Draw a map
The map on this site is one Autistic person's. Helen Edgar drew it in 2024 as a picture of her own monotropic bodymind, and a great many people have recognised themselves in it since.
The invitation has always been to draw your own. This is somewhere to do that.
You start on open water, not on an empty page. Put land where you need it, and then join it up: a river running through, a bridge across to the next part, a boat going between. A map does not have to be a single island to be yours, and it does not have to be marooned. The pieces for crossing are the first ones in the tray for that reason.
Make the whirlpool big enough to swallow half the coast if that is the kind of year it has been. Add the places from Helen's map that are yours, leave off the ones that are not, and add nothing at all if the shapes say it better.
Draw your own map
The board is fresh water. Put land where you need it, join it up with rivers, bridges and boats, and move things until it looks like your year. Nothing you draw leaves this device, there is no score at the end, and no two maps are supposed to match.
Drag a shape out of the tray and drop it where you want it, or click it to put it on the middle of the board. Then drag a piece, or tab to it and use the arrow keys to move it, + and − to resize, [ and ] to turn it a little, f to flip it. Delete takes it off, and Ctrl or ⌘ with Z undoes it. On a ? of your own, Enter opens it for writing. Rivers, paths and bridges are in the tray running four ways already; Turn moves a piece an eighth of a circle at a time, and Flip mirrors it, so anything can end up pointing anywhere.
Shapes
Drawn from scratch in the site's own tones, never traced from the map — which is what makes them yours to keep, copy and change.
Land and islands
Ground to stand on, as much or as little as you want. These drop behind everything else, and they do not have to sit on their own: the water, bridges and boats are further down.
The twenty, drawn
Each of Helen's twenty areas as we picture it. Ours, not hers — use them, or build your own out of the shapes below.
Water, and the ways across it
The board is fresh water. Rivers run through a map, bridges cross to another one, boats go between. Nothing here has to be marooned to be yours.
Ground
What an area is made of.
Marks
Things that sit on the ground.
Things
The twenty, covered. Drawn by us, from scratch — combine them, and nobody's map has to look like anybody else's.
The twenty places
Add the ones that are yours. Leaving one off is an answer too.
Places of your own
The twenty do not name everything. Put a ? where something of yours belongs and write what it is — your words, kept on this device and nowhere else.
JavaScript is switched off, so the drawing board on this page cannot run. Drawing needs a script in a way that marking does not — so the marking tool still works with the script off and can be printed, and the workbook does this job on paper, which is where the invitation started.
There is no right map
There is no score, no type and no result here. Nothing counts what you put down or tells you what it means. The one thing this site is sure of is that a stuck state is changed by changing the conditions around a person, never by a page telling them what they are — so the tool draws, and says nothing about what it sees.
Every area on Helen's map has its own page naming who coined it and what changes it, and the marking tool asks the smaller question: where are you on her map right now. That one works with JavaScript switched off, and prints.
The workbook does all of this on paper, in more depth.
What you draw stays here
Nothing you place is sent anywhere. There is no account, no upload and nowhere for a map to go: the site has no server that accepts one, and its own security headers forbid the browser from trying.
The words you write on a place of your own are yours. They are kept the same way everything else here is — in this browser, on this device — and there is nowhere for them to go: no account, no upload, and security headers that forbid the page from trying. Nobody at Stimpunks or Autistic Realms can read them, because they never arrive anywhere to be read.
Your map is kept in this browser, on this device, so it is still here when you come back — and it is gone the moment you clear the site's data, or press Clear the map. A different browser, or a different device, starts from blank ground.
The shapes are Stimpunks' own drawing and, like everything else here, CC BY-SA 4.0. Take them, change them, pass them on.
Share what you make
If a map you draw says something you want to say, the story project is open — poems, art, blogs, essays, music, anything.