Impact and the Growing Rhizome

Positive impact is change that makes life better for people: a child whose school stops punishing them for being neurodivergent or just different, a parent who stops blaming themselves, a teacher who reads one page and changes how they work together with a pupil on Monday morning.

Autistic Realms and More Realms are run by one person (me, Helen Edgar), from lived experience and twenty years of teaching, alongside the communities I work with. I don’t measure what I do by how many pages I publish or how many clicks they get. Those are activity markers. I measure it by usefulness, dignity enabled, harm reduced and access expanded, which are harder to count. This page shares the numbers I do have, what they can and can’t tell you, and where I fall short.

Metrics

The website figures below only start in May 2024, when I moved Autistic Realms from Wix to WordPress, so everything before that is missing. On the old site, the Monotropism and the Monotropism Questionnaire blog alone had over 100,000 views in a single year, and it has had at least 100,000 more since.

Metric	Count
Posts and pages published, both sites (reach, not outcome)	341: 160 posts and 89 pages on Autistic Realms, 62 posts and 30 pages on More Realms
Downloadable resources in the shop	615, pay what you can from £1, 27 free
Resource downloads since 2024	7,405
Orders and people served by the shop	1,839 orders by 1,645 people
Website views, all time (reach, not outcome)	188,971: 183,284 on Autistic Realms, 5,687 on More Realms
Website views this year so far	97,813 across both sites (56,791 visitors to Autistic Realms)
Website views per month	7,375 in the last 30 days
Readers by country this year	UK 34,724 · US 27,741 · Australia 7,582 · Canada 4,372 · Ireland 3,275 · New Zealand 1,422
Books	3 published, 1 more in press
Book chapters and contributions	8 published, 7 forthcoming
E-books, workbooks and training packs	23
Talks, panels, webinars and podcasts since 2023	About 50
Scholarly works citing autisticrealms.com (Google Scholar)	11
Social media followers	Facebook 22K (page 10K, profile 12K) · Bluesky 9,731 · Instagram 7,578 · LinkedIn 8,645 · Substack 2.9K · X (Twitter) 5,021 (archived account)
Followers across all platforms	55,000+
Newsletter subscribers	632

What the numbers can and can’t say

Views tell me something reached a screen. They don’t tell me whether it changed anything. A download tells me a resource was wanted. It doesn’t tell me whether it went on a classroom wall or into a drawer.

Most of what I know about impact arrives in ways no table captures: a message from a parent after a meeting went differently, a teacher who tells me at a conference that they use the burnout guide with every new class, a young person who found the words for their own experience in a post about monotropism. I don’t collect these systematically, and I don’t ask for permission to publish them, because a person who has just told me something tender should not have to think about whether it will end up on a web page. So this page shows you the countable part, and the countable part is the smaller part. If I use any quotes, they are always shared with permission and credited how the person wants, either anonymously or otherwise.

Where readers come from

So far this year, search engines have sent Autistic Realms 37,802 visits, which means people are arriving with a question already in mind: a parent typing “autistic burnout child” at midnight, a teacher looking up monotropism. The next biggest sources are Facebook 7,366, LinkedIn 1,441, Bluesky 1,096, the National Autistic Society 715, Stimpunks 489 and Monotropism.org 389. More Realms, the slower, more theoretical sibling site, reaches readers mainly through Bluesky and my online networking. It is a bit different and more neuroqueering, its readership is smaller, and I am ok with that.

The most-read pieces so far this year: Penguin Pebbling: An Autistic Love Language (8,153 views), Monotropism, Limerence And Autistic ADHD Experiences (4,432), Monotropism vs Polytropism: ADHD, AuDHD & Autistic Attention (3,578) and Intensive Interaction as Neuro-Affirming Relational Practice (3,263).

Resources in circulation

The shop holds 615 posters, cards, infographics, e-books and training packs. 27 are free and the rest are pay what you can from £1, so the money column says very little and the download column says a lot: 7,405 downloads since 2024, by 1,645 people. The most downloaded resource is the free Autism and Neurodiversity Starter Pack, written with David Gray-Hammond, which has gone out in 604 orders from my website alone and thousands more times from David’s NeuroHub Community site and Stimpunks, where it is also available to download. Everything is licensed CC BY-NC-ND, so it can be printed, shared and put on walls without asking, and that is the point.

