The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
The Middletown Podcast features interviews with leading thinkers and practitioners across the autistic and autism community. Conversations are autism-affirming and neurodiversity-informed with a focus on the lived experience and knowledge of our community. Episodes highlight issues impacting autistic people and we share ideas for family members and school staff who are providing support.
The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
Podcast: Monotropism with Fergus Murray
The theory of Monotropism focuses on how autistic people allocate their attention. Autistic theorist, Fergus Murray joins us on the latest podcast episode to discuss how the theory, which was developed by autistic people, may explain much of autistic experience.
To read some of Fergus’ writing visit: https://oolong.co.uk/
Welcome to the Middletown Podcast. I'm Kat Hughes, I'm a researcher at Middletown and I'm also autistic. In this episode I chat to Fergus Murray, an autistic theorist who's also a science teacher. Fergus is the son of the late great Diana Murray, who was sent to the development of the theory of monotropism. Fergus is furthering her legacy by focusing on monotropic processing. Through research and practice, they explain how monotropism makes sense as a theory of autism and their understanding. That has the potential to really benefit autistic people. Fergus has such a brilliant brain and I loved the way that they can so clearly explain things. I really enjoyed our chat. I hope you enjoy it too, and, fergus, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is a very sort of starter question what exactly is monotropism?
Speaker 1:So monotropism is a characteristic of thinking or a style of thinking which spreads processing resources less widely, so it concentrates processing on a smaller number of things at a time and throws more resources at those things. You could also think of it as a monotropic thing because interests pull in their attention and other resources more strongly than they would for other people. But I think that can confuse people a little, because an interest could be anything that captures your interest. It doesn't have to be a special interest, so I think that's a common misunderstanding. Also, monotropism is a theory of autism. It's the idea that autistic people process things more monotropically than others, and this explains all of the current diagnostic criteria for autism and much about autistic experience which is not captured by the diagnostic criteria as well.
Speaker 2:Perfect. And then I know there's something called flow state. Can you explain how flow state fits in with monotrapism?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the idea of a flow state is a pretty familiar one. Even people who have never heard the phrase before will have heard of some variety of it. You know, being in the zone, being in flow, being really in the moment. So In psychology it was most mainly theorized by a guy called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who had a difficult time getting psychologists to pay attention to it. At first I think a lot of psychologists were focused on things being wrong with people and didn't really want to talk about what went right with people very much. They didn't seem to be very interested in that. So he sort of tried to get published for a few years talking about flow states. Finally he sort of broke in through sports psychology, where it's well understood among sports psychologists that it's very important for sports people to be in the zone, to be in flow, to be, you know, chasing peak performance.
Speaker 1:So a flow state is where you're kind of fully absorbed in the task. Usually the task is something which is challenging, but not too challenging. So it's a good fit for your skill level and typically it means sort of shutting out everything else, focusing just on the task. Often you lose track of time. It feels horrible to be pulled out of a flow state, and yeah, so Jifte Maha'i saw flow states as being really central to everybody's well-being, and I think that's true and a lot of people and governments and organisations have really run with it since.
Speaker 1:So you know, if someone is not able to access flow states, they are likely to be quite dissatisfied with their lives. And where this fits in with monotropism is well, for one thing. Descriptions of flow states really look a lot like descriptions of monotropism is well, for one thing. Descriptions of flow states really look a lot like descriptions of monotropism. The whole thing of being deeply absorbed in something and losing track of everything else, losing track of time all of that is classic autistic stuff and it's right there in the descriptions of monotropism which my mum, dinah Murray, and when Lawson and Mike Lesser started writing about and presenting about in the 1990s, I think at the time they weren't really thinking about flow as such. To the best of my knowledge, it was Damien Milton, the autistic scholar best known for the double empathy problem, who first started making that connection that's fascinating, and then it really.
