The word “monotropism” had already flagged up to me at some point long before, unsurprisingly, but it was only after I came across a couple of shares in very quick succession (links below) on this topic by Fergus Murray, the son of Dinah Murray who, with Wenn Lawson (both of them being autistic), originally came up with the idea of monotropism as a theory of autism, that the possibility that here was a major missing piece of my self-understanding jigsaw really lit up for me, leading to this post.

I found Murray, first off, on the AuDHD Flourishing podcast (my new favourite thing) on which he was being interviewed by host Mattia Maurée who I came across after finding an article in the Guardian, published just three weeks ago, on AuDHD entitled “The sudden rise of AuDHD: what is behind the rocketing rates of this life-changing diagnosis?” I was scouring the internet for just anything that would help me get to better grips with the ups and downs of being AuDHD and why following advice for one half of that combination or the other didn’t ever seem to gel for me and would often even stir me up into a wave of demand avoidance, which led me directly to Maurée who is quoted in the article as having discovered the label AuDHD when she also realised that following separate pieces of advice about autism and ADHD just wasn’t working for her. This led me to her podcast and to Murray and from there to monotropism which, for the first time, struck me as much more than just a common trait of autism but more like a central tenet that literally makes autism what it is!

So this is all fairly typical of one of my hunts for information and understanding, with one thing leading to another thing…and then on to another, like a trail of breadcrumbs and, all the time, I am digging deeper in that tunnel of understanding, examining and reexamining my own experiences along the way…which is pretty much monotropism in action.

Murray, in the episode with Maurée, appropriately entitled “Monotropism Might Explain Everything“, makes a really compelling case for how monotropism can impact pretty much everything to do with how you experience the world and interact with others and, right away, I was finding myself in these descriptions of autistic experience, which are all down to a subtle difference of thinking style when monotropism is present. In his words in an article I found on Medium, “I believe that the best way to understand autistic minds is in terms of a thinking style which tends to concentrate resources in a few interests and concerns at any time, rather than distributing them widely. This style of processing, monotropism, explains many features of autistic experience that may initially seem puzzling, and shows how they are connected.” Starting Point for Understanding Autism, Fergus Murray).

In brief “Monotropic people have an interest based nervous system. This means they focus more of their attention resources on fewer things at any one time compared to other people who may be polytropic. Things outside an attention tunnel may get missed and moving between attention tunnels can be difficult and take a lot of energy.” (Community input from various social media platforms to help define monotropism, January 2024 – Autistic Realms, quoted on the Montropism.org website.)

I don’t want to get too heavily into regurgitating all the extremely well explained information that is already out there about monotropism (as per all the links scattered throughout this post) although here are a few of the key points that Murray shares in the above article (where he outlines each point in detail), all of which he considers to be features of the monotropic mind, and all of which I strongly relate to:

-coping with multiple channels of information is hard

-filtering is tricky and prone to error 

-changing tracks is destabilising 

-intensity is a big part of the picture (a topic I have blogged about several times before)

-looping back to the same things is a feature

-once an idea is rejected it’s gone!

A really strong feature is that a monotropic mind tends to get caught up in passionate interests or deep fascinations and, another relatable term I have now heard being used quite a lot, gets lost down “tunnels” of information. A key point to make is that although we might be considered to have quite a narrow zone of interest, that doesn’t mean we have only one thing that we are interested in; on the contrary, we often hold multiple interests or fascinations at the same time and/or progress through a long series of such interests over the course of a lifetime; however, to our minds, all these different areas are quite often perceived as being highly interconnected, if in ways that are very far from obvious to other people. From experience, this very-much describes a long journey through a sequence of interests that have fascinated me over the years and I have never lost interest in any of those things but continuously build upon them, though I tend to specialise in one or two things at a time. When I talk most animatedly, I am known to spin off in all sorts of “random” directions so that the person I am talking to is often left wondering “how on earth did we get from this topic to that topic” all in the space of a relatively short conversation but, to me, there is always a thread of connection that I am following, subtle though it may be, which knots together all these seemingly unrelated things in a way that is highly fascinating to me if perhaps obscure to them. 

