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(A riff on Psalm 39, in light of the fact that it is included in many of the funerary liturgies I have been reviewing this week)

I’ve always tried to be guarded in my words, even to the point of meekness, because those things left unsaid which lurk just beneath the surface… are dangerous. When you stray from that path of social convention, other things can also come loose. You may lose sight of the duty to hold space for all other creatures: weak, strong, good and evil. So I remained silent and still. And all around me there is violence and murder. I watch transgression unfold against the most basic terms – knitted into the fabric of the universe – of humanity and friendship. Men and women grasp for power and hoard wealth. The banality of all this evil causes me to burn with rage. I can no longer be silent, so like Job, I issue my question to the source of all life:

Does my life (or indeed anything) have purpose? Those theologians told me that I should embrace God-given vocation. In humility, yes, but still – they said – seek not leisure and detachment, but accomplish small purposeful tasks with your span. Build a better world.

Now suffering and death pervade the created world, set in motion by some of those same theologians and the question of legacy weighs so hard that it might suffocate me. This message that I gulped down in youthful foolishness and ambition feels uncalibrated, foolish, untrue. When I take an honest look and consider the time of the earth, the spans (and trajectories?) set in motion by Love, we are barely even a speck of energetic dust. Our time is shorter than a single disdainful gasp of the universe. We are just shadows, flitting about our business, then vanished by the shining lights of the present societal collapse. By the death of children.

So what, Love, do I wait for? I am chastened. silenced. consumed. I shake with weeping, I feel my weakness and desolation even into my bones. Will you weep with me? Will we ever feel joy again?

I am a stranger to thee: and a sojourner, like many of my generations before me. Spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I too go hence, and be no more seen.

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

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My younger son asked me this week (as we had just been crying together): what is sadness for? His question arose from what I appreciated to be a wise insight – the practicality of grief and sadness feels different from other emotions which he and I have been in active conversations about, e.g. anger, anxiety or stress. These latter emotions and states address an urgent physical need, enabling a person to find safety or prioritise certain kinds of mental tasks when in danger. But as Isaac suggested with his question – the function of sadness is more opaque. We feel an urgent need, even a compulsion to express sadness but what is it for?

His question, at least for me, is also tied up in our ideas on how we should do grief and mourning. I’ve spent much of the past ten years working on the concept of grief, loss and mourning across a variety of contexts. This includes a large funded academic study I co-led with a friend and colleague on the intersection of species extinction and religion. Part of the reason I’ve had this enduring preoccupation as an academic theologies lies in personal experience of loss. When I was 8 years old, my father died – an unexpected catastrophic rupture in our family life and childhood. We all did our best to honour the memory of my father and grapple with our feelings, and probably – in retrospect – did an exemplary job of it. The loss of my father became an episode in a landscape of loss. By the time I was 18 many of the male members of my biological family had died, through heart attacks, cancer, stroke, and suicide. That’s not to say that I didn’t benefit from the support and mentorship of the other lovely uncles and cousins and many wonderful men who supported us in the context of church. But Shane and I were the last two remaining men to have the Kidwell name. If I’m being honest, some days that loss made me feel important, and provided a sense of vocation.

I did diagnostic work with various counselors in my 20s and 30s seeking to understand why and how anxiety and depression have been frequent companions for adult Jeremy. One of the core guiding insights that I drew from psychotherapy was that something had gone catastrophically wrong in my past. I think that people who have experienced catastrophic loss or trauma may be particularly drawn to this way of thinking as it provides us with a present quest we can pursue which seeks to make right what went wrong in our past. To some extent, it may be fair to say that Freud and colleagues were motivated by similar underpinning convictions (and quite a lot of misogyny). But the consequence of this was that my own diagnostic mind has been occupied for several decades on analysing how unprocessed or badly processed grief from this litany of loss haunted my everyday. I’ve been driven by this sense that misperformed grief or latent trauma was the engine driving my everyday experiences of anxiety and seasonal instances of low mood.

I studied (in some some cases experienced) the practice of grief and loss in other cultures and religions. I analysed historical and contemporary Christian rituals of mourning with a particular attention to the way that those practices echoed in other places theologically. I came away with a few core convictions, which are broadly shared by people who have written on so-called Western practices around grief and loss.

First, we do not create sufficient time and space for loss. In many cultures and religions ritual mourning is expected for at least a year. Within the Christian and secular cultures and communities we’ve been a part of in the USA, Canada and the UK, mourning is typically allowed for a week, and perhaps up to a month – but beyond that people begin to worry and ask about whether you are doing enough to move on with life. There is a pervasive anxiety that if we do not actively attempt to confront loss in some way and engage in practices of “moving on” bad things will happen, perhaps we will get stuck in that valley never to escape. I’ve come to believe that this is deeply pathological, and the cultural practices we have around grief in those contexts are misguided. The 1 year mark seems about right to me, and that’s what I’m aiming for as I honour the memory of my son.

