262,000.

782.

Those are follower counts. One belongs to an influencer who made a video characterizing gifted adult communities as weird Facebook groups and circle jerks — dismissing in four minutes what takes years to build. The other belongs to the person who showed up in the comments to say: I was in one of those communities. It helped me understand myself. Please think about what you’re doing.

You can probably guess which number belongs to whom.

And you can probably guess how the conversation went.

This essay is about that exchange. But it’s also about something bigger — about how the attention economy creates unearned authority, about what gifted communities actually are and what they cost to build, about the gifted label itself and its complicated relationship to autism and ADHD, and about what responsibility actually looks like when you have a quarter million people listening to you talk about communities you have never organized.

Let me start with what she got right. Because she got some things right and intellectual honesty requires me to say so.

The gifted label is not a diagnosis. It has never been a diagnosis. It is not recognized as a standalone neurological category in any diagnostic manual. And the history of how it emerged — who got labeled gifted, who benefited from that label, what it was ultimately in service of — is worth examining critically. I have done that deeply, you can find it here.

Giftedness as a formal educational category emerged largely in the 20th century as a way to identify children who could be accelerated through systems designed for the average. There is a real argument — and I find it compelling — that the gifted label was less about serving those children and more about identifying future utility. These are the kids who will be productive. These are the kids who will be useful. These are the kids we should invest in.

And underneath that label, largely unexamined and certainly undiagnosed, were enormous numbers of autistic and ADHD kids whose cognitive profiles happened to produce outcomes the system found valuable — and whose struggles the system found convenient to ignore.

She is right about that. The gifted label, as currently constructed, is doing real harm to real people by masking the underlying neurology and sending them into adulthood without the tools they need.

Where we diverge is everything that came after.

And where we diverge starts with what she assumes the gifted kid experience actually looks like.

When large platform creators mock gifted communities, they are mocking a specific image.

Private schools. Enrichment programs. Academic competitions. Parents who advocated loudly and effectively. Kids who were celebrated, fast-tracked, and given every resource to develop their potential. The child whose giftedness opened doors.

That is not my story.

I attended six different elementary schools. Sometimes two in a single year. Housing instability was a feature of my childhood, not an exception. I was economically disadvantaged in ways that made the gifted label feel less like a gift and more like a cruel joke — here is proof that your brain works differently, now figure out the rest yourself.

I got the label. I got the expectations that came with it. I got nothing else.

No enrichment programs. No advocacy. No acceleration into spaces where my mind could actually stretch. No support for the ways I was struggling beneath the performance of capability. Just a designation that made me visible in ways that weren’t always safe — because poor kids aren’t supposed to be smart, and smart kids aren’t supposed to be poor, and the intersection of those two things produces a particular kind of invisibility that I spent decades navigating.

I learned to hide my intelligence. Not because I was ashamed of it but because it was a liability in the environments I moved through. Being visibly smart when you are economically disadvantaged marks you as strange, as threatening, as someone who doesn’t know their place. You learn quickly to put it away.

And then adulthood arrives and you are still carrying all of that cognitive complexity with nowhere to put it and no framework for understanding why you keep running into walls that everyone around you seems to move through effortlessly.

Why can’t I pay my taxes. Why can’t I maintain basic routines. Why does the infrastructure of ordinary life require an amount of effort I cannot sustain despite being the same person who can hold an entire theoretical framework in her head and write a thousand words of coherent analysis in an hour.

It was not until my forties — my forties — that I understood I was autistic. That the giftedness and the autism and the ADHD were not separate things. That they were two concentric circles — the giftedness sitting inside the autism and ADHD, not existing apart from them. That the label that had been placed on me as a child had given me an identity while withholding the information that would have actually helped me understand myself.

The gifted label gave me a container.

The autism identification gave me the truth.

And in between those two things — in the decades between a label that named something and a diagnosis that explained it — what held me was community.

Here is what the creators mocking gifted communities are missing:

The people in those communities are, in enormous numbers, not the privileged gifted kids of the dominant narrative. They are the ones who got the label and nothing else. Who were smart enough to be identified and poor enough to be abandoned after identification. Who spent their entire childhoods being told they had potential while being given nothing to build it with. Who became adults wondering why they were still struggling when they were supposed to be the exceptional ones.

They found each other as adults because no system ever adequately found them as children.

The 2e — twice exceptional — community. Gifted people’s books. Gifted frameworks for understanding a brain that is simultaneously exceptional and impaired, operating at a frequency that neurotypical systems were never designed to accommodate. These were the things that helped me understand myself before I had the autism identification. They were not a hierarchy. They were not a supremacist club.

