The frame: who makes the weather
There is a second map, and the first one does not make sense without it.
Nine zones. Each marker jumps to what it is. Every one of them is made by people, and every one of them could be unmade.
The nine zones
1 Mountains of Misinformation
What a person has to climb before anybody will believe what they are telling them about their own mind. Decades of it, published, cited, and taught.
2 “Disorder” Framing Disaster Zone
Autism as a disorder: the framing built into the diagnostic manual, the funding, and the first sentence of most things ever written about us. It puts the fault inside the person before a conversation has started.
3 Harmful highway
The one-way road running through the middle of the map, all of its arrows pointing the same way. Decades of research done from the outside, aimed at making Autistic people more normal rather than making the world more habitable.
4 Behaviourism Bay
A theory of learning that reduces human beings to inputs and outputs, still running at scale in schools and clinics. Compliance is measured; the person is not asked.
5 Marsh of Masking
It covers most of the landscape, and that is the point of putting it in the middle. Masking is a survival mechanism of suppressed needs that many Autistic people perform just to get through a day. It works, and it costs everything.
6 Sandstorm of Stigma
The weather that arrives with the label. It changes what a room assumes about a person before they have said anything, and it does not blow over.
7 Dunes of Deficit Metaphors
The language itself. Deficit, impairment, symptom, severity, risk — vocabulary that turns a difference into a deficiency before the sentence has finished. The puzzle piece is here too.
8 Canyon of Cures & Eugenics
Where the money went. Vast sums invested in cures and in preventing Autistic people from existing at all, while the things Autistic people actually asked for went unfunded. This is the zone that is not a metaphor.
9 Destination Neurotypical Bay
Where the highway was always going. A person who has arrived is indistinguishable from their peers, and exhausted, and nobody is measuring the second part.
Autism & The Map of Neuronormative Domination: Stuck States vs Flow States was made by Helen Edgar with Ryan Boren, Chelsea Adams and Norah Hobbs. It exists because the map on its own is too easy to misread.
The misreading
Look at the Map of Monotropic Experiences and it is tempting to treat it as a picture of a person. Here is your Burnout Whirlpool. Here are your Mountains of Ruminating Thoughts. Chart a course, work on yourself, get to the Forest of Joy.
That reading turns a political argument into a self-improvement exercise, and it gets the causation backwards.
The whirlpools are manufactured. Autistic burnout comes from years of being severely overtaxed by the strain of trying to live up to demands that are out of sync with our needs. Somebody sets those demands. Meerkat Mounds are what a correctly-functioning threat system does in a room that is genuinely unsafe. Cyclones of Unmet Needs are a gap between the support people ask for and the support they are given, and that gap is a budget line somewhere.
None of this is weather. All of it is made.
Stuck states and flow states
Everyone benefits from flow. For monotropic people it is not a luxury — it is how the bodymind recharges and how the sensory system settles.
A stuck state is what happens when flow is unavailable. States of inertia: unable to start, or unable to stop. They are not a personality, and they are not a stage of life. They are what a mismatch produces.
As a monotropic (Autistic/ADHD) person, you need flow states to thrive; if you can't access safe spaces, engage in your interests and feel connected, then you are more likely to enter a stuck state.
Helen Edgar, Autism & The Map of Neuronormative Domination
So the question the map asks is never what is wrong with this person. It is what is this environment doing, and who decided it would be that way.
Why this page exists at all
We built this site knowing that a beautiful interactive map is one short step from a personality quiz.
So there is a rule underneath every area page: what changes a stuck state is a change to the conditions, not an instruction to the person. You will not find "rest more" here. You will find what an environment can stop doing.
If you take one thing from this map, take that. Broken systems, not broken people.
Read more
- Autism & The Map of Neuronormative Domination: Stuck States vs Flow States — Helen Edgar's full article.
- Neuronormativity, behaviorism, and the double empathy problem in the Stimpunks glossary.
- Autistic burnout, and Dora Raymaker's research.