneath that: it governs which ways of being and behaving, across every species, get to count as acceptable at all. It holds neuronormativity inside it, but it isn’t limited to brains, or even to humans (Tarragnat, 2025).
Ethonormativity simply is that grid — a fixed grid laid over a field that was already full of variation before the grid ever showed up.
8. A constellation of intensities
I recognise that grid in every space I’ve ever masked in — education, the workplace, wherever something that was moving gets asked to hold still long enough to be measured. And I recognise its absence, with real gratitude, in the spaces I’m part of — NeuroHub Community with David Gray-Hammond, Stimpunks: an Autistic rhizome, a mycelial network of care, non-hierarchical, no fixed centre, connecting wherever it meets (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
I used to think the shape of my own mind was something like a spiky profile — a way of picturing uneven ability across different areas, real peaks and real troughs, instead of one flat line running across the whole of who you are. At least it’s truer than a flat line. However, a profile still measures. It still needs axes, still has edges — and that’s exactly where I want to push further, past even the spiky profile. What I actually recognise, when I try to map myself, isn’t a chart at all. It’s a constellation of intensities: a galaxy, always in relationship with itself, always in motion, never finished (Edgar, 2026b).
A profile still measures. It still needs axes, still has edges. What I actually recognise, when I try to map myself, isn’t a chart at all; it is an interconnected, interdependent galaxy.
9. The Universe Doesn’t Do Flat Lines
I still don’t have these ideas fully settled or finished. Every time I follow this thread — from the sky, down through physics and philosophy, into the actual shape of my own galaxy of monotropic attention — I end up some where different but with the over arching throughts that:
The universe doesn’t do flat lines.
It never really tried to.
It went straight from near-uniform fog to unrepeatable structure, without ever pausing at sameness for its own sake.
I think that’s worth remembering, gently — the next time any of us are asked to explain why we don’t match the line of neuronormativity. We are all star dust. We are neuroqueering the spiky profile: no edges, limitless ways of being.
10. L★S
Zine No. 11 · Guest author
Written by Helen Edgar. First published on Autistic Realms: More Realms, and shared with Star Stuff.
Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of normality: Neurodiversity and capitalism. Pluto Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)
Edgar, H. (2026a, June 7). We are made of relations: Quantum physics and what it means to be Autistic. More Realms.
Edgar, H. (2026b, June 16). My monotropic galaxy: A constellation of my Autistic self. More Realms.
Rovelli, C. (1996). Relational quantum mechanics. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 35, 1637–1678.
A guest zine in the Stimpunks Star Stuff series. Where The Universe Runs on Difference (No. 8) is about breadth — variety over monoculture — this one is about difference coming first: the baseline is what gets built. The physics-and-philosophy sourcing, and how it sits beside Nos. 8 and 9, is gathered in The Difference-First Frame.
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.
Reading Liam Ren’s idea “of neuroqueering methodologies, or neuroqueering as methodology” ignited a memory, a re-emergence of an experience that I had many years ago. Liam describes neuroqueering as something unfinished, and shaped by intensive frequencies, something that ebbs and flows. This resonated with how my own learning journey has unfolded over time. Meaning has rarely developed through linear progression; instead, it has emerged through immersion in specific hyper-focused interests, through deep monotropic intensity, and often a return to a previous deep interest (like this article about the artist Mark Rothko), a constant spiralling movement, ebbing and flowing between past and present.
Their reflections on the idea of a “synaesthetic art critic” and philosophical engagement beyond conventional academic structures brought me back to my student years studying History of Art and English Literature almost 30 years ago. Long before I had the language for words like monotropism, neurodivergence, or neuroqueer theory, I was already encountering art as a whole-body experience; as a field of sensation that reorganised bodily awareness. Art was something I felt, something I needed in my life, and still do. Abstract expressionist painting, particularly the work of Mark Rothko, became a place for me where perception, emotion, and bodily awareness seemed to merge, and I felt a bit more understood, it made me feel more complete in a way that only art, music, literature and poetry can.
The Gallery as a Plane of Immanence
One memory stands out with particular clarity: visiting Tate Modern in London to experience Rothko’s Seagram Murals, first-hand with my friend as part of our Uni course. The gallery space was dimly lit, quiet, and expansive. The paintings were monumental, not decorative objects hanging on the gallery wall, but immersive environments; I felt I actually entered in to them. The paintings were autonomous compounds what Deleuze describes as “blocks of sensations” that reorganised the gallery space. “The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (Deleuze, 1994).
Looking back now, the gallery setting can be understood as what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a plane of immanence — a field of relations within which thought becomes possible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Thought does not arise solely within an individual’s mind; it emerges through material and affective conditions: architecture, colour, silence, bodily positioning, and social presence with our surroundings. This space helped shaped my perception of the art before any conscious interpretation began; it was something I felt before the words arrived. In fact, I still have no words to accurately describe my experiences, which is possibly why art is so important: it fills the gap where words restrict us.
Plateaus of Attention: Monotropism and Sensory Duration
My friend and I lay down on the gallery floor, surrounded by vast fields of dark red and maroon. I let the colours wash through me, as though I were bathing in them, held within an atmosphere that seemed to slow and thicken time itself. We must have stayed there for a long while, suspended in a quiet intensity that resisted any sense of conclusion. I have returned to the gallery many times since, always with the same feeling: that I never quite want to leave, as though the encounter is still unfolding and I am still making sense of it.
This sustained immersive, monotropic experience could be understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a plateau: a continuous region of intensity that maintains experiential charge without moving toward resolution (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). My attention deepened rather than accelerated or reached any definitive answers about the work; my thoughts unfolded as time seemed to just slip away, and I felt I almost became part of the art itself. This narrowing of attention functioned as a temporary territorialisation of perception, through which sensory relations intensified rather than diminished.
The theory of Monotropism (Murray et al., 2005), may help explain this experience further. When the attentional resources of Autistic and ADHD people become highly focused, engagement with sensory or conceptual environments can become immersive and nonlinear. In the Rothko gallery, this narrowing of my attentional field did not feel restrictive; instead, it enabled an expanded relational field in which colour, the sounds of the gallery, the architectural scale of the building and paintings, my memory, and shared presence formed a kind of temporary assemblage. The meaning and memories created there emerged slowly through my ongoing immersion with the art and the space I was in.
Synaesthetic Encounter and the Body without Organs
I experience synaesthesia, where sensory impressions begin to overlap and blend. While immersed in Rothko’s deep reds and maroons, I felt and heard a low vibrating internal hum. The colours did not stay at a distance as something to look at; they felt as though they entered my body, with an affective force and pull, creating an atmosphere that was both calming and intense. Experiences like this can challenge expectations about how we are supposed to engage with art. Rather than observing from the outside, perception becomes immersive, relational, and deeply felt, maybe more so if you experience synesthesia in this way, but I only have my own experience to draw from.
I didn’t know it at the time, other gallery visitors probably thought I was a bit strange, but lying on the gallery floor also involved an unspoken disruption of normative spectator behaviour in a setting like this. Visitors are typically expected to stand, sit or move quietly, and observe from a respectful distance. By shifting bodily position — lying, sitting and walking around, I was unknowingly experimenting with perception itself and also neuroqueering the expectations of being in a formal public gallery space.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the Body without Organs (BwO) as a process in which habitual bodily organisation loosens, allowing new intensities and relations to emerge (1987). The BwO is not the disappearance of the structure of our actual human bodies but an experimental reconfiguration of how our bodies connect and respond, and can reconfigure in different spaces.
Within Tate Modern’s gallery, Rothko’s work disrupted and destaballised the boundary between me as a viewer and artwork. The gallery functioned as an assemblage in which colour, texture, depth, scale, sound, friendship and memory all combined to form a temporary field of relational intensity. In this reorganisation, my own perception of the art became more experimental. The pressure to interpret correctly when writing up my essay notes receded, and my attention plateaued into a state of sensation in which my identity and environment were mutually shaping each other as I let the colours flow through me, as I heard the sound of the deep reds, and felt as if I were becoming part of the art itself.
Neuroqueering Methodology and Lines of Flight
For many neurodivergent people, such intensive monotropic responses to art, literature, music, dance or poetry may be familiar. Through a Deleuzian lens, they could be understood as creative reorganisations of experience, minor reorganisations of affective and perceptual relations, subtle lines of flight that open alternative ways of being present in the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Liam Ren’s exploration of neuroqueering methodology helps frame these encounters as epistemologically significant. Neuroqueering challenges assumptions that knowledge must be produced through linear argument or normative cognitive performance. Instead, it recognises that understanding may emerge through affective immersion, relational environments, sustained attentional flow states, and our divergent ways of experiencing art and the world.
Abstract art like Rothko’s can therefore function as a neuroqueer methodological space, a temporary territory where dominant expectations of productivity, legibility, and behavioural regulation loosen for the person who is engaging with the artwork.
Becoming Through Colour
Reflecting now, my time lying beneath Rothko’s paintings enabled a different way of thinking to emerge, one shaped by duration, sensory attunement, and relational presence. Memory itself operates rhizomatically, as a process of ongoing recomposition rather than recollection, returning unpredictably and forming new conceptual connections across time (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), as has happened when I read Liam’s blog.
Such encounters suggest that philosophical becoming may occur not only in texts but also in embodied situations like this that loosen the organisation of the self and open new planes of relation. Neuroqueering methodology can therefore be understood as a lived practice of experimentation, a willingness to follow lines of sensation in our bodyminds into unfamiliar territories, to linger with the ‘what could this mean’, with the ‘what may happen if…’.
Rothko’s murals continue to offer such plateaus for me. They create environments in which perception can deepen, bodyminds can reorganise, and thought can unfold through relational intensity with the artwork and the surrounding space when conditions feel safe. In Deleuzean terms, art is not primarily representational but intensive. As Deleuze and Guattari write;
“the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 164).
