A Place of Unmasking

Quaker Meetings as Neurodivergent-Affirming Spaces

“I’ve started going to Quaker meetings because the Buddhists are too noisy.” It’s become a “comedy bit” that I do now when I’m mentioning my attendance to other people, including my Buddhist nun teacher who laughed and knows how happy I am that the local Buddhist center’s retreat this year is a silent one. Like most comedy routines, it contains truth. It is wonderful to sit mostly in quietness with other people without feeling a pressure to interact. There’s not a constant input of teachings, prayers, chants or hymns, or “discussion sections” to process. There’s only the occasional burst of words that often resonates in my mind like a bright bell and focuses my attention, which then itself seems to vibrate in tune with the after ring. I become the bell.

“It’s the biggest dopamine high of my week: sitting in a circle with 12 mostly retired people in Monkseaton.” That’s another line in my bit. But it’s true. Quakers are a byword for quietness and—given that many people still confuse them with the Amish—for restraint, purity, and “properness.” But I am finding attending the meetings thrilling. The hour brings me entirely alive.

I didn’t realize until I wrote this how apt the name of the meeting is. For anyone local to me (near the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England), Monkseaton is a quiet coastal suburb. I love how I’ve just realized that the word carries a sense of berobed figures, seated in contemplation: Monk-seat-on. I am a professional poet, often employed to summarize events, like festivals or conferences, in instant verse. But slower, more private versions of sinking into words allow me space and time to process thoughts, feelings, and sensations. I feel that Quaker meetings also allow me this space and time, but it’s done communally. In fact, sometimes I feel like the group is cowriting a poem together, mostly silently except when parts of it burst through into speech. This feeling is not in my comedy bit.

Something that is only sometimes in the comedy bit, depending on whom I’m talking to, is “Quakers are very autistic-friendly.” If I’m talking to one of my many fellow late-diagnosed autistic or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) friends and colleagues, then I will include it. Maybe it will make them want to go along to a meeting. Maybe it will help them realize that there are more places than they think that are safe and good spaces for people of our particular neurotype. But if it’s someone whom I don’t know, or who might only recognize the “medical model” of autism—described only by deficits with the stigmas and stereotypes about existing only with a learning disability and not possibly with empathy or a need for connection—then I will not mention it.

I see my Quaker meeting as a place of unmasking: somewhere I can go and be accepted as myself and drop the usual social norms and requirements. 

I am very publicly “out” about my autism diagnosis, having written a poetry collection about it. I am currently touring a spoken word show about neurodiversity. Shame thrives in silence, and since I am in a job where being “eccentric” is more accepted as part of the persona than it would be for someone who works in a bank, I hope I can make a difference by being open. But I still encounter many situations where somebody’s first reaction to hearing it will be something like: But you can’t be autistic! You’re making eye contact! Seem very sociable! Have been married! I seem to fit their expectations of “normal” and will be openly disbelieved. But like many of us who were diagnosed later in life (I was 42 and am 49 now), I have spent a lot of my life masking or camouflaging my autistic traits in order to fit in. This isn’t a conscious decision. It’s a reaction to how society can treat people who are different in their sensory, social, emotional, and cognitive ways of being. Masking takes energy, and new research shows it can often increase mental health problems and trauma, but for many of us it is unconscious, necessary, and ingrained.

I see my Quaker meeting as a place of unmasking: somewhere I can go and be accepted as myself and drop the usual social norms and requirements. I love reading about the early Quakers. It seems like they were going through their own process of “unmasking”: questioning why hat-doffing, vow-swearing, and titles were necessary. They were making a more direct and bodily connection with something transpersonal, rejecting traditional hierarchies and power structures because they don’t make sense.

I am not diagnosing the early Quakers as autistic. However, they were certainly neurodivergent or “neuroqueer” in the definition used by neurodiversity activist and scholar Nick Walker. Walker’s definition of neurodiversity recognizes it can be a movement or a paradigm, not just a descriptor. Used as a philosophy, it values differences in the ways that people process things as a strength, just as variety is a strength in biodiversity:

The idea that there is one “normal” or “healthy” type of brain or mind, or one “right” style of neurocognitive functioning, is a culturally constructed fiction, no more valid (and no more conducive to a healthy society or to the overall well-being of humanity) than the idea that there is one “normal” or “right” ethnicity, gender, or culture.