Second, the physicality of death is important to the process of mourning. One thing which stands out to me from my father’s death relates to the time when my brother and I were asked if we wanted to see my father’s body. My younger brother quickly replied “yes” and my reaction was “no”. In retrospect, I have come to regret my decision (and my brother has not). Though I’m not sure how this could even have been done, I wonder if I should have been pressed to experience the tangibility of a body and to be grounded in the reality of death in a way that only this can achieve. I’ve spoken with many other adults who have been present at the time of someone’s death and the beauty and intimacy of this experience. This is particularly the case for those who have been present for a good death – the passing of someone who is old and full of years and ready to depart in the company of those they love. It is more ambiguous in cases of sudden and unexpected death, but I remain firm in my conviction that it is important to provide and take opportunities, even if you are a young person, to be with the body of someone we have lost if that can be done gracefully.

Third, we do not account for the velocity of grief. Again, looking at the cultural and religious contexts I’ve occupied, we are allowed to weep openly, for a certain duration, but never in an uncontrollable way. People feel compelled to explain what has happened, to bring coherence back to the world, and in some ways to bring a sense of order and control to grieving. When I was young, I wore my self-control as a badge of honour – I can recall confiding to some friends (with pride) that I hadn’t cried (at all) for years as a teen. As the oldest child in our family when my father died, I was encouraged by other men in my life to be the “man of the house,” and to concentrate my efforts on being mature and filling the gap left by my larger-than-life father. I remember harboring an internal narrative about how it was important that I hadn’t succumbed to grief – and hadn’t cried really at any time during my childhood. But this also tied into being an autistic adolescent and teen – I can find the presence of others to be so overwhelming, body language, microexpressions and just pure raw emotions will quickly flood my own experience. It’s very hard for me to process anything with others around. It’s when I sit in silence by myself at the end of the day that it begins to wash over me in overwhelming waves. This is in some contrast to my wife who processes grief best in company (and for which I am so very grateful for the many lovely women who have come to sit by her this week). But for me as a young person this must have felt like a protective mechanism, suppressing my own processing of loss and trauma even when I was alone so that my secluded self matched my social self. I spent a long part of my 30s trying to reconnect with emotional expression, to find ways to let loose that grip of control over my self-presentation. This usually just amounted to a few silent tears at a funeral but that felt like an accomplishment.

This experience has given me a particular sense of vocation for speaking authentically and encouraging grief with young people. And this week, I’ve been struck by all the young people in our life who were friends to Noah, and the ways that they are processing this loss of a friend. I have (always tentative) conversations with young people, and find myself reflecting afterwards on whether that young person matches my memory of little Jeremy. There are some symmetries: iIt seems to me that young people process grief in more direct and tangible ways: asking extremely practical questions: “what will you do with his bedroom?” or “did you see his body?” but at the same time, I suspect there is something this practicality is masking, an inner awareness of lagging capabilities for the work. When you are young you do not yet have emotional templates for confronting and processing grief – you are making up the script as you go along, so there must be time for experimentation, and kindness from adults around when that experimentation doesn’t quite follow social convention or achieve its intended aims. Most young people don’t know what they feel or how to connect to the feelings associated with loss, and I think think this is probably natural. So it has been interesting for me to observe that they don’t often want to sit and cry as we share stories. I would have previously worried that this was a form of suppression and might even feel compelled to do some gentle but proactive work to encourage authentic emotional release and expression. But I am less confident in this diagnostic insight than I once was.

Part of my journey which has unfolded in the background as well has been coming to understand my own neurodivergence, which I’ve written a fair bit about on this blog previously. This learning has salience for grief in several ways and I think it is important to affirm that autistic grief has it’s own landscape(s).

Though I still hold that it is important to stay with the feelings, let yourself sink into them, and see where they carry you, or how they hold you in place, I find myself unable to suppress my tendency towards analysis. For now I’m holding onto this as a somewhat unique element of autistic grief  – we can think and feel things out together, or at least I can. And these things are intertwined for me.

While so much that has brought me grace in these two weeks has been the opportunity to be present with and speak to friends in mourning, it’s also the case that I particularly need to find times and places of solitude. My autistic world is so vivid and sensorially cacophanous that I cannot find my way to deepest mourning until I am by myself. That has been the case this month. Very late at night, or when everyone is out for a play, or very early in the morning, when my sensory and analytical buffers are finally clear, I find the overwhelming waves of sadness begin to come over me and I can gasp out the gutteral and incantory questions which drive me right now. Why have you left me? I miss you so desparately. Where are you Noah? Were you afraid? Do you know how much I love you?

For the theologians and philosophers reading: these are NOT questions. They are places where the bottom has fallen out of my world. I ask them to speak truthfully about what has happened to me, not to seek consolation, or to resolve some matter of cognitive ambiguity. I do not want footprints in the sand poems, theological platitudes, shoulder patting, “he’s in a better place” bible verses, or really even any consolation at all.

Let us weep together beside Noah’s body, while looking over photos, recalling memories, or in those random moments when our breath catches at the sheer incomprehensibility of it. Let us speak of the weeping that we have done in our solitudes. Let us share the questions which well up in the place of darkness, but not seek to explain what has happened. If that comes at all, it will be much later.