Speaker 2:I guess the reason that I find psilocyte so interesting is because it really shows what a positive monotropic processing can be for someone yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So one of the joys of monotropism as a way of understanding autism is that it's not fundamentally negative. Autism has historically been exclusively defined in negative terms as a set of deficits. Theories of autism have focused on core deficits. The closest to a neutral framing, by the time my mum was writing about monotropism, was the idea of weak central coherence, which if you're calling someone central coherence weak, you can't really say that you're being neutral about it. Right.
Speaker 1:It's arguably not a terribly coherent theory of autism and it's not really one which is taken very seriously anymore. It still gets taught on some courses, but Frankie Happy, who was pretty much the main person pushing it forward, doesn't really think it's a theory of autism anymore. So, yeah, monotropism sort of came into this space where everything being said about autism was negative and looking at the bad stuff and said, oh, hang on, what if autistic people just use attention differently and allocate processing resources differently, and this has good effects and difficult effects, Because almost everybody has experiences of flow states. I think also it is a good way of helping people to understand autistic experiences. Almost everyone has been deeply absorbed in something and then been wrenched out of it and they know that that's horrible, but they don't necessarily know that that happens to autistic kids all the time, Because it seems as if monotropic processing could be understood as a tendency towards flow states.
Speaker 2:Autistic people monotropic processors just enter flow states more easily typically, and it's a much more central part of our experience of the world and then are there you've kind of mentioned, then the, the challenges and that feeling of being wrenched out of that flow state and and the focus that you have. Are there kind of particular challenges that an autistic student might face in the classroom in relation to that Sure?
Speaker 1:yeah. So I mean most classrooms are really not set up to facilitate flow states, let alone to acknowledge how unpleasant it is to be pulled out of flow states. So the average classroom certainly at secondary level so I'm a secondary school science teacher the average classroom experience involves days being broken up into discrete, rigid blocks of perhaps an hour, sometimes less. Whatever someone is doing at the end of that time they're supposed to pack it in, do something else entirely. So if someone does ever enter a flow state in the classroom, they need to be aware that they could be pulled out of it at a set time or they very likely will be pulled out of it before that, because most classes it's not just that the school day is broken up into periods. Each class is broken up into discrete chunks. If you're still working on a thing after half an hour when it was supposed to be a 25-minute chunk, then you're in trouble. Quite often kids are ashamed for being too absorbed in something, especially if the thing they're absorbed in isn't what they're supposed to be absorbed in at any given time, which certainly happens quite a lot. What else can we say? Most schools don't allow very much autonomy for kids and flow states pretty much need to be self-directed. If someone gives you a task to do which is totally in line with your interests, then you might enter a flow state, getting into it. Even if it's something that you're, in theory, interested in, if that's not where your head is at at the time that the task is allocated, you're not going to get into flow. So an educational experience which centered flow would have to center autonomy as well and self-direction, which, again, I think there's a lot of evidence that these are things which benefit the population at large.
Speaker 1:It's not just a good thing for autistic people and monotropic processors, but especially autistic people and ADHD is as well. It's pretty clear that people with ADHD sorry, I'm putting that in quotes because the idea that it's something you have drives me a bit nuts and characterising it as an attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, is wrong on multiple counts, anyway. So ADHDers also enter hyperfocus, they also enter flow states and this is like a very widely reported aspect of ADHD experience which is just not there in the diagnostic criteria. It's treated as a deficit in attention. Obviously it's not.