They were a lifeline.

A gifted adult community is a place where people who spent their entire childhoods being told they were exceptional finally find out they are not alone in their struggle. Where the gap between what the world expected of them and what they could actually sustain gets named for the first time. Where someone finally says: yes, I also can’t figure out why I’m struggling. Yes, I also feel like I’m operating on a completely different frequency than everyone around me. Yes, I also spent decades wondering what was wrong with me.

It is, in many cases, the first place people encounter the language and community that eventually leads them toward autism identification.

It was for me.

And someone with 262,000 followers who has never built one of these communities, never run one, never sat with the people inside them and understood what brought them there and what they found when they arrived — walked onto social media and characterized them as something shameful.

In four minutes.

To a quarter million people.

That is an abuse of platform power. And I want to explain precisely why.

Here is how the attention economy works. And I want to be precise about this because it matters enormously for how we think about authority and responsibility on social media.

Algorithmic reach is not earned in the way we typically think about earning things. It is not a meritocracy. It is not a reflection of accuracy, depth, wisdom, or genuine expertise. It is a reflection of engagement — of how effectively content triggers the psychological responses that cause people to stop scrolling, react, share, and comment.

Content that is emotionally provocative, confidently stated, and easy to consume performs well algorithmically. Content that is nuanced, carefully qualified, and requires sustained attention to understand performs poorly. Content that validates existing beliefs spreads faster than content that complicates them.

This means that the attention economy systematically rewards a specific kind of communication — bold claims, simple frameworks, confident dismissals — and systematically punishes the kind of communication that community development, scholarly work, and genuine expertise actually require.

When someone with 262,000 followers makes a four-minute video saying gifted communities are just weird Facebook groups and giftedness is just autism repackaged — that video will perform well. It is confident. It is simple. It is mildly provocative. It gives people something easy to agree with.

When someone with 782 followers shows up in the comments to say: I was in one of those communities and it helped me understand myself, here is the nuance you’re missing — that comment will not perform well. It is careful. It is personal. It asks the audience to hold complexity.

The algorithm does not know the difference between those two people’s actual expertise. It only knows engagement. And so it amplifies one and buries the other.

And then we mistake amplification for authority.

Let me say something about community development work, because I don’t think people who haven’t done it understand what it actually costs.

Building a community — a real one, not a follower count — requires years of invisible labor. It requires showing up consistently for people who are struggling. It requires creating containers safe enough that people will risk being honest about their experience. It requires holding conflict, facilitating growth, managing the dynamics that emerge when vulnerable people gather, and doing all of this without algorithmic reward, without follower counts, without the validation that social media metrics provide.

It requires, in many cases, doing it while you yourself are struggling. While your own brain is not cooperating. While you are navigating the same systems and the same gaps that the people in your community are navigating.

I have been running support groups for late-identified autistic adults for three years. I have built community in spaces where people came in not knowing what was wrong with them and left with language, with connection, with the beginning of an understanding of their own minds.

That work is invisible to the algorithm. It does not produce content that goes viral. It does not generate 262,000 followers. It generates something the attention economy has no metric for: people who finally feel less alone.

And when someone with a large platform walks onto social media and characterizes that work as a weird Facebook group — as something to be laughed at, as evidence of a problematic hierarchy — they are not making a critique.

They are causing harm.

To the people in those communities who are watching.

To the organizers who built them.

To the economically disadvantaged gifted kid who finally found people who understood her — and is now being told by someone with 262,000 followers that what helped her was a circle jerk.

Now let me say something about social power. Because this is the argument I made in my video response and I want to develop it fully.

Platform size on social media is largely unearned in the sense that it is not primarily a reflection of merit. It is a reflection of timing, of algorithmic favor, of the particular combination of personality and content style that happened to resonate with the specific dynamics of a specific platform at a specific moment. Someone with 262,000 followers is not necessarily wiser, more knowledgeable, more careful, or more qualified than someone with 782. They are more algorithmically legible.

But unearned power is still power. And power carries responsibility whether you earned it or not.

When you have 262,000 people listening to you, what you say about communities shapes how those 262,000 people understand those communities. When you dismiss gifted adult spaces as circle jerks in a video that will be algorithmically amplified to hundreds of thousands of people — many of whom have no other reference point for what those spaces are — you are shaping a narrative. You are doing harm whether you intend to or not.