Encountering these fields of colour can therefore feel less like interpreting an image and more like entering a sensory event, one in which attention shifts, time gathers, and experience becomes widened with duration.
Within such encounters, sensation may operate temporally as well as perceptually. Deleuze and Guattari describe how “sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant… what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears” (1994, p. 211). This contraction of vibration resonates with my own Autistic synaesthetic experiences of spiralling memories of sound, colour and physical sensations in my body, deep attention, and non-linear temporal flow. Art, in this sense, can become a way of inhabiting duration differently, allowing perception to loosen its usual coordinates and making space for alternative sensory epistemologies – creating new nodes on the rhizomes of our experiences and deepening our monotropic tunnels and interests.
From this perspective, aesthetic encounters are not simply personal responses but ontological events. As Nabais (2010) observes, art involves the “capture of the force of life and also creation of a life which stands by itself” and the creation of autonomous zones of sensation that exist independently of subjective interpretation. Rothko’s paintings could be understood as environments in which sensation continuously re-composes these experiences. Rather than resolving the chaos of an abstract work of art, art can hold open a field of intensity through which chaos becomes composed into sensation.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation” (1994, p. 204). If neuroqueering expands the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible, then philosophy may sometimes begin in these quieter aesthetic spaces and our relationships with a work of art — spaces where colour reshapes attention, duration transforms understanding, and sensory experience invites us to become otherwise.
Since writing this reflection, I have found myself thinking about how memory and theory shape the way we understand past experiences. What once felt like an open, personal sensory experience with art has become more organised through language and philosophy.
I have also begun to wonder about the gallery space itself. The quietness, dim lighting, and cultural expectations of contemporary art created conditions where immersive attention felt possible and safe. Lying on the floor felt like a small disruption of usual behaviour, but it was also an action that the space could absorb. This raises questions about who is able to experiment with their perception in public spaces, and under what conditions difference becomes accepted or contained. These reflections also make me think about how public spaces quietly regulate behaviour, attention, and movement, shaping what kinds of sensory engagement are seen as appropriate or disruptive. I am also aware that not all people are granted the same freedom to move, pause, or experiment with perception in public spaces. What felt possible for me in that moment may not feel safe or permitted for others. For some people, moving or sensing differently in public can lead to misunderstanding, correction, or exclusion rather than quiet acceptance.
Reflecting further, I notice an ongoing tension between using the theory of monotropism to understand deep attentional engagement, and engaging with philosophical ideas such as those of Deleuze and Guattari about becoming that resist fixed explanations. Neuroqueering methodology may live within this tension. It can help us name and affirm neurodivergent ways of experiencing the world, while also inviting us to remain open to change, uncertainty, and new ways of thinking, and to question the taken-for-granted standards of focus, composure, and productivity that shape how bodies and minds are expected to function in shared environments. Immersive sensory encounters can feel uncertain or overwhelming, reminding me that opening perception in this way involves a negotiation between curiosity, vulnerability, and the need for grounding.
Rather than reaching a conclusion, these reflections feel like a continuation. My encounters with Rothko’s paintings continue to unfold through memory, conversation, and ongoing sensory meaning-making. Perhaps neuroqueering is not about finding final interpretations or fixed language to define an experience or way of being, but about noticing how perception and understanding shift over time, opening space for new possibilities to emerge. These questions are not only personal but collective, connected to wider struggles over whose ways of sensing, thinking, and being are recognised as valid, and whose are overlooked, regulated, or misunderstood.
To neuroqueer perception may therefore be not only to experience differently, but to gently challenge the norms that decide which experiences are allowed to matter.
Next Blog: What may neurodivergent experiences reveal about how plateaus are lived, sensed, and sustained, and how might we neuroqueer them?
What is a plateau? Not a peak to be reached, but a region where intensities sustain themselves.
Plateaus are not entered so much as encountered, they are fields of relation where perception, time, and attention begin to shift.
In my next blog, I will explore and unfold some more!
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. Continuum.
Nabais, C. P. (2010). Percept, affect and micro-brains: Art according to Deleuze. In S. Di Marco, O. Pombo, & M. Pina (Eds.), Neuroaesthetics: Can science explain art? (pp. 165–175). Fim de Século.
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 journey begins with curiosity, and with transformation.
Over the past few years, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari has become profoundly important to me. I am not a Deleuzian scholar and have no formal academic background in philosophy at all – the aim of this project is very much focused on community learning and expanding conversations.
Through cycles of debilitating Autistic burnout, I found myself searching for language that could help me make sense of experiences that felt difficult to articulate — deep attentional flow, sensory intensity, nonlinear thinking, moments of rupture, the slow processes of recovery and new ways of becoming.
Burnout, Deterritorialisation, and New Patterns of Becoming
Concepts such as the rhizome, multiplicity, body without organs, planes of immanence, assemblage, and deterritorialisation, explored in works including A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and later reflections such as What Is Philosophy? began to resonate with my lived experience as an Autistic and ADHD (AuDHD) person. My monotropic attention often feels like it moves through constellation-like interconnected tunnels of intensity rather than along a single stable path. My cycles of burnout feel like a sudden loss of territory, a destabilisation of the structures that once enabled my participation in the world. In this sense, burnout sometimes resembled a form of deterritorialisation: a disorientation that disrupted familiar rhythms while opening uncertain possibilities for forming new connections. Recovery does not mean returning to a fixed state, but gradually composing different patterns of relation, energy, and belonging.
Encountering Deleuze and Guattari’s work offered me ways of understanding these experiences not as personal failure, but as part of dynamic relational processes within the wider ecosystems I am part of. Their philosophy is helping me think differently about identity, learning, exhaustion, creativity, and the environments we inhabit. It is opening up a space to understand neurodivergent experience as movement, transformation, and ongoing becoming rather than as a deficit or fragmentation of a whole.
Rhizomatic Thinking and Nonlinear Understanding
At times, reading their work has felt disorienting, yet also strangely and comfortingly familiar. The nonlinear textures of their writing, moving through plateaus, building connections, going through the tides of intensities, and shifting conceptual landscapes, echo ways of thinking that many neurodivergent people may also recognise.
Ideas do not always unfold in a straight line; instead, they branch, loop, and return, forming clusters of attention and moments of unexpected resonance. In this sense, philosophical engagement can feel rhizomatic: thoughts emerging in multiple directions, forming nodes of meaning that connect across time, experience, and environment.
Rather than progressing step by step toward a single conclusion, understanding develops through community movement — through following lines of curiosity, pausing at plateaus of insight, and allowing connections to form gradually. Philosophy, for me, is therefore not only something to be interpreted, it is also something to be experimented with, inhabited, and lived through with repeated encounters with ideas, places, bodies, and other people. In this way, thinking becomes relational and ecological, shaped by the networks we are part of and the intensities that draw our attention.
Neuroqueering Philosophy
This project can therefore be understood as an act of neuroqueering philosophy and our ways of being in the world.
Drawing inspiration from the work of neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker, neuroqueering involves approaching established concepts, systems and ways of being in ways that challenge normative assumptions about knowledge, cognition, identity, and relational life. In this sense, neuroqueering is not only about representation, it is also a practice of becoming, an active reworking of how we think, connect, and how we can re-create meaning together against neuronormativity and conformity.
A Rhizomatic Community Project
This community project — Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming— grows from this ongoing process of engagement and constant iteration, finding and creating difference through repetition.
It is envisioned as a slow, collaborative exploration of philosophical ideas based primarily on Deleuze and Guattari, through neurodivergent lived experience, creative reflection, and relational dialogue. Philosophy does not only take place within academic institutions, it also unfolds in everyday life, through deep interests, sensory experiences, professional work, parenting journeys, community relationships, ecological awareness, and the rhythms of burnout and renewal that so often shape neurodivergent lives.
The project itself is intentionally rhizomatic. Anchor posts from different people may introduce themes or conceptual entry points, but participants are invited to respond in ways that feel meaningful to them — dipping in and out as attention, energy, and curiosity shift. Engagement does not need to be linear or continuous; it may follow rhythms of monotropic flow, periods of rest, or moments of pause and return – there is no expectation in how you take part if this interests you. I am really just hoping to develop my own deeper understanding and connect with others who are also interested in exploring this.
Contributions may take many forms: reflective essays, creative writing, visual work, dialogue, field notes, or theoretical experimentation. At times, there may be intense activity and connection; at other times, the project may enter quieter phases of reflection or renewal. These pauses ill not be seen as interruptions but part of the process itself, moments in which new insights gather, relationships deepen, and different possibilities for thought begin to emerge.
Over time, the project may come to resemble an evolving assemblage, a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and lines of thought intersecting, diverging, and forming new connections. Rather than building toward a single conclusion (as I have no idea where this will lead!), the process itself becomes generative: a collective practice of rhizomatic thinking, sensing and becoming together.
Practices such as linking to one another’s work, acknowledging influences, tagging shared themes, and responding across social media platforms are therefore not only practical but philosophical. Through shared hashtags — such as #NeuroqueeringDeleuze, #RhizomesOfBecoming, #NeuroqueerPhilosophy, and other evolving conceptual markers people can help form a visible network of ideas: a living rhizome of thought that evolves.
These small acts of citation, iteration, responding, and relational engagement enable ideas to travel, intersect, and transform across different spaces and communities. In this way, the project becomes more than a collection of individual reflections. It becomes an ongoing process of collective becoming, shaped through collaboration, dialogue, and the emergence of new nodes of thinking together.