Some of my biggest breakthroughs have arisen out of such dot-joining exercises but they do call on a need for me to be able to fixate and focus without distractions so that I can surrender to the flow that carries me between intriguingly connected things. Everything that is most important to me in my world is intrinsically connected in ways that only I can fully perceive (making it very hard for other people to relate) yet to me these connections make more sense of things and provide me with the juiciness that keeps me wanting to be alive. Even my more diverse interests such as painting and health researching have themes in common that help inform each other in surprising ways, something I once tried to share, in a lot of detail, on my artist website but which hit such a bank of incomprehension from people wanting to check out my bio as a painter that I finally (after many years) decided to simplify what I wrote about myself to conform better with what is usually expected of a visual artist’s professional statement. It took the oversight of realising that I am autistic for me to even notice how my original spiel was just too much for most people to digest!

Frequently encountering this kind of incomprehension from people (the story of my life!) and the fact that I need to be able to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of my curiosity in order to be creative at all is why I could never be led or dictated to by some outside source of obligation forcing me to put my attention on subjects that haven’t organically arisen out of my own journey of self-exploration from which all of my genuine interests arise. This, of course, does not intersect well with being employed, making a living or fulfilling any kind of obligation dictated by what other people expect of me and has led to a whole lifetime of falling through the cracks when it comes to meeting societal, work, income bracket and other expectations.

As per other anecdotes shared by people with monotropric minds, my experience of it can be as close to bliss as anything in this world and without it I would be in my most emotionally disregulated state a lot of the time (which is an enormous clue to just how much I need the space and freedom in my life to indulge my monotropic mind in order to function as my best self; thankfully, I now have that kind of freedom and space but this wasn’t always the case at all). Descriptors used include having access to “a channel of energy”, “a feeling of joy a lot like being in love”, “playing or enjoying an adventure”, “being in a secure sensory bubble” or “like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia” (anecdotal experiences of monotropism collected and shared on the Autistic Realms website). Problems tend to arise when other people don’t relate either to the activity of withdrawing into your own thought domain itself or with the subject matter that holds your attention so fixedly and the result can be that other people assume you are wasting time, being lazy, disassociating, making excuses for not joining in, being deliberately difficult when you fail to work in a more conventional way and, of course, when they pathologise you. 

Connected to this, I know that in my own case I may seem to be doing absolutely nothing (relatable) a lot of the time, in fact people always assume that I just sit around relaxing all day since I gave up “work”, but in reality I’m always in the thick of it, doing such a lot, if mostly on the inside; to which, if you are monotropic, you may relate but, if you are not, there is very little chance that you will grasp what I am saying here. In fact, I never really give myself a day off…I’m always deep in thought, following up on leads or chasing down more information, frequently to be found noodling things around in my mind at all hours or writing things up, in note or journal form, or in this kind of highly polished format ready to share something in my blog (though, believe me, I do a whole load of other writing that never gets shared). In every spare moment, I am reading something, listening to a podcast, looking up answers to the various questions that occur to me all the time or diving down rabbit holes in pursuit of new things that happen to catch my eye, but there is seldom vacuous space in my day. In fact, I probably couldn’t work any harder than this if I had a full time research or data gathering job and, in fact, I give myself far less time off, yet this kind of dedication, and the exhaustion that frequently accompanies it, remains largely invalidated by others because they fail to relate to either the interests we have or why we are so driven in the pursuit of them. “Nobody is forcing you to do this” I am so often told when I collapse in a heap of tiredness, which reflects a fundamental failure in understanding just how driven and compelled I feel on the inside, for a reason I only half understood before I came across monotropism described in more detail the other day.

