Blog

By Helen Edgar, Autistic Realms 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…

The word resilience is often used as a weapon, especially against parents/ carers whose children are different, who may be neurodivergent and who are more likely to need accommodations in school to succeed. I have found the word ‘resilience’ triggering for a long time, it has been used against me as a parent, against my…

Inspired by Betsy Selvam’s talk on Art as a Therapeutic Tool, delivered at Stimpunks Seeds of Cope event 17th May 2025, and the amazing Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice Course I am on with KR Moorhead, Marta Rose and Meg Max. Burnout can creep into our lives as a type of deep exhaustion that won’t lift, no matter how much sleep you have. It can leave…

From Pathology to Possibility: Reclaiming Our Stories Autistic people have been spoken about, written over, and pathologised for far too long. Our lives have been turned into case studies, symptoms, behaviours, and ‘outcomes’. We have been flattened, squashed into diagnostic criteria, and dissected through checklists and things like social skills programmes built around what we…

“Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.” [And that may even be a good thing]. (Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, 2002) Haruki Murakami is one of my…

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…

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…

Explaining what it is like to be autistic to non-autistic people can be difficult. To quote Dawn Prince-Hughes (Cultural Autism Studies at Yale), being autistic is like “being human without the skin”. This can be difficult for non-autistic people to understand. Seeing and feeling the blank looks and Double Empathy Problem (Milton, 2012) at a really extreme DEEP level…

Kieran Rose (2018) describes autistic burnout as a ‘crash where you keep on crashing’. This resonates deeply. I have experienced cycles of burnout throughout my life due to systemic unmet needs living as an autistic person in a world primarily designed for non-autistic people. The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) is real, and as explained in my previous…

Quantumness tends to prosper in very cold systems that are carefully isolated rather than part of a tepid soup awash with other activity.” (Lewton, T. 2024) This may be a weird take, but … I think we could use the idea of quantumness and reframe it around an interpretation of marginalised groups living on the edges…

“The growing cracks in the thin veneer of our “civilised” economic and social operating model are impossible to ignore”, Jorn Bettin (2021). The double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) creates a gap of disconnect experienced between people due to misunderstood shared lived experiences. It is “a breakdown in reciprocity and mutual understanding that can happen between people with very differing…

I am autistic and monotropic, and I am interested in exploring Helen Mirra’s theory of holotropism (2023) and how this may impact flow states and regulation. Holotropism synthesises the theory of monotropism (Murray, 2005) with deep ecology and holistic anatomy. Holotropism is a: “multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain under the monotropism map…To be holotropic is to have wide open sensory…

In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker (2021) describes embracing neuroqueering as a verb. When considering Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, we need to reinterpret, rethink, redefine, and reimagine what those spaces may look like and the journey required to be able to facilitate them. We are considering whether we can use the template Walker created for designing autism courses as a template for…

“Intentionally liberating oneself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity can be thought of as neuroqueering” (Walker, 2021). This blog is published on Stimpunks website in its entirety, with links to full references and resources on their page: Neuroqueering Learning Spaces, An Exploration. More Realms has always been a space for me to push the boundaries of Autistic Realms and explore…

“The growing cracks in the thin veneer of our “civilised” economic and social operating model are impossible to ignore”, Jorn Bettin (2020). As a late-diagnosed autistic person, I feel a massive disconnect with the world around me. I am living in the ‘gap’ between so many spaces but also feel the potential of neuroqueering and transforming what…

In Milan Kundera’s novel, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1981), he described the heaviness of life, the restrictive oppression and boundaries that can tie us all down, yet there is freedom in the possibilities the mind can bring and in the choices we can make. We can subvert the restrictions of neuronormative society; we can,…