The Valley That Held Me: Returning to Moominland

What a forgotten children’s book taught me about autism, queerness, and building gentler worlds—one classroom at a time.

A tender, radical return to Moominvalley—where queerness, autism, and anti-capitalist gentleness find home. Part memoir, part manifesto, this piece reclaims softness as strength and childhood as a map toward liberation.

Introduction

The news cycle is a firehose again. It’s not just the volume—it’s the targeting. Autistic people, trans people, immigrants: all of my intersecting identities feel under siege. RFK Jr. wants an autism registry. The federal government chips away at trans rights with every new bill or executive order. And now they’re coming for those of us with what they call “birthright citizenship”—as though our presence here were some clerical error rather than a truth of living. It’s relentless. I try to keep up, to stay aware, but the price is steep. Autistic burnout looms like a low-pressure system: heavy, hard to describe, and impossible to ignore. Joy has been hard to find. Stillness even harder.

Then, without warning, a memory surfaced. Not a headline, not a panic, but a scene from the Theatre of My Mind: a small, round creature with wide eyes and a tail, nestled in a valley that changed with the seasons. Moomintroll. I hadn’t thought about the Moomins in decades. Yet suddenly they were there—softly, insistently—like an old song that had waited patiently for me to remember its melody. This wasn’t nostalgia in the usual sense. I wasn’t longing to escape. I was longing to return—to something I hadn’t fully understood at the time, but that had always made space for me.

I think now of my grandmother—my fierce, brilliant wee Scottish Marxist gran—who shared her world with me not through long explanations, but through fragments: a Radio Times, a Tunnock’s teacake, a well-worn Penguin paperback. She wouldn’t have had the words for “autistic” or “queer,” but she recognised the wee one I was. The one who needed ritual and meaning and a place to belong.

I remember her returning from one of the little British shops that dot Southern California—those expat outposts packed with teas, sweets, comics, and books from home. I never went with her. She would arrive back with allsorts and quiet treasures, her handbag still carrying the scent of boiled sweets and liquorice. That was where I first met the Moomins. I never saw the shop myself, but through what she brought home, it became real to me. She gave me something more than a book. She gave me a world. A world where difference wasn’t corrected—it was accepted. Where wanderers were welcomed, not questioned. Where emotional truth mattered more than explanation, and where the seasons were allowed to shape the story. She didn’t need to explain why she brought it to me. She knew I would recognise something in it. And I did. Even if I didn’t yet have the words, I felt the invitation.

And now, coming back to it, I see the truth that was always there. The Moomin universe is not just charming or odd—it’s a quietly radical space. A blueprint, even. For those of us who live at the edge of things—autistic, queer, anti-capitalist—it offers not an escape from the world, but a different way to survive it.

Moominvalley: An Overview

This recollection has me thinking more about my grandmother. Divorced from my grandfather long before I was born, at a time when that simply wasn’t done. Fierce. Strong. Unapologetically her own person. She never sat me down to explain the world—she showed it to me, with sharp humour, working-class wisdom, and an unshakable sense of justice. She was my protector and my co-conspirator, the one who taught me not to flinch at difference, and not to bow to power. I realise now that she must have recognised something in Tove Jansson too. Something of herself. Something of me.

Jansson was a Finnish-Swedish writer and artist, a queer woman, and part of a linguistic and cultural minority in her own country. Born in 1914, she lived through wars, censorship, and exile—not just political, but emotional. Her family were artists and intellectuals, and she, too, lived by the pen and brush. During the Second World War, she published her first Moomin story in the shadow of bombs and blackouts. Whilst others used art to escape, Jansson used it to confront, subvert, and reimagine. Her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä—who would become the model for Too-Ticky—was by her side for decades, though their relationship, like so many queer ones of the time, remained quietly coded in public.

What Jansson created in the Moomins wasn’t just a story—it was a world. A valley, tucked away from the cruelty of systems, where difference is ordinary and emotions are taken seriously. Moominvalley is as much a philosophy as it is a setting. It’s a place shaped by nature’s rhythms, where characters ebb and flow with the seasons, and nothing stays static for long. The books—nine in total, spanning from 1945 to 1970—begin with whimsy but grow increasingly introspective. They carry storms, silences, migrations, grief. The comic strips, created later with her brother Lars, brought satire into the mix: jabs at consumerism, fame, conformity. They were playful, yes, but sharp.

What holds it all together is the quiet insistence that this, too, is a way to live. With care. With oddness. With a refusal to be anything other than exactly what you are.