I’ll share more about what I’m learning and thinking about it all later, but I think that’s enough for now.

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“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” (Job 12:7–10)

“who teaches us more than the animals of the earth, and makes us wiser than the birds of the air?’”
(Job 35:11)

Noah loved birds. It was an recurring focussed interest of his. He memorised the contents of about a dozen bird guides when he was 8-10 years old and for a while we carried around this stack with us everywhere we went until many volumes became tattered and too worn to use. I’m not sure what it was that drew Noah to birds specifically. He wasn’t one to share his inner thoughts in most cases, and I suppose he probably simply wasn’t really that bothered to know why they interested him, only knowing that they where a creaturely friend of great variety and interest that made for good and quiet companions.

I think it is fair to say that Noah had something of an affinity with these winged creatures and that they shared some modes of existence. Noah was often one to land softly on something and then only stay long enough to be noticed and then he’d quietly lift off again. He preferred to to dwell in a flock, always asking when we’d have another opportunity for a large family gathering.

In the biblical literature, which was also an interest of Noah’s (think here of another stack of bibles he loved to have us carry around in public when he was a bit younger), birds play a special role. The Psalmist writes that God knows birds intimately: “I know every mountain bird by name; the scampering field mice are my friends.” (Psalm 50:11). In a moment of desolation, the Psalmist reveals his own penchant for bird-watching and notes his affinity to specific birds in his suffering: “I am like a desert owl of the wilderness, like an owl of the waste places;
I lie awake; I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop.” (Psalm 102:6–7) Birds are also harbingers of death, repeatedly referenced as agents who restore landscapes that have been battlefields of their corpses (see Rev. 19:17 for a particularly vivid portrayal of this agency). The bible is full of reports and predictions of violence, but this is only a reasonable reflection of the ways that many humans choose to be violent people in spite of our better natures.

But this morning the birds are singing loudly outside: a layered song with many different voices each distinguishable from the next yet complementary in their cacophony. I sit with them in gratitude for their willingness to carry on with their work day after day, providing us with wisdom in their comportment and care for one another. Like the Psalmist, at least for now, I am also the lonely sparrow on the housetop, caught up in silent thoughts of loneliness and loss.

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I’ve begun a project over the past year conducting research into worldbuilding. As readers will have noticed I’m really interested in the diversity of worlds we inhabit, both physical and digital, and the ways that these worlds can serve as sites for presence, connection, collaboration, and communication. There’s a shadow side to these capabilities as the worlds we inhabit can also be sites for opppression and control. It is important to acknowledge that the worlds we inhabit are indeed plural worlds and not just a single homogenous world. I’ve often observed the ways that we shuttle back and forth between worlds (and identities which are facets of ourselves that we can perform or inhabit) can be an act of resistance to avoid or resist forms of coercive control and oppression. This is especially true for neurominorities, whose embodied difference is most cogently expressed as a difference in communication and cognitive style, both elements which are either facilitated or closed down by the parameters of a communicative lifeworld. Perhaps the worst form of oppression you can subject another human person to is to close down their world-choices to a single homogenous space with parameters that they cannot readily inhabit. Take, for example, the insistence that Deaf people inhabit a hearing world, or that our Blind friends inhabit a sighted world. This conviction about world pluralism lies at the heart of the social model of disability, and in conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues about disability, it seems like the core problem that prevents them from inhabiting empathetic understanding is a lack of understanding about the multiplicity of worlds we can inhabit. I’ve often found forms of philosophical realism, at least by some definitions based on the insistence that we inhabit a singlar common world, to be a worrisome tool for the unselfconscious-privileged to try to exert control over others. And this insistence that we ignore differences and multiplicity, dangerous and cruel.

To dig a bit more into the meaning of this insight for neurominorities, let me highlight a few examples. For someone with sensory hypersensitivity like me, the lack of dampening and the loud/brightness of environments can be a recipe for disaster. Our build enviroment is often designed around a single sensory experience, cost cutting around noise dampening can seem reasonable if you haven’t inahbited the sensory world of another person. Patterned decorations on walls and floors can be oppressively overstimulating, even nauseating, or inducing vertigo for some people.

A key part of worldbuilding relates to the forms of communication we enable and disable, and this is particularly acute with digital platforms. I was getting re-aquainted with the OG chat platform IRC a few weeks ago and some of the design features really stuck out having been away for several years. IRC doesn’t have a chat history, so you can’t jump into a room and catch-up. It’s purely synchronous, with messages appearing in real time, and if you’re not logged in, once you join back on you only have access to the lines which arise from that point forward. You can always put up a message or send a direct message to someone asking them to update you on the conversation that has ensued, but these are the demands of a stateless communication environment. A bit like real life.