Speaker 1:It's like it's harder for ADHDers and autistic people to direct our flow of attention towards things that we're not particularly interested in. So that's a big part of what goes wrong in the classroom for a lot of neurodivergent kids. Also, on the theme of barriers to low states in the classroom most classrooms, physically, are full of distractions. They're often visually cluttered, they're likely to have 20 other kids, many of them having conversations, and background noises, flickering lights, smells all of this stuff can make it much, much harder to focus in the kind of intense way that we associate with life states.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, it brought me right back to some of my childhood classrooms and, yeah, horrifying experiences, to be honest with you, really difficult and then, um, I suppose one of the things that I feel like can be quite difficult for people to understand is the feeling of being ripped out of that flow state, and I, like you mentioned, sort of everyone has some understanding of it, but I think I don't know if it's quite the visceral feeling that people like, whether they really do understand how difficult it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's hard to express, isn't it? I kind of think that most people do have a pretty good degree of understanding, but most people will never make that connection. They won't realize that this is an experience which happens all the time to especially autistic kids in school. But you know monotropic people across the board. Um, so, yeah, like I ask people to imagine that they've almost reached the end of a chapter and then someone insists that they come away from their book immediately and eat food. Or you know, if they're into sports, um, it's five minutes from the end of the game and someone calls on the phone and totally demands that you talk to them immediately and you have to put that aside.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, I think most people kind of get that like they. They understand that that is going to make you angry and disoriented and, um, yeah, kind of indignant, but maybe the the level of discombobulation involved is not familiar to everybody. Yeah, um, because, yeah, when you're fully immersed in flow or you're monotropically hyper-focusing on something and then you have to stop it and start something else because that's usually what we're talking about then it's like you need to completely shut down the former processes. Just completely shut down the former processes screech to a halt and then pile all of your processes and resources into this new basket that somebody else has demanded they should be in and that whole thing. Just it takes a lot of resources, it's depleting, it's upsetting, it's frustrating and most people don't get that. They have no idea what's happening for you, so they treat it as your problem, that you're upset. Yeah, so there's a lot of kind of invalidation in common autistic experiences.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially in school, but in lots of other places too. Yeah, in common autistic experiences? Yeah, definitely in school, but in lots of other places too.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah and and I the most recent, I suppose, memory that I have that that when I was thinking about chatting to you, that this kept coming back to me. Um, I used to to work in an office where where I was was it was like an old building that had been converted, so I was on a landing, that was the the way to the kitchen and the toilets. So I would like 15 minutes of work and then someone would pass through and we'd have a chat and then it was constant disruption and distraction and everyone was lovely, but by the end of the day, oh my goodness, I was a demon, because I was so frustrated and so exhausted and it was just. It was a real physical feeling and I think people don't necessarily understand the sort of the physicality of it as much as I need and then are there positive education practices.
Speaker 2:Then that can really work with that sort of way of processing yeah, I mean I talked a bit about self-direction.
Speaker 1:I think that should be central to all education as far as possible. Um, it's very difficult to make it so, certainly in a school environment. Um, the whole schooling thing is about like inserting the correct knowledge into every child's head at around about the correct time, and if that doesn't work then it's presumably the kid's fault. So respecting kids' interests and what they actually want to learn about and letting them lead as much as they can goes a long way. Respecting flow states, understanding the role of hyperfocus in learning, and I think to some extent this is something which a lot of educators do understand. I painted a bit of a caricature there of schools inserting knowledge into kids' heads at the appropriate times, which is still I think it's much truer than it should be, but it's still not as true as it used to be. Schools used to have a lot of just kind of sitting down in rows while being instructed and expected to write things down and presumably somehow remember them. Um, and we have come a long way from that, especially in, you know, early years and and to some extent, primary education, um, where I am led to understand a lot of the time kids are allowed to get on with what they want to be doing and, you know, play around. I think play is, it really needs to be central here as well. Actually, throughout education, um, I think I mean for me, playing and flow states are deeply bound up, um a kind of an expansive conception of play. I think you know it's it's significant that we talk about playing characters and playing musical instruments as well as playing games. I think all of those are forms of playing. You know you're um taking a set of rules or parameters and you're kind of you know messing around to see what you can do with them. What if this? It's how mammals learn. Pretty much it's across mammalia. Young animals play with each other and sometimes on their own, to learn. They explore possibilities, they check things out, and I think there are a lot of things which, if you don't play with them, you don't really understand them, including things like maths, which are not widely understood as playful things. I think writers and educators like Seymour Papert have really made so many deeply helpful suggestions which have not really been taken on board in our education system about things like how we can use technology, because programming is a playful activity, certainly when you're learning to do it. It really lends itself to trying stuff out, seeing what happens.