Philosophical Lineages and Expanding Connections
While this project begins with the collaborative philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, which I am personally very interested in learning more about, it also recognises that their work emerges from a wider philosophical lineage. Thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz shaped Deleuze’s explorations of affect, duration, multiplicity, and relational existence. As the project develops, we may move across a wide variety of philosophical and sociological spaces, tracing connections between historical ideas, contemporary neurodivergent theories, and emerging forms of post-human thought and More-Than Neurodiversity.
This work is shaped not only by academic theory but also by us as members of the neurodivergent community. Through our lived experience, and by shared practices of reflection and care, it can grow through our neuroqueer writing, creative work, and grassroots spaces such as Stimpunks.
I would like to draw attention to those who are currently influential in my own work, including Nick Walker, Robert Chapman, Julia Lee Barclay-Morton, David Grey-Hammond, Ryan Boren, and more recently Liam Ren.
Post-humanist and new materialist perspectives also inform the project’s emphasis on relational ontology, movement, and ecological entanglement. The work of Karen Barad, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Donna Haraway, and Rosi Braidotti may offer ways of understanding knowledge as something that is produced through relationships, between bodies, environments, and material conditions rather than as abstract theory alone. I have found Ombre Tarragnat’s concept of ethodiversity truly inspiring as it further expands this view, reminding us that diverse ways of perceiving, behaving, and relating are part of broader patterns of life beyond the human.
Together, I hope these influences and others will help shape a project that understands philosophy through a neuroqueer lens as an unfolding project across communities, experiences, and environments, through collective processes of thinking, sensing, creating, and becoming.
An Ongoing Process of Becoming
This is a long-term journey. Ideas may return, shift, and deepen over months or years, I have no final destination. Only plateaus, places to pause, notice connections, and continue thinking and creating together.
If these ideas resonate with you, I would like to invite you to take part. By sharing reflections, linking to one another’s work, and forming new connections, we can collectively expand this rhizome of thought, adding new nodes, pathways, and neuroqueer possibilities for becoming together.
Let the rhizome keep expanding!
References and Further Exploration
This project grows through dialogue with a wide range of thinkers, writers, and community spaces. The following resources offer starting points for exploring neuroqueer theory, neurodiversity scholarship, post-human philosophy, and related conceptual work that may inspire you.
Please do reach out to add to this evolving list!
Neuroqueer and Neurodiversity Thought
Ryan Boren — Neurodiversity advocacy, inclusive pedagogy, and neuroqueer learning environments. Stimpunks https://stimpunks.org/
Robert Chapman — Critical neurodiversity studies, philosophy, and social justice perspectives on mental difference. https://criticalneurodiversity.com
Helen Edgar — Autistic Realms Neurodivergent lived experience, monotropism theory, autistic burnout, relational wellbeing, and practical neuro-affirming resources for families, educators, and professionals. https://autisticrealms.com
Helen Edgar — More Realms Creative neuroqueer writing, philosophical exploration, and posthuman ecological thought, with experimental reflections on identity, temporality, and relational becoming. https://morerealms.com
David Gray-Hammond — Neurodivergent community building, neuroqueering practice, and collaborative learning spaces. NeuroHub Community https://neurohubcommunity.org/
Julia Lee Barclay-Morton — Creative neurodivergent writing, Autistic identity, embodied healing practices, and reflections on burnout, difference, and artistic process. Their platform The Unadapted Ones explores neurodiversity through memoir, theatre, and relational approaches to wellbeing and creativity. https://www.theunadaptedones.com/
Erin Manning — Movement, relationality, and process philosophy, with a focus on creative and embodied practices. http://erinmovement.com/
Brian Massumi – Philosopher of affect, movement, and relational process, whose work develops and extends Deleuzian thought and the emergent, more-than-conscious dimensions of perception and social life. https://brianmassumi.substack.com/about
Ombre Tarragnat — Ethodiversity, ecological neurodiversity thought, and more-than-human approaches to difference. https://www.ombretarragnat.com/
Some philosophical Currents Shaping Deleuzian Becoming……..
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari — Collaborative philosophy exploring multiplicity, becoming, assemblage, and rhizomatic thought. Key texts include Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and What Is Philosophy?
Henri Bergson — Duration, movement, and intuition. Bergson’s concept of durée (lived time) and his emphasis on creativity and process strongly influenced Deleuze’s explorations of temporality, change, and nonlinear experience.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Multiplicity, perspective, and the fold. Leibniz’s philosophy of relational perception and his metaphysics of monads informed Deleuze’s later work on subjectivity, complexity, and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
Friedrich Nietzsche — Becoming, difference, and creative transformation. Nietzsche’s critique of fixed identity and his emphasis on the creation of values shaped Deleuze’s philosophy of affirmation, transformation, and difference.
Baruch Spinoza — Immanence, affect, and relational ethics. Spinoza’s understanding of bodies as defined by their capacities to affect and be affected profoundly influenced Deleuze’s thinking about immanence, becoming, and ethical ways of living.
This project is not a fixed map but an evolving terrain. You are warmly invited to explore blogs and other creative work, follow lines of curiosity, and contribute your own reflections. Through shared experimentation, dialogue, and connection, the rhizome will continue to grow — forming new nodes of thought and new possibilities for becoming together.
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.
Exploring threshold consciousness, temporal ecology, and the porous boundaries between dreaming and waking through a neuroqueer lens.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences — vivid sensory and emotional states that occur at the boundaries of sleep — they may include visual, tactile and auditory hallucinations and are often described within biomedical models as temporary disruptions in wake-sleep and sleep–wake states. However, for many Autistic and neurodivergent people, particularly during periods of burnout, trauma-related stress, and prolonged systemic overload, these experiences may become more frequent and intense and deeply destabilising. This is something I personally experience: the deeper into burnout I move, the more the boundary between dreaming and waking can blur.
This article introduces the idea of neurodivergent temporal ecology as a way to help theorise this and explore how dream persistence between wake and sleep states and threshold consciousness may emerge from interactions among monotropic attention, neurodivergent temporal rhythms, trauma physiology, and the sensory and social environments we inhabit. Drawing on neuroqueer theory (Walker, 2021), philosophical accounts of temporality (Deleuze, 1994; Manning, 2013), Autistic burnout research (Raymaker et al., 2020), and sleep science (Ohayon et al., 1996; Mahowald & Schenck, 2005), this piece reframes hypnagogic and hypnopompic states as relational experiences rather than purely neurological anomalies.
Hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences in Autistic burnout are not merely sleep disturbances. They can be expressions of neurodivergent temporal ecology — moments when attentional, sensory, trauma-related, and environmental pressures destabilise normative boundaries between dreaming and waking and where our flow states between wake and sleep merge.
By drawing on my lived experience, I am suggesting that these different sleep states and versions of reality can challenge assumptions that consciousness should always be linear, stable, and organised. I am inviting people to rethink how sleep, perception, rest and wellbeing are understood, and to consider how environments might be reshaped to support diverse rhythms of awareness and reality.
Living at the porous edge of waking
For some Autistic and neurodivergent people, sleep may not always feel like a clear shift from wakefulness into rest or from rest into wakefulness. Instead, it can feel like temporarily living in a liminal threshold, a shifting terrain where dreams, memories, sensations, and waking perception overlap. This can be confusing, disorienting, and at times frightening.
During burnout or crisis, when sensory, emotional, and social demands exceed available energy, if you are anything like me, these threshold experiences may intensify. You might wake and still perceive dream imagery in your room, perhaps see spiders moving across the wall, shadowy figures in the corner that reach out to touch you, or hear voices that seem present and very real. These experiences can feel entirely real in the moment and may be accompanied by sleep paralysis and a sense of being trapped between worlds. Reaching out to touch the spiders, only to find your hand moving through empty air as the image fades, it can be deeply unsettling. Gradually, environmental and sensory cues become clearer, the dream loosens its hold, and waking awareness returns, often leaving emotional residue and exhaustion before the day has even begun.
Sleep research refers to these as hypnopompic experiences, which occur when REM dream processes persist briefly into waking consciousness (Ohayon et al., 1996). Similar experiences while falling asleep are known as hypnagogic states and are associated with narcolepsy, stress, disrupted sleep, and other neurological vulnerabilities (Mahowald & Schenck, 2005).
From a neurodivergent temporal ecological perspective, these threshold states are not simply individual neurological problems; they may reflect complex relationships among attention, trauma, sensory environments, and cultural expectations about time, productivity, and even how our rest and sleep function. Learning to accept this has made it less frightening for me, and accept it as something that is just a part of my life between worlds that intensify the more stressed or burnt out I am, although this may not be everyone’s experience.
Neuroqueer time and threshold consciousness
Neuroqueer theory challenges deficit-based interpretations of neurological differences by questioning assumptions that perception must always be stable, rational, and temporally linear (Walker, 2021). Expanding on this, I am suggesting that diverse experiences of consciousness may represent meaningful responses to lived conditions rather than signs of dysfunction.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic states are deeply liminal. For those of us already marginalised and living in the liminal spaces, it may be no surprise that our waking and dream worlds reflect this too?!
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences occur before our conscious awareness has fully stabilised into the structured clarity expected in waking life. Meaning is often felt before it can be explained. I often feel suspended between dreaming and waking, between my inner imagery and the external reality. It can be scary and confusing, which is why I’ve been thinking about this a bit more and trying to work out why it may be happening.
Philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) describe time as layered and shaped by intensity rather than simply progressing forward. Manning (2013) writes about how experience is something felt before it is cognitively organised. Sleep threshold states make these ideas tangible, revealing consciousness as fluid and relational, shaped through ongoing interactions between body, memory, the environments we live within and interact with, and social rhythms based on different intersectional identities and experiences.
Spiral time, rhizomatic memory, and dream flow
Many neurodivergent people experience memory and time in non-linear ways. Past events may re-emerge as sensory atmospheres or emotional presences, creating a sense that the past remains active within the present. This can feel like living within a spiral of time rather than along a straight timeline.