This isn’t a problem for some people who don’t engage with long-term memory in an intensive way, and I know some who enjoy the ephemeral nature of IRC (and similar environments like raves and parties) who can just “drop in” and catch up to the extent they want to, but perhaps also simmer a bit in a sublime statelessness. Contrast this with some kinds of autistic cognitive experience which are oriented around a more saturated perception of the world, taking in more sensory and other perceptual data without filtering as much out, in some cases (at least it feels this way!) without filtering anything at all. When I’m in a room for a meeting, I’m processing all the body language, poses, microexpressions of all the people around me, unable really to filter it, short of wearing a blindfold, and even then I’ll pick up a lot from tone and speech patterns, which again are forms of noise I can’t really filter much. So we take a lot more in, unavoidably, and as a result we need longer to process it all, more time to recover from that kind of full saturation, and also tend to have more accurate recollections. You can read a bit more about this in Precise minds in uncertain worlds: Predictive coding in autism. But we also have diverse ways of getting to back to a comfortable baseline in light of this saturation. A person might narrow their experiences and environments until they’re receiving a level that isn’t overwhelming. Or you might find (sometimes pharmaceautical) ways to dull your senses through adrenaline or dopamine dumping. In other cases, you might simply work through it all and synthesise everything that is coming at you.

Personally, I find that when the atmosphere or my experience of it has some jagged edges, where I’m missing some information, those jagged edges really scream at me until I can resolve them. This might arise when I join at the second half of a conversation missing the previous context, someone has a mood or reaction that can’t be explained by the current conversation, or we’re being introduced to a new policy which really can’t be explained by the justification that’s being provided. Sometimes places and not just people have these jagged screaming edges for me. And the only real way to quiet that noise is to sort things out and get my head around what’s going on. I’d hypothesise that many people that we encounter who are unusually pastoral or compassionate might be driven by a similar kind of alterity, it’s not just that you care (though of course this is the foundation), but that you need to understand what’s going on with a person. Following this kind of natural drive leads to a lifetime of practice which produces people who are fluent in cross-cultural communication, at stretching beyond the horizon of their own lifeworld into that of someone else. Many autistic bodyminds are also highly systematic, constantly searching for the patterns which lend coherence to that information you’re taking in. This can be a kind of hyper-relationality, the person you go to when you need to catch up on the happenings in your community.

For all these reasons, stateless communication contexts are really uncomfortable for me. When I log into a slack room, discord, or MS teams page, I’ll read the entire history up to where I left off previously. I can’t help it, each message hits me with a demand that I understand it’s meaning. To avoid such a thing feels like an abrogation of community, relationship, and even just basic perception of the world around me. I’m not sure I’m wrong about this, either.

It occurred to me, on reflection, that I’ve always gravitated towards stateful or synchronous communication styles, probably for this reason. Contrast IRC with email, which is straight-forwardly stateful and transactional – you send an email, you get a response. And when you read that response, you have all the information without any gaps in the middle, or invisible histories. But there is also a contrast here with other contemporary platforms, and the ways we use email inasmuch as we make use of and have access to forms of message threading. Think of it this way, if you’re in a room with 15 people all talking, all having different discussions with each other, meaning at least half the people are talking, those conversations aren’t necessarily linked to one another in any meaningful way outside of the influences produced by the atmosphere of the room and the exigencies of the moment. Each of those conversations has it’s own coherence which may not be linked to any of the others. Why don’t we find this overwhelming? Well in many cases, people use eye-contact, bodily closeness and other cues to hone in on the specific conversation that is intended for them. In this way threading is about visibility and proximity. Well designed social media works this way too, if you’re in a room with many conversations happening, messages might be threaded into each other based on a visual reminder of what the poster is replying to, or the use of thematic hastags. Now imagine there are 100 people all in a room chatting at the same time but you’re all blindfolded, and everyone is speaking into a microphone which is then aggregated and fed into headphones so you don’t have the usual cues to separate out the different threads of conversation. That’s pretty much my experience of every room – even when I have the visual cues, I can’t shut out the other conversations (or at least I can but only by using quite a lot of physical and mental energy which will definitely run out quickly). Scott Christian Salva has a really nice video he’s produced to share what this is like:

Some digital environments, or at least the ways we use them, can produce conversations with the same kind of messiness for some people. On discord or slack you can quickly make a break-out room, a sub-conversation within a channel. MS Teams, not so much. Some platforms all you to visually mute mesages in a stream which don’t have a specific tag. This is also the case for omnibus email newsletters with huge chains of information which isn’t necessarily tied to a moment. Some people feel comfortable skipping sections and scanning quickly. I read all the text.

Just like in architecture and the crafting of a building or some other built environment as an act of worldbuilding, each of these platforms is designed to project an extension or amplification of our personal world’s structures, the kinds of presence and availability we find comfortable, the pace, rhythm and texture of communication. While some forms of worldbuilding like writing fiction, have craft cultures which are oriented around horizon-crossing, crafting a world which opens up into a mode of being which isn’t your own through trans-cultural, trans-racial, or trans-species writing. But some of our worldbuilding discourses and craft don’t really seem to be oriented by this kind of horizon-crossing as an exercise. It strikes me that, at least at presence, the people who build worlds we inhabit as common spaces, don’t really do this kind of work, except for some noteworthy exceptions. To do this we’d need to have modes of participatory and collaborative design which opens up these experiments in horizon-crossing in deliberate ways, and provides participants who have been subjected to silencing and oppression time and space to discover their own suppressed or masked modes of inhabitation. There’s an increasing conversation about digital accessibility, but it strikes me that most of this conversation is about legal liability, law compliance, and even corporate branding. It be amazing if we could find ways, in our communities and organisations, to open up forms of participatory design which were inclusive, open ended, and prepared for the emotional and financial costliness of this kind of experiment.

