I used to think the shape of my own bodymind was something like a spiky profile — a way of picturing uneven ability across different areas, real peaks and real troughs, instead of one flat line running across the whole of who I am.
The term has helped give language to something many of us lived long before we could name it: that being brilliant at one thing and genuinely unable to do another isn’t laziness, and it isn’t a contradiction — it’s how a neurodivergent bodymind is put together (Autism Understood, 2023). It pushed back against the flattening habit of “if you can do X, you should be able to do Y,” and made room for the truth that a peak and a trough and ways of ebbing and flowing can belong to the same person without either one cancelling the other out (The Neurodiversity Directory, 2026). It even carries a small history of resistance in its own naming — Damian Milton chose “spiky profile” specifically because he didn’t want “islets of ability” or “uneven profile,” terms that framed difference as scattered fragments rather than a real, whole pattern (Stimpunks Foundation, 2022).
It’s a better reflection of neurodivergent ways of being than a flat line of neuronormativity, but it is still a profile that measures us against ‘something’. It still needs axes and edges, and that’s exactly where I want to push further, because it still doesn’t quite capture how it feels to be this shifting and multidimensional. A spiky profile isn’t static or one-dimensional; it’s affected by everything and everyone around us. Our sensory, communication, and cognitive profiles are always moving, always in relationship with our environments — never fixed long enough to be pinned to a single chart.
As neuroaffirming as the spiky profile can feel, it’s still asking something of us. It still wants a domain to plot against another domain, a percentile against a percentile, a standard deviation between this peak and that trough. It still needs a grid to be spiky on, even the most generous, strength-based version of the profile is still a chart — still comparing us to a norm, still asking how far we sit from an average we never agreed to be measured against. The edges haven’t gone anywhere; they’ve just been redrawn a little more kindly.
This is where I think we need to neuroqueer the spiky profile rather than simply defend it. Neuroqueering isn’t about finding a nicer position within the existing grid, it’s about asking whether the grid was ever the right container to begin with.
What I recognise, when I try to map myself, isn’t a chart at all. It’s a constellation of intensities — an interdependent, monotropic galaxy. It is more like an ever-shifting arrangement of sensory, cognitive, and relational ways of being, always in motion, always connecting, always becoming; never fixed, never finished. Some intensities I’ve lived in for decades, others shift by the moment, but none of them sits on a defined axis. They belong to the same ever-expanding galaxy that reflect my monotropic ways of being — we are all made of star stuff.
A constellation doesn’t ask how far you are from average. It doesn’t need a baseline to make sense of itself — only relationships, motion, and the space to keep forming. We aren’t uneven versions of a flat line.
We were never a line.
We are made of stardust.
We are multidimensional and always in a process of becoming.
References
Autism Understood. (2023, July 7). Spiky profiles. https://autismunderstood.co.uk/autistic-differences/spiky-profiles/
The Neurodiversity Directory. (2026). What is a spiky profile? Strengths, weaknesses, and variance. https://neurodiversity.directory/glossary/spiky-profile-definition/
Stimpunks Foundation. (2022, July 26). Spiky profile. https://stimpunks.org/glossary/spiky-profile/
Explore Star Stuff
Read my Star Stuff collaboration with Stimpunks
🌌 Read the full Star Stuff page — the heart of the project: the manifesto, the science, the philosophy, and reflections from the community, all together at Stimpunks
📖 Read the zines — eleven of them so far, including my own guest zine, Why Difference Comes First, which follows the quantum and Deleuzian thread in full, alongside community favourites like Bone Song and Underground
✨ Wander the Field Guides — neurodivergent constellations, the elements you’re made of, and the life forms that thrive in places we once thought impossible