Within such temporal patterns, dreams may continue to influence waking perception. Recurring hypnagogic or hypnopompic experiences can involve familiar dream environments, emotional connections with dream figures, or confusion about whether an event occurred in a dream or in waking life. For me, these experiences often intensify during burnout, when attentional flexibility decreases and emotional processing becomes more difficult (Raymaker et al., 2020). It is like my mind is trying to anchor itself and regain a coherent flow.
Dream persistence that overlaps with reality feels like it is perhaps functioning as a survival mode. When the nervous system is overwhelmed, continuing internal processing during sleep it is may be an attempt to conserve energy or make sense of distressing experiences. Although this can result in anxiety or disorientation, it also reflects an adaptive effort to maintain coherence and flow.
I have found it helpful to think about Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome (1994), which offers a way of understanding experience as emerging through non-linear connections rather than clear beginnings or endings. Autistic perception often seems to move in this relational way, linking memories, sensory impressions from waking life, and dream imagery into shifting constellations of meaning and attention tunnels. At times, it can feel as though I enter or leave dreams at unexpected points — already somewhere in the middle of experience — rather than transitioning neatly from one state of consciousness to another.
Monotropism, inertia, and attentional depth
Monotropism theory suggests that Autistic and ADHD attention often involves deep engagement within a limited number of attentional channels (Murray et al., 2005). This can support creativity and intense focus but I think for some, myself included, it may also make transitions, including waking from sleep more effortful.
During burnout, reduced flexibility in attention can combine with the experience of monotropic split, intensifying the persistence of dream imagery across sleep–wake thresholds. Monotropic split refers to the way attention is divided between competing demands, where part of the bodymind remains deeply immersed in an internal focus while another part attempts to respond to external expectations (Adkin, 2022). This can create a feeling of cognitive and sensory stretching or fragmentation, particularly when environmental pressures require rapid shifts in attention and we are expected to bounce out bed and go to work or begin parenting duties!
In such states, the nervous system may struggle to complete the transition between dreaming and waking. Our attention tunnels, the deeply focused channels through which monotropic cognition often operates, may begin to blur across states of consciousness. A person may feel suspended, as if floating between inner imagery and outer reality, experiencing a slowed, blurry awareness where perception has not yet fully stabilised. Dream environments, emotional tones, or sensory impressions can linger as waking demands begin to intrude into our attention tunnel and pull us back into reality.
Research on Autistic inertia may further help to explain this process. Autistic inertia describes difficulties initiating, stopping, or switching between activities or cognitive states (Buckle et al., 2021). When combined with ADHD-related fluctuations in attentional regulation, including oscillations between hyperfocus and exhaustion, these dynamics can contribute to what might be described as temporal momentum, a continuation of cognitive immersion beyond the usual boundaries of sleep and waking (Heasman et al., 2024).
Dream-like flow states between conscious and unconscious may not be just sleep disturbances but may be understood as an interaction among monotropic attentional depth, inertia-related challenges in shifting states, and the physiological effects of burnout. As our attentional energy resources diminish and re-accolate and distribute themselves, the bodymind may remain engaged in internal processing, trying to organise its patterns and regain a flow state that makes more sense as the body begins to wake or go to sleep. This can result in an almost layered experience of perception, uncertainty about what is real, and needs a gradual re-orientation to the external world rather than an abrupt transition. It is why waking up can be sooooo hard!
Understanding hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences through the lens of monotropic split and Autistic interia may offer a more nuanced account of the threshold consciousness for neurodivergent people. It highlights how attentional styles, environmental demands, and states of exhaustion interact to shape the ways neurodivergent people move and flow between dreaming and waking, immersion and return.
Burnout, trauma, and ecological strain
Autistic burnout is increasingly recognised as a consequence of prolonged stress, masking, and environmental mismatch (Raymaker et al., 2020). Trauma can fragment sleep cycles and intensify emotional dream content (Mahowald & Schenck, 2005). Sleep deprivation has also been linked to perceptual disturbances and cognitive dysregulation (Ohayon et al., 1996).
Frameworks such as Gray-Hammond’s ecosystemic model (2026) highlight how burnout, altered perception, and sleep disruption or changes interact with environmental pressures. These perspectives suggest that psychiatry can sometimes individualise systemic strain, locating distress solely within the person rather than addressing the conditions that contribute to it.
Altered states of consciousness may therefore be better understood as ecological signals, indications that our nervous systems are adapting to environments shaped by expectations of neuronormativity, constant productivity (even in sleep and the ways we sleep and rest!) and sensory tolerance. Productivity-focused time demands can place particular strain on neurodivergent people whose rhythms of engagement, ways of resting and recovery differ from dominant norms, leading us to burnout and more unusual sleep patterns.
Ethodiversity and relational consciousness
Ecological neurodiversity introduces the concept of ethodiversity, recognising that multiple cognitive, sensory, and relational styles coexist within shared environments (Tarragnat, 2025). From a this perspective, consciousness is not simply produced within the individual brain but emerges through ongoing assemblages of body, memory, environment, culture, and time. These relational conditions shape how attention moves, how energy is resourced, and how safety is experienced.
Building on the idea of monotropic split, burnout can be understood as a state in which these ecological relationships become strained or fragmented. When attentional demands exceed available capacity, the nervous system may remain partially engaged in internal processing even during periods of rest. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences can therefore be seen as threshold moments in which perception is reorganising across disrupted ecological conditions.
Sleep is More-Than biological restoration; it can also be a site of cognitive and sensory integration, where experiences are slowly being sorted, re-patterned, and re-assembled in an attempt to regain coherence and flow. Dream imagery may persist into waking awareness because the bodymind may still be trying to regain a safe flow state before waking. More time in nature and engaging in stimming and monotonous flow states with what interests you and what you are passionate about may help rebalance this…….
The gradual fading of dream imagery on waking may reflect a process of ecological realignment, a slow recalibration of our internal temporal rhythms. While these experiences may signal burnout and misattunement with surrounding ecosystems, they may also indicate an adaptive move toward recovery. For myself, being aware of my hypnopompic and hypnogogic states is a signal that I need deep rest, reduced overload, and environments that better support my own neurodivergent rhythms of monotropic attention and engagement. I need more time with my passions and interests, more time stimming and meeting my sensory needs in the dark, under my weighted blanket.
Dream Thresholds, Temporal Diversity, and Mingling with the Universe
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences remind us that consciousness is not always clear-cut or neatly divided into sleeping and waking. There is no ‘right way’ to sleep, to dream or to wake up!
For many Autistic and neurodivergent people, especially during burnout, these threshold states can become intense, immersive, and emotionally charged. Dreams may seem to linger in the room as we wake. Sensations and images can feel real for a few moments before gradually fading. These experiences can be frightening, confusing, and exhausting. At the same time, they may also reveal something important about how neurodivergent minds move through time and perception and why dream worlds and reality may blur at times – perhaps even beyond hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences and into the wider ways of daydreaming, immersing in fantasy and role play.
Recognising temporal diversity as part of neurodiversity means understanding that different nervous systems have different rhythms of rest, monotropic attention, and recovery. Productivity-driven expectations about how quickly we should fall asleep, wake up, or “return to normal” can place additional strain on already overwhelmed systems. When dream imagery continues into waking life — or when vivid sensory experiences arise as we fall asleep — it may be a signal that our bodymind is trying to process, integrate, and make sense of overwhelming experiences.
From a neuroqueer and ecological perspective, altered states of awareness can be understood as relational signals. They may point to our current environment as too demanding, to unsafe sensory landscapes, or to social pressures that require constant adaptation and masking. In this sense, hypnopompic and hypnogogic experiences could be seen as part of the nervous system’s survival response, continuing its work of sorting and patterning experience when there has been little time to rest while awake.
In my own writing on Autistic perception, I have described this as “mingling with the universe.” Sometimes neurodivergent awareness feels deeply interconnected with surroundings — sensory detail, memory, emotion, and environment all blending together in ways that are difficult to separate. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic states can intensify this feeling. Inner worlds and outer realities briefly overlap, reminding us that consciousness is not fixed or isolated but shaped through ongoing relationships with the spaces and systems we inhabit.
Understanding these experiences through a lens of Neurodivergent Temporal Ecology challenges narrow psychiatric interpretations that focus only on individual symptoms. Burnout, sleep disruption and differences, and perceptual instability often emerge within wider contexts — including sensory-hostile environments, pressures to conform to linear productivity time, and limited opportunities for genuine rest or recovery. Supporting neurodivergent wellbeing, therefore, requires more than medical responses. It calls for cultural and structural change: creating environments that recognise and support different rhythms of living, thinking, and sleeping.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences can be unsettling. Yet they can also offer insight into how neurodivergent minds adapt, survive, and find meaning. When dreams continue into waking life or merge as we fall asleep, it may be a sign that we have reached the limits of our energy, but it can also be an invitation to slow down, seek safety, and restore connection with ourselves and our environments.
Temporal Diversity
Recognising temporal diversity expands how we can understand neurodivergent sleep, mental health, rest, and care. It encourages us to move away from rigid ideas about what consciousness “should” feel like and toward more compassionate, flexible ways of supporting neurodivergent lives.
By understanding that our monotropic perception is always moving in relationship with sensory landscapes, memories, emotions, and social rhythms, we can begin to see reality itself as something fluid and negotiated rather than fixed. Sleep and waking become liminal crossings rather than fixed boundaries.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences are not just disruptions to sleep or sleep disorders, but perhaps signals about how well our environments are really supporting and making sense to us. I see them as part of my monotropic flow state that enables me to transition between waking and dream worlds – where both worlds are equally important. When we learn to listen to these signals, we can create the possibility of lives where different ways of sensing time and consciousness are recognised as meaningful and not pathologised. There is very little discussion about hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences; it is still very much shrouded in the same stigma as psychotic hallucinations, and I have found people look wary when I talk about this.