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What’s the best way to work? There has been a lot of bluster (and cruelty) by business executives seeking to enforce a rollback on remote working, which in some cases (like mine) was forcibly introduced to novel work contexts. Many of my friends in tech work and thrive in all-remote teams so they are admittedly puzzled by some of the narratives connecting work productivity with a certain kind of presence in a building. Many other friends find it puzzling that anyone might not see the benefit and enlivening in face-to-face embodied interaction with fellow humans. What’s been missed in much of this debate, which has tended to focus on econometric measures of workplace productivity, is the fact that there isn’t a “best” way to work. Working involves a lot of different kinds of people, who will have different ways of thriving and interacting. Some people will struggle with zoom sessions, missing cues, needing embodied intimacy to feel connection. Others will feel overwhelmed, or even repulsed by the insistence on shared space in oversaturated noisy work environments. Which is more productive? Neither. Again, different kinds of people work in different kinds of ways. But it’s not surprising to see a vanguard trying to enforce what is “normal” and “best” for workers.

This preference often follows capital. Teams that are all-remote, can’t fathom how they would cover the additional costs of leasing office space and addiing sufficient infrastructure. Conversely, my own workplace, like many other Universities in the UK has made massive capital investment in running and staffing campus infrastructure, including student housing and food services, and a very paltry one in digital and hybrid environments, most of the latter only when forced to do so under Covid-19 lockdowns. So while tech seems to be, by default, remote friendly, due to underinvestment in infratructure, higher education is the opposite, due to underinvestment in infrastructure. Those who have highlighted the benefits of remote working for wellbeing and improved outcomes for students, especially those with disabilities and neuro-minorities, have been ignored, rebuffed, or even silenced in some cases. It’s a messy situation with many dimensions to it – and I recognise that there won’t be a situation where everyone’s needs are going to be met optimally. So the work here, as I conceive of it, is to find ways to try and find imbalance and work to correct it.

I’ve been observing some symmetrical challenges for young people. On one hand, we see a concerning and large body of evidence showing the negative mental health impacts, exploitation and danger that meet children through their use of digital social environments on social media. This has led to a burgeoning movement among many educators and parents to ban phones (by young people) in schools. There’s a similar, but more intense subculture of which we’re often a part, where parents seek to protect their children by minimising their use of digital devices altogether. As home educators focussed on learning in nature, my partner and I are often part of these conversations. And I often agree, our young people are systematically denied access to nature, social spaces which aren’t saturated by media, or even the basic conditions for a quieter or contemplative experience. But I have also noticed narratives that increasingly concern me here too. Sometimes parents and public figures speak of screens use as a form of “addiction”- this was certainly the case in my own childhood where we were strictly rationed only 30 minutes of computer game playing during weekdays, and weren’t permitted to have video game consoles for much of our early years. I’ve also seen people promulgate  the research regarding negative mental health impacts on young people of playing computer games. As a scholar it’s my job to test assumptions, and as I’ve brought that conviction to this area of concern, I’ve found that children’s engagement with digital devices does not meet the basic thresholds for addictive behaviour. And all of that researching showing the negative effects of video games on children (or before that television)? Mostly just journalists citing pseudo-studies, which source checking reveals are thin and inconclusive. Another way of reading that distress of young people when parents enforce harsh and restrictive rules regarding digital devices is that they’ve found a mode of comfort or accommodation that eases some area of cognitive or emotional difficulty in their lives (which may have even been imperceptible to parents), so their distress is indeed intense, but not because it is rooted in a harmful addition, but because they are being separated from something soothing and helpful in a very overwhelming world.

I’ve been working in campus environments for my whole life – first working in a school district office, then a large telecommunications company and then a series of Universities. In this time of bitterly depressing suburban and urban landscapes, I love the ways that campus working can revive a sense of being in a small town community – waving to people you know on your way to a meeting, popping into the campus cafe for a break, bumping into friends in the hallway and having spontaneous conversations. So it’s probably not surprising that I didn’t realise the significant negative impact this kind of environment was having on my mental and physical health until I was forced into a new work atmosphere under lockdown. The impacts of lockdown didn’t affect us all equally. Some people lived their best lives during lockdown, continuing in already all-digital jobs in comfortable homes benefitting from less logistical distractions and improved delivery services. Others struggled. Many died or experienced significant bereavement. University teaching shifted all online for many Universities for an extended duration – mine was one that re-opened as quickly as possible – but we did have a time during mandatory campus closures. This was incredibly stressful as I needed to rewrite all my teaching, ex nihilo, for a new format, and also found myself teaching on completely new courses given University mandates to take up co-teaching on all modules for “resilience”. As I’ve spoken with a number of staff since then, however, this experience also opened the door of experience to remote working for many of us who had never expereinced or considered it before. For those of us in neuro-minorities, this was a particularly striking enlightenment. We suddenly felt forms of relief we’d never experienced at work before and baselines suddenly shifted.

