The notion of monotropism fundamentally changed the way I perceive and manage my Autistic & ADHD experience. It’s enabled me to find my limits and work within them, and to accurately identify my struggles individually so I can work with them, and it’s getting better all the time. - ThreadSky

kathryndeplume.com • 80 days ago

The notion of monotropism fundamentally changed the way I perceive and manage my Autistic & ADHD experience.

It’s enabled me to find my limits and work within them, and to accurately identify my struggles individually so I can work with them, and it’s getting better all the time.

Reposted from Autistic Realms (Helen Edgar)

If you are multiply neurodivergent, then being monotropic will likely impact all intersections of your life & all overlapping differences you may experience. I am curious how this impacts you -possible positives & negatives. Feel free to share.

Find out more:
autisticrealms.com/monotropism-...

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justwes.info•80 days ago

I honestly had to look up what monotropism is lol. I generally can switch between tasks very well unless something just really puzzles me. Like at work - if there is something I want to make work and I decide to rabbit hole - yeah, the rest of the world (including my needs) no longer exists.

justwes.info•80 days ago

At least not until I realize I’ve gone that far down the rabbit hole or until I reach a satisfactory conclusion. If it is not one of those cases though I am usually doing many things at once and switching between them in the “gaps” of being able to actively work on a task.

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

For me working on multiple things is a physical impossibility.

If I try, all but the thing I am currently focused on will be neglected and forgotten.

And if I happen to not forget the other things I am paralysed by the chaos because I can no longer see each task in its entirety.

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

The thing is, though, that a “task” is literally anything and everything.

Social situations for e.g. are *full* of tasks, which is why interactions are such a challenge.

There’s on so much I can focus on at a time before I start to fall apart and melt down, usually into silence 😬

justwes.info•80 days ago

🫂

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

Everything (and I mean everything) is a conscious and manual process and has to be managed, otherwise I’m overwhelmed and probably inert 😅

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

Monotropism is why, for example, we might be standing on the corner of a street talking and a bus or a crowd of people will go past and I’ll completely lose my thread, or I won’t hear the last n words you say.

I’m aware of everything, and everything demands equal focus.

annek-4peace.bsky.social•80 days ago

This theory explains my life and that of most of my family better than a cobbled together "special interests + hyper focus + difficulty with change + easily overwhelmed + ..." that appears in diagnostic criteria.
Small wonder - it was invented by an #actuallyautistic researcher!

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

It truly does. And once it clicks and you understand it, you start to see it everywhere, and it adds the missing nuance.

For example, I’m not actually bad at social interaction in isolation. I’m actually pretty good at relating to other people and communicating. I just can’t do it in chaos...

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

Because chaos requires focus in order to make sense of it, which takes away my ability to focus on relating and interacting.

It’s not just external chaos either. I know now, for e.g. that I shouldn’t socialise after work, until I have fully switched mode, or I will fail at it. I need a clean slate.

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

Monotropism also makes it easier to understand and rationalise my inconsistency..

I now know that the main reasons I am inconsistent are that firstly my *total* capacity fluctuates (often by mood), and secondly that my *available* capacity fluctuates by what I am currently internallly processing.

kathryndeplume.com•80 days ago

If I were to analogise this, I’d say that before I learned of monotropism I didn’t know what “shape" I was, just that I didn’t fit.

Monotropism has allowed me to work out what shape I am and to think about tesselation differently.

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