Recognising and sharing stories about these experiences may help neurodivergent people feel less pressure to force themselves back into fast, “normal” rhythms of waking and productivity. Instead, moving between dreaming and waking, focus and rest, can be understood as part of the natural diversity of human perception. Allowing time for slower realignment, through rest, sensory grounding, and meaningful flow states can support the gradual return of energy and clarity.
By learning to listen to our own rhythms and to the flow states that move between dreaming and reality, sleep and wakefulness, rather than constantly resisting or trying to cure these experiences, the meanings and re-orientation of flow within liminal dream spaces can begin to unfold more gently. Growing awareness and understanding of neurodivergent patterns of monotropic attention, rest, and recovery is part of an ongoing process of re-energising, re-orienting, and discovering more sustainable ways of being so we begin to re-world our experiences, not only in waking life, but also within our dream worlds and the shifting spaces in-between.
Buckle, K. L., Leadbitter, K., Poliakoff, E., & Gowen, E. (2021). “No way out except from external intervention”: First-hand accounts of autistic inertia. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 631596. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631596
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Academic.
Heasman, B., Williams, G., Charura, D., Hamilton, L. G., Milton, D., & Murray, F. (2024). Towards autistic flow theory: A non-pathologising conceptual approach. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 54(4), 469–497. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12427
Mahowald, M. W., & Schenck, C. H. (2005). Insights from studying human sleep disorders. Nature, 437(7063), 1279–1285. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04287
Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15857859/
Ohayon, M. M., Priest, R. G., Caulet, M., & Guilleminault, C. (1996). Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations: Pathological phenomena? British Journal of Psychiatry, 169(4), 459–467. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8894197/
Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
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 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 Foldentwines with the theory of monotropismand 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
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.
At the heart of everything I do is a belief that lived experience and Autistic lives matter.
What if support for Autistic children began with listening to Autistic people?
That was the the question I had in mind when I first created Autistic Realms in 2022. I wanted it to be a space that I wish had existed many years ago when I was first trying to understand and support my own children, myself and the families I worked with as a teacher.
As an Autistic parent and someone who’s lived through cycles of burnout and the barriers that come with being misunderstood, I wanted to build a space that speaks from within the experience. A space that affirms our way of being and helps parents, carers, professionals, and young Autistic people themselves feel less alone.
What Is Autistic Realms? A Practical, Neuro-Affirming Support Hub
Autistic Realms is where I share grounded, neuro-affirming support for families, educators, and allies to support Autistic people, especially those facing barriers to education, burnout and systemic misattunement.
It’s mainly a family-focused space rooted in lived experience, academic research, community wisdom, and the need for real support that respects Autistic minds and bodies.
Topics I regularly explore:
Monotropism, deep focus, and flow
Autistic burnout
Supporting children who are experiencing barriers to education
Sensory processing and interoception differences
Autistic communication, play, masking, and identity
Neuro-affirming reading lists and community signposting resources
Explore My E‑Books
Over the past few years, I’ve created a growing library of over 20 practical, neuro-affirming eBooks and 100s of infographics, mostly focused on supporting Autistic young people and their families.
Many are completely free to download, covering topics such as sensory processing and managing transitions, low-demand parenting, support for executive functioning difficulties, and finding out about the theory of monotropism.
These guides are ideal for sharing with schools, therapists, and support networks—or simply for finding your own sense of understanding and validation.
Step Through the Portal Into More Realms
There’s also another thread woven through everything I do and love….
A slower, stranger space for art, literature, poetry, philosophical unravellings, and deep neuroqueering ways of becoming.
Which is why I have now created More Realms, a companion site for creative flow, theoretical and philosophical exploration, and the more sensory relational side of neurodivergence.
More Realms is where I draw on my background and love of Literature and Art alongside lived experience and neuroqueer ways of sense-making, to explore ideas through poetry, story, image, and more-than-human connection. Rooted in neuroqueering, posthuman thought, and ethodivergent sensory relationality, this space will host reflective writing, collaborative projects, and community-rooted explorations of art, literature, and alternative ways of becoming.
It’s a space to spiral, stretch, and reimagine, where words tangle with moss and metaphor, and where Autistic and disabled creativity is not marginal, but central.
I am hoping that More Realms will help me keep Autistic Realms clear and accessible for those seeking practical support, while also honouring my own creative process and flow.
More Realms is for you if you’re curious about:
Neuroqueering time
Mad studies
Posthumanist ideas
Deleuzean inspired philosophy
Poetics, liminality, and more-than-human belonging
Creative storytelling from the margins
Nature, rhythm, and spiralling attention
More Realms is a space of becoming, for those who long to wander deeper—into the wild edges of thought, where nature invites pause, neuroqueer ideas take root, and sensory worlds unfold. A place to linger. To meander through tangled textures. To drift in spiral time. To create our own maps.
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
Rest can become a radical act in a world that often equates our worth with productivity, especially for Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people navigating the tides of burnout, where even our ways of resting may look different. I have been really inspired by Tricia Hersey’s wonderful writing and their recent book, We Will Rest! The Art of Escape from Nap Ministry (2024).
The Tides of Burnout and Monotropism
Following on from my blog Tides of burnout and being monotropic I believe Autistic burnout is more than exhaustion; it’s a profound depletion of mental, emotional, physical and sensory resources. Burnout is often caused by prolonged masking, sensory overload, and the relentless demand to conform to neuronormative standards.
From my own experience of Autistic burnout, I think the theory of monotropismis key to helping us understand why and how burnout happens and can also support better ways for us to move on through burnout. Monotropism is a theory developed by Autistic people in the late 1990s and resulted in the paper Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism (2005) by Dinah MurrayMike Lesser, Wenn Lawson. Monotropism is a neuroaffirming theory of Autism (and many ADHD people resonate with it too!) where a person’s attentional resources are focused deeply on a limited number of interests/ events or experiences at any one time. While this deep focus and flow can enrich our experiences, things like shifting attention can be really challenging, especially when external demands pull us away from our areas of interest.
The dynamics between the theory of monotropism and societal expectations can create a cycle for Autistic people. Intense focus can lead to overexertion, and difficulties with interoception may mean you aren’t even aware of when you need a rest or when you are tired, and it may mean you miss some of the signs of reaching a burnout crisis. The immersive, joyful feeling of being in deep flow can mean that you want to carry on and on as time passes quickly, 5 hours may feel like 15 minutes, and you may not have eaten, drunk or moved. Alternatively, not being able to engage in flow and battling systems and trying to fit in to your place of work can be utterly draining, even if you enjoy your job! Often being around other people, having multiple demands at any time, and having to socialise and communicate in ways that fit into other people’s frameworks can leave us feeling more than depleted at the end of the day.
When you are in a flow state, external demands can feel painful, they take even more energy, and may leave you in a state of inertia, unable to do anything and feeling paralysed. Balancing the needs of wanting to immerse yourself in your interests and things that bring you joy, and the demands of work and family that may pull against your inner needs, means you may have even less capacity and even less energy to even know what you need to rest in a meaningful way. The feelings of needing to mask to fit in and juggle and balance your innate inner Autistic monotropic needs with the demands of neuronormative expectations can feel like you are trying to swim upstream; it is exhausting. Meltdowns, shutdowns, or reduced responsiveness can be a form of enforced rest when your body and mind are overwhelmed. Meltdowns and shutdowns are your body and mind in survival mode; they are a sign you need deep, authentic, meaningful rest.
Rest as Resistance
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, advocates that rest is not a luxury but a form of resistance against oppressive systems that devalue our well-being. She asserts, “Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.”
For Autistic individuals, embracing our authentic ways of resting challenges the internalised narratives that equate our self-worth with neuronormative ideals.
Reframing Rest
Rest isn’t solely about sleep, yoga or other mindfulness-type activities; it’s about creating spaces, creating physical and emotional spaces, and meeting our sensory needs so we can exist without the pressure of performing to society’s expectations and suppressing ourselves. For monotropic people (Autistic/ ADHD), this might involve engaging deeply with our special interests, spending more time stimming, spending more time in your sensory den or simply allowing yourself more moments to be yourself without judgment.
How Autistic & Monotropic Rest May Look Different
The most restful spaces are often those where we don’t have to mask or justify our needs and where we feel safe.
Deep focus on special interests and passions
Society may see this as “work” or “obsession,” but for many monotropic people, being immersed in your flow state with something you are passionate about can be regulating and restorative.
Stimming
Stim vocalising and stim movement, such as rocking, tapping, flapping, or pacing or dancing may seem active, but they are often soothing and regulating, helping to release stress and maintain flow. Stim listening and stim watching can make you feel cosy and safe. They bring predictability and comfort, especially when the world feels chaotic. Resting in motion and stimming can give you back energy and give you more capacity to manage.
Solitude
Rest might mean being completely alone or managing to do your work by using body doubling strategies to help you focus your energy resources more easily and effectively, without the pressures of socialising or working in more conventional ways.
Monotasking (doing one thing deeply)
While multitasking is often celebrated, sustained single focus is how many of us find flow and peace, even if that feels more like a constellation type of thinking, with your mind diving in a million directions as you connect so many things together and doesn’t feel very ‘mono’ at all !
Spending time in dark, quiet, or low-stimulation environments
This sensory rest is vital for decompressing from overload, even if it looks like “doing nothing.” Using this like weighted blankets, ear defenders, and fidget tools are often essential for flow states, not optional extras as they can help you feel safe, regulated and rested.
These are not distractions but often meaningful ways to self-regulate and can be a great way to embrace flow independently or alongside or with others.