This dovetailed for me with a process of unmasking and diagnosing being autistic. That sudden gestalt shift, left me seeing things in a new light. I reflected on my past (if tacit) enjoyment of long written exchanges over email, as they offered an opportunity to get my thoughts out clearly in a format that left the other person with time to process what I’d said and react asking for clarification – a rare opportunity in real time meetings, especially those in large groups. I thought back even further to my experiences as a young person in the early days of the internet – I had access to email as a teen, and was administrating the servers that provided email hosting for our entire school district. I enjoyed late exchanges texting messages over IRC and other text-based chats. There was something pure and accessible about being able to sit in a room with no sensory stimuli, read people’s words without being constantly inundated and distracted by a room full of body language, microexpressions, smells, background noise, scraping chair legs, fans running, perfume, body odour, laundry detergent, garlic from that lunch sandwich, etc etc etc. I could focus on the person, and had a level of emotional availability and energy to read and return communication with a clear mind. I relish the ability to think slowly about a tricky policy or scholarly challenge with a colleague over the course of weeks, months or even years without pressure to foreclose and decide. Sometimes my thinking takes unusually long times, because I’m considering a much wider range of angles than other people do and also because I tend to need to synthesise and make a coherent model or plan for moving forward before I can feel comfortable pushing on with action.

After a year under lockdown, returning to campus was excruciating. That’s not because I’d been converted to new forms of leisure that had been formerly unavailable, but because I had become attuned to matters of personal discomfort and stress that had always been present, but which I’d learned and conditioned to mask and conceal. This is corroborated by a long history of personal physical impacts from sustained workplace environmental stress long before 2020. The return was also a departure from a temporarily opened portal on creative thinking about hybrid work environments. All of a sudden, people who had been struggling before under the previous regime with certain defaults, had their chance. Some of my students thrived and developed new levels of entitlement to demand more flexible teaching. Some staff too, had seen the fruits of this, though we were all also admittedly tired and broken down from the trauma and chronic sickness so many of us experienced during the pandemic. So we returned with new forms of ambition and entitlement. I know of many people who have experienced this in many workplaces – this opening of hope, which was quickly dashed when it became clear that executive authority meant to enforce a return to the previous default, and had narratives in hand to defend their choices. The creativity and consultation was over.

The opening of the millennium was full of hope for new creative formats and fora. So much of that has faded, and several years out now, I’m left wondering how we can revive the energy we need to improve the ways we work and live together. I remain steadfast in my conviction that digital spaces are a crucial tool for making our communities more open and available to people who have a personality or bodily experience that deviates from the default – I think this population extends far beyond those who comfortably acknowledge a personal expereince of disability, or would claim to be highly sensitive, to a significant minority of the population, that is, some people in every team in every business, charity, school: customers, stakeholders, and members.

The trouble is, our options for digital exchange have been captured by hostile forces. I was an early adopter in every case, but no longer make use of those platforms which have been infected by algorithms, surveillance, and advertising, e.g. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. This problems is also much deeper – we’ve become committed to values which establish an unbreakable tether between ourselves and those services. We avoid small platforms with niche audiences and communities. We don’t avoid and even refuse to participate in the work of moderation and community maintenance online. It’s easier to complain about facebook’s moderation policy whilst grudgingly continuing to use the platform than it is to shift to an alternative where you need to build up a new, potentially smaller audience, especially if that new platform will also require new forms of work. We require convenient apps with smooth UX and seamless user experinces. And we avoid applications that make demands on us to customise or install tools, engage in learning offline before they are possible. We gravitate towards algorithmic feeds, because it feels easier than having to confront content coming up in our reading that doesn’t match the current vibe – which as a general rule undermines the very idea of moderation and discovery of new and challenging ideas. Convenience and populism meet in the current social media landscape, and regardless of whatever less-unvalorous-option arises (non-federating bluesky anyone?) it will simply continue this lock-in to toxic media engagements which erode our personal values, relationships and citizenship.

My one hope for a future resurgence is in a desire to create spaces for our young people. I’m anxious that many of my peers with the privilege and skill to build these spaces, but who lack the disabilities to grant that work urgency, have opted-out. But maybe there is some opportunity here to create new communities to connect young people, given them agency, community, and safety not through demands that some oligarch-led platform reform its bad behaviours, but by creating new spaces in small communities tied to or seeded from our geographical, familial and relational ones. This would open those communities up to those of us who are hyper-sensory, experience social anxiety, or just don’t work at the pace of the crowd. It would help those people who are able to get along just fine with the norm, by granting exposure to other ways of life that can be spicy and exciting. I think I’m going to put some energy into making this case, and building these environments in the years to come. I hope you’ll join me!