I think of George Fox’s radical belief that men and women were equal and how that meant early Quaker women thought and presented themselves differently from other women who were forced into more normal (heteronormative) ways of being. That seems to me to fit Walker’s description of “neuroqueering.” Walker acknowledges that the term has multiple definitions but suggests one of them as

Engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one’s own cultural conditioning and one’s ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance, with the aim of reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.

The word “weird” here is being reclaimed from being used in a derogatory sense, but there’s an intriguing origin to it. It comes from the Old English wyrd, which means “fate,” which in turn meant “spoken by the gods.” In more than one way, society has deemed it weird to sit together and silently attend on what might be spoken or heard in that silence. As an autistic person, I can struggle to filter out lots of sensory information that enters my brain simultaneously. In a meeting, I can tune in. I think it helps that I’d had a meditation practice for a couple of years before I started attending six months ago. I am getting better at working out what is an internal physical sensation, what is a thought from my “chattering mind,” and what is an insistent gathering of attention— I’ve come to learn that this indicates I might be listening to or speaking from something transpersonal. I am more likely to say “from the Light” than “from God,” but honestly, “from the bright ringing” would feel closer. It’s full-bodied, auditory, and within and beyond me all at once.

The sense of all attention being focused and heightened seems to me likely both a challenge and an opportunity for my fellow autistic and ADHD humans with low-support needs. Many of us operate better when our brains can look at just one thing at a time and be in a state of hyper-focus or flow. But many of us will struggle with lack of dopamine or an intensely wandering mind. The quiet might feel overwhelming.

Our bodies may need to “stim” (self-stimulate) with repetitive movements like foot tapping, hair twirling, or body rocking, in order to calm ourselves from the anxiety of being in an unfamiliar space with unfamiliar people. Given that we are often hypersensitive to sensory environments, we might hear the lights humming or a clock ticking, or we might be assailed by our neighbour’s perfume or distracted by someone’s very red scarf.

I would love many more neurodivergent people to be issued a clear invitation. . . . This is a movement that was founded on upholding difference and will continue to do so. Perhaps I could go so far as to say, it is a place where it is possible to be “proudly weird.”

Ideas about what makes a good “space” for neurodivergent people are still being developed. My instinct and conclusion from my own experience is that Quaker meetings are potentially good places for many neurodivergent people to worship and to be. But the invitation needs to become more explicit (with references to neurodiversity made clear in informational literature) and consideration given to any accommodations that can be made. 

One new framework, developed by autistic doctors for healthcare settings, uses the acronym “SPACE.” The “S” stands for sensory needs, already generally well-considered in Quaker spaces. “P” is predictability, which again is often a great strength of Quaker meetings; making clear information available in advance will help with this, too. The “A” in SPACE is for acceptance, which, again, Quakers have running through their ethos. “C” stands for communication: this is about being aware that autistic people may have different communication needs. Some may be non-speaking or use augmented communication devices. Many have fluent speech but may struggle in times of stress or overload. Clarity and directness are recommended, as many autistic people interpret meanings literally (an organization that values “plain speech” is already onto a winner). The “E” is for empathy; although autistic people are stereotyped as lacking empathy (while many of us in fact have a surfeit of it), it’s less recognized that non-autistic people can struggle to empathize with the different processing needs and communication and sensory profiles of autistic people. Taking time to understand these differences will help in all sorts of ways, as will giving increased physical space, time to process, and recognition of the different ways that emotions are expressed and received.

I must confess to an irony. A new writer friend had originally invited me to a Friends meeting because, as she said, “I keep getting this feeling that you’d love the space and the stirring that’s happening within it.” She’s seen my show and knows about my neurodivergence. But it’s not something that I’ve mentioned in that room where everything happens and nothing happens. I’ve found myself talking about snails and their homes, living adventurously, how love can be embodied in a saint’s name, still being attached to a duck, felled trees, and questions about “what would George Fox do?” But I haven’t spoken about my neurodivergence. There is, in fact, a freedom that comes in not having that as an explicit part of my identity for an hour: to exist in a place beyond labels and identities and find a flow that is part of something wider and deeper, where I am accepted, connected, and reflected. But it is a freedom that is made possible by the conditions that enable me to feel safe and relaxed enough to be part of it. I was lucky to have been invited in by somebody with a good intuition, but I would love many more neurodivergent people to be issued a clear invitation that tells them their needs would be recognized in Quaker meetings and that this is a movement that was founded on upholding difference and will continue to do so. Perhaps I could go so far as to say, it is a place where it is possible to be “proudly weird.”