Who Lives in the Valley?

Who lives in the valley? It’s a question that feels almost mythic now—not just about characters, but about ways of being. The Moominvalley is inhabited by creatures who aren’t just odd in shape or speech, but odd in the most glorious, radical sense: they feel deeply, live differently, and don’t tidy themselves up for the comfort of others. Each one carries something essential. Something I’ve come to recognise in myself and those I hold close.

There’s Moomintroll, of course—soft-hearted, wide-eyed, endlessly curious. He is loyal to the point of aching, always looking for someone to walk beside, or wait for, or welcome back. He doesn’t just want love; he wants belonging. A place to put it all.

Then there’s Snufkin—green cloak, wide-brimmed hat, harmonica in hand. He comes and goes with the seasons, always on the move, always seeking solitude after too much company. He hates fences and signs, preferring quiet rivers, open skies, and the kind of freedom that costs nothing but demands everything. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it matters.

Moominmamma is the centre of it all. Apron, handbag, always calm. The one who knows how to patch tents, pack picnics, and soothe frayed nerves. She holds space, not just physically but emotionally. Nothing shocks her. No one is too much.

Moominpappa is a dreamer with a fountain pen and a flair for the dramatic. He’s forever writing his memoirs, slightly in love with his own legend. There’s affection there, and also that familiar ache of someone who wants to be understood but often misses the mark.

Little My is pure fire. Tiny, fierce, utterly unfiltered. She thrives in chaos and cuts through niceties like a blade. She tells the truth no one else will say, and there’s freedom in that—even when it stings.

Too-Ticky is winter’s companion. Steady, sensible, unshaken by the dark. She builds things that work. She doesn’t waste words. Practical in a way that feels holy. She’s the one who sees through panic and reminds you what matters.

The Groke is cold and feared, but not unkind. She is loneliness made manifest—longing that freezes everything it touches. She comes quietly, always trailing fog. People avoid her, but what she needs is warmth.

The Hemulens live by rules and stamps and carefully catalogued flower presses. They mean well. But they often miss what’s right in front of them, distracted by order and certainty.

Then there are Thingumy and Bob—small, inseparable, speaking in a strange reversed language. As a gestalt language processor, I recognised something of myself in them: communication not quite understood, but deeply felt. They didn’t need to explain—they just needed to be allowed to stay.

And beyond them, a constellation of others: The Fillyjonk, always worrying; Stinky, always scheming; the Hattifatteners, strange and silent, drawn to lightning like a ritual. They’re all fragments of archetype and truth—small windows into the human (or Moomin) condition, lived sideways. And together, they make the valley whole.

Autistic-Coded Resonances

Looking back, I realise now that what drew me to the Moomin books and comics as a child wasn’t just the stories, or the drawings, or even the comfort of a world that made space for strangeness. It was the names. The names. Moomintroll. Snufkin. Fillyjonk. Hattifatteners. They felt like sweets on the tongue—playful, silly, soft around the edges. The gestalt language processor in me still savours them. They were whole worlds in a single word. I didn’t need to decode them. I could just feel them.

And now, as an autistic adult with the language I didn’t have then, I see clearly what I felt instinctively as a child: the Moomin universe is profoundly neurodivergent-coded—especially autistic-coded. Not in the diagnostic sense. Not in the way that medical models like to pin things down. But in the rhythm of the stories, the interiority of the characters, and the quiet way it honours people who live differently.

There’s monotropism everywhere—deep, focused attention on a single thing. The Hemulens, with their obsessive collections and compulsive order, felt instantly familiar to me. Not as a punchline, but as a mirror. The way a Hemulen can ignore the entire world in favour of a stamp album—that was me, lost in a pattern, or a texture, or a single sentence I couldn’t stop repeating.

There’s also burnout, though no one calls it that. Characters withdraw, disappear for whole seasons, lose words, become still. And it isn’t shamed. In Moominland Midwinter, Moomintroll wakes up alone in a silent world. It’s disorienting, yes, but also sacred. He learns to survive the quiet, to find new rituals. There’s no demand that he “snap out of it” or “go back to normal.” The winter is his now.

So many of the relationships in the Moomin stories unfold slowly, on non-verbal terms. Emotional truth is often shown through gesture, or presence, or the decision to return after a long absence. Stimming is everywhere: Snufkin pacing by the river, Moomintroll humming to himself, Too-Ticky carving or building with her hands. And no one tries to stop them.