And when someone with 782 followers shows up in your comments to say: please think about what you’re doing, here is what those spaces actually meant to me — the responsible use of platform power is to listen. To ask questions. To consider the possibility that your reach has outpaced your knowledge on this particular subject.

Instead, what happened was: she was mocked. Her follower count was weaponized against her. She was told her perspective was just white woman word salad. She was told to go advertise to her 700 followers on her own page.

Using social justice language. Directed at someone with less platform power. In a comments section where the power differential was not even close.

If you cannot see the contradiction in that, I would gently suggest that the social justice language has become the tool rather than the principle.

Let me be precise about what I am and am not arguing.

I am not arguing that the gifted label is uncomplicated or that gifted communities are beyond critique. They aren’t. The hierarchy that the gifted label creates is real. The way it can function to separate children into tiers of perceived value is real. The failure to identify the underlying neurology — the autism, the ADHD — that often sits beneath high cognitive performance is real and has caused real harm to real people including me.

I am not arguing that platform size makes someone wrong. Large platforms can be built by people doing genuinely important work.

What I am arguing is this:

Reach is not expertise. Followers are not credentials. Algorithmic amplification is not the same as accuracy. And the communities that struggle most to be seen — the ones doing invisible labor with small budgets or no budgets at all and no algorithmic reward, built by and for people who were labeled and then abandoned — deserve something more than dismissal from people who have never sat inside them.

The gifted adult community that helped me understand myself before I had language for my autism was not a circle jerk. It was a container. It was the first place I encountered people who understood why I was struggling in the ways I was struggling. It was, in a very real sense, the beginning of the path that led me to everything I have built since.

That community was built by people who showed up. Who did the work. Who held the space. Who got no algorithmic reward for any of it. No monetization for any of it.

Many of them were, like me, the economically disadvantaged gifted kids that the dominant narrative never bothered to imagine.

They deserve better than four minutes and laughing emojis.

Here is what I want to say to influencers with large platforms who are speaking about neurodivergent communities, gifted communities, disability communities, or any community of people navigating complex identities and difficult systems:

Your reach is real. Your influence is real. And neither of those things makes you an expert on communities you have not built and experiences you have not lived.

The people doing the invisible work — the support group facilitators, the community organizers, the people who show up week after week for others while managing their own neurological complexity, often without compensation, often while struggling themselves — those people are the experts. Not because they have more followers. Because they have done the work.

Listen to them. Even when they only have 782 followers. Especially then.

Because the algorithm has no idea what community costs.

But the people who built it do.

One more thing.

If you’re one of the people who found yourself in a gifted community and felt seen for the first time — who found language for your experience, who found people who understood the particular exhaustion of being a brain that operates outside every standard metric — I want you to know something.

That experience was real. That community was real. The work that built it was real.

And if you moved six times before middle school. If you learned to hide how smart you were because it wasn’t safe to let it show. If you got a label and expectations and nothing else. If you spent your forties wondering why the basic architecture of ordinary life keeps defeating you despite everything you’re capable of — you are not alone. You were never alone. There were always others.

You just had to find each other.

That’s what community is.

Not a weird Facebook group.

Not a circle jerk.

A place where the kids who were labeled and abandoned finally find each other as adults.

And build something the algorithm will never be able to measure.

Sher is a doctoral student in Transformative Social Change, founder of The Compassion Collective, and the originator of the Cognitive Ecology Model. She has been running support groups for late-identified autistic adults for three years. She writes The Cognitive Ecologist on Substack. The Lost Girls: What It Cost a Generation of Neurodivergent Women to Be Seen is available now on Kindle, with the paperback launching July 16th. There are over a thousand essays available. And if you believe in reciprocity, paid subscriptions are how you practice it.

Let me tell you about the time I was called a colonizer.

Not by a conservative. Not by someone who had looked at my work and found a genuine contradiction. Not even by someone who had asked me a single question about my life, my ancestry, my years of study, or the two years I spent in neurological collapse building a theoretical framework out of pure survival.

By a white woman on the left.

Who had read one post.

In which I said that I, personally, as a late-identified autistic woman with Indigenous ancestry who was made invisible by the disability system for most of my life and then traumatized by it when I finally became visible — had chosen not to interpret my autism through a disability framework.

Colonizer.

And then, because the internet is generous that way, came the ableist accusation. Internalized ableism, specifically. From another white woman. Also without questions. Also without curiosity. Also with complete confidence that she understood my internal reality better than I did.

I want to be clear about what happened in that moment.