Delaying or avoiding communication (texts, calls, emails)when you can
Social expectations can be draining; rest might mean letting people know you prefer to text rather than speak verbally, or you can manage an online meeting instead of in-person.
Non-traditional sleep-wake cycles
Monotropic focus may shift sleep patterns; rest might come at unconventional hours, and that’s okay if you have supportive people who understand you. Find out more about monotropic time in my recent blogs.
Withdrawing from roles, routines, or expectations temporarily
Stepping back from responsibilities may look like avoidance, but it can be intentional self-preservation and help reduce the severity of a burnout crisis.
Talk therapy may not feel restorative.
Many Autistic people find traditional therapy approaches overly verbal, which can further drain energy. Many Autistic people need extra time and space to process thoughts or emotions by ourselves, outside of the demands of conversation and social expectations. Restorative therapy care might look more like body-based, creative, or activities with less emphasis on verbal support (e.g. art, or nature-based therapy may help).
“Going out with friends” may be socially draining, not restful
Socialising, even with people we love, can sometimes increase stress and add to burnout. Rest might mean not attending and connecting in quiet, low-demand ways instead.
Unstructured time without expectation
Just having a safe space where nothing is expected of you can be deeply restful, even if it “looks” unproductive. Rest means breaking free from the pressure to always say yes, even when you’re running on empty.
Rest is More Than a Nap: Reclaiming Rest as Autistic Liberation
Rest, as Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry reminds us, is about more than naps. It is a radical, embodied act of refusal. Rest is a disruption of neuronormative grind culture, capitalism, and all the systems that treat human beings as machines. Hersey reminds us that:
“Rest pushes back and disrupts a system that views human bodies as a tool for production and labor. We know that we are not machines.” — Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance
For many Autistic people, especially those of us navigating burnout, masking, and a world that often misunderstands our rhythms of being, means that our ways of resting are often misunderstood, denied and even stigmatised. We have been taught to ignore our bodies, to push through overload and to meet neurotypical expectations at the cost of our well-being.
Rest is often more than sleep. It’s more than self-care routines or sensory tools marketed as solutions. Rest is anything that reconnects us with ourselves.Anything that brings our monotropic attention gently back to flow, safety, stillness, or regulation.
Rest for Autistic people might look like silence, repetition, solitude, immersion in a special interest, and a withdrawal from speaking and other expectations. Although society may not recognise these forms of rest as valid, I think they are deeply necessary. They are a reclamation of our authentic Autistic monotropic selves from systems that expect us to perform, conform, and endure.
When we begin to honour our need for rest, not just to “recover” from burnout but to resist the conditions that cause burnout, we can begin to move. Rest becomes liberation. Rest becomes connection. Rest becomes our right.
As Tricia Hersey urges:
“Find ways to connect back to your body and mind. Find ways to intentionally slow down… It is your divine and human right to do so. WE WILL REST.”
Tricia Hersey gives us permission to slow down and let go of shame. She urges us to create community. When you are in safe spaces with people who ‘get you’ and allow you to be your true self, rest comes easier. It can feel like a mutual collective flow that is validating and empowering.
“Create community. Build community. Be community. Community care can seem impossible when you are exhausted. It is possible. Community is anywhere two or more are gathered……don’t rush to do anything alone. To be an escape artist is to. being the collective. Supported in rest, care, and love. Demand the collective as a source of inspiration and change. Real change comes from the people” Hersey, T. (2024). We will rest!: The Art of Escape. Little, Brown Spark. Pg 35
Let us rest.
Let us resist.
Let us reclaim our unique ways of being Autistic.
Some things to reflect on….
1. What does rest mean to you beyond sleep?
How do you define rest in your own life?
Are there certain activities or sensory experiences that help you feel rested?
2. How does being monotropic influence your need for rest (or those you support)?
In what ways does deep focus on specific interests affect energy levels?
Can engaging with your passions serve as a form of rest? Do you feel it helps restore your energy? Can you find ways to make more time for activities and experience that enable you to engage in flow more often?
3. What societal expectations make it challenging for you to rest?
Are there pressures to be constantly productive or social that impact your ability to rest in ways that feel meaningful for you?
How do these expectations conflict with your personal needs for real, authentic Autistic rest?
4. In what ways can rest be an act of resistance for you?
How does choosing to rest and embrace your monotropic ways of being challenge societal norms or expectations?
Can you view rest as a form of self-advocacy or empowerment?
Do you think positions of power and privilege and intersectional issues also affect your ability to rest in meaningful ways?
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005a). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
When Autistic people are in burnout, we’re often told to “rest”, to slow down, take time off and pull back from pressure.
These suggestions don’t work for me as rest doesn’t feel restful when it’s a demand and disconnected from how I naturally think, feel, and process the world as a monotropic person. When I am in burnout I tend to go deep, I worm hole into Deleuzean philosophical podcasts, I read texts that I actually don’t always understand, I dive even deeper to try and make connections and sense. It is a way of regulating, it helps me feel good, I feel immersed and restored, it gives back energy when other things feel like they strip my spoons away. In former years I may have gone on long runs, very long runs, pushing my body and not my mind to it’s limits but my body is now tired…… Ways of resting like this are often shamed. We may be told we are a work-a-holic, indulging in pointless activities and disconnecting with ‘real life’.
For many Autistic people the type of rest that helps us isn’t about switching off, or trying to re-align with other people’s expectations of what rest ‘should’ look like. It’s about going deeper, into the things that hold meaning for us, into the flow of our interests, into the tunnels that carry us back to our temporal monotropic home. Our rest may be more sensory or related to art, crafts, lego, gaming, making slime, splashing in puddles, rearranging collections, or something else, but it is all valid how ever it looks, deep diving into things that we are passionate about helps regulate flow and can bring some joyful glimmers into a life that often feels VERY hard!
Why “rest” doesn’t always feel like rest
Burnout for Autistic people is real, complex, and often invisible due to things like interoception differences, until it hits, intensely. It can come from sensory overload, constant masking, everyday demands that chip away at our energy, and the pressure to keep up with expectations that were never designed with us in mind. When we reach burnout, when we have no more energy or spoons left to mask or push through anymore, well meaning friends often tells us to ‘rest’ and take time off work, but resting isn’t always as simple as stopping. If I can’t do the things that are pulling my attention at that time I am left really dysregulated and it prolongs and intensifies burnout.
Unstructured time can feel disorienting, especially when usual routines fall away, being told to “just relax” or “do something gentle” can feel like more pressure and another demand to mask, especially if those things don’t match how we truly regulate. Sometimes the hardest thing is figuring out how to rest in a way that actually helps you regulate your monotropic flow and needs.
Structure inside unstructured time
In burnout, we often can’t tolerate external demands, but we still need something to hold on to, a sense of structure and a rhythm that gives us coherence when everything feels scattered and chaotic. For myself, that structure often doesn’t come from schedules or to-do lists, it comes from deep immersion.
Many Autistic (and ADHD) people are monotropic, meaning our attention naturally flows toward a small number of interests at a time. When we follow those interests, we’re not just focusing, we’re making sense of the world, finding comfort, and reconnecting with who we are and our authentic needs. It can be rejuvenating and restorative spending time with your passions and leaning into sensory experiences, activities and interests that help you feel good.
In burnout, these interests can become even more important, they give us a place to go when everything else feels too much. They give us structure insidethe unstructured and can help make life a bit more manageable.
Tunnelling
It can be easy to misunderstand what this looks like from the outside. When we tunnel into something , watching the same video on repeat, reading long philosophical texts, researching something niche for hours, people might think we’re avoiding life, or that we’re shutting down. Instead of seeing this as a disconnection with the world and feeling shame, I am trying to reframe it as a way of re-connecting.
Monotropic tunnelling can be a way to feel safe, to make sense of our experience, to process what’s happened in a way that feels manageable. It can be a way of caring for ourselves without needing to explain or perform. It’s a way of resting through depth, we aren’t switching off, we’re switching into something meaningful that holds space for us.
Monotropic time
Time doesn’t always move in straight lines for Autistic people. We don’t all experience time as linear or predictable. It loops, it spirals, it stretches and contracts depending on our energy, our environment, and our focus.
In burnout, time can feel strange, my days blur together, some moments drag endlessly and others disappear quickly. Trying to rest by the clock is hard and stressful. Leaning into monotropic spiral time opens up something different, it gives us permission to return to the same place again and again, to revisit, re-watch, re-read, re-iterate our thoughts and activities. It allows meaning to emerge slowly, even if it doesn’t look productive to others and you may not feel like you are making progress yourself you likely will be. We need to look at wider time frames, look back on weeks ago, years ago and it is then we may be able to see the difference in our repetition.
Reclaiming rest
For some of us, rest comes in the form of lying still, wrapped in silence under weighted blankets with fairy lights and candles burning. For others, rest may be movement, of our bodies, of thoughts, patterns, language, sounds. For many we may combine all of this and fluctuate between various states trying to get all the points on our spiky profiles aligned .
Regulation doesn’t always mean quietness or disengagement from work or traditional mindfulness activities that are so often suggested by therapists. Here are a few examples of how rest might look different for Autistic/ ADHD/ Monotropic people:
Immersing in a deep interest or sensory experience
Stim-watching or stim- listening to something familiar over and over
Revisiting a thoughts, questions, wanderings and half done projects
Researching a niche topic until the world feels more coherent and you feel that ‘just right’ sensation
Stimming and letting the rhythm bring calm and regulate flow
These aren’t distractions from rest or healing, they are rest and can help us heal, especially when they’re done on our own terms, at our own pace. Rest doesn’t have to mean stepping away from everything that matters to us. It can mean stepping more fully into it. It can mean honouring what actually restores us, even if it looks different from what others expect.