Sometimes, I struggle to even keep on top of how my animated mind is always shooting off in all directions, asking questions that just have to be pursued or following a trail of clues to get to some better understanding of something that has caught my attention. In the average day, I have so many thoughts…just so many fascinating, curiosity inspiring, “got to do something with them” thoughts that it’s as much as I can do to jot them all down in an app that I now use to tidy them out of my mind for a future moment, especially if I already have my plate full with whatever I am currently hyperfocusing on. If I don’t jot these things down but try to act on them impulsively as they occur, I get frequently taken off tangent, which can sometimes be a good thing but, at other times, it can feel like I just dropped an entire universe on the floor and smashed it to pieces because of all the other thoughts that I had to let go of to do that.

If you too are monotropic then the chances are that you are also putting a lot of energy into whatever you happen to be into. In fact, if any of this, even remotely, sounds like you, then you might want to explore monotropism yourself.

So the most helpful thing of all, for me, has been to take the questionnaire designed to quickly help you to identify whether you have this kind of mind, which you can do for yourself following the link to it here. Chances are that just reading through the questions will help you to gain a better picture of the kind of processing that is specific to a monotropic mind, compared to a more typical polytropic mind and, once you have assessed your own position on these topics, you should be able to gain a sense of whether this factor has been a player in your own experience of life and the various ways you have perhaps “felt different” or at odds with other people.  To be clear, this survey is not a “test for autism”, however a consideration of monotropism is being widely hailed as the missing link in the consideration of what neurodivergence is, helping to make sense of so many autistic experiences (monotropism also describes many people’s experiences ADHD) at the individual level, with ADHD people generally more likely to have a monotropic mind than allistic people, autistic people then even more likely than those with ADHD and AuDHD the most likely group of all to present with a monotropic mind. 

As someone who is AuDHD myself, I was very eager to run the questionnaire and came out with a very high score of 226 out of 235. Since I ran those questions, I am starting to feel that a lack of consideration of monotropism was the missing link in my self-understanding until now…and that going on to consider it more than I ever have is about to accelerate my progress in my continuing effort to live a better, more comfortable and far less deficits-fixated life as a neurodivergent individual. As per this quote from Autistic Realms: “Monotropism can have a positive and negative impact on sensory, social and communication needs depending on the environment, support provided and how a person manages their mind and body”. Who knows how things could have been different for me if I had lived in a world that accepted, supported and even valued my kind of mind however, at this advanced stage of my life (now 56), it’s largely down to me to create that kind of support and right environment; and, thankfully, I now have the circumstantial autonomy to do this, though I appreciate that not everyone is so fortunate.

In order to follow through on this intention, it’s been interesting to comb back through my life experiences to really notice my monotropic mind at work, all the ways it dictated my zones of interest at various developmental stages and also the many ways that I struggled, or missed out, because of being wired this way. I also found myself wondering if there was a thread or theme to the interests I have had life-long and it seems to me that there has been a very high degree of coherence to the path I have followed; also much to indicate that there was no way I was ever going to agree to specialise in one thing, decades ago, in order to make a career out of it, which helps explain just how much struggle I had around choosing “options” at school or nailing my colours to the mast with just about anything at any stage (since I had to keep everything open-ended and free to evolve, or change directions, as I went along).

For me the main (if rather broad) zone of my lifelong hyperfocus has always been, loosely speaking, “anthropomorphic, philosophical, spiritual and existential”. I began studying human behaviour extremely closely in real life scenarios from the day I was born, then through tv and some extremely adult reading materials at a very young age, often touching on the themes of war and some of the worst expressions of human behaviour (since I was trying with all my might to understand them…and to sift out the better sides of humanity, with dogged optimism, hoping I would one day find something redeeming to fixate upon). I passed through the interest domains of history (with fairly single-minded focus for quite a while…), literature (largely as another means of micro-analysing human thought processes as most directly recorded throughout the ages) and philosophy, which I spontaneously chose as a last minute A-level option over choosing a science as had been planned (most people I knew couldn’t grasp the usefulness of my choice at the time but I loved it as a school-sanctioned opportunity to sit and think in a context where my unstructured thoughts were actually valued). I then flipped back to doing literature at degree level because I was completely undecided about what to do with myself and, basically, stalling for time.