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One thing they don’t teach you in grad school is how to tend your focal attention. This is probably because it’s a non-issue for a majority of researchers, who find themselves regularly able to just sit and focus their attention on a given task at will. But that kind of volitional ability is not available to all of us, nor is that sort of volitional style a universal experience, e.g. focusing for a brief period of time on a task relatively unprepared.

Many researchers have different volitional styles, however. You may find it very hard to focus on something unprepared, or conversely, very hard to maintain focus for a long time. One of the core principles of chemistry is that of a catalyst – a substance that precipitates some chemical process or event, dissolving solids, creating fire, and so on. I’ve found this to be a quite helpful metaphor for the process of neurodivergent scholarship. We’re all finding inspiration from various places, it might be an argument on social media, or with a friend in the pub that enables you to clarify your thinking in the context of defending what you considered to be a reasonable position, or a piece of music that sets your mood in just the right direction to open up the flow of reflection and writing. It can be noise or quiet, positive or negative. The key thing is that we are always relying on something to get us started thinking and writing. It’s likely the case that many people have their catalysts worked out intuitively, and may not be facing blocks on a regular basis, so this is all a tacit process. It has taken me a number of years to realise the important role of catalysts in opening up my thinking and enabling me to conduct constructive reflection and writing. And now that I’ve developed an awareness of these mechanisms, how they loop into mood, volition, and thinking in the context of my unqiue personality, I’ve gained an awareness of how they sacred and precious they are. By extension, I’ve learned how a key element of developing your toolkit as a neurodivergent researcher involves minding and tending these catalysts.

Sometimes I’ll find that a piece of music just opens up some really particular thinking and before I realise it I’m in that wonderful flow of writing. Now I write down the name of the piece and include a streaming link so I can access it again in the future. Sometimes the setting of writing is important, so I’ve thought a lot about designing an environment that works for me. But crucially, there isn’t just one kind of writing, so I’ve catalogued a variety of places each with a different sensory profile, in light of the particular kinds of thinking they open up. There can be temporal catalysts – specific times of day for specific kinds of activity, even situated within specific seasons.

So how are you minding your motivation? What sorts of catalysts work out for you in particular kinds of thinking and writing?

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If, like me, you’ve been following the development of generative AI and large language models as a tool for scholarship and productive working, you’ll likely be interested in the development of NotebookLM. Google has a version of this kind of tool, which ingests a PDF file and outputs a short podcast style audio discussion of the book which provides an enjoyable summary. It’s a pretty efficicent way to blast through a pile of journal article PDFs and sift for those that might bear closer reading. However, many readers will be cynical about google’s inability to provide a public good, so will be even more glad to hear that there’s an open source alternative, Open NotebookLM. Itsfoss.com has a pretty good writeup on the tool including instructions on how you can run it yourself entirely locally to your own PC. Worth noting that Open NotebookLM has a max 100,000 characters limit, and the audio quality isn’t quite up to google NotebookLM yet. But it’s a great move in the right direction.

Also, after you’ve done a few listens to podcasts from NotebookLM, you might benefit from some comic relief:

If you really want to have fun, you can even add faces for your podcast “hosts”

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One of the hardest things about being an unmasking (or not) neurodivergent academic is the frequent estrangement from your previous selves. Until recently, I was constantly tripping over and ruminating on actions I’d made or thoughts I’d expressed in previous eras of life with some sense of shame or embarrasment, even following a reflex to conceal or suppress those thoughts.There are forms of protestant Christianity and models of self-improvement which I’d been exposed to which enshrine these forms of self-harm as good practice. I was thinking about the ways that this impairs scholarship this morning, reading an old post by Cory Doctorow. Cory is a bit older than me, but we emerged in similar radical techno-cultures, so I’m always learning and feeling edified by his writing. In my reading today, Cory talks about the value of bottom-up thinking. Reflecting in the post on blogging, he says:

Clay Shirky has described the process of reading blogs as the inverse of reading traditional sources of news and opinion. In the traditional world, an editor selects (from among pitches from writers for things that might interest a readership), and then publishes (the selected pieces).

But for blog readers, the process is inverted: bloggers publish (everything that seems significant to them) and then readers select (which of those publications are worthy of their interests). There are advantages and disadvantages to both select-then-publish and publish-then-select, and while the latter may require more of the unrewarding work of deciding to ignore uninteresting writing, it also has more of the rewarding delight of discovering something that’s both totally unexpected and utterly wonderful.

That’s not the only inversion that blogging entails. When it comes to a (my) blogging method for writing longer, more synthetic work, the traditional relationship between research and writing is reversed. Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

As you’ll have seen from the ways that this blog serves as a repository of all my public writing over the course of more than a decade, this is the same approach I tend to take. Write and communicate the fragmentary thoughts, and work to identify the coherence of them, in a bottom-up way, until you identify the incohate intuition which drove them in the first place in a way that you can communicate to others.

What struck me about Cory’s piece, however, was his emphasis on the importance of memory. Referencing Vannevar Bush’s concept of the “memex”, he goes on to suggest:

it’s hard to write long and prolifically without cringing at the memory of some of your own work. After all, if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled.

Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.