An autistic woman who has spent years doing the most rigorous possible excavation of her own neurology — who built an entire ecological model out of that excavation — who has interrogated every layer of the system, mapped every dynamic, and arrived at a framework for understanding her own mind that is more complex, more nuanced, and more carefully considered than anything available in the existing literature — was told, by someone who had never met her, that she had internalized ableism about her own autism.

I’ll give you a moment with that.

The rigidity accusation. Landing on the person doing the most flexible, multilayered systems thinking in the room.

The colonizer accusation. Landing on the Indigenous woman.

The ableist accusation. Landing on the autistic woman who knows her own mind better than anyone in that comments section ever will.

If this were a novel, Toni Morrison would have written it. And she would not have played it for laughs.

I have been doing public scholarship on social media for years. Thousands of interactions every week. And I have watched this same pattern repeat itself so many times that I can no longer call it an observation.

I have to call it a finding.

There is a specific dynamic that emerges — reliably, predictably, almost choreographically — when certain white women on the left encounter knowledge that doesn’t arrive in the expected packaging. Knowledge held by someone without the right credentials. Without the right class markers. Without the right performance of ideological positioning before the ideas are allowed to land.

The response is not curiosity.

It is correction.

Immediate, confident, unasked-for correction. Delivered with the absolute certainty of someone who has outsourced their moral authority to an ideology and is now enforcing that ideology on behalf of a system they believe they are dismantling.

This is what I want to talk about today. With precision. And — because I have been there too — with compassion.

Let me name what I mean by submission narrative, because I want to be precise and I do not want to be misread.

I am not talking about all white women on the left. I am not talking about white women who are doing the genuine, unglamorous, structurally-risky work of transformative social change. I am not talking about white women who show up with curiosity, who ask questions before they correct, who can hold complexity without needing to resolve it into a verdict.

I am talking about a specific pattern. A specific relationship to ideology. A specific way of being in progressive spaces that I have watched cause enormous damage — to individuals, to communities, to the actual project of liberation.

Here it is:

Some white women have left one authority structure and entered another. They have moved out from under patriarchal submission — the submission to husbands, fathers, institutions, churches, the entire apparatus of white heteropatriarchy that told them who to be and what to think — and into ideological submission. The rules are different. The content has changed entirely. But the relationship to rules is identical.

They have not learned to generate their own authority from within.

They have learned to borrow it from the ideology.

And because borrowed authority is always precarious — because it depends entirely on your fidelity to the source — they become its most zealous enforcers. Not its architects. Not its questioners. Its police.

Audre Lorde said the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. What she perhaps could not have anticipated — or perhaps she anticipated exactly, because Audre Lorde anticipated most things — is that some people would pick up the master’s tools, paint them in liberation colors, and use them on other women while calling it accountability.

Now here is where the class dimension enters, and I want to be careful here because this is the part that is most invisible to the people doing it.

The women I am describing are, by and large, protected. Educated. Resourced. They have health insurance and stable housing and credentials that open doors. They have, in many cases, spent years in academic or nonprofit or activist spaces where the language of social justice is the water they swim in.

And they genuinely cannot imagine that someone without those markers could hold the knowledge that I hold.

Not because they are stupid. Not because they are cruel. But because the entire system they were educated in — including the progressive parts of it — teaches that knowledge looks a certain way. Arrives in certain containers. Carries certain credentials. Gets produced in certain institutions.

Toni Morrison wrote extensively about how whiteness defines itself through what it excludes and controls — how the inability to see certain people as full human beings with full interior lives is not a personal failing but a structural one, produced by systems designed to maintain that blindness.

When a protected, credentialed woman cannot imagine that an unemployed autistic Indigenous woman might have built something worth taking seriously — and so instead of asking questions, she corrects — she is not being malicious.

She is being exactly what the system made her.

And that is worth holding with some compassion.

Even when it lands like a punch.

I have been there too.

Not in the same way. Not with the same protections. But I have been inside the submission narrative. I have outsourced my moral authority. I have enforced ideology on other people without asking questions first. I have been so certain I was right — so certain the framework I carried was the correct one — that I didn’t stop to ask whether the person in front of me might know something I didn’t.

This is what systems do. They get inside you. They shape your perception so completely that you can’t see the shape anymore — you just see reality. And then you defend reality. Vigorously. Against anyone who suggests a different one.

bell hooks called this the internalization of domination culture. The way oppressive systems don’t just oppress people from the outside — they restructure people’s inner lives, their ways of seeing, their relationships to authority and knowledge and each other. And then those people reproduce the system. Not because they want to. Because they don’t know they’re doing it.