I then seemed to hit a wall as a monotropic young adult, caught-up as I was in so much masking behaviour in order to survive for the next few years that I had very little hyperfocus scope left in my chaotically busy days (apart from getting stuck in a mindscape of worries and perfectionism); that is, until I became ill, which forced me to reexamine everything that I knew about the “purpose of life”, and “why is everything always so hard for me”. This developed into deeply questioning what really made me tick and kept me most healthy, broadly exploring my way into alternative health modalities, mindfulness and spirituality yet still left largely perplexed and frustrated by human behaviour, very little of which I related to, eventually leading me into the shallow waters of learning about neurodivergence. Once not even knee deep in that domain, I was unable to avoid recognising myself in near enough everything I was reading on the topic and became hooked on all aspects of it, as I still am (and I don’t see that abating any time soon). In fact I think it’s fair to say, all my interests have led to, and culminate in, a burning desire to hyperfocus on all things neurodivergent for the rest of my days…all this, along with my various other interests, though they all have this way of boomeranging back to the matter of my neurodivergence.

So now the whole broad topic of neurodivergence is my passion, with specialisms that include the unique presentation of autism and ADHD, with side interests that include synesthesia, high sensitivity and the impact of being a late diagnosed female including all the various repercussions on long term health, especially when it comes to some of the more bewildering chronic health manifestations and hypermobility. I am ever hungry in pursuit of non-pathologising perspectives of neurodiversity and for gathering evidence of the multitudinous effects of trying to exist as a neurodivergent individual in a dominantly allistic world.

Diving into fresh territories, such as this newly spotlit topic of monotropism, can light me up inside like another person would get a thrill from booking a holiday or treating themselves with a new purchase. For me, those things (including spending impulsivity, which has tended to be one of the ways I try to keep myself more grounded and thus more relatable…although shopping itself can easily turn itself into its own area of single-minded hyperfocus…) can sometimes crop up as a distraction from my monotropic behaviours, particularly at times when  my own intensity starts to feel abhorrent on the inside, especially to my ADHD part’s need for constant variety, sensory experiences and movement, or equally when I become self-conscious of how my highly cerebral behaviours are turning other people off (so I try to snap out of my monotropic behaviours for a while, in which case I need a distraction). However, my monotropic fixations are never far from my mind and, for me, the whole of life is a data gathering exercise that involves me making notes literally day or night and wherever I happen to be and whoever I am with. You might assume I’m texting when I pick up my phone to type a few words, like everyone else does, but I am more likely to be noting down observations and thoughts as they happens to occur to me…a habit I didn’t even think of as all that unusual until I stepped back to fully examine my own monotropic behaviours. Straddled and distracted by my inner processes at all the times I am meant to be doing anything else externally, I wouldn’t know how to put down my monotropic preoccupations for a day, or even an hour, if I tried and I am always engaged, to a good 90% or more, in my current fixations, which I carry around with me everywhere I go, rather than being fully present “in the moment”. Or, you could more accurately say, I am always in the moment…a moment filled with my own inner processes, which are always live and on air at any time I happen to be awake!

