Neuronormativity, neuromes, campuses and finding a safe space

Really it's about community that works for you

For a while at the end of the lockdowns I was avid for stories of good things that had come out of them. Eager to hear silver lining stories amid what had, for me, mainly felt like losing things and witnessing the world losing things and trying to forget, as we do after trauma. “Ah, so without the pandemic you wouldn’t have left your horrible job/met the love of your life/discovered your passion for modelling clay pigeons/produced the best album of your career/adopted a gerbil- tell me more…”.

Yesterday was a very community type of day and I didn’t leave the house. It’s been a community type of week in fact, all via the screen on which I’m typing this. I was part of Trauma Geek’s study group on trauma and neurodiversity. About sixty people on Zoom discussing their thoughts and questions from all over the world (mostly from America and the U.K. Living in quite a culturally homogenous area, I loved the slight surprise of hearing say, a Scarborough accent and then a Denver accent in close proximity).

Then I was part of a group of about a hundred and fifty people sitting in awareness of their mind and body and being, as part of a regular meditation session run by a college in Devon. I snuck a glimpse at the people bathed in screen light and lamp light in their living rooms, eyes closed, statue-still, being together while not in the same room. And for a couple of evenings before that I’d been running my creative writing and neurodiversity courses via Zoom. Some participants saying that it was transformative just to see and hear and read people who felt similar to them, who accepted them and “got them”. I might have de-valued Zoom connections for a while in the months after the lockdowns because I was desperate to be in physical rooms with human beings of flesh and moving-air but now I’m feeling fervent gratitude for the opportunity to have both.

Because what I’m mainly seeking are neuromes. Since Christmas I feel like I’ve been hopping from neurome to neurome like a frog on lily pads. What is a neurome? It’s the mind equivalent of a biome. It’s a space where quirky minds can thrive and flourish. Where they accepted in their diversity and their associated sensory needs. I coined the term in a Substack newsletter I wrote a few months ago and it came up again when I found I was in one behind a bush on a university campus, discussing sculpture, myth and different learning styles, and mentioned it to the co-facilitator of the accidental neurome. I was on a week long writing residency at Lancaster University, facilitated by the arts organisation Lancaster Arts. There were very open parameters; I had to engage with their theme of “land”- which I wanted to do because I’m currently thinking about biodiversity and neurodiversity. I also had to have conversations with three academics whose work also had some link to land. They’d applied to meet with an artist of some sort.

Actually I think all of them were looking for neuromes. I think many of us are- and I thought it even more when I walked round the very grey campus, filled with rectangular buildings and desks and meticulously trimmed hedges and fluorescent lights and posters of the university charter which mentions diligence and employability and quality assurance but not care or flourishing. There was a persistent sense of “One size fits all” here. Which doesn’t work for so many of us. It was the week of Trump’s inauguration - and instead of the unpredictable threat and danger that evokes for so many people, I thought that at least I only had a sense of ongoing squashing in this relatively safe corner of the world. Low ceilings and covered walkways pressing in. I was so grateful to have paid time, space and freedom to think and write and dialogue for a week - but the subtle repressiveness of the setting weighed on me.

In TraumaGeek’s study group, Janae (who is Trauma Geek- I loved the palpable joy at geeking out over trauma many of the participants shared in their introductions, alongside their lived experience of trauma) had said that the majority of the world are NOT neurotypical. To be neurodivergent is to be a majority. This struck me. I realised I’d fallen for a binary in which in my little corner of the world, I’m in a neurominority as an Autistic/ADHD person. But actually, the pathologising medical paradigm that categorises what “normality” and “normal functioning” is in the diagnostic manuals, is based on a particular white, Western ideal of how a person is supposed to be. Most psychological studies have been performed on young white men on university campuses. Janae, and others, strongly linked this “neuronormativity” with White Supremacy. They could see an overlap.

That’s partly the case where I am in the UK too. But actually, the neuronormativity here is so strongly entwined with the class system and how that’s perpetuated and connected to universities- like Oxford and Cambridge originally - and institutions like the government and civil service and the BBC. Certain norms of voice and bodily expression and conduct and taste are carried through them. It goes without saying- neuronormative ones. (Here, it would tend to be called a “middle-class” presentation of self). I partly know about that because I did my PhD on performance and class and gender in one such university. And I regularly get to go on the BBC performing poems. is it because I mask so brilliantly and appear neuronormative as so many of us do? Actually, I think it’s more because, with my strong Northern accent and professional poet-ing, “eccentricity” gives me a leeway allowed in certain settings- as long as you’re not going to upset the neuronormative applecart too much. AND it’s because I’m good at finding neuromes.

We talked a bit in the study group about how some people resist a suggestion that they’re neurodivergent. A common situation might be where someone’s children are diagnosed as autistic, and despite any traits (of this genetic condition) they might have, a parent insists they can’t be themselves. If you fit into neuronormativity that can be a scary/anxiety-provoking thing to give up. As the weird, top-of-the-class outlier and family scapegoat, I never did. (That’s another thing- if your family is invested in neuronormativity in some way, it’s harder to go against it). So if I wanted to find connection at all, I had to find neuromes. That’s what the library kids and the theatre kids are doing often. It was survival to me to find or make them. For others it might be threat.

The university where I did my first degree, Loughborough, and Lancaster, were known as “plate-glass” universities when they were created in the 1960s. They would exemplify the post-war ideals of education for all (and art for all). I have benefitted from this in some many ways. And have been able to find like-minded and accepting tribes of the quirky brained (or accepting of the quirky brained) in campus radio stations, poetry nights, study groups and, later, PhD supervision sessions. But the principles behind their construction speak of a universal citizen who thinks and behaves pretty much like any other universal citizen. Lancaster’s architect Gabriel Epstein said:

“The real problem is to conceive and plan great humane urban centres. It is this and the creation of public spaces which has concerned me for years. In this regard we do not deal with short-lived tendencies: the sensual and functional relation of people to public space is unchanging and practically independent of climate and culture.”

Ah. But I reckon it’s not though. In fact, the reason that being behind a bush (behind a brilliant sculpture by German sculptor Anna Hirsch-Henecka of the moment the mythical Daphne turns into a tree, after being chased by Apollo who wants to rape her) felt like a necessary sensory and functional relief. Enclosed, with dappled green light. Few other spaces on the campus allow for neurodivergent sensibilities. I’ve written longer than I usually would in a newsletter and feel like I want to return to the Daphne/Apollo myth and the under-known sculptor who I experienced as a possible neurokin, although the residency where she made that sculpture took place forty years before mine. Neuromes can cross time and space too (I think books might be neuromes too). For now I’ll end by saying that in these unsettling times, I hope you can find. accept and make neuromes where you can - and safe spaces to either help you endure the requirements of neuronormativity- or escape them entirely.