Speaker 1:So you know, I was playing trigonometry at the age of about 10. And five years later I was introduced to trigonometry at school as if it was just this thing to do calculations on triangles with. Like my god, I knew that trigonometry was about waves and circles and all of geometry, and I had a vague idea that most of physics was about waves by that point. So I knew that it was this incredibly powerful thing that could make amazingly beautiful images and animations. But my teachers didn't, as far as I could tell. So, yeah, play, play, autonomy, self-direction. I said that already.
Speaker 1:Flow states All of those go a long way. I feel like I should mention Maria Montessori here. I have been working at a Montessori school for the last year, but I've been working in the upper school where we have tried to apply Montessori learning. But I think in some ways we haven't necessarily succeeded in making flow central in the same way that it is in um montessori primary schools. So maria montessori, you know, about 100 ish years ago, had this experience of watching a kid enter a flow state and be totally absorbed in this task, with no prompting, clearly learning, trying stuff out, playing. I was like, wow, little kids do that. Because the environments that kids were being put into did not lend themselves to that kind of thing, and so she developed this whole educational philosophy around flow states without necessarily using that language. A lot of her lessons have been taken on board by mainstream primary schools in early years. I think Not just her, a lot of other teachers and researchers who reached much the same conclusions.
Speaker 1:But they have barely penetrated at all in secondary education and it's quite difficult to know how to implement them in the context of a system which is set up so that if you don't know certain things by a certain age and have certain skills that you've picked up, you fail, like you're officially branded a failure. You don't pass your exams or enough exams or the right exams, and if you don't do that at a set age, then that's it basically, or at least that's the message that schools typically get across. It's not nearly as true as a lot of people think. It is because there is lifelong education available. You can actually go back and do all kinds of things later, but it's not expected, it's not really accepted.
Speaker 1:So people feel like if they come out of school without qualifications, then they failed and that you know. Kids come out of school without all the right qualifications for all kinds of reasons. Obviously, being autistic is a big one, being neurodivergent in other ways, not being able to focus in the classroom environment for all of the reasons which some people just can't, but also things like being a young carer, being disabled in other ways, being from an impoverished background, having parents who have to work all hours All of these things can mean that kids just don't hit the the right milestones at the right times and our educational system fails them.
Speaker 2:And we say that they fail yeah, it's shocking and then I presume the amount of pressure on teachers to stay within that system, um, must be extraordinary, because teachers then are are sort of guided by those successes in inverted commas, and so, yeah, I can't even imagine and and there are so many things I think the teachers have to think of at any given time that certainly, when I was in school it was as you say. It was like sit down in a row, write this down, get it into your head, off you go, best of luck. But now there's so much more that teachers have to do and so much more that teachers have to think about in terms of mental health and sort of supporting students. There's I can't imagine, everything that needs to be juggled across the school day for teachers. Yeah, so it's very tricky.
Speaker 2:Um, are there ways saying that? Are there ways that teachers might kind of misunderstand or misuse monotropic processing? Because I think an awful lot of teachers, very understandably, with that level of pressure, are kind of thinking, well, what is the thing that I can use, what is the key that's going to make things click for this student? And so, is there a way that monotropic processing might be kind of misused within that process?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, certainly quite a common mistake that teachers make, when they hear about the importance of special interest for autistic kids, for example, is to try and shoehorn things so that they relate to the special interest when they don't necessarily have the insight themselves to get how things can link up.
Speaker 1:Because, you know, that can be a beautiful thing and it's something that autistic people tend to do a lot is find ways to link things to the things that we're super interested in. But if it feels fake, if it feels forced, then I don't know. I think that's uncomfortable for everyone involved. Even worse than that is treating special interests as a reward. So it's like, yeah, you know, do this boring work and then you get to think about Thomas the Tank Engine for a while, whatever, and that you know, trying to shoehorn special interest into a reward system, um, has it has the effect that extrinsic reward systems generally tend to have, which is to make the work itself less interesting and the thing which is supposed to be a reward feels like less and less of a reward over time.
Speaker 2:yeah, and I, yeah, and I for me, anyway, I always find that that interests are so precious and even the way I approach an interest that I have, I like I want to keep it for as long as I can because I hate that moment when I feel it fading and I know there'll be something else to come along.