But then I’ve always been an observer of life from the sidelines and making it fascinating for myself has been a way of coping with the fact I don’t feel part of it…not really…and never have (I have even managed to make my complicated health status fascinating as a way of living with it). As that lonely child at primary school, I coped by cultivating a sense of, rather businesslike, “anthropological curiosity” that made it alright, even necessary, to maintain an air of aloof, scientific detachment from my age peers, even before knowing about the different kind of neurology that underpinned it. I now recall how I went through phases of justifying this behaviour by telling myself, first, that I wanted to be a novelist and needed to gather data (although, in reality, I never got close as I couldn’t seem to write about anything very relatable to other people, as I had already realised by the time I was 11 or 12, before which all my stories were pure mimicry…accomplished enough to get a really good mark but really just a reflection of all the many books I had read rather than my own originality). Later, I self-justified my aloofness as a sort of artistic rebelliousness and eccentricity but that was also a cover for what was really going on, being this very strong desire to remain undistracted by having to join in more. Truth be known, I have always preferred to stay in my own lane in order to preserve my ability to surrender to my monotropic fixations whenever I want to and without guilt, pretence or distraction, preserving for myself a degree of autonomy that makes space for my mind to indulge as freely and fixatedly as it truly needs to.

I’m now in the process of acknowledging this truth about myself, embracing it, allowing it and making better use of what is, really (in its own way) a skillset of sorts. To get the best out of it, I need to ensure that I don’t try and spread myself too thinly, not even across two of my own monotropic interests at the same time (even though they are almost invariably linked at various levels…as mentioned, even my painting tends to be intrinsically linked to whatever I am processing in my head at the time, though I may not initially glean how, a factor I first started noticing over a decade ago…so, in fact, no single activity gives me a proper break from the fixations of my thoughts). I do far better to pick an area of deep dive and then just plunge in there, without trying to keep one foot in another camp, because my brain, quite simply, isn’t designed for that. And, besides, it likes to work overtime so, if I don’t give it ample outlets in the daytime, it will only start to impinge, even more, on my sleep.

Looking back through the years of concurrent health challenges, the really struggling health phases have tended to occur during periods of time when my attention was being pulled in more than one direction or spread very thinly. This tells me such a lot! I really need to make space for this mental preference of mine to be down some rabbit hole most if not all of the time; it’s not something that ever could or should be sidelined (and certainly not healthy to do so) and I am so done with apologising for it or thinking I could ever possibly suppress it.

Owning my monotropic brain (an extremely recent development, still in very early days) has been huge and the relief this affords is still a fairly new sensation in a lifetime of always feeling “weird” or like I am supposed to be apologetic for behaving in this way…as in, introverted, distracted, caught up in my own head much of the time, fixated, intense and, sin of all sins, apparently determined to make myself utterly unrelatable to most people. However, why should I apologise for the way I am literally hardwired to be, which was not a choice but an accident of genetics and which is its own entirely valid way of being; one which happens to come with its own potentiality and gifts, delivering some of the peak moments of my existence when I let it run freely! The degree to which trying to cork this factor at various points of my life, because it wasn’t convenient for me to be so singularly fixated or apparently self-absorbed, contributed to me not thriving or becoming acutely dysfunctional or unwell could never be accurately measured in hindsight but I have my suspicions. So I now know that I need to preserve a lot of brain space for this factor and I can even see how my ever crashing health for two decades was my body’s secret way of preserving this space, so I could pull back from the morass and just be with my thoughts.

Since that original burnout (and there were other smaller ones that predated it and which, in hindsight, could also have been my body’s best initiative to gain me some head space!) I think that part of me has been on guard more so than ever before. Those times of my life that look even remotely likely to impinge on my ability to indulge my monotropic needs, during which I just know distractions are going to abundant and my attention forced to spread out, have generally been the times most closely associated with more burnout and random health crashes. So bringing in even more space and time to allow for narrow, uninterrupted focus could, in theory, make me a healthier person with more energy and flow and generally better, more balanced, health which is quite an insight to have as I have often tended to assume the opposite…in other words, that sitting around thinking all the time, allowing my brain to work overtime, was either not helping me to get into a healthier state or actively causing me to become more anxious (in hindsight, whilst these might be a typical response to “overthinking”, they are simply not mine). This shows one of the dangers of appraising neurodivergent behaviours through an allistic filter because, for us, different rules so often apply.

