Monotropism, Spiral Time, and the Rhizome of Memories

*“Memories scatter like shards of seaglass along a fractured spiral, the centre always slipping just beyond my grasp. Hazy images and sensations drift in and out of the fog, sometimes offering sharp glimpses, but rarely staying long enough for me to hold. Most pass by shrouded in a soft mist, like half-formed echoes trapped within a labyrinth. Sounds, images, smells, and feelings blur and merge, tangling into an ever-expanding rhizome, sprawling in all directions, folding in on themselves. Memories come more as felt impressions than as concrete events. Remembering isn’t straightforward for me; it’s less recall and more a process of re-navigation. I have to trace uncertain paths, try and find a thread to hook into to regain my flow, often sensing that what I’m reaching for is just out of reach if trying to recall a specific event, but my sensory memories are more clear and vivid as they are felt sensations – which is hard to explain to people who may not experience their memories in this way. ”

I am currently on a Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice course led by KR Moorhead, Marta Rose and Meg Max. This week we were exploring time and memories, which felt very apt given my recent monotropic outpourings about time. In this week’s session I wrote the above piece about how I experience memories.

Memory may not be linear for neurodivergent people. It may feel like a spiral of felt sensations. Being monotropic shapes how I re-sense moments, navigating echoes and threads of sensory experiences rather than always recalling events. I felt validated that some other people seemed to relate and share similar experiences of their time not being linear and also being quite hazy recalling specific events but having really vivid recollections of more sensory experiences.

Monotropism and Memories

Monotropism is a theory of Autism (Murray et al 20025) that describes a way of focusing attention that tends toward deep but fewer channels. For those of us who experience the world monotropically, attention locks in and tunnels can form like portals. These attention tunnels can lead to intense engagement and immersive sensory experiences, but they may also shape how we encode, retrieve, and relate to our memories.

Memory for me is not a fixed archive of past events filed neatly on shelves. It is alive, constructed in the present, woven from threads of past focus, emotion, embodiment, and attention. For monotropic people, those threads may be less linear and deeply context-bound in our sensory experiences. We may not remember when something happened in conventional, sequential neuronormative time but we may vividly feel how we experienced something, we may recall the sensory landscape, the tone, the rhythm of presence or absence.

Spiral Time and Felt Time

I’ve written previously about monotropic experiences of time as being like ever expanding rhizomatic spirals like rather than a linear A-B or 9am to 10pm of time as lived by the clock and conventional calendar. I think this also shapes how memory functions, rather than stretching out along a clear chronological line, time for me feels like it folds back in on itself and experiences and memories happen and are stored within the folds (a concept from Deleuze that I have written about at length). A moment from years ago might feel right now, while a conversation from yesterday may feel distant or unretrievable unless there is something to hook me in and brings it back into focus so I can retrieve the thread and follow the flow.

In monotropic spiral time, memories don’t behave like neurotypical people may expect or how we may have been brought up to understand how memory works. My memories don’t line up neatly, they tangle, twist, merge and drift like mist through a forest. Sometimes I feel I’m not remembering in the traditional sense at all, but kind of re-sensing, like I am trying to feel my way through a fog of echoes and impressions, a texture, a tone of voice, the way the light fell. It makes my memories of concrete events feel hazy and fuzzy but my experiences feel vivid and it can be quite confusing and frustrating at times.

Labyrinths and the Rhizomes

For monotropic people our minds and memories may feel less like walking through an album of neatly arranged photos and more like navigating a vast, living labyrinth. I can’t easily “go back” and retrieve a memory, it feels like I have to wander, I have to reach out and try and sense where the thread of recall might catch and hook onto something, what I often find is not a single event but a tangle, a rhizome of multisensory experiences that I have to unravel.

This rhizomatic quality of navigating time means my memories don’t live in isolation, they’re not strictly filed under “birthday, age 9” or “Monday morning, March 3rd.” Instead, they seem to connect through shared emotions and sensory patterns. One feeling or sensory experience might loop me back to three seemingly unrelated moments, a smell might pull on threads across decades and I don’t always know why. This can be disorienting in a world that expects time and memory to be neat and logical but it’s also a kind of richness, a depth of connection that linear systems seem to often miss. It can make conversations with friends and family hard as it seems like I am not interested enough in people to have created a core memory like in the Disney film Inside Out, my memory of real life events feels like a sieve where things happen then disapear but they are all there, it is just perhaps that they are stored differently.

It brings me back to my first blog I wrote on More Realms (2023), Middle Entrance. In 1943, T.S. Eliot’s collection of four poems were collated to form Four Quartets. The final poem in this series Little Gidding (1942), continues Eliot’s exploration of time and our connections with each other through generations and current society.

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

My memories, relationships and ways of being are like constantly evolving spirals that spin in and out in multidimensional ways. Different connections and experiences add to and contribute to a wider, deeper fluid rhizomatic network of potential that is always in a constant state of flux. This idea of an evolving spiral, hooking onto a node of the rhizome and returning to a new beginning in the middle, liminal spaces, within the folds is how I experience memory. I need time to process, time to rlect and for memories to and beautifully reflected in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea”.

— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”

Navigating Memories

Memory for me feels less like recall, I am not able to press a button and retrieve a file (unless it is related to my own special interest about Autism research or teaching in which case my filing cabinet seems to ping open!). It is more like a re-navigation, I have to find the right entry point and node of the rhizome, I need to feel for the thread, follow it gently and try not to tug too hard in case it disappears back into the fog. I often know I know something, but I can’t get to it directly. I need the right conditions or sensory cue to draw it out and that takes time and and can make me appear distant or uninterested when the opposite is true.

This is why questions like “What did you do last weekend?” can feel like demands rather than simple curiosity. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention, it’s that the question doesn’t align with how my memory map works or how I perceive time. If you ask me what the light looked through my window like as I sat reading in bed, or how the air felt when we stepped outside I might have a more instant response but I probably won’t be able to recall the chronological sequence or events and relate things in an easy to understand order, it is like that gets lost in the spiral. It can be frustrating at times just to have fleeting impressions of memories that I know mean a lot to me but I can’t easily retrieve.

Understanding and Support

Understanding memory through a monotropic lens may helps us honour our different ways of knowing, recalling, and connecting with events and people. For those supporting Autistic individuals, whether as educators, therapists, or family members this means shifting assumptions and instead of assuming memory is absent or deficient it may be better to consider asking things like:

• How do memories show up for you?
• What helps you reconnect with something you felt or experienced?
• Is there a sensory or emotional thread that brings it back?

This may also be empowering for those of us who live and experience life monotropically. It validates the experience of having a different bodymind, of perhaps remembering more through attention tunnels of sensation rather than facts or dates. It recognises that memory is not a failure when it doesn’t fit neurotypical expectations it’s perhaps just a different kind of map that we have to navigate.

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”