It doesn’t feel like domination when you’re doing it.

It feels like protecting the community.

Sarah Schulman, in Conflict Is Not Abuse, makes a related argument: that progressive spaces have developed a rhetoric of harm that allows people with more social power to position themselves as victims of people with less. The enforcer who claims to be speaking truth to power. The credentialed woman who frames her correction of an unprotected woman as an act of justice. The person who weaponizes the language of oppression against the person who is actually being oppressed.

This is what Schulman calls the supremacist lie — the way people with structural advantage use the language of vulnerability to consolidate that advantage while appearing to challenge it.

Weaponizing justice language is double oppression. It takes the tools built for liberation and uses them to suppress the people liberation was supposed to serve.

And here is what I want to say about complexity. About systems thinking. About the ecological framework that started all of this.

The women I am describing — and I say this with genuine compassion, not as an insult — cannot hold it.

Not because they are unintelligent. But because the kind of thinking required to hold multiple truths simultaneously, to sit with contradiction without resolving it into a verdict, to see a system whole rather than in parts — that is a cognitive and cultural capacity that has to be developed. It has to be practiced. It has to be, in many cases, suffered into existence.

Ursula Le Guin wrote about this throughout her work — the way ideological certainty is always a flattening, always a reduction of the living complexity of the world into something manageable and controllable. Her people who walk away from Omelas are not the heroes of the story. The heroes are the ones who can see what Omelas requires and refuse to look away from the complexity of that — who neither stay and perform happiness nor walk away and perform purity, but remain inside the unbearable tension of knowing.

That is systems thinking. That is ecological thinking. That is what I have been building toward for years, through survival, through burnout, through the excavation of my own neurology, through mapping every layer of every system I have ever moved through.

And it is genuinely hard. It requires a tolerance for ambiguity that the submission narrative specifically trains out of people. Because ambiguity is threatening when your moral authority is borrowed. When the ideology has to be right, complexity becomes the enemy.

So they flatten it.

And then they call the flattening accountability.

Here is what I know about liberation. The real kind. The kind Lorde and hooks and Morrison were pointing toward.

It does not look like certainty. It does not look like correction without curiosity. It does not look like knowing someone’s internal reality better than they do after reading one post.

It looks like genuine encounter. Like the willingness to be changed by what you find. Like showing up to a conversation not to enforce what you already know but to discover what you don’t.

It looks like asking questions before you deliver verdicts.

It looks like being willing to find out that the person in front of you might know something you don’t — even if she doesn’t have the credentials you expected, even if she arrived at her knowledge through survival rather than scholarship, even if her framework challenges the one you’ve been enforcing.

Le Guin called this the carrier bag theory of fiction — the idea that the oldest human technology was not the weapon but the container. The thing that holds. The thing that gathers. The thing that makes it possible to bring different elements together without destroying any of them.

That is what ecological thinking is. That is what systems thinking is. That is what I am inviting — in every note, in every essay, in every thousand interactions on social media every week.

Not a verdict. A container.

Not correction. Curiosity.

Not the enforcement of a borrowed authority.

The genuine, risky, transformative encounter with another human being’s full complexity.

I have compassion for the women I’ve been describing. I mean that. I understand what the system did to them. I understand the seduction of borrowed authority when you’ve spent your life being told your own isn’t legitimate. I understand the terror of complexity when certainty is the only thing holding the structure together.

I have been there.

And I found my way out through exactly the kind of ecological, systemic, multilayered thinking that gets called ableist and colonizing and everything else in my comments section.

The irony, as always, is doing its own work.

What I am asking — from the women who have the education and the resources and the protected positions and the confidence to correct strangers on the internet without asking a single question first — is this:

Use those resources for actual liberation.

Not performance. Not enforcement. Not the borrowed authority of an ideology that has become its own kind of cage.

Show up with curiosity.

Ask questions before you deliver verdicts.

Consider the possibility that the person in front of you — even if she looks nothing like what knowledge is supposed to look like — might have something to teach you.

We belong to one another.

That is the oldest principle in the room. The one that cuts across Indigenous traditions with more consistency than almost anything else. Reciprocity. The understanding that knowledge flows, that wisdom moves, that we are all inside the same ecosystem and what we do to each other we do to ourselves.

You cannot enforce your way into liberation.

You can only find your way there together.

And together requires that you actually see the person standing next to you.

