Burning Bright: Multiplicity, Autistic Presence, and the Radical Truth of My Practice

By many accounts, I’ve always been too much.
Too intense, too strange, too emotional. Too sensory, too reactive. Too different.
Too much to understand, too much to manage, too much to be allowed.

And I’ve heard the question muttered, sneered, or sometimes even asked aloud with theatrical disbelief:
Who does she think she is? (And then, quite violently, they have either failed me, excluded me, belittled or bullied me).

The answer to that question is: I’m someone whose being, like every being, is not singular but multiple.
Not metaphorically, but ontologically, as Annemarie Mol writes in The Body Multiple.

Mol’s theory has stayed with me not just because it’s intellectually rigorous, but because it offers something rare: a way to survive without moulding myself into something I’m not. She writes that the body is not one fixed object, but something enacted differently in different contexts… through practices, through language, through relationships, through place. A disease like atherosclerosis, in her study, is not one thing. It is many things, depending on where and how it is encountered: as a scan, a symptom, a complaint, a texture, a cut, a story.

This way of seeing (or more importantly, being seen) matters. Especially if you are someone, like me, whose body has never quite fit into singular narratives. Especially if your neurodivergence doesn’t hide. Especially if your divergence doesn’t just show itself under stress. It burns.

When Divergence Burns Bright

Stressful situations don’t just reveal my autism: they ignite it.

While some autistic people can mask, to survive in the grey, fluorescent spaces of normative life, I never could. My neurodivergence is visible. Always has been. And under pressure, it becomes unmistakable.

When overwhelmed, I don’t become quiet or palatable. I become more. I stim harder. I speak in loops. I flap, pace, tangle my sentences. I might cry without warning, raise my voice, or go utterly still. I do not slip beneath the surface… I crack the surface open.

And sometimes, in those moments, people recoil. I hear the word “freak” spat under breath… or worse, loudly. I feel the sudden shift in temperature when someone decides I am too much. And for so long, I believed them. I believed my inability to mask meant I was unfit, embarrassing, wrong. That my autistic body was a disruption to the social order and should be kept out of sight.

But what Annemarie Mol offers in The Body Multiple is a different way of understanding these moments. If the body is not a singular, fixed object but multiple, enacted differently across contexts, then the self that breaks apart under pressure is no less real than the self that appears calm and articulate in safer conditions. Both are me. Neither is more authentic. Neither is more deserving of care.

The version of me that others label “too much” is not a failure. It is simply a version that is out of sync with a world built to exclude it. The issue is not that I am broken, but that most spaces are not built to hold my reality.

And Yet, in Crip Queer Artistic Spaces…

In certain rooms, though… in the right lighting, the right textures, the right people… I am not too much. I am just right.

In crip queer artistic spaces: among collaborators who understand bodyminds as sites of creative intelligence, who speak the language of access intimacy and neurodivergent flow, my divergence is not a liability. It is a resource. It is possibility: It is vision.

Here, my intensity isn’t seen as erratic. It’s perceived or encountered as electric.
Here, my ideas aren’t strange. They are radical.
Here, my repetitions aren’t dysfunction, they’re rhythm.
Here, I don’t have to ask permission to be complex.

In these spaces, people don’t ask “Who does she think she is?” because they already know. I’m someone whose thoughts stretch beyond what the room can contain. I’m someone whose ideas reach beyond the edge of the sea. I’m someone whose divergence is not just acceptable: it’s generative.

The Cost of Displacement

Contrast that with this past week.

Due to a loss of internet at home, I’ve had to move across London, day after day, searching for connection—not just digitally, but somatically. I’ve bounced between friends’ homes, borrowing Wi-Fi to keep up with my work. My hotspot allows for emails, but not video calls—and my work, as a psychotherapist, requires full presence.

This shifting, this constant dislocation, has drained me.

Each new space (with its unfamiliar acoustics, its unfamiliar rules, its white walls and cold lighting) strips away part of my regulation. Each journey across the city fragments my sense of self. Without my anchoring—my own textures, my own colours, my own smells and silence—my nervous system frays.

People don’t understand that white walls, often praised for being “neutral,” are not neutral to me. They are aggressive. They bounce light back into my eyes, into my bones. Beige and grey rooms bleach me of energy. My walls at home are soft or dark, bold, muted, absorbent—they hold me. They regulate me. They let me return to myself. Though I have been very grateful to my wonderful friends and neighbours who have stepped up to offer their homes and spaces for an hour or two here and there, still the travel and room hopping has drained me completely.

I cannot deliver from disconnection. I cannot practice (ethically or sustainably) when I am scattered and sensory-flooded. My work depends on my ability to be deeply attuned, which requires that I am deeply regulated. This is not inflexibility. This is truth.

The Dreaming Body: My Practice, My Multiplicity

As a psychotherapist, I do not work with neat categories. I work in the realm of symbol, ritual, archetype, and dream. Because these are the languages that speak to multiplicity—to the parts of us that cannot be contained by diagnoses or surface appearances.

I work with dreams because they show the parts of the self that speak when the mask falls away or a certain self walks away and reveals another self. I work with ritual because the body remembers what the mind cannot say. I work with alchemy because transformation is not linear—it is cyclical, messy, intuitive. I work with archetypes because they show us the many selves we carry—the lover, the child, the fool, the witch, the one who burns, the one who heals.

I work this way not just because it’s effective, but because it’s honest. Because it makes room for the kinds of realities that neurotypical logic often discards—the ones that emerge in poetry, in dreams, in stimming, in silence, in fire.

My clients—many of whom are neurodivergent, disabled, queer, trans, or otherwise living on the edge of “normativity”—do not need to be pathologised. They need to be witnessed. They need space to enact themselves fully. They need to be held in their own multiplicity—gently, reverently, and without demand for coherence.

That’s the space I hold, because it’s the space I have always needed.

Multiplicity Is Not a Metaphor — It’s a Demand

So when I say that I live a multiple life, I am not being poetic. I am being precise.

I am not one version of myself. I am not consistent. I am not linear.
And I no longer seek to be.

Mol writes that the body does not need to be resolved into one truth. That refusal (that radical pluralism) has been my salvation. It means I no longer have to erase the versions of myself that don’t fit into polite society. It means I can burn brightly in one space and dissolve in another—and both are real. Both are me.

It means I can be the stimming, looping, burning autistic woman or non-binary person on a crowded street
I can be the skilled psychotherapist holding space for someone else’s grief
I can be the artist dreaming symbols onto paper at 11pm under orange lamplight and dark magenta walls.
I can be the one who is sometimes undone—and still holy in the undoing

Multiplicity is not indulgent. It is not incoherence. It is not excess.
It is reality.
It is ethics.
It is freedom.

And I don’t need anyone’s permission to live inside it.