Speaker 1:But that moment where an interest is starting to lose its glow is really tricky and anything external that could impact that is really difficult yeah, yeah, definitely, and this is why the advice to like, follow your passions, um, for work can be really really problematic, um, and it can be wonderful, it can be beautiful if you're in the right work environment and everything is basically okay, lovely, yeah, you get to engage with your passion in the work. They find maybe you won't get bored of it, but a lot of people, when they are effectively forced to focus on their passions for too much of the time, they stop being passions and end up being something you resent, and that's tragic.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, yeah, I, I was a um. I started working as a music journalist. That was my sort of special interest and at 16 I started working as a music journalist and even like my teachers would let me read music magazines down the back of class. They were like she loves it, leave her to it. That's fine, which was very progressive at that time. But, um, yeah, for I did it for 10 years but the glow just left and I absolutely hated it and resented it by the end.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I completely agree finding work that you can enjoy and then you can put aside, it's so, so useful yeah, yeah, that's the other thing, right, um, it's, it's not just being forced to focus on your special interest too much. It's sometimes passion is going to be too all-consuming. Yeah, um, if you're having to do something eight hours a day and then you're going home and thinking about it the whole time, you're at home as well, you're going to burn out that's it exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. So you're, as you said, you're a science teacher, and I'm always really fascinated when I meet autistic folk who work as teachers, because my education experience was so difficult that the idea of entering into a classroom fills me with horror in any capacity. So what is it that drew you to working in teaching?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I can't say that my own education experience was great to working in teaching yeah, I mean I can't say that my own education experience was great. Um, like, looking back, there is a lot that I appreciate about my school more than I did at the time. They, you know, they were really trying to be progressive in a lot of ways, but they were doing that within a system which was fundamentally very, very flawed. So I mean what? I'm 46 now. I've been a teacher for 11 years, counting the training year, so it took me a long time to decide that maybe I should try being a teacher. I've always loved science. My passion for physics has never gone away. Science in general is fascinating to me. There's a lot of maths I'm passionate about as well, although I never meant to be a maths teacher. That was kind of an accident.
Speaker 1:So in my mid-thirties I'd realised, a few years before, that I was autistic. I'd spent a long time trying out different jobs and finding that they didn't work out for one reason or another. You know usually classic things about work culture or not fitting in, compounded by difficulty with admin, things like that. I tried being self-employed. I was a self-employed web developer and private user for a good few years. But again, classic autistic difficulties, adhd difficulties, really struggling with admin and paperwork and not being any good at marketing myself or networking All of these are major, major barriers to actually making a living in the employment.
Speaker 1:So I thought I'd give teaching a try. I'd always thought that there would be a lot that I would enjoy about it. I you know I love explaining things to people. I particularly enjoy, um, you know, that moment where difficult scientific concepts click and people understand how to apply them. That's deeply satisfying to me. You know another of my kind of um career goals that never got anywhere with being a science writer. Um, I have done lots of writing about science but very little writing to editors and saying, hey, will you give me some money so that I can write about science? Um, that was just somehow an insurmountable barrier to me.
Speaker 1:Anyway so the actual teaching always appealed to me and it still does. I've always enjoyed that part of the teaching profession. But I put off doing teacher training for years because I dreaded the classroom management, the behavior management. I'm not one of nature's authoritarians. Making kids do things that they don't necessarily want to do is really not appealing to me. Partly that's because of my educational philosophy and all the things we've talked about, but also it just doesn't suit my temperament.
Speaker 1:Um, and yeah, that and all of the admin involved in teaching was pretty off-putting. Yeah, um, but yeah, I'd reached the point with, you know, my self-understanding and my people skills where I felt like actually it would be worth giving teaching a go. So I applied for the Institute of Physics funding for physics teachers who are good at physics. I got better paid to be a student teacher than I ever had been really before. It's not exactly well paid, but it's.
