Built for a different world

On neurodivergence, mast cells, and the cost of chronic distortion

If you could observe yourself from outside time, and outside the experience of being a human, you might appear less like a solid figure and more like a living geometric field, a dynamic arrangement of energy.

Let’s assume that a human is a pattern of organization in consciousness.

Beyond your distinctly human DNA—the same DNA that all humans have, that shapes us into humans—you also carry unique patterning that shapes how reality moves through you. This architecture, vastly diverse among humans, influences attention, perception, creativity, nervous system thresholds, emotional processing, how information enters and exits awareness, immune function, metabolic function, everything. In this sense, your unique geometry determines how the world is experienced through you.

When your unique geometry encounters the geometry of your environment, one of three things happen:

1. The environment changes your shape (think epigenetics)

2. Your energy influences and changes the shape of the environment (ex. a calm nervous system setting the tone of a room)

3. You and the environment exist harmoniously (resonance. a being can express its full range and the most genetic potential gets expressed. freedom to return to your shape)

Right now, the world (which—excuse the woo-woo language—I’m going to refer to henceforth as “the grid”) is not very compatible with MOST HUMANS.

Right now, most of us are living in distortion, our natural architectures all bent out of shape, so to speak.

For anyone who has any bit of pattern recognition, it’s easy to see that we’re in a bad way.

I thought it would be interesting to write about how we got here and how we move forward. Particularly for ‘neurodivergent’ people, which you may have noticed is more and more of us these days.

(That’s another thing I want to write about, and it may make its way into this essay [I truly have no idea. I’m allergic to outlines. Essays are journeys, and really who knows where we’re headed?]: that “neurotypical” does not represent the biological majority but rather the humans that fit into the current grid without having to warp themselves. This is VERY FEW people these days, I’m sure you’ve noticed.)

Anyway! Moving on! How we got here…

The wrenching of the grid

I’ve written in the past about the glory days. The hunter-gatherer days. Can’t say I remember that time myself, but I like to imagine it was pretty lit. Following birdsong to berry bushes, tracking wild game through the forest while a lion tracked you. Here many types of nervous systems and attentional systems evolved. Cool ones. Diffuse ones. Connected-to-Spirit ones.

But then the grid began compressing.

~ 10,000 BCE: The Agricultural Revolution

The body became an economic unit for the first time. Land required ownership. Ownership required inheritance. Inheritance required certainty about bloodlines and suddenly gender needed to be fixed, managed, controlled. Surplus required hierarchy to manage it. Power began to consolidate.

A wrench cranked on the grid.

Still, in ancient and indigenous cultures the grid was pretty flexible and dynamic. I like to imagine it as a mycelium-like net draped over the earth. There was room for the full range of human expression, including two-spirit people, oracles, shamans, fools, wanderers. Difference was often revered and understood as carrying its own kind of intelligence.

~ 300–600 CE: Organized religion as state power

Plural cosmologies gave way to orthodoxy. The body became suspect. Deviation became sin. The cultural containers that had held divergent beings, like the oracle, the shaman, the wanderer, or the person who existed outside the binary, began to be systematically dismantled. Difference became transgression.

Wrench.

~ 1600s–1700s: The Enlightenment

Reason became supreme. Everything that couldn’t be measured, like intuition, embodied knowledge, or ways of knowing that operated outside linear logic, began losing legitimacy. The fear-motivated, planning-oriented social organization we still live inside consolidated itself. “Progress” became the thing.

Wrench, wrench.

~ 1800s–early 1900s: Industrialization

The industrial revolution changed how goods were made, and this became the template for everything else. Schools, offices, schedules, the food supply. Linear, repeatable, standardized, measurable. The body was now a machine. Productivity a moral virtue. Deviation was not just discouraged but pathologized. For the first time, a vast medical and institutional apparatus emerged to name and manage the people who couldn’t comply.

Wrench, wrench, wrench.

