Borderlands: On liminality, neurodivergence and writing

“A living language is continually being made and remade, woven out of the silence by those who speak… And this silence is that of our wordless participations, of our perceptual immersion in the depths of an animate, expressive world.”
– David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous

A certain strangeness has followed me since childhood, a constant companion of forty-two years. Like an imaginary friend, she has walked alongside me unseen and unheard. Her shape is unclear (still) to everyone around me, including myself, because she is a part of me. This travelling skin only recently told me her name, she is called Autism. 

Born a halfling of Welsh-English origin, I grew up weaving in and out of these green borderlands. I have always felt different. To be autistic in the high masking sense is to dwell in a kind of liminality, usually feeling odd or out of place in some way. In most conventional or typical situations, I am often looking for a chance to let my highly sensitive soul slip out the back door where she can cope. I am an edge-dweller, empath, an energetically attuned being always wandering between worlds. 

Dipping in and out of Mid-Wales as a child and young person offered a sense of wildness and freedom I couldn’t quite access on the other side of the border. It was only at the age of 29, whilst living in London, that I began to realise my relationship with sadness was far too intimate. This was the emergence of a highly internalised, incredibly slow, and heavily masked emotional breakdown that began in my early twenties. It is only in the last couple of years that I have entered what feels like recovery.  

In my thirties I pressed the escape button on living in cities, moving from South London to live and work in rural northwest Scotland. Here I began to engage with the landscape and world around me in a way I could make sense of. It was completely safe to walk home under the moonlight or wander rugged coastlines as opposed to heavy concrete streets. My sensory world started to expand into a new language, and I began writing. 

A single step is a letter, walking a path is a word, and finding a route is a story. In his book Lines, Tim Ingold compares modalities such as walking, writing and weaving as ways of reading the world. I began walking wilder terrain at this time alongside writing poetry. Over ten years later, I can see how this process has evolved to support me in finding the ways I best move through the world and am able to express myself. Returning to the Welsh borders, I find myself drawn further and further westwards, in creative conversation with landscapes that enable a sense of freedom and self-expression. 

Shortly after I received my autism spectrum diagnosis at the age of 40, I began a PhD at Aberystwyth University. I would probably qualify for an ADHD diagnosis too, falling into the AUDhd category, but question how useful more labels would be. Realising I am neurodivergent has already changed my poetry and is very much forming a part of how I write in other contexts. I have always worked in a variety of media, which I now realise is part of my sensory profile. I experience this as a kind of synesthesia where different senses and mediums blend and mix as an inherent, living process. Thanks to a diagnosis, I am more able to assert myself as a researcher and present work (including writing) in ways which align with my learning styles and are healthier for me. 

These are early days in my autistic ‘coming out’ story, and there are moments where it all feels very shaky indeed. I haven’t written much about it aside from personal journaling and poems, and find myself hanging back in general. I am not at peace with our growing culture of over-identification, and what autistic designer-writer Temple Grandin calls becoming ‘label locked’. I often don’t disclose my autism and try not to engage with media about neurodivergence that will re-traumatise me or lead down rabbit holes that aren’t helpful. There are a lot of people out there simply rehashing negative experiences, which I have mixed feelings about in the unsolicited world of social media. 

I do think however that people telling their stories is a good thing and that I’d like to be one of them, otherwise my truth will remain hidden. Figuring out the best way to do that is nuanced and requires consideration. Much like walking, the best way is often to take a step out onto the path. Nature accepts us completely as we are and as a part of it, without judgement. Like Katherine May (Author of The Electricity of Every Living Thing), I find that walking is often the only place where I don’t have to pretend. 

The attitude of an unmasked being, gently weaving her way through the world, is one I am now taking towards writing. In beginning to tell my story I feel less alone, and that the people who want to hear it are the ones that really matter. Writing is a ‘glimmer’, a source of autistic joy and expression. Neurodivergence is a part of evolution and entangling of experience, offering a new map of (be)longing. Our expressions of difference include what we might call Hiraeth; the Welsh longing for a sense of place. In these new spaces of potential, perhaps we divergent wanderers might find a home.  

You can follow Emily on Instagram. Visit her website here and check out her podcast Desire Lines.