Even when — especially when — she doesn’t look like what you expected knowledge to look like.

Sher is a doctoral student in Transformative Social Change, founder of The Compassion Collective, and the originator of the Cognitive Ecology Model. She writes The Cognitive Ecologist on Substack. If this made you uncomfortable in a productive way — that’s the ecosystem working. There are over a thousand essays available. And if you believe in reciprocity, paid subscriptions are how you practice it.

There was no moment of decision. That is the first thing to understand about the bargain. There was no threshold crossed, no choice made with full information about what was being traded and what it would eventually cost. It happened the way most of the formative things in a childhood happen — gradually, incrementally, through the accumulation of tiny data points that a child’s mind processes and files and converts, without fanfare, into belief. Into behavior. Eventually into identity.

A correction here. A reward there. A look on someone’s face that you learned to prevent, or to produce. A belonging secured. A rejection survived. A lesson learned so early and so thoroughly that by the time you were old enough to question it, it had already stopped feeling like a lesson and started feeling like just the way things were.

The bargain was this: if you made yourself useful enough, you could stay.

I want to be careful about the word useful here, because I think it can slide too easily into something that sounds like a complaint about having been helpful — and that is not what I mean. Helpfulness is not the problem. Generosity is not the problem. The desire to contribute something real to the people and communities around you is not a pathology, and I am not interested in an analysis that treats every act of care as evidence of damage.

What I am interested in is a specific thing that happens when usefulness stops being something you do and becomes something you are. When the contribution stops being a choice — even a deeply felt, genuinely motivated choice — and becomes the condition of your belonging. When the question you are implicitly asking in every room you enter is not what do I want to give here but what do I need to give here in order to be allowed to remain.

That shift — from giving as expression to giving as condition — is the bargain. And it is so gradual, and so thoroughly woven into the ordinary fabric of how children learn to navigate the world, that most people who made it cannot tell you when it happened. They only know that at some point they stopped asking what they needed and started asking what was needed. And that the transition felt, at the time, like simply growing up.

The useful child gets praised. The responsible child gets trusted. The helpful child gets included. The self-sufficient child gets left alone — and for certain nervous systems, being left alone is not abandonment. It is relief. It is the precious permission to simply exist without being required to perform.

These rewards were real. I want to be honest about that. The feedback loop was not imaginary, and the people who provided it were not, for the most part, being deliberately manipulative. They were doing what people do — responding to what was in front of them, praising what appeared praiseworthy, relying on what appeared reliable. Nobody looked at the capable, responsible, endlessly helpful child and thought: I will allow this to continue because it is convenient for me. They thought, if they thought anything explicit at all: how wonderful that she is like this. How fortunate we are to have her.

But systems don’t require conscious intent to produce harm. They require only structure and repetition and enough time.

And so the structure established itself: usefulness produced reward, reward reinforced usefulness, and gradually — so gradually that the transition was impossible to locate in time, impossible to point to and say there, that was the moment — usefulness stopped being a strategy and became an identity. The scaffolding became the building. The adaptation became the self.

Here is what that looks like from the inside, years later.

You are good at reading rooms. You have always been good at reading rooms. You walk into a meeting and within sixty seconds you know who is anxious, who is posturing, who is about to say something that will land badly, who needs to feel heard before they can hear anything. You calibrate. You adjust. You manage the temperature of the conversation toward whatever outcome seems most likely to allow everyone to leave feeling okay.

You do not experience this as labor. You experience it as perception. It is simply what you notice, simply how you move through the world. The idea that someone else might walk into the same room and notice none of it — might experience the meeting as just a meeting, might leave without having tracked the emotional weather of every person present — is genuinely difficult to imagine. You have been doing this for so long that you have lost access to the experience of not doing it.

This is one of the ways the bargain becomes invisible even to the person who made it. The labor disappears into the competence. The effort disappears into the outcome. What remains is the reputation — she’s so perceptive, so emotionally intelligent, such a natural with people — which increases the demand for more of the same, which increases the labor, which increases the invisibility of the labor, which increases the demand.

The loop closes. The account continues to draw down. And nobody — including you — is watching the balance.

I want to say something about what the bargain costs that goes beyond the economic language I used last week, because I think the economic frame captures the structural problem accurately but misses something about the interior experience of it.

The deepest cost of the bargain is not the labor. It is the loss of access to yourself.