The characters often need retreat, and the narrative respects it. Snufkin leaves. The Groke arrives only at night, slow and silent. Thingumy and Bob hide under furniture. These aren’t treated as flaws. They’re treated as truths. The valley bends around the needs of those in it.

And oh, the Groke. That deep longing for warmth without the words to ask for it. That coldness that isn’t cruelty, but grief. I feel her now in a way I couldn’t then. The autistic ache to belong, always just outside the circle, watching it flicker in the distance like a campfire you can never quite reach. The world may not have had a name for what I was, but the Moomins did. They called it presence. They called it enough.

Queer-Coded Possibilities

It’s only with hindsight that I can see what my younger self was drawn to, again and again, without ever knowing why. The softness of the world. The blurred edges. The lack of insistence on pairing off, growing up, falling in line. The Moomin books didn’t just permit ambiguity—they lived in it. They trusted it. And now, with the clarity of queerness in my bones, I see them for what they are: a deeply queer archive, tucked inside a child’s bookshelf.

Tove Jansson lived much of her life with care and caution, navigating a world that had no language for the fullness of her love. Her long partnership with Tuulikki Pietilä was never made public in the way modern visibility demands. Instead, it was embedded in the work, gently and deliberately. Tuulikki became Too-Ticky—a winter-dweller, a maker, a practical presence who speaks plain truths with quiet authority. She wears trousers. She doesn’t flutter. She anchors. You don’t need her to say she’s queer. You feel it in her way of being.

And then there’s Snufkin and Moomintroll. Their relationship is not labelled—but it pulses with intensity. Moomintroll waits for him like the moon waits for the tide. Snufkin leaves because he must, because freedom calls louder than comfort—but he always returns. There’s no grand declaration, no confession. Just a shared silence, a harmonica, and the space between them that never quite closes. For so many of us who loved without understanding, who longed without the words, it was all there.

Moominvalley is a place where non-normative families simply are. No one asks why Moominmamma is raising a cast of wanderers and misfits. No one demands nuclear structures or heterosexual resolutions. Characters live together, drift apart, find new homes. Some fall in love, some don’t. Some leave. Some return. Some just are—content, full, sufficient without a partner or a purpose.

There’s fluid identity throughout: soft boys, practical girls, and creatures who move between, beyond, and beside the binary altogether. Emotionality is never mocked. Masculinity is gentle. Femininity is strong. The characters are known not by what they possess or achieve, but by how they relate to others—and to themselves. It’s a queerness of gesture, of tone, of choosing to stay when staying matters.

Reading it now, I understand what I didn’t then. The Moomin universe gave me my first taste of queer belonging—before I had the words, before I even knew what I was. It made space for softness, ambiguity, and chosen connection. It let me be whole without explanation.

Anti-Capitalist Echoes

My grandmother’s bookshelf was a world unto itself—one that made room for contradictions. She read Burns with reverence, P.G. Wodehouse with a knowing smile, and The Morning Star with clenched conviction. Hers was a life steeped in working-class pride, yet, through her mother, she traced an improbable connection to the House of Hanover and, by extension, the throne. A distant link, but present all the same—like a half-forgotten thread in a family tartan. Her childhood friendship with her cousin Eileen—who would one day write Step Aside for Royalty: Treasured Memories of the Royal Household—was part of that strange tapestry. But my gran? She was fiercely Marxist. Steeped in dialectic. Shaped by struggle. And she raised me to question power, to honour the earth, and to read widely. Her beliefs were never rigid, but they were rooted. When I first heard the phrase “green is the new red,” years after she was gone, it didn’t just make sense—it described her exactly.

It also helped me understand why the Moomin books were in her home. There’s an anti-capitalist environmentalism to Moominvalley that runs deep—not as manifesto, but as assumption. The idea that nature holds its own logic. That rest is sacred. That ownership is a kind of violence. Moominvalley has no economy as we know it. There are needs, and there is care. No one earns their place. They’re simply welcomed.

And then there’s Snufkin, the anti-property anarchist in a green cloak. He dismantles fences, refuses ownership, and travels light—not out of detachment, but out of principle. He is, in many ways, the ethical heart of the valley. He resists surveillance, regulation, and the bureaucratic nonsense of rules for their own sake. My gran would’ve loved him.

The comic strips, especially those developed with Tove’s brother Lars, pull no punches. They mock consumerism, fame, exploitation, and the absurd logic of capitalism. The Moomins stumble into schemes—tourism, real estate, self-branding—and each time the satire slices through. These pursuits don’t fulfil them. They distort them.