Speaker 1:You know, like I said, our previous jobs had been difficult. My teacher training year always killed me, but I got through it in the end. My teacher training year always killed me, but I got through it in the end. Uh, and then I got a job teaching at a small school where I got to work with small classes, part-time, and mostly with kids who were interested in what I had to teach them. And that's what I've been doing ever since um, which is largely okay. But, um, I I've only occasionally been able to do that alone. So I keep being expected to take large classes of kids who haven't chosen to teach to learn what I'm teaching, and sometimes that goes well and sometimes it doesn't go so well. If I'm having to keep track of 15, 20, 25 kids all trying to do science experiments again. I'm monotropic. I find it difficult to process multiple things at once. I don't have eyes in the back of my head.
Speaker 2:To some extent, I can, you know, mitigate the difficulties by being very, very well prepared, but that doesn't always work, I know quite a few autistic folk who have become teachers and then decided that it wasn't the right fit for them, and I can understand just how difficult it can be, as you say, in so many different ways, but then also where there can be real joy in it too. So are there things that can be done to make life easier and the environment easier for autistic teachers?
Speaker 1:For sure. Life easier in the environment, easier for autistic teachers, for sure. Um, yeah, there are a lot of things I find, when I'm talking about what we can do about education, I always struggle a little bit with the fact that there are really deep, fundamental problems in the entire education system which we can't really do anything about. But yeah, there are also lots of smaller things which could help. So, like I said, I have managed to make a teaching career of working with small classes of kids who have chosen to study what I want to teach, um, and that makes so much difference, but it's a challenge in the context of this education system. It's really really, really hard to only do that. Maybe if you're only working in colleges, that kind of thing, you might be able to do that, but I certainly wouldn't have stood a chance of doing that in mainstream state schools, which ideally I would have preferred to work in. You know, politically I don't really think there should be private schools, but I also know that state schools aren't really working for a lot of kids. So there's that I have worked part time, which again is for some reason very, very difficult, and schools really expect you not to, given how many teachers burn out on either profession. It seems like a mistake not to make it easy to work part-time. But what can you do? Uh, what else?
Speaker 1:Having some autonomy, um, again having control over what I teach, makes a huge difference to me, um, partly because it allows me to, you know, focus more on the things which I think are super interesting and less on things which I don't, which you know I think is good for students as well. I think if a teacher is enthused about a subject and fascinated by it, then they're much more likely to have a good learning experience. Also, it's hard to know where to start with it, but school politics, office politics, the whole social side of teaching can be a real challenge, and it's definitely I'm trying to find the word. It's definitely hampered my teaching career that I have not necessarily, you know, spent as much time in staff as other teachers. Um, or you know, gone to social events and things.
Speaker 1:Um, or understood hidden meanings, because a lot of the time people don't really say what they mean, lack of clear instructions. I think that's a massive one for a lot of autistic people in every workplace and every school. If I haven't been explicitly told what to do, maybe I can work it out. But if I haven't actually had it explained to me and then I guess, and I guess wrong, then that's treated as if I'm bad at it, which again that's a huge problem for kids at school as well.
Speaker 1:All the time, you know, we set work and we think that what's obvious to us is obvious to them, and actually what's obvious to different people varies enormously. I think just that insight in fact would go such a long way towards allowing people to work together effectively, towards allowing people to work together effectively, um, but teachers and bosses routinely just assume that what's obvious to them is going to be obvious to everyone else, and if you ask for clarification, then that can be treated as a challenge but it's so valuable to have autistic teachers at schools because I know from my own experience, like I didn't know, I was autistic.
Speaker 2:My teachers didn't identify as autistic, but there was three teachers I had over the course of my time and they saw me and I knew that they saw me and I knew that there was something different in how they understood me and how they saw how I worked and what I was interested in and what I enjoyed and they just went with it and that made such a difference yeah, and you know, I think partly it's about having teachers who have a similar experience in the world to you and partly it's, you know, seeing yourself represented.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, I mean it's. It's really tragic that so few schools are able to adequately accommodate autistic teachers. It's obviously incredibly powerful for a lot of neurodivergent kids to have neurodivergent teachers, and I think we should be talking about neurodivergent here quite a lot of the time. But it's complicated. Adhd and autistic experience have a lot of overlap. There is often significant overlap with other kinds of neurodevelopments as well. Dyspraxia obviously has a lot in common with autism.