Of course, the nature of the current fixation makes a huge difference in this regard but I need to give myself far more credit for being able to recognise, by now, a healthy versus unhealthy preoccupation before I dive into it. What I wasn’t giving myself credit for, until now, was the possibility that a monotropic brain like mine could also be a healthy brain rather than a pathologisable state to be vigorously avoided, as medicalised viewpoints of neurodivergence would have me believe!

Allowing whatever my mind finds appealing or exciting to be alright, regardless of it’s relatability by others, is another big breakthrough. Whatever it is doesn’t have to be anything to do with productivity or relatability or popularity of commerciality…in fact these things are usually a distraction from the main point of focus that my brain really wants to pursue, taking me off at tangents every time. I also don’t have to share with anyone if I don’t want to; because allowing the free, unimpinged playfulness of thought to happen is the main thing and enjoyment is the clue that I’m on track with that. As shared above, the experience can be blissful, can be playful, can be soothing, can be sensorily protective, can be self-regulating, and many more of the very things that we neurodivergent folks need more of in our lives to balance all the other hardships of dealing with an allistic world.

Shedding the culturally ingrained need for validation is going to be hard work along with the guilt that I am conditioned to feel at deeply and unreservedly pursuing something so utterly self-gratifying without any other obvious purpose. The main flag that I am allowing this factor more free rein is that I will inevitably need to claim more unstructured time for doing it and so be forced to further prioritise and safeguard that time by committing to allistic demands (such as being sociable, being available, being connected, joining in) even less than ever; however, through whose eyes is that a bad thing? Not through a pair of neurodivergent eyes!

I don’t even have to get into conversation about my interests if I don’t want to, although that leaves me a lot less to say (since I so struggle with small talk or chatter outside my interest zones), and I certainly don’t have to expose my thinking processes (how I reached my conclusions, especially if doing so makes me vulnerable as I try to explain the often highly subjective routes I have taken towards epiphanies I have managed to have). If I do choose to share, for instance through blogging which I do enjoy, I can put out there the bare minimum that might be useful to share without always trying so hard to take other people on the whole cognitive journey with me, as I have often tended to do with my blogging, which can then become convoluted and turn into yet another impingement on the flow and enjoyment of my interest because all my efforts end up getting tied up in the far more challenging matter of communication and evidence-building, often across a relatability abyss of different neurotypes because not everyone reading my blog is neurodivergent. It’s time for me not to worry too much about that or at least make it a secondary consideration to the monotropic flow process itself.

Sometimes I just know something instinctively, or I know via a pathway of clues that can’t be conveyed to anyone else that doesn’t share my particular brain wiring or the highly nuanced connections that it makes, and that’s alright. I’ve wasted a lot of energy in the past…exhausted myself…trying to do that very thing and it’s time to now conserve all that energy or to at least to start to discern better when it’s most useful to try to bridge the gap versus times when I need, most of all, to preserve my monotropic processes as something deeply soothing and stabilising for myself to pursue, nothing whatever to do with anyone else and something that doesn’t always require a finished product at the end. When I am coming out of a burnout, it is often the monotropic process that comes to my rescue but, when I turn that into some sort of sharing exercise, it can very quickly turn into a trigger or source or exhaustion rather than the soothant I really need.

Aiming my style of communication towards a neurodivergent audience (which is more likely to relate to my style of delivery and my inner processing without so much spoon-feeding) rather than trying so hard to be relatable to an allistic audience is another way I need to conserve my energy from now on. Making my interests into yet another zone of my life that is strung around with endless compromises, demands and obligations such as “needing” to share in a “relatable” way not only risks removing all the enjoyment but also risks dropping me out of my monotropic flow process. When the writing process, or the reason “why” I tell myself I  “need” to share in the first place, becomes so obviously invasive, I owe it to myself to step back from that to reconsider what I am doing…as I’ve more recently done on quite a few occasions when I might once have felt compelled to publish something I’ve written out of misguided sense of obligation to deliver new “content”  on a regular basis but have decided, instead, to preserve the written outcome for my eyes only (the same applies to making sure I don’t force myself to produce art at times when it ceases being a pleasure or way of processing how I feel and, instead, turns into something I feel I “ought” to deliver as output, as a way of creating some sort of valuable or valid presence in the world). I do have a very strong desire to contribute to the critical mass of “lived experience” anecdotes to do with neurodivergence as a way of helping to tip the balance of the severe lack of non-medicalised information out there, to try and help other people to find their way as others have so often helped me, but there is a fine line between this worthy aim and turning it all into yet another obligation that works against my monotropic need for autonomy and space in order to follow my flow.