What the Moomin books insist, again and again, is that leisure is not luxury—it’s life. Picking mushrooms, floating on the river, lying on your back watching clouds: these are not indulgences. They are essentials. Productivity holds no moral weight here. Conformity is treated with suspicion. And extraction—whether of time, labour, or land—is a form of violence against the soul.

My grandmother may not have named it in these terms, but she recognised it. And so did I. The Moomin universe models a kind of freedom I’ve rarely seen elsewhere: a freedom not of escape, but of living in resistance. With gentleness. With integrity. With joy.

Synthesis – Why This Matters Now

These books were never written to be radical. There is no manifesto buried in the pages, no calls to arms, no overt rebellion. And yet, they model a radical ethic—one that feels all the more urgent now. In a world growing sharper, louder, and more punishing, the Moomin books remain soft, kind, and defiantly weird. They hold space for the disallowed. For the ones who drift, the ones who resist productivity, the ones who long for belonging but can’t abide conformity.

This is what makes them dangerous now—dangerous in the best way. Whilst books are being banned and curriculums stripped of compassion, whilst austerity hollows out public education and marginalised children are pushed further to the edges, the Moomins offer a counter-world. One where being different isn’t just allowed—it’s honoured. One where retreat is valid, where ambiguity is welcome, and where rest is a right, not a reward. They whisper the same message over and over: you are enough, as you are. You can leave and return. You can say little and still be known. You can resist, quietly.

And yet... as I sit with all of this, as I contemplate my own next steps, it no longer feels abstract. I’m thinking about my place—my role as an RSP teacher in my current school, the students I serve, the systems I navigate, and the long, exhausting commute that separates my days from my life. I’m beginning to imagine what comes next. I’m thinking, maybe, about returning to primary school. About building something smaller. Gentler. Slower. I’m beginning to picture a classroom not just as a space for learning, but as a space of restoration—for both the children and myself.

And perhaps, without realising it, that’s why the Moomins returned to me. Perhaps that’s what this memory was trying to tell me. That it’s time to re-create the valley. Not as a fantasy, but as a pedagogy. A way of structuring a classroom that honours silence and softness. That doesn’t demand performance, but invites presence. A room with corners to retreat into, rituals that soothe, and stories that make space for difference without diagnosis. A room where autistic children are seen not as puzzles to be solved but as people to be met, slowly, on their own terms.

Perhaps I will become a teacher in a primary Special Day Class for autistic students. Perhaps I already know how to do it. Not because I was trained to—but because I lived it. Because I carry the valley inside me. Because someone once gave me a book that was really a map. And because I am finally ready to return—not to childhood, but to a kind of wisdom that has been with me all along.

Final thoughts …

I think often now of the wee one I was—the quirky bairn with tangled thoughts and a head full of wind. I didn’t have the words then. I didn’t know what made me different. But my grandmother did. Or at least, she saw me. And in giving me those books, she offered me more than something to read. She gave me a signal. A lantern in the dark. A valley I could carry with me.

Back then, I didn’t know what autism was—not as a word, not as an identity. I didn’t know how to name the ache I felt for a kind of closeness I couldn’t explain, or why I always needed quiet after too much joy. I didn’t know that my softness was a strength, or that my desire to retreat wasn’t weakness, but wisdom. I didn’t yet know that I was queer. I didn’t yet know that I was trans. But I knew that the world inside those books made sense to me in a way nothing else ever had.

And now, decades later, I see what I couldn’t have fathomed in Act I, or even Act II, of my life. I couldn’t have imagined leading an autistic space. I couldn’t have imagined building a classroom that truly honoured neurodivergence—not as an accommodation, but as a foundation. And now, I can’t wait to try. The Valley has waited long enough.

Because if we want autistic students to thrive, we must create spaces led by autistic people. Not governed by deficit models or performative inclusion, but shaped by lived understanding. Spaces where scripting isn’t corrected, but celebrated. Where sensory needs are met as a given, not a reward. Where quiet is welcome. Where softness isn’t punished. Where no one has to earn their belonging.

I’ve returned to the Moomins not because I want to go backwards, but because I’m ready to go forward—with intention, with care, and with the map I’ve carried all along. And maybe you’ve felt it too. That pull toward a different way. Toward a place that doesn’t demand you be anything but yourself.

Maybe you’re ready to return to Moominvalley—not to escape the world, but to remember how to survive it. Not to forget who you are, but to come home to it. To build it. To become it.