Speaker 1:For example, maybe there are dyspraxic people who aren't autistic. I'm not saying that they don't exist, and maybe there are autistic people who aren't dyspraxic. But you know, difficulty coordinating has always been a very striking feature of autism for, like most autistic people, and it seems to fit with a monotropic perspective. If your processing resources are focused on a smaller number of things at a time, it makes sense that coordinating multiple things at once is going to be harder. Yeah, so most kids aren't neurodivergent probably, or at least not in identifiable ways, and most teachers aren't either. So most kids have the experience of having teachers who pretty much get where they're coming from most of the time, but a lot of autistic kids, a lot of neurodivergent kids, just don't, and that does go for other, you know, marginalized minorities in society.
Speaker 1:It really helps to have authority figures who understand your perspective and I think you know other teachers stand to learn a lot from having autistic teachers around the place as well and other neurodivergent teachers apart from anything, because they need to understand what's going on for their kids. I've always had other teachers come to me to ask my insights into what might be going on for their kids, and I think that really counts for a lot. Even in my small independent schools, I've found that I struggle to be accommodated, to feel like it's not fundamentally a problem that I struggle with the things I struggle with. I get that some of them make things harder for other teachers, but some of them make things easier for other teachers and I think, like you say, there's just a lot of value in accommodating neurodivergent teachers in the workplace.
Speaker 2:You talked about sort of representation and then sort of how important it is as a young person to sort of have that. Was there someone that you found very supportive when you were younger and sort of what sort of support was helpful for you?
Speaker 1:I mean certainly my mum. For anyone who's listening and doesn't know, my mum was Dr Dinah Murray who developed the theory of autotropism, later joined by Wynne Lawson and Mike Lesser. And growing up she didn't think she was autistic. She didn't think I was autistic at first. It was about halfway through the three decades that she spent thinking about autism that she realized that she really fitted the criteria herself. She was monotropic enough, you know. I think she always knew that she was quite monotropic and so was I, um, but at some point we both kind of like oh yeah we're not really multitasking, are we just hopping from one thing to another and forgetting about the previous thing?
Speaker 1:um, and yeah, although we sort of, you know, get on okay socially, actually there have been times throughout our lives when that has not worked out for us, and you know we've missed things that other people seemed obvious and so on.
Speaker 1:So, um, yeah, having having a, a mum who was really quite weird and knew it, um, helped a lot, because I, you know, kids would tell me that I was weird from very early on in my schooling and it didn't take long for me to accept that they were right and that was okay because, you know, it turns out that basically all of the most interesting people are weird. So, okay, it's not an insult like thanks for noticing, I guess yeah, learning to embrace weirdness is a real gift, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why weird pride is a thing. So you know, my mum made herself a weird pride badge and you know, scrawled weird pride in biro no felt tip on a badge that she would wear to. You know official occasions about autism and things. And yeah, this is why, when she was sick in 2021, I started Weird Pride Day on the 4th of March. I think it's actually just really important for everyone to accept the things that make them weird. However weird or not weird you are, you're going to have some things which other people find weird, and our society has a really kind of messed up split approach to this, where we celebrate difference to a point. We accept that most of the interesting people are weird. Actually, musicians, artists, scientists, notoriously are a bunch of weirdos and yet when someone doesn't conform with social norms and expectations, it's treated as some kind of terrible problem, at least until it's not, and I think you know we should be just celebrating and accepting that from the start thanks so much for listening to the podcast.
Speaker 2:This is a conversation based interview designed to stimulate thinking and hopefully support the development of practice. It's not intended to be medical or psychological advice. The views expressed in these chats may not always be the view of middletown center. If you'd like to know more about Middletown, you can find us on x at Autism Centre and Facebook and Instagram at Middletown Centre for Autism. Go easy until next time.