A short history of the word
Monotropism is a theory about attention. The idea is that attention is a limited resource, and that different minds distribute it differently. A polytropic mind spreads attention thinly across many things at once. A monotropic mind pours nearly all of it into a small number of interests at a time.
The theory was developed by Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser, who were describing their own minds rather than observing somebody else's. Murray was presenting on attention tunnelling and autism as early as 1992, and the three of them set it out properly in a 2005 paper in the journal Autism.
It started as a theory of autism and it has reached further since. When researchers built a monotropism questionnaire in 2023, the people scoring highest were those who identified as autistic, as ADHD, or as both.
What it looks like from in here
You get an attention tunnel. Whatever is in the tunnel gets an absurd amount of depth. You'll go further into it than is reasonable, learn it faster than people expect, and stay in it long past when a sensible person would stop.
Everything outside the tunnel gets very little. Not because you don't care. Because there isn't any attention left over.
And getting pulled out of the tunnel is expensive. Not annoying. Expensive. An interruption doesn't cost you the ninety seconds it took. It costs you everything it takes to climb back in afterwards.
It's not a shorter attention span. It's a deeper, narrower one.
How I found it
For years I was trying to understand my own brain. Not in an abstract way. The same specific questions, over and over.
What makes me me. What makes me special. What my dharma is. How I actually see the world. Where my mind goes when I am under stress. Where I go when I am trying to learn something. How deep I go, and why I can't stop once I am in there.
All of it came back to the same place. My mind, and the fact that it does not run the way other people's seem to.
Then I came across the word monotropic.
First thought: what a cool word. My favorite word is "situation." Monotropic is a strong second.
Second thought, about a minute later: this explains a lot.
Here is the thing underneath it. Your brain forms thoughts as a result of stimulus. Something happens, and a thought arrives. Most people never get in between those two, so the thought just feels like the truth.
Start watching what each part of you does with the same stimulus. How your body reacts to it. How your mind reacts to it. How your feelings react to it. How your spirit reacts to it. They do not all say the same thing, and the gaps between them are where the information is.
Do that for long enough and you stop guessing about yourself. You can see where everything is actually flowing from.
Understanding how you interact with the world, and how your brain actually sees the world, is the biggest unlock there is.
That one word sent me down the path this whole site sits on.
Getting here took a lot. A lot of time. A lot of joy and a lot of sadness and the full range of everything in between. A lot of going back through my own experiences and working out which of my needs had been met and which had not, and what that had been costing me the whole time.
I am happy to share it with you.
What Monotropic Mind means
Monotropic is the word for how my attention works. Monotropic Mind is what I decided to do about it.
I spent a long time thinking I was broken
For most of my life I was sure something was wrong with me. I couldn't fit in. I didn't have the ability to, and I couldn't work out why everyone else seemed to have been handed instructions I never got.
So I decided I was a broken human. I decided I was unlovable. When you believe that, you would rather sit in anger than open yourself up to something, even when you can see that the thing in front of you is wonderful. Anger is safer. Anger doesn't require anybody to want you.
As a kid I had what I now recognise as demand avoidance. Resistance to demands was wired into my nervous system. Not only demands other people put on me. Demands I put on myself, and things I genuinely wanted to do. It wasn't a decision I was making. It was how I met the world.
There is a name for that pattern. PDA, pathological demand avoidance, first described by Elizabeth Newson in the 1980s, and plenty of people now call it a persistent drive for autonomy instead, which is closer to what it feels like from inside.
I want to be straight about something, because it matters. I have never been formally diagnosed with anything. My first real unlock came from a conversation with a therapist who is autistic. After that I read, and studied, and tested what I found against my own life. That is not a diagnosis and I am not going to dress it up as one.
So I am not here to tell you what you are. I am not qualified to, and it would be the wrong thing to do anyway.
What I will say is this. You know your own mind better than anyone alive. Nobody else has the data. Watch how you respond to stimulus. Notice where your mind goes when you leave it alone. Pay attention to what you actually enjoy, how you learn, and how deep you go when something has you. Then go and read, and see which of it fits.
The word gave me language for something that was already true. It did not create it. That is the whole of what I am recommending: go and find your own language.
What changed
Big transitions are where you find out what your life actually means. The darkest stretches are where you find out what your purpose is, because that is where you question all of it. Every thought. Why you are even here.
You find it in the extreme. I wish that were not true. It is where it was for me.
It took a long time to get to, and the answer turned out to be simple.
I was the person I was waiting for the entire time.
There is a song called Innerbloom by RÜFÜS DU SOL. The whole thing is about self-discovery, and it is where that finally landed for me.
There is no event coming. There is no person arriving to hand you the love or the happiness. You have to give it to yourself.
I know how that sounds. But I wake up every day grateful, and I mean that as a practice rather than a mood. I am training my brain to feel gratitude, to feel happiness, to feel fulfillment. Nobody hands you those. They are yours to choose.
I stopped seeking validation through other people.
I know exactly where that started. I was six years old, playing for a soccer team called the Bombers. I would bust my ass out there, and what I wanted was for my parents to tell me I had done well. They didn't. It hurt. That is the first time I remember wanting validation and not getting it.
I carried it for a very long time before I recognized what it was, and that is the part nobody warns you about. It does not feel like a need for validation. It just feels like you have to keep proving something, and you never stop to ask who you are proving it to.
Then I put one goal in its place: show up as my best self.
Some days that means working fourteen hours. Some days it means training. Some days it means hanging out with a friend.
That is what the self-discovery actually was. Not one revelation that fixed everything. It was changing how I see my past, how I see the world, and how I move around inside it, one piece at a time.
And then the biggest piece arrived. The thing I had spent my life treating as the defect, the going deep, the learning, the obsessing over one thing until I have taken it completely apart, is not the broken part. It is the engine.
I don't experience the world the way most people do. I used to think that was the problem. It turns out that discovering the beauty of the world through a different lens is the whole point, and it is what actually makes me monotropic.
The way I see the world and experience the world is not typical. I like that.
What I found underneath
My core is love.
That took a lot of work to reach, and I want to be honest about where the work started. It started in insecurity. It started in believing I wasn't enough. That is not a noble origin story and I am not going to dress it up as one. But I kept going, and what was underneath all of it was a deep appreciation and love for humanity, and eventually for myself.
What this site is actually for
This is not about making money. It is not about business success. I have companies for that.
This is about fulfillment. It is about giving myself love, and unlocking my love for the planet, my love for God, and my love for everyone.
One thing worth saying plainly: loving everything does not mean liking everything. You get to choose what your life is.
Who you stand next to
Surround yourself with people who inspire you to be the best version of yourself. That is the most important choice you will make, and most people make it by accident.
Don't keep toxic people around because you have decided you are strong enough to handle them. One drop of rat poison in a glass of water is still a glass you shouldn't drink.
If you have something you're enthusiastic about
Go. Set off on it.
The best part, and the part nobody tells you, is that it is completely fine not to know where the journey goes. Not knowing is not evidence you are doing it wrong.
I go deep on a lot of different things. I don't say that to brag. I say it because it is the thing I have to offer. I have built frameworks to understand the world because I needed them, and the best of them I got from other people who had already worked it out. I come at all of it from a completely different lens.
I have done a lot. I would like to share the beauty I found along the way.
Source: Murray, D., Lesser, M. & Lawson, W. (2005). "Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism." Autism, 9(2), 139–156. More at monotropism.org and the National Autistic Society.