~ 1980s–present: Late-stage capitalism and the optimization of the self

Hello to the quantified self, productivity systems, hustle culture, wellness as performance, and the idea that your body and mind are essentially a startup you’re responsible for scaling. Here, optimization has been internalized as a moral framework. You’re not just expected to produce. You’re expected to want to produce more, to track it, to improve it, and to feel shame when you don't.

WRENCH!

I’m no historian but you get the gist.

This is why you’re sick. Environmental mismatch = inflammatory response

The hardest thing about being neurodivergent (personally speaking) is not that I process differently or am sensitive and hyperintuitive. I love those things. The hard part is that I am chronically ill.

I’m incredibly interested in the mechanism behind this. So let’s take a detour away from the floaty language of geometry and talk about mast cells, MCAS, and our favorite neuromodulater, histimine.

Mast cells are immune cells, frequently described as “sentinel” cells, alarm ringers that release histimine (along with other inflammatory mediators) whenever they sense something threatening like a toxin or allergen or even emotional overwhelm.

Histamine is best known in association with allergies. But in fact it is also a neuromodulator that directly influences dopamine, serotonin, and glutamate.

Basically, anytime your body encounters an environment that is not aligned with your architecture, it releases histimine. And too much histimine causes chaos. Panic attacks, hives, fainting in the middle of the grocery store, JUST TO NAME A FEW.

If you have a sensitive architecture and are, thus, sensitive to toxic, manufactured, false, harmful, misaligned environments, you are likely releasing quite a bit of histimine. You are likely suffering because of it.

BUT HERE’S THE THING.

Mast cells can become too jumpy. This can happen after illness (like Covid). Or it can happen in the womb if you’re exposed to lots of stress hormones or even if you happen to have ancestors who were stressed the fuck out all the time, because epigenetics. And it—chronic activation—can also happen after remaining for a long time in an environment that is not compatible with your shape.

When the environment is persistently mismatched to your architecture and your nervous system, the mast cells don’t get to rest. Histamine accumulates faster than it can be cleared. The body maintains a low-grade inflammatory state that eventually stops being low-grade. Everything becomes louder, chronic, extreme.

Here is an incomplete list of conditions associated with mast cells and histimine:

Brain fog | Migraines | Sensory processing disorder | Anxiety | Depression | Bipolar disorder | PMDD | Rejection sensitive dysphoria | Fibromyalgia | Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome | Chronic fatigue syndrome / ME | Chronic pain | Interstitial cystitis | MCAS | Autoimmune conditions broadly | Lupus | Hashimoto’s thyroiditis | Rheumatoid arthritis | Eczema / psoriasis | Chronic hives | IBS | SIBO | Leaky gut | Food intolerances | Acid reflux | Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis | POTS / dysautonomia | Orthostatic intolerance | Temperature dysregulation | Asthma | Allergic rhinitis | Chemical sensitivities / MCS | Environmental sensitivities | Endometriosis | Painful periods | Hormonal dysregulation

You’re not sick because “these are the co-occurring conditions of neurodivergence.” You’re sick because you’re an organic, vibrant, intricate, dynamic soul trying to live inside a hard-edged, simulated grid. It’s time to opt out.

Returning to shape

The grid is not some immovable trap that the bad guys have put in place. It is a living network of human nervous systems. A network of architectures. Returning to your true shape, your most expansive expression, the environment in which your genes can fully express, brings us back, one step closer to that mycellial grid shape.

But how to do this? It must be a unique answer for each person. I’ve started writing some about this, which I’m excited to share, beginning with exploring your attentional system and how to build around it.

I also know that if you’re chronically ill, sometimes calming the histimine loop can help you get to a place where you have enough energy to begin changing your environment. But of course as long as we’re forcing our attentional and nervous systems into structures that don’t work, we’ll remain sick.

The last thing I know (from my own experience) is that the real progress happens when you’re able to let go of the victim mentality. We have to empower ourselves to change anything.

I hope you’re healing yourself and tapping into your weirdness. I hope you’re writing about it, talking about it, painting about it, making songs about it.

With love,

Molly