We can rest by allowing ourselves to spiral, to tunnel, to be nonlinear. To return to what we love without guilt, to make space for our bodyminds to move the way they want to move. We shouldn’t need to explain why something feels regulating, if it works, it works, and if flow feels good then embrace it!
We need to reclaim neurodivergent ways of resting from a system that doesn’t understand our rhythms. We need to create spaces where rest isn’t something separate from who we are, it’s something woven into the way we live through our in -person and on-line communities in practices such as body doubling, co-regulation and interdependent ways of being.
Embracing deep flow
Burnout can feel like everything is falling apart, but it could also be seen as a threshold , a place where we can pause, listen, and reconfigure, not to become someone else or mask to fit in, but to return to ourselves. We may need to stay in our monotropic flowy attention tunnels even longer than others expect, we may need to go deeper. We may need to let go of timelines, checklists, and expectations that don’t fit.
If you’re in burnout and feeling like conventional neuronormative based advice doesn’t work for you, you’re not failing, you’re not broken, you’re moving with a different rhythm, one that makes sense to your body, your mind, your way of being and that is valid.
Sometimes rest isn’t about pulling away, it’s about going deeper in and embracing our monotropic flow.
Courses, books and resources
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
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.
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.
*“Memories scatter like shards of seaglass along a fractured spiral, the centre always slipping just beyond my grasp. Hazy images and sensations drift in and out of the fog, sometimes offering sharp glimpses, but rarely staying long enough for me to hold. Most pass by shrouded in a soft mist, like half-formed echoes trapped within a labyrinth. Sounds, images, smells, and feelings blur and merge, tangling into an ever-expanding rhizome, sprawling in all directions, folding in on themselves. Memories come more as felt impressions than as concrete events. Remembering isn’t straightforward for me; it’s less recall and more a process of re-navigation. I have to trace uncertain paths, try and find a thread to hook into to regain my flow, often sensing that what I’m reaching for is just out of reach if trying to recall a specific event, but my sensory memories are more clear and vivid as they are felt sensations – which is hard to explain to people who may not experience their memories in this way. ”
I am currently on a Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice course led by KR Moorhead, Marta Rose and Meg Max. This week we were exploring time and memories, which felt very apt given my recent monotropic outpourings about time. In this week’s session I wrote the above piece about how I experience memories.
Memory may not be linear for neurodivergent people. It may feel like a spiral of felt sensations. Being monotropic shapes how I re-sense moments, navigating echoes and threads of sensory experiences rather than always recalling events. I felt validated that some other people seemed to relate and share similar experiences of their time not being linear and also being quite hazy recalling specific events but having really vivid recollections of more sensory experiences.
Monotropism and Memories
Monotropism is a theory of Autism (Murray et al 20025) that describes a way of focusing attention that tends toward deep but fewer channels. For those of us who experience the world monotropically, attention locks in and tunnels can form like portals. These attention tunnels can lead to intense engagement and immersive sensory experiences, but they may also shape how we encode, retrieve, and relate to our memories.
Memory for me is not a fixed archive of past events filed neatly on shelves. It is alive, constructed in the present, woven from threads of past focus, emotion, embodiment, and attention. For monotropic people, those threads may be less linear and deeply context-bound in our sensory experiences. We may not remember when something happened in conventional, sequential neuronormative time but we may vividly feel how we experienced something, we may recall the sensory landscape, the tone, the rhythm of presence or absence.
Spiral Time and Felt Time
I’ve written previously about monotropic experiences of time as being like ever expanding rhizomatic spirals like rather than a linear A-B or 9am to 10pm of time as lived by the clock and conventional calendar. I think this also shapes how memory functions, rather than stretching out along a clear chronological line, time for me feels like it folds back in on itself and experiences and memories happen and are stored within the folds (a concept from Deleuze that I have written about at length). A moment from years ago might feel right now, while a conversation from yesterday may feel distant or unretrievable unless there is something to hook me in and brings it back into focus so I can retrieve the thread and follow the flow.
In monotropic spiral time, memories don’t behave like neurotypical people may expect or how we may have been brought up to understand how memory works. My memories don’t line up neatly, they tangle, twist, merge and drift like mist through a forest. Sometimes I feel I’m not remembering in the traditional sense at all, but kind of re-sensing, like I am trying to feel my way through a fog of echoes and impressions, a texture, a tone of voice, the way the light fell. It makes my memories of concrete events feel hazy and fuzzy but my experiences feel vivid and it can be quite confusing and frustrating at times.
Labyrinths and the Rhizomes
For monotropic people our minds and memories may feel less like walking through an album of neatly arranged photos and more like navigating a vast, living labyrinth. I can’t easily “go back” and retrieve a memory, it feels like I have to wander, I have to reach out and try and sense where the thread of recall might catch and hook onto something, what I often find is not a single event but a tangle, a rhizome of multisensory experiences that I have to unravel.
This rhizomatic quality of navigating time means my memories don’t live in isolation, they’re not strictly filed under “birthday, age 9” or “Monday morning, March 3rd.” Instead, they seem to connect through shared emotions and sensory patterns. One feeling or sensory experience might loop me back to three seemingly unrelated moments, a smell might pull on threads across decades and I don’t always know why. This can be disorienting in a world that expects time and memory to be neat and logical but it’s also a kind of richness, a depth of connection that linear systems seem to often miss. It can make conversations with friends and family hard as it seems like I am not interested enough in people to have created a core memory like in the Disney film Inside Out, my memory of real life events feels like a sieve where things happen then disapear but they are all there, it is just perhaps that they are stored differently.
It brings me back to my first blog I wrote on More Realms (2023), Middle Entrance. In 1943, T.S. Eliot’s collection of four poems were collated to form Four Quartets. The final poem in this series Little Gidding (1942), continues Eliot’s exploration of time and our connections with each other through generations and current society.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
My memories, relationships and ways of being are like constantly evolving spirals that spin in and out in multidimensional ways. Different connections and experiences add to and contribute to a wider, deeper fluid rhizomatic network of potential that is always in a constant state of flux. This idea of an evolving spiral, hooking onto a node of the rhizome and returning to a new beginning in the middle, liminal spaces, within the folds is how I experience memory. I need time to process, time to rlect and for memories to and beautifully reflected in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea”.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
Navigating Memories
Memory for me feels less like recall, I am not able to press a button and retrieve a file (unless it is related to my own special interest about Autism research or teaching in which case my filing cabinet seems to ping open!). It is more like a re-navigation, I have to find the right entry point and node of the rhizome, I need to feel for the thread, follow it gently and try not to tug too hard in case it disappears back into the fog. I often know I know something, but I can’t get to it directly. I need the right conditions or sensory cue to draw it out and that takes time and and can make me appear distant or uninterested when the opposite is true.
This is why questions like “What did you do last weekend?” can feel like demands rather than simple curiosity. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention, it’s that the question doesn’t align with how my memory map works or how I perceive time. If you ask me what the light looked through my window like as I sat reading in bed, or how the air felt when we stepped outside I might have a more instant response but I probably won’t be able to recall the chronological sequence or events and relate things in an easy to understand order, it is like that gets lost in the spiral. It can be frustrating at times just to have fleeting impressions of memories that I know mean a lot to me but I can’t easily retrieve.
Understanding and Support
Understanding memory through a monotropic lens may helps us honour our different ways of knowing, recalling, and connecting with events and people. For those supporting Autistic individuals, whether as educators, therapists, or family members this means shifting assumptions and instead of assuming memory is absent or deficient it may be better to consider asking things like:
How do memories show up for you?
What helps you reconnect with something you felt or experienced?
Is there a sensory or emotional thread that brings it back?
This may also be empowering for those of us who live and experience life monotropically. It validates the experience of having a different bodymind, of perhaps remembering more through attention tunnels of sensation rather than facts or dates. It recognises that memory is not a failure when it doesn’t fit neurotypical expectations it’s perhaps just a different kind of map that we have to navigate.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
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.
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:
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.
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.
If you would like to take these ideas further, my courses, books and resources live on Autistic Realms. Everything in the shop is pay what you can, and many resources are free.
In my previous 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:
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
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Bergson, H. (1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.
Bergson, H. (2022). Creative Evolution. Routledge.
Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press.
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.
Yergeau, M. R. (2018). Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke University Press Books.
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.
Dwelling in Resonance: Monotropism, Monotropic Time, Spirals & Neuroqueer Temporalities
“Lodged in all is a set metronome” –
(W. H. Auden, 1969 – from the poem In Due Season)
Consider if you’re Autistic/ ADHD/ Monotropic and what happens if your internal metronome beats to a different rhythm to other people?
For many of us who are Autistic, ADHD, or AuDHD, time is not a straight line. It spirals, loops, expands, contracts. It may feel like you have your own rhythm or internal metronome that others may not be quite in synch with, or like you are singing a song that others cannot hear the beat of. I will briefly explore the theory of monotropism (the tendency towards deep, focused attention where more of your attentional resources are used on fewer interests at any one time) in relation to my experience of time as an AuDHD monotropic person and offer am emerging neuroqueering perspective of the fluidity of time.
(This is a shortened and edited version of my much longer blog about Monotropic Time (2025), which evolved from my series of Medium blogs, where I have been exploring some Deleuzean concepts within a framework of Neuroqueering Liminal In-Between Spaces (2023) ………amongst other random ideas!)
Neuronormative Time
Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of “chrononormativity” is introduced in her book Time Binds (2010). She explains how we learn to use our bodies through normative time—schedules, deadlines, and life stages—all governed by the logic of productivity. According to Freeman, chrononormativity encompasses the socially reinforced expectations and norms of how we spend our time – it makes us question what governs ‘productive’ time and what we see as ‘rest’ time.