For more than a decade, I’ve revisited “this day in history” from my own blogging archive, looking back one year, five years, ten years (and then, eventually, 15 years and 20 years). Every day, I roll back my blog archives to this day in years gone past, pull out the most interesting headlines and publish a quick blog post linking back to them.

This structured, daily work of looking back on where I’ve been is more valuable to helping me think about where I’m going than I can say.

It struck me this morning, that this is a crucial part of the kind of messy process I undertake, but my implementation of it has often been impacted by forms of shame, driven by a span of life lived un-conventionally. As a neurodivergent youngster, I was trained by the adults around me to conceal my unconventionality, unless it could be packaged and shared with those around me in ways that would seem unthreatening and graspeable. And the “stranger” patterns or results of thinking were best concealed, masked for the sake of personal safety. Masking generates a pattern of self-suppression and a linked experience of shame and rumination on the dangers of past actions. Review becomes a space for reinscribing our masks, testing the fit, and ensuring its efficient operation.

What Cory points out here (at least for me!) is the importance of self-acceptance and love in the context of a bottom-up scholarly life which requires regular review and reflection. As I’ve pursued a process of unmasking, and what Devon Price reflects on as “radical visibility” over the past half decade, I can recall a specific moment of where I passed a threshold of self-understanding and acceptance and was able to begin looking back on my former self with acceptance and love rather than shame. What’s become increasingly clear to me is that until you’re able to pass that threshold (and let’s accept that it is surely a recursive process I will need to repeat with increasing levels of honest self-awareness), you are estranged from these processes of memory which are a crucial endpoint of scholarly reflection in the mode that I’ve come to practice. If you celebrate the bottom-up process like I do, your practice will nonetheless be truncated until you are able to methodically look back on past reflections with the ability to recognise their imcompleteness whilst also celebrating the shards of insight that they may tacitly contain.

Do also check out Cory’s post which inspired mine this morning, “The Memex Method” here at pluralistic.net.

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photo of the River Severn flooded in 1940, a car is being dragged by several men with a rope out of the river

Yesterday there was torrential rain, lashing Wales for a few hours and creating widespread flooding which shut down roads and trains. This morning, I walked past the River Severn on my way in to run a seminar at the University of Sustainable Development. The Severn is one of the largest and most lively rivers in the UK, but the river this morning was far beyond its usual path, a gushing, brown expanse carrying rain and runoff. It was a striking juxtaposition, creaking civil infrastructure neglected in part through decades of climate change denial, and a loud and lively admission of climate change intensified storms, likely a weather pattern which landed in the United States last week as a series of devastating hurricanes.

I’ve been studying the ways that we can communicate across species barriers, and the challenges to our conceptions of “normal” communication which result from these encounters. Over the summer I taught a course at a theological college, and we engaged in a contemplative ecology walk one rainy afternoon. That walk took us past the River Mersey in Manchester. As I pressed students to engage with other creatures around us in an act of contemplative communication, we paused to wonder about what sort of spiritual beings the different creatures around us might be and how they might be speaking to us. Rivers commmunicate through motion: pace, push, and flow. Like trees (and the subject of a workshop some weeks before), they communicate slowly, expressing conviction and presence by moving land and shifting their path in subtle ways, gently carrying other little beings of soil and rock with them to new homes. Communication through motion is not inaccessible or unknown to humans, though our everyday lives do sometimes deny us joyful motion, scholars have plumbed the communicative potential of dance, and I think we would do well to observe symmetries in the art of intention motion by human communicators and nonverbal nonhumans.

As we paused on our walk at the Mersey, I observed to the group that the sides of the river had been filled with cement in a form of cheap and efficient flood protection. This river could not move. It had been rendered mute and inert, in what could be seen as an act of cruelty and disdain for the intended ecological presence of a river. As the students and I reflected on the Mersey and the forms of presence it might be offering to us, and we moved beyond our initial appreciations for its benefits for anthropos, in the therapeautic conveyance of pace, strength, patience, forebearance. It was impossible to ignore the ways that the river brought life to the whole biotic community of the city. Yet at the same time, when I asked the group to push past our own lifeworlds and to try and imaginatively inhabit that of the river and consider what sort of presence it had to itself, it was hard to ignore the suffering it must endure as a creature, full of potential expressiveness, yet lashed to an artificial course, still generously holding down (for the sake of the health of other creatures) toxic runoff from centuries of mining and industry sedimented under its body. I spend some of my contemplation in quiet solidarity with those other traumatised creatures, including humans, who have had their communication taken from them.

This morning many news outlets decried the destructive potential of our waterways in Wales. I do not deny the tragic consequences of short-sighted development schemes and climate denialism placing houses close to waterways with little to protect them. And I note the ways that the victims of suffering in recent weeks are overwhelmingly minoritised and poor. However, I do not lament the speech of the river Severn this morning. At the same time that it is giving us life and protecting us from self-inflicted harms, it is speaking to us – screaming it the loudest possible voice (I wonder, is it rage? grief? fear?) – can we find our way back to the old ways of listening to the land and paying heed to its wisdom?