Knowing - As Seen Through An Alternative Truth

Knowing is not a test you pass but a relationship you enter, shaped by whose clocks, calendars and categories you are forced to live inside. If your inner timing runs on a different resolution to the institutions around you, the world quickly learns to call this misalignment a defect instead of what it is: a structural mismatch between ways of knowing.

Being out of phase

From the outside, my life can be read as late, interrupted or incomplete: education that never quite tracked, jobs that refused to stabilise, projects that seemed to spiral instead of progressing in straight lines. Inside, the experience is not of absence but of excess: too many patterns, too many connections, too many timelines overlapping in ways that resist tidy sequencing. The problem is not that there is no rhythm, but that the institutional metronome is set to a tempo that cannot hear mine.

For a long time, I treated this as a personal failure to synchronise. I assumed that if I just tried harder, masked better, pushed through the exhaustion and sensory static, I would eventually click into the groove that everyone else seemed to find so natural. When that click never came, the story curdled into shame: I was broken; the structure was neutral.

The structure is not neutral

Structures are stories fossilised into rules. Our schools, workplaces and diagnostic systems are built on decisions, often invisible and rarely questioned, about what counts as intelligence, maturity, productivity and sanity. Those decisions have histories: colonial administrations that dismissed Indigenous cosmologies as superstition while mining them for land and knowledge, psychometric regimes that turned normality into a statistical weapon, economic models that equated worth with output on a timetable.

When you are neurodivergent, you feel those histories in your nervous system. You learn very quickly that attention must look a certain way, learning must proceed at a sanctioned pace, emotion must stay within the lines of what is considered professional, rational or adult. Your inner coherence is repeatedly misread as incoherence because the measuring instruments were never calibrated for you.

This is the structural truth: it is not that I lack a valid way of knowing, but that the environment is tuned to amplify one narrow band of cognition and treat all others as noise.

Other ways of knowing

Indigenous knowledge traditions remind us that knowing is not just about data accumulation; it is about relationship: to Country, to ancestors, to community, to responsibilities across generations. Time, in these frameworks, is often cyclical or spiralled rather than linear; wisdom is not something you acquire once but something you maintain through ongoing reciprocity. From that vantage point, being out of sync with institutional calendars can look less like pathology and more like fidelity to a different temporal order.

Neurodivergent cognition too has its own logics: pattern recognition that leaps across domains, sensitivity that notices what others filter out, hyperfocus that dissolves the boundary between self and subject. These are not defective versions of the dominant mode; they are distinct architectures of attention and meaning making. The difficulty arises when those architectures are forced to perform inside spaces designed by and for a different cognitive majority, without any say in the design.

Collision points

The collisions show up early: a classroom where the curriculum moves in a straight line while your mind moves in constellations. You are told to stick to the question when the question itself is what you are trying to understand in a wider pattern of questions. You learn to translate your own thoughts into a thin, linear version that fits the rubric, and each translation costs you a little more of your sense that your way of thinking is real.

Later, the same pattern repeats in workplaces, clinics and bureaucracies. Forms ask for single causes where you perceive systems; deadlines compress processes that, for you, require a slow, recursive build up; performance reviews reward steady, predictable pacing over bursts of deep, nonlinear insight. You become an edge case in systems that were never designed to hold your trajectory.

A philosophical shift

The temptation is to keep chasing legitimacy inside the existing frame: to seek a diagnosis that explains you, an accommodation that makes room for you, a credential that proves you can still play the game. These can be necessary survival tools, but they do not touch the deeper question: why does one way of knowing get to define the game at all.

Philosophically, the shift is from asking “What is wrong with me relative to the structure?” to asking “What is revealed about the structure from where I stand?”. From my vantage point, the supposed neutrality of institutional time and intelligence dissolves; I see how much effort goes into maintaining the illusion that there is one correct pace of development, one proper form of attention, one legitimate path through education and work. My misfit becomes a lens, not a flaw.

Peace building between worlds

If we treat these different ways of knowing as separate countries sharing the same physical territory, then what we lack is not more diagnosis but more diplomacy. A peace builder’s task is not to erase difference but to create conditions where difference can appear without immediately being sorted into superior and inferior. That means redesigning our contact zones, such as classrooms, workplaces and decision making tables, so that they can host dialogue between neurotypical and neurodivergent, Western and Indigenous, scientific and spiritual epistemologies.

In practice, this looks less like accommodation and more like co-creation. It means letting alternative timings shape the schedule, letting non linear thinking shape the curriculum, letting relational accountability shape what counts as evidence and success. It requires institutions to tolerate the discomfort of not always leading the conversation, and to accept that their cherished metrics may need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Living the alternative truth

To live out of phase is, in this sense, to inhabit an alternative truth about what a life can look like. It is to refuse the story that value comes only from timely milestones, stable careers and legible progress charts. It is to insist that there are other measures: depth of insight, quality of relationship, fidelity to one’s own tempo of understanding, contribution to futures that current institutions cannot yet model.

This is not a romanticisation. The costs of misalignment are real: burnout, exclusion, economic precarity, internalised doubt. But alongside the harm is a vantage point that can see the cracks in the supposedly solid structures of knowledge and success.

From here, the question is no longer “How do I fix myself to fit?” but “How do we, together, re tune the structure so that many tempos, many logics and many histories of knowing can coexist without being forced into a single beat?”.

Being out of phase with institutional timing does not mean being broken. It means you are already living inside a wider epistemic landscape than the one the system was built to recognise, and that your very misfit is an invitation to imagine structures worthy of the worlds of knowing we actually have.

My School Report - circa 1987

About the Author

Troy is a non institutional learner.

He left school at the age of fifteen, having often been labelled “the class clown” and repeatedly told he would never learn or contribute anything of value. His way of knowing did not fit the traditional classroom tempo. His questions did not fit its corridors. His intelligence did not arrive through worksheets or examinations, but through experience, pattern, and internal knowing.

His education came instead from what might be called the University of Life Experiences, learning with his hands, learning through systems, learning through lived consequence and deep observation. This form of knowing, once dismissed in the classroom, has since proven capable of developing complex systems and frameworks adopted by commercial enterprise, alongside sophisticated yet practical theoretical models that explore neurodivergent cognitive learning styles, tonal epistemology, and the hidden architectures of human understanding.

His work focuses on how people think, feel, and communicate beyond binary categories, particularly in relation to diverse learning styles, pattern recognition, and the way meaning emerges before language can explain it. He builds tools and models not from abstract authority, but from first order experience translated into structure.

What was once treated as a defect has been reframed as a lifelong gift.

The same internal knowing that was silenced in school became the foundation for systems that now help others make sense of complexity, difference, and tone.

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To learn more about Troy and his work, visit ToneThread.com or checkout his blog at ToneThread.com/blog.

ToneThread • Meaning intelligence for human systems