Writing, research and recognition

Three books so far: Embracing Monotropism and Supporting Young People to Help Prevent Autistic Burnout (2023), the Neuro-Affirming Glossary (2025) and, with David Gray-Hammond, Re-Storying Autism (2026). Chapters and contributions include Embracing Monotropism and Flow, written with Fergus Murray for It Takes All Kinds of Minds (Routledge, 2026), and pieces in The Scale of the Spectrum, Understanding Autistic Burnout and Ways of Being, Knowing and Doing. Seven more chapters and papers are in press, including two for Neuroqueer Theory and Practice (Autonomous Press) and one for The Monotropism Reader (Pavilion). The full list, in APA style, is on the publications page.

Google Scholar lists eleven scholarly works that cite autisticrealms.com, and my work is cited or featured in books by Viv Dawes, Katy Elphinstone, Kerry Murphy and others. One Neuroqueer Learning Spaces piece has been translated into French, and work about the Map of Monotropic Experiences has been translated into Greek and Welsh. None of this is why I write, but it tells me the ideas are travelling beyond the people who already agree with me. If you would like to translate any of my work, please do reach out!

Working alongside others

Almost nothing here was made alone. I am Co-Creative Director of Stimpunks Foundation with Ryan Boren, Co-Director and Community Facilitator of NeuroHub Community with David Gray-Hammond, Content Researcher at Monotropism.org with Fergus Murray, Communications and Community Lead at Thriving Autistic, and an Education, Training and Resource Specialist with GROVE Education. Out of those relationships came the Map of Monotropic Experiences, Neuroqueer Learning Spaces, Cavendish Space, Penguin Pebbling, Star Stuff and queering.earth. Since 2023 I have given around fifty talks, panels, webinars and podcast episodes, almost all co-created with other Autistic and neurodivergent people; they are listed on the talks page.

Where I fall short

An impact page that reports only what worked isn’t fair. So this section stays and gets updated when I find new things wrong or not quite right with what I do, as I am only a single person and human!

I don’t know whether any of this changes practice at scale

Guides get downloaded, cited and shared. I cannot tell you whether a single school changed a policy because of one. I have no outcome tracking I would trust, because most of what exists in that genre measures compliance and calls it progress, and I will not do that to the people I work with. What I can honestly say is narrower than a funder usually wants: ideas I published are in circulation, and I do not know what they changed.

The sites were less accessible than they should have been

An audit in October 2026 found 164 images across the two sites with no alt text, dozens of empty or mis-levelled headings, and a shop where most product pages said nothing about the product beyond a licence paragraph. For a site about access, that is a real failure that upset me. All of it has now been fixed, and the audit is repeated so it stays fixed. The remaining gaps are listed openly in the audit notes.

I make mistakes, and find out later

I occasionally publish things that may have an error in the references, and only find out later about dates or other authors. I own up to my mistakes and will publicly announce any errors with an apology.

Some quote cards in the shop carry attributions I now need to check more thoroughly.

Some graphics have had typos for years, as I moved my site over from Wix to WordPress in 2024. Some early posts use language I would not use today. I correct these when I find them, and I would rather say so here than quietly swap them out.

Reach depends on platforms I don’t control

Facebook alone has sent 7,366 readers so far this year. A change to one algorithm can halve that overnight, and has. Search engines send most of the rest, and they reward whatever is already popular. The newsletter and this website are the only channels I own, which is why I keep asking people to subscribe rather than follow.

What I deliberately don’t measure

I don’t count hours worked, speed of output or constant availability. I am an Autistic ADHD person who has been through burnout more than once, and a site built on metric fixation would reproduce exactly the conditions I write against. Rest is part of the work. The gaps in posting are not a failure of commitment; they are the cost of being a person.

How you can help my work travel and grow

Share a resource with someone who needs it. Print it and put it on a wall. Cite it in your training, your policy, your essay. Pay what you can in the shop if you are able, and take it free if you are not. Join the newsletter so we are not relying on an algorithm to find each other. Tell me when something here helped, or when it was wrong, because both of those are how this page gets better.