A collaboration between Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms and David Gray-Hammond of NeuroHub Community

The Wider Existence is a Substack that David and I write together (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, 2026). Here we explore philosophy, liminal spaces and existential diversity, alongside neuroqueer theory and practice and queer ways of being and becoming.

Two questions

When a person is struggling, two questions are available. The first is asked constantly: what is wrong with this person? It places the problem inside a bodymind and leads to diagnosis, correction and a plan to change somebody. Nearly every institution a Neurodivergent or Mad person meets is built to ask it, usually without realising it is asking anything at all, and almost never noticing the systemic violence entangled in the asking.

The second is asked rarely: what is wrong with the world around them? It locates the problem in an environment, an ecosystem, and leads to changed conditions and accountable institutions. It is harder to ask because it moves the responsibility for change away from the person who is suffering and onto services, schools, workplaces, families and policy. It deindividualises distress. The Wider Existence exists to ask this second question, again and again, across as many subjects as we can reach.

Existential diversity

We write from a concept we developed together, and the Substack takes its name from the book we are slowly writing about it. Existential diversity is the diversity of how lives connect with, and impact, the world around them, unconfined by the physical boundaries of the bodymind or by the limits of a mortal existence.

Put more simply, none of us is contained. Our existence reaches past our skin and past our lifespan in four registers: materially, as star-forged matter on loan, cycling water and air; functionally, as minds scaffolded by objects, habits, notations and other people; causally, through the environments we build and hand on; and semiotically, through the signs we make that others read after we have gone.

That reach runs in both directions. We alter the world before we arrive in it, as rooms are prepared, names chosen and services allocated or withheld in anticipation of us, and for a disabled or Neurodivergent child that anticipation is often where the harm begins. We go on altering it during our lives and long afterwards, as small acts ripple outwards through time. Perhaps the most meaningful thing we can do is to create and take part in community, understood as an ecology that constitutes its members rather than a container people are admitted into, where belonging is built rather than granted.

What you will find there

Rather than a list of topics, The Wider Existence applies one move to many subjects and follows it wherever it leads.

• Philosophy, put to work. Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Barad (2007), Guattari’s (2000) three ecologies, biosemiotics and new materialism, used because these tools answer questions that disability politics alone cannot.
• Liminal spaces. The thresholds rather than the categories, the space between survival and sense-making, and the sideways belonging of the Autistic rhizome, built through liminal space rather than upwards through conformity.
• Madness. Psychosis, Mad studies and the boundary between autism and psychosis that clinicians already cannot hold, including symphrenia, our proposal for naming the connected mind.
• Ecology and kinship. Ethodiversity runs through fungi and forests as readily as through human communities, and kinship across species, living and non-living, is our starting point.
• Time. Monotropic time, crip time and the clock as a Victorian invention that took on a moral charge alongside the standard body, because so much of what gets recorded as individual deficit is simply timing.
• Joy. If distress is environmental, so is joy, and a great deal of intervention has been organised around removing it, from play recorded as stereotypy and stimming extinguished as a behaviour target to masking taught and then billed as progress.
• Neuroqueer theory and practice. Moving beyond the expectations of neuronormativity (Walker, 2021), with close attention to what any of this changes on an ordinary Tuesday, in a classroom, on a ward or in a family.

Who is writing

David Gray-Hammond is an Autistic, ADHD and Schizophrenic author, independent academic and CEO of NeuroHub Community, whose work sits at the intersection of complex mental health needs, community building and a critique of power systems. I am a late-identified Autistic and ADHD advocate, writer and consultant, and the founder of Autistic Realms, and my work is grounded in monotropism, attention, flow states and burnout, and in neuroqueer and posthumanist thought.

Everything we publish is conceptualised jointly unless we say otherwise, and where an idea has its own lineage we name it. The ecosystemic model of distress was developed by David with me and Tanya Adkin, and ethodiversity reaches us through Ombre Tarragnat from Adolfo Cordero-Rivera.

The Wider Existence

By Helen Edgar

Every threshold is a question
            the Master’s House never asks.


      Betwixt
                  and between,
the self loosens its grammar.

            Subject,      object,
   inside,         outside:
                        the categories thin
      like mist above a river at first light.


Where does a mind end?
                  At the skull, the textbooks said.
      But attention travels.
                              It settles in a stone,
            a star map,
                        a word turned over
   a thousand times,
            and something of us remains there,
                        held in the long time of things.


                  Existence is plural.
      It runs through bodies
                              and beyond them,
across the years,
            through the ones we love,
                  into places that remember us
                                    after we have gone.


To neuroqueer is to practise
            another physics of the self:
      to let the edges stay soft,
                  to move at the pace of the deep current,
   to trust the single bright channel of focus
                  as a way of knowing the world.


            Becoming has no destination.
                              The river does not arrive.
      It keeps on meeting
                                    the sea.


We write from the middle,
            from the unfinished place,
                        where our ways of being have room to widen…

Our first essay will be on symphrenia, a non-pathological identity and neurocognitive style for people at the intersection of AuDHD and psychotic experience. If exploring the fringes and creating understanding sounds like something for you, you are very welcome to subscribe for free and join us. Until then, stay weird.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

Gray-Hammond, D., & Edgar, H. (2026). The Wider Existence [Substack newsletter]. https://thewiderexistence.substack.com/

Guattari, F. (2000). The three ecologies (I. Pindar & P. Sutton, Trans.). Athlone Press. (Original work published 1989)

Lorde, A. (2007). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (pp. 110–113). Crossing Press. (Original work published 1984)

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