The Presence Paradox
Meditation, monotropism, and the clarity that comes with structural alignment
This is a parallel piece to
’s post Counting the Rice. I encourage you to read it before continuing here.There’s a kind of mental process that gets framed as a path to presence. A way to settle the mind, narrow your attention, or move inward—through ritual, or repetition, or discomfort—the idea is that structure itself can deliver clarity if you follow it long enough. Meditation often gets talked about this way—as something you do in order to arrive at a quieter, more intentional version of yourself.
I was always drawn to the idea of meditation. Stillness, presence, attention—they felt familiar to me. But not because I consciously sought them out. They were already a part of me, already central to how I survived.
I didn’t yet know I was autistic. I didn’t have language for sensory overwhelm, or monotropic attention, or why scattered environments and rapid redirection made it harder for me to think. But I had already learned to protect my ability to function by finding uninterrupted focus—by narrowing in, finding internal rhythm, and holding it. Not as a form of exploration but as the only viable source of stability.
Stillness wasn’t something I arrived at. It was something I returned to when I needed to stop unraveling.
So when I tried deliberate meditation—through guided breathwork, body scans, silence-based focus—I expected it to feel familiar, maybe even affirming. And in some ways, it did. The focused stillness helped me relax. My body settled. My thoughts were less interrupted. And clarity in that space brought the usual benefits: less anxiety, more cognitive bandwidth, a return to familiar continuity.
But none of that felt profound. It felt like… common sense. You remove tension, and tension eases. You reduce sensory noise, and thoughts regain structure. There was no revelation, no shift in how I saw myself or experienced thought, no insight about the nature of consciousness or awareness. Because what others seemed to be discovering through these practices was simply the state I already lived in.
They spoke of “being present” like it was some rare alignment between self and moment. But my perspective already centered around my own presence of thought. Not because I worked to get there, but because that’s just where I start. The only time I really lose that presence is when something pulls me out of it—when external disruption scatters my attention or overload blocks access. When left uninterrupted, my default isn’t noise. It’s coherence.
And that’s why the framing always felt off. It wasn’t just that I didn’t need the tools. It was that the tools were solving a problem I didn’t have. I wasn’t trying to reach clarity. I was trying to protect it. Meditation didn’t bring me home. It asked me to begin a journey I never needed to take.
At first, I didn’t know how to articulate that. I assumed the disconnect was personal, or maybe even a kind of experiential immaturity—like I wasn’t “doing it right.” But the more I learned about how my mind actually works, the clearer it became that the misalignment wasn’t about discipline or understanding. It was structural.
Learning I was autistic gave that structure the context I’d been missing. And through that process, I began to see that what I had built instinctively—my orientation toward stillness, my need for cognitive continuity, my relationship to sensory input and focus—wasn’t just personal preference or coping. It was neurological architecture. My presence of thought wasn’t something I achieved through regulation. It was something I retreated to when the external world became too fragmented to tolerate. I wasn’t meditating. I was surviving. And when that survival mode finally gained context, I could begin to approach it not as a failure of normalcy, but as a foundation for understanding myself clearly.
That clarity changed how I interpreted accommodation and support. Because I used to think support meant learning how to do what others could do. That I was supposed to become more comfortable with redirection, multitasking, background noise. That flexibility meant getting better at leaving myself behind and finding my way back. But what I’ve come to understand is that support, for me, means fewer disruptions to the thread I’m already following. It means protecting the coherence I start with—not pulling me out of it and handing me tools to reconstruct it later.
And ironically, this has helped me understand how meditation actually does work for many people. For those whose baseline is dispersion—who are constantly being pulled in multiple directions, mentally and environmentally—meditation offers a way back inward. It helps strip away interference and carve out enough stillness for presence to take shape. That kind of guidance is valid, real, meaningful. And for a lot of people, it’s necessary. But that only makes it more important to understand when it’s being used in a context where the starting point isn’t dispersion at all.
The disconnect isn’t because meditation is beneath me. It’s because the premise assumes I’m elsewhere. And when you assume someone’s baseline is distance from presence, you’ll build support that centers return. But not everyone is returning. Some of us are trying not to be dragged away in the first place.
That realization changed how I approach not just self-care, but instruction. It gave me permission to stop treating internal presence as something to cultivate, and instead recognize the real work, for me: protecting access to it. Giving myself fewer reasons to leave. Structuring my day around tasks that align with the way I process. Holding space for immersion instead of trying to train myself out of it. Not seeing burnout as a failure to cope, but as a signal that too many threads have been pulled at once.