A person who has adapted comprehensively enough, for long enough, can lose the thread back to her own preferences. Her own limits. The particular textures of what is genuinely sustaining versus what merely gets through the day. The body’s signals, which were telling the truth all along — which were registering the cost with precision, every day, in the form of the exhaustion and the anxiety and the low-grade persistent sense that something was wrong — get filed under not now, not relevant, not information I have time to process.

You become so fluent in the language of what is expected that your own native language begins to feel foreign. Not gone — it is still there, still generating signals, still trying to be heard. Just… buried. Under years of competent translation into a form other people can receive.

And then one day — or over many days, in the slow way that things actually shift — you realize you don’t know what you like. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know what you would do with a Tuesday afternoon if nobody needed anything from you, because you have not had a Tuesday afternoon like that in longer than you can accurately remember, and the question of what you would do with it feels not like an open door but like a gap where something was supposed to be.

That gap is what the bargain actually cost. Not the labor — though the labor was real. Not the years — though the years were real. The gap. The distance between who you are and who you have learned to perform being, which has been maintained for so long that the performance has started to feel like the person.

What I have found, in the years I have spent thinking about this, is that the bargain is not undone by recognizing it. Recognition helps. It helps enormously. But it does not automatically rebuild what was buried, does not restore access to the native language, does not fill the gap.

What begins to fill the gap is something slower and less dramatic than recognition. It is the practice — awkward and incremental and often uncomfortable — of asking the question you stopped asking. Not what is needed. What do I need. Not what does this room require of me. What do I actually want to give here, and what do I want to keep.

These sound like simple questions. They are not simple questions. For a person who has organized her entire sense of worth around her capacity to meet other people’s needs, they can feel destabilizing in a way that is genuinely hard to explain to someone who has not lived inside the bargain. Like a rule is being broken. Like something is being claimed that has not been earned.

It has been earned. It was earned a long time ago. The permission was always there. The bargain just made it very difficult to see.

I have been sitting with all of this — the bargain, the gap, what it takes to begin to close it — for a long time. It is part of a larger accounting I have been doing, one that has taken me further than I expected when I started.

I’ll have more to tell you soon. There is something coming on July 16th that is the shape of everything I have been thinking about for several years, and I am not quite ready to name it yet, but I wanted you to have this piece of it first.

The bargain was real. The cost was real. And the question on the other side of it — what do I actually want — is one you are allowed to ask.

You were always allowed to ask it.

Nobody told you that. I’m telling you now.

Yesterday, a writer with a significant platform published an essay arguing that people who use AI to help them write should be embarrassed. The essay was well-written, confident, and funny in places. It made its case with the ease of someone who has never once sat in front of a blank screen knowing exactly what they mean and having no idea how to make another human being understand it.

I wrote a response. I called it On Communication Privilege. The argument was simple: the people most likely to write these essays are people for whom the world was already built. Their thoughts arrive organized in the dominant style. Their education rewarded it. Their workplaces rewarded it. Their natural register is the default register. And when someone like that calls AI-assisted writing an embarrassment, what they are actually doing — without knowing it — is defending a hierarchy they have never had to examine because it has always worked in their favor.

The response circulated. And then the comments arrived.

One person — the original essayist — responded by disclosing, in passing, that epilepsy had once severed his access to language. That his own path to becoming a writer was shaped by neurological disruption. He then told me that struggle is the only legitimate curriculum, that people who need support are being made into victims, and that I was being too compassionate for my own good. When I shared that I had received comments telling me to kill myself, he told me to toughen up and develop a sense of humor.

Another commenter decided she was not speaking to a human being at all. She was speaking to ChatGPT. She said so, and left.

A third offered the basketball analogy. The greatest players practiced. Writing is the same. Either you want to be great at it or you don’t. The privilege argument, he said, was a non-sequitur.

I want to sit with what happened in that thread for a moment before offering a framework for it. Because what happened was not a debate about artificial intelligence. It was a demonstration of exactly what my original essay described — live, in real time, with the people who most needed to understand the argument performing its proof.

A man whose own nervous system once made language inaccessible to him told a disabled woman to toughen up for finding communication tools useful. A woman decided that the presence of a tool meant the absence of a human. A man invoked meritocracy in a domain where the playing field has never been level and called it common sense.

None of them appeared to notice what they were doing.

That is the thing worth examining. Not the bad faith — I don’t believe any of them were operating in bad faith. What is worth examining is the structure of the blind spot. How does a person with a documented history of neurological communication disruption arrive at the conclusion that communication supports are for people who haven’t tried hard enough? How does an entire comment section mobilize to defend a hierarchy it cannot see?