In a world dominated by chrononormativity or what I will call (neuronormative time), the capitalist, clock-driven expectation is to be productive, punctual, and linear, neurodivergent ways of moving through time are often pathologized. If you are Autistic/ ADHD/ AuDHD you may find you are often stigmatised for being “late,” “chaotic,” or “disorganised,” when in fact, you may simply be existing on a different temporal wavelength. As Tolani and Venkatesan write in The Time We See (2025), time isn’t neutral. It’s structured by ableism, productivity demands, and neurotypical developmental milestones. If you fall outside this invisible scrip, if your time bends, stretches, and spirals, you’re often thought of as disordered or somehow needing fixing or interventions. Perhaps the differences in the way we experience time can be explained by the theory of monotropism? Perhaps it is an ontology?
Monotropic Time
I think the theory of monotropism (Murray et al. 2005) could offer us a lens to reframe time for Autistic/ ADHD/ AuDHers who are more likely to be monotropic (Garau et al. 2023). If you use more of your attentional resources on fewer areas of interest than others, then perhaps your experience of time will narrow too in some ways and expand in others? Just like our monotropic experiences when zooming into our passions and perhaps deep diving into a rabbit hole of research and creating ever-expanding constellations of rhizomorpheous connections or being so immersed in a sensory experience of looking at light reflecting on water or onto your wall that you feel you have may be almost become the tiny fragments of light (or may be that is just me?!) ?
Having a different perception of time could also help explain a large part of the Double Empathy Problems (Milton 2012), especially between monotropic and polytropic people. If you’re like me and monotropic, hours can feel like minutes when you’re in a deep attention tunnel and fully engaged in a flow state; outside demands may feel like they literally melt away or dissolve. It is perhaps not that we’re “losing time”; but rather, we can reframe it that we are dwelling within time, immersed in a resonant spiral of attention that is tunnelling ever deeper the longer we are engaged and the deeper into a flow state we go. It may feel like pure Autistic joy if you are engaged with something positive (alternatively, it could end up feeling like an eternal loop of hell and ruminating anxiety-filled, all-consuming thoughts if your attention has hooked into something less joyful).
When in flow, the concept of “now/not now” becomes irrelevant. You are simply in flow, it can feel like the the world outside of your attention tunnel filled with neuronormative demands and expectations is literally melting away. This could be seen to be monotropic temporality. If you are monotropic, you may feel more attuned to your environment; everything may be felt more intensely, thoughts and time itself is not linear, and everything from the core of your being may be more interconnected. Time itself may be felt differently as we experience the world differently. If you are monotropic, you may feel that time is spirally and rhizomatic and flowy, just like your thoughts, sensory system and interests or passions!
The Riverbanks of Monotropic Flow
In my Map of Monotropic Experiences, I describe monotropic time as being like a flowing river. When we’re in the right environment and are able to follow our passions and immerse ourselves freely in sensory experiences, we may be able to swim easily within the natural smooth current and flow of our bodyminds. However, when we’re pulled out of our attention tunnel and flow state by unexpected events, transitions, and external expectations and demands, the river can turn turbulent.
It takes more energy resources to fight against external demands and neuronormativity; it can feel like you are swimming upstream; are using all of your energy but not getting very far and never reaching where you want to be. This is only sustainable for so long before people end up spiralling into what I have visualised as burnout whirlpools. Monotropic people are may be more likely to get stuck in states of inertia, loops of anxiety and ruminating thoughts, not because they’re broken, but because the majority of the world refuses to flow with us and we are swimming against our natural tides. You can only swim upstream against your natural flow for so long before you are likely to hit burnout and start to struggle.
Monotropic time is nonlinear, rhizomatic, and relational. It’s shaped by sensory experiences and a deep embodiment of the environment and relationships around us. If you are monotropic, you may have a different temporal ecology that needs support, not correction. Without the right accommodations, support, and safe spaces to be your authentic self, the waters of neuronormativity can be dangerous and lead to burnout and mental health difficulties.
Neuroqueering Time: A Temporal Liberation
“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
To neuroqueer time is to resist the tyranny of the capitalist clock and neuronormativity. It is to refuse productivity as a measure of worth and instead honour attunement, resonance, flow states, connections and meaningful relationships with people and with our environment. As Nick Walker writes in their book Neuroqueer Heresies (2021), neuroqueering is not just about identity, it’s a practice of creative survival. Neuroqueer temporality isn’t just for Autistic people or ADHDers, it’s also an invitation for everyone to find their own rhythm and dimension of time that works for them.
From Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception to Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of flight that I wrote about in my blog Middle Entrance (2023), some ideas are slowly starting to make a bit more sense for me and are beginning to connect in new ways. I began my Medium blog (which is now hosted on Autistic Realms) by exploring Lefebvre’s ideas around the concept of space being alive. I feel space (like my own Autistic/ ADHD identity and energy) is fluid. Space constantly changes and depends on the interactions of those around us and objects within other spaces. I have been exploring ways of finding meaning in the spaces within what could be considered ‘ma’ to enable thoughts to develop and create connections with others from as I explored in my neuroqueering from the liminal in-between spaces blog(2023).
Embracing monotropic time could be seen as a form of neuroqueering as defined in Nick Walker’s (2021) book Neuroqueer Heresies. I have been considering if the energy created by these connections can lead to even more new spaces, ideas, and possibilities by subverting the expectations of the normativity of relationships and communication in my blogs about neuroqueering from the in-between and liminal spaces. I am now looping some of these thoughts back around and centering them on the theory of monotropism and my different way of experiencing time.
If we embrace our natural monotropic flow states and monotropic spiral time, we can maybe begin to understand time not as a schedule or governed by a ticking clock or by timetables set out by neuronormative expectations. Instead, we can explore how, as Autistic/ ADHD people we may experience living in monotropic time more as a form of relational, moment-to-moment negotiation between our environment and ourselves. From a neuroqueering perspective, if we embrace monotropic time, it can enable us to expand and defy time set out by neuronormative ideals and be liberated from the ticking clock of capitalism.
A World Beyond the Clock
Whether we call it spiral time, neuro-holographic time, or monotropic time, what matters is that we validate these different temporal realities. Because for many of us, time is not measured in minutes but in meaning. Monotropic time is like a portal, whereas neuronormative time may feel more like a prison at times, or at least like we are trying to swim upstream and going against the very essence of our natural monotropic flow and rhythm.
In 1943, T.S. Eliot’s collection of four poems were collated to form Four Quartets. The final poem in this series Little Gidding (1942), continues Eliot’s exploration of time and our connections with each other through generations and current society.
“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
This quote seems particularly relevant to my deep interest in evolving spirals and finding meaning in gaps and spaces and an experience of monotropic time that I am continuing to explore and loop back to Eliot’s poetry.
I visualise time, relationships and ways of being as constantly evolving spirals that spin in and out in multidimensional ways. Different connections and experiences add to and contribute to a wider, deeper, fluid rhizomatic network of potential that is always in a constant state of flux, perhaps more so if you are monotropic. This idea of an evolving spiral and returning to a new beginning in the middle is beautifully reflected in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea”.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.
To support monotropic people, perhaps we need to bend or unfold neuronormative time. As Autistic/ ADHD/ AuDHD people, we likely need more space and flexibility to thrive in a world dominated by neuronormative demands and governed by neuronormative time. We need to create room for flow, for stillness, for neurodivergent ways of resting, regulating and rejuvenating, for our monotropic deep dives and immersive sensory experiences and for our nonlinear rhythms. We need to let go of the myth of “normal” time and start dwelling in resonance, which may enable us to be more at one with the natural flow of our bodyminds and our environment.
We all have our own internal metronomes that are responsive to the environment around us. As monotropic people, we may need more flexibility and a softer, more supple understanding and acceptance of our different perceptions of time from people around us. As Tolani, P., & Venkatesan, S. (2025) summarise their paper published last week The Time We See: ADHD, Neuroqueer Temporality, and Graphic Medicine, “It is crucial to recognize that time perception is not universal but varies across neurotypes, suggesting a broader and more inclusive view of temporal experiences.”
To support monotropic people, we need to create safe, spacious environments where time is allowed to stretch, spiral, and soften. Monotropic time must be honoured not as a deviation but as a valid, expansive and different rhythm and way of living.
When we make room for fluidity and loosen the grip of rigid schedules, tight timetables and linear binary expectations, we can then enable space for monotropic time perception to unfurl, unfold and expand rhizomatically so we are not just surviving and trying to swim upstream but can immerse ourselves in flow and thrive to be our authentic monotropic selves.
Neuroqueer temporality isn’t just for Autistic people or ADHDers. It is an open invitation for everyone to discover their own rhythm, their own flow, their own temporal dimension that feels right. Each person moves through time differently, shaped by their neurology, bodymind, and personal lived experience for some it may be they experience time more neuro-holographically.
To honour neurodiversity, we need to slow down, soften, and make space for each other, and for ourselves. When we allow time to bend, spiral, expand and breathe and when we embrace flexibility and presence over pressure, demands and neuronormative expectations we can create environments where everyone can flourish in ways that are more meaningful to them and everyone has the potential to thrive.
Heasman, B., Williams, G., Charura, D., Hamilton, L. G., Milton, D., & Murray, F. (2024c). Towards autistic flow theory: A non‐pathologising conceptual approach. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12427
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
Rapaport, H., Clapham, H., Adams, J., Lawson, W., Porayska-Pomsta, K., & Pellicano, E. (2023). ‘I live in extremes’: A qualitative investigation of Autistic adults’ experiences of inertial rest and motion. Autism, 28(5), 1305–1315. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231198916
Tolani, P., & Venkatesan, S. (2025). The time we see: ADHD, neuroqueer temporality, and graphic medicine. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 68(1), 117–138. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2025.a953457
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.