I sometimes use tools that look like meditation. But I use them for alignment, not return. I don’t close my eyes to go somewhere. I do it to stay here—more securely, with less disruption. That shift might seem subtle from the outside. But internally, it’s the difference between assuming your mind is a problem to solve versus recognizing it as a place worth preserving.
And that’s the clarity I want to see more often. Not just around meditation, but around any practice framed as universally transformative. It’s not about dismissing those tools. It’s about understanding where they begin, what they assume, and who they leave out when we fail to ask.
Because when we stop treating presence as a singular goal and start recognizing the diversity of where people begin, we don’t just make space for those who were misread. We build better tools. Better frameworks. Better forms of care—for everyone.
In Counting the Rice, Fiona writes about engaging with a kind of performance exercise developed by Marina Abramović—sitting silently for hours, separating grains of rice and lentils by hand. The task is repetitive, designed to push the participant through monotony and resistance until something deeper breaks through. It’s structured as a test of presence, with transformation implied on the far side of endurance.
But Fiona didn’t transform. There was no arc. No collapse of resistance into presence. No revelation breaking through fatigue. She entered the task already focused, already present. Her attention didn’t need to be redirected or coaxed—it landed naturally in the rhythm of the work. And when no shift came, what followed wasn’t disconnection. It was disappointment. The structure had promised something more, but there was nothing more to reach, because she had started from the place it was trying to deliver her to.
I recognize that structure. Not just the experience, but the framing failure. The way a process can misread you—not because it’s flawed, but because it never considered the possibility that someone might already be where others are trying to go.
That’s what meditation felt like for me. A set of instructions meant to guide me toward a state I already occupied. And when the instructions didn’t land, I didn’t feel seen—I felt misplaced. The entire structure was built on the assumption that presence is something you must achieve. That stillness is a reward for patience. That clarity comes only after letting go.
But my mind doesn’t work that way. I don’t reach presence by surrendering thought. I preserve presence by being allowed to hold it. My monotropic cognition doesn’t push toward coherence. It expands from it. Stillness isn’t a tool I use to find alignment. It’s the space that lets my thinking stabilize and grow. And when systems are built to recreate that space as a destination, they can’t accommodate those of us who are already there by default.
I didn’t need to pass through struggle to arrive at presence. What I needed was for presence to stop being treated as a destination. And what I value now—more than transformation, more than insight—is the stabilizing recognition that I was never off track to begin with.
There are many kinds of alignment. Some emerge after friction, others through repetition, and some simply by being given the conditions to stay uninterrupted. For monotropic minds like mine, and like Fiona’s, alignment isn’t something we discover on the other side of disruption. It’s something we already know how to maintain—if the world allows us to. And when we are misread, or pulled out, or asked to justify what feels intuitively true, the disruption isn’t just frustrating—it’s disorienting.
Meditation didn’t reveal anything profound to me, but it did help me clarify where I was coming from, and where I needed to go. Counting rice didn’t teach Fiona stillness—but it help her recognize it as strength. These aren’t failures of method. They’re misreadings of origin.
The real clarity comes not from pushing further in, but from stepping back and asking what these structures are built to assume. Who they center. What they overlook. And what becomes possible when we treat alignment not as something to strive for—but as something that, for many of us, is already happening beneath the surface. ∞
Thank you for referencing my piece Michael, this is such a nice companion to it and I love the idea of separating achievement from presence. I am sure many of us (monotropic or not) who don't have the expected experience in practices like meditation can be very discouraged, but you have reframed it so well, and clearly, here. We are not all starting from the same place. I wonder how your realisation could be a practice in itself, as in - how to recognise if you are someone who needs to retreat into presence rather than battle towards it?
"These aren’t failures of method. They’re misreadings of origin."
I've had — as with many things you've described here — nearly the same experience when I tried meditation. Nothing happened. I assumed I was doing something wrong, though I was following all the steps, creating the right environment. I did get some insight into how my mind worked.
I've been meaning to try the rice & lentils counting exercise, but until a couple days ago was kind of out of things for being overwhelmed and followed by needing some time to recharge. But I'm good now and have the weekend free to count as many legumes and grains as I wish. And catch up on some substacking.