So I’m slowly learning that my monotropism is its own activity and needs no other conclusion or objective (such as sharing) to make it valid or sign it off. Monotropism absolutely needs space and part of that spaciousness is an absence of perceived obligations or pressures around it. Thoughts along the lines of “just having to get this piece written” so I can get back to my pleasurable slipstream (almost as though to unburden my mind of a weight I am carrying until I can offload it) are a danger sign that I’m slipping back into attaching obligations to what should be a free flow state, at which point I need to question what (learned mindset, picked up from an allistic source?) motivates that very strong feeling of obligation because there can be no other source of such internalised pressure other than me parroting some other (ill-fitting) point of view. So then I need to identify the source of that ingrained, highly programmed mindset and replace it with my own actual needs and desires before taking another step forwards with any output I am making myself churn out.

Along that same track, I also need to get my daily order of activities just right so that so called domestic obligations don’t interfere with my need to be allowed to follow my mental whims early in the day in order to stay regulated, which can involve flipping some of the more ingrained ideas about priorities. I used to tell myself I had a baseline of daily domestic and personal care duties or benchmarks to achieve before I was allowed to slip into my hyperfocus of the moment. In doing so, I made it far less important for me to allow my monotropic brain to do what it wants to do than to measure up on some internalised scale of what it means to be a well-functioning and capable adult human being pulling their weight (internalised ableism at its worse). The reality is that I exist on a spectrum: my cognitive abilities may be high but I struggle with a lot of daily things and lean into my partner for a lot of support and backup with that side of things on a daily basis (he literally reminds me to go to the bathroom, to move, eat or drink water sometimes when I get really monotropic…which is one of the downsides that comes with the turf when I get really drawn in). He also takes care of more than half of the more routine domestic tasks much of the time because I am genuinely more physically disabled in these things than I tend to admit…though there are other times when organising or cleaning the home really appeals to my AuDHD need to create systems combined with an impulse to shake things up and instigate change, just as long as its not required of me to do these things every day. Things had already evolved this way over recent years…and its how they need to be, perhaps more so, if I am to prioritise and protect my monotropic needs on a daily basis.

Because too many (especially mundane) demands and obligations drop me out of my monotropic pleasure zone and can leave me hanging there, inert and irritable, when I lose my thread so why would I prioritise my weak areas at the start to my day, and so risk that I will likely lose my mental mojo completely by the time I’ve made room for it. Instead of kicking off my morning with things that make me feel in deficit, and as though my thoughts have turned to mush most days by the time I get to them, why not, instead, dive straight into the things that make me feel like I am a shining bright light of inspiration, exploration, connectivity and insight with all the inherent sense of purpose this affords me…and then tick off those other mundane things later in the day?

In other words, switching my priorities around the other way so I get to spend more time and focus on the things I am good at (cerebral and hard to relate though they may be) and far less fixated on the tasks that are not my strong suit (but which I have still, historically, tended to nag myself to do before I could “earn” my monotropic indulgence) could be a prime way for altering how good I feel about myself and my life…at long last. I can either let someone else take care of those other things more, if they are agreeable, or I can flip my priorities to allow myself to take the deep dive first and then do the mundane tasks later. So what if I contribute different qualities to our shared life together and, yes, I do get hyperfocused on a particular slipstream of fairly niche interests much of the time but that’s alright; it just happens to be my way and my husband, at least, gets and accepts me just as I am so why pretend to be any other way any more (another version of unmasking). I now need to own this huge part of me with other people and in a wider sphere, although this could be more contentious I do appreciate, but its important that I start to do so.

Fully allowing myself to go down any one of my current “tunnels” of research or consideration just as soon as something flags up as interesting, instead of playing all these old mind games to do with “guilt”, so called “other priorities” or worrying about what I “ought” to be doing, comparing myself constantly to other people, feels just so liberating I now suspect it to be a master key to far better health outcomes. (The big exception to this wholesale allowance of monotropic behaviours is the weekends…I try really hard to be more “available” at the weekends which can involve fending off some of my impulses to deep-dive.) The one thing I do have to master first, before I plunge in, which has been a long time in the learning, is to make a regular appointment each morning for checking in with my body…and then move the body…before I allow myself to get too sucked in. If I skip this stage and go straight from a sleeping state into a monotropic state, potentially lasting hours or even the whole day, the needs of my poor body get completely overridden and the consequences of being so sedentary can be pretty severe in light of my hypermobility, as I have learned the hard way. So, I now try to stick to the daily routine of lying on my yoga mat to check in with how I am feeling, as soon as I wake up, while I do some stretches to get my body unstuck from its sleeping posture, then I move the body a fair bit to get the blood flowing…doing some dance movement is always the best way for me…and then, ideally, go for a walk as soon as possible after I have eaten, before I get too stuck-in my monotropic though tunnel and preferably on my own if this is going to motivate me (at least this can then contribute to the monotropic process since I don’t tend to skip a beat on the inside but at least I’m now moving my blood flow and getting fresh air whilst I do this). Missing this body-attending stage out can have very dire consequences, I have learned as I get older, so its a non-negotiable from now on.

I also need to keep sensory distractions to a minimum when I am about to plunge in as I really struggle to filter distractions out…so I really don’t want to have that dishwasher or washing machine grinding away in the background when I’m like this, thus we have had to come to a compromise about the timings of using these noisy domestic things, and about how often and when people expect to interact with me when I am in my zone, in our household. This comes at last after many a year when I just gave myself no real consideration when it came to how much noise or distraction people or things were creating in my environment at my most monotropic times of day (because I didn’t want to seem unreasonable or demanding or felt I had no right to defend activities that other people found worthless or incomprehensible…and sometimes, for instance when it came to the sensory aggravation of constant traffic noise where we used to live, I had no choice but to try and put up with it). So I would just stuff in my noise cancelling earplugs and do my best to stay in the zone (not the perfect solution as I find even vibration or having someone in the room distracting when I’m in flow). That said, I can also sometimes filter out too much when I’m in a flow state, not noticing an alarm going off, someone hammering at the door or missing the fact I left the lid off the kettle and the room is filling with steam while the kettle boils dry …so it can go both ways (and my husband sometimes has to follow behind me to fill in some of my attention blanks when I’m most distracted).

By taking these steps to prioritise my monotropic mind, allowing and accepting it, making space for it, making it comfortable and defending the kind of environment it likes to be in, I can tell I am starting to feel more whole in my neurodivergent state rather than struggling against the odds, feeling unhealthy and being so desperately out of balance as I was for just so many years.

Of course, this is just my version of a slowly evolving model for living better with a monotropic mind and yours might require a completely different approach since we each have our own expression of this kind of wiring, if we happen to have it at all. That said, I just wanted to take a moment to share how I am finally learning to accommodate, not fight with, what I now know to be such an inherent part of my neurodivergent experience of life that, in many ways, I consider it to be its most central driver. At worst, not realising I am wired this way and, at best, fighting it has been a major sticking point all my life so I am quietly hoping that things become a little easier and more personalised to my inherent preferences from now on; also, that I can start to reap all the benefits of indulging my innate preferences, without further guilt or making it wrong.