The answer requires going deeper than social critique. It requires looking at communication itself — not as a skill, but as an ecology operating simultaneously across six interlocking systems. And it requires being honest about what happens when a tool arrives that begins, imperfectly, to make that ecology more equitable.

Because what these men were feeling — and I want to be precise here — was not malice. It was the specific disorientation of privilege encountering redistribution. It feels like loss. It reads, from the inside, as oppression. And when people feel oppressed, they respond by attacking what they believe is oppressing them.

In this case, that was an autistic woman on the internet who used a tool to help organize her thoughts.

That is the story. Now here is the framework for understanding why it is not a coincidence.

Communication is not a skill. It is an ecology.

When we call communication a skill, we collapse an extraordinarily complex set of interlocking systems into a single dimension and then blame the person for everything happening in the other five. We make structural conditions invisible by converting them into personal failures. We take what is genuinely a question of access and infrastructure and reframe it as a question of effort and character.

A more accurate account begins here: every act of communication is simultaneously biological, psychological, social, institutional, cultural, and spiritual. These layers are not metaphors. They are real systems operating in real time, and they interact with each other in ways that the skill framework cannot accommodate.

The biological layer

Every act of communication begins in a nervous system. The translation of inner experience into external language is a neurological event — mediated by the particular architecture of a particular brain, shaped by genetics, development, trauma history, and the ten thousand micro-calibrations a nervous system makes across a lifetime of being in or out of its window of tolerance.

For some people, this process is fluid. Thought arrives already organized in linear sequence. Words come readily. The gap between what is known and what can be expressed is narrow and easily crossed.

For others — and this population is considerably larger than dominant discourse acknowledges — the gap is substantial, structural, and not closable by effort alone. The neurodivergent person whose thoughts arrive in gestalt rather than sequence. The trauma survivor whose nervous system routes processing through the body before the cortex. The person with aphasia, dyslexia, or a processing difference that makes the conversion between inner knowing and outer language effortful in ways that are invisible to everyone who has never experienced it.

These are not discipline problems. They are neurological facts. And a tool that helps bridge that gap is not cheating. It is accommodation — the same category of support as eyeglasses, hearing aids, and text-to-speech software. We do not tell people they are cheating at vision because they use corrective lenses. We do not tell them their experience of the world is inauthentic because a tool helped them access it more fully.

The resistance to extending this same logic to written communication is not about authenticity. It is about something else entirely, which we will get to.

The psychological layer

Communication does not happen in a neurological vacuum. It happens inside a self — a self that has a history of being heard or not heard, understood or misunderstood, rewarded for expression or punished for it.

What gets called a communication style is, in large part, a psychological record. It is the accumulated residue of every room a person has been in, every teacher who praised or criticized how they wrote, every interaction that taught them whether their particular way of organizing thought was acceptable or aberrant.

For people whose natural communication style aligned with the dominant institutional mode — linear, measured, professional, grammatically conventional — this record is mostly positive. They were told, across years and contexts, that the way they express themselves is correct. That positive reinforcement is invisible to them because it was so consistent it reads as simply the way things are.

For people whose natural style diverged from that standard, the record is different. Too direct. Too emotional. Too verbose. Too quiet. Too intense. Too much context. Wrong tone. Wrong format. The feedback was not content-based — it was register-based. They were not told their ideas were wrong. They were told that the way they carried their ideas into the room was wrong.

This produces what trauma-informed practitioners recognize as communication-specific self-silencing — the internalized certainty that one’s expression will be received as deficient, followed by the exhausting labor of pre-translating everything before it leaves the body. It is cognitively expensive. It is emotionally costly. And it is entirely invisible to the person who never had to do it, who interprets its absence as simply the natural state of things.

The social layer

Individual nervous systems and psychologies do not communicate in isolation. They communicate inside social systems — systems with their own logic about whose expression counts, who gets the benefit of interpretive generosity, and who is required to do the translation labor before they are permitted to participate.

These systems are not neutral. They have default settings, and the default settings were built to serve particular kinds of minds communicating in particular ways. The professional email template. The academic essay structure. The meeting format that advantages linear verbal processors. The interview style that rewards confident brevity over careful accuracy.

The writer who told me to toughen up was operating entirely within this social layer while claiming to speak about something universal. His own neurological history — his disclosed experience of epilepsy severing his access to language — should have generated curiosity about the experience of communication difference. Instead, he fell back on the social logic that has always governed these conversations: suffering is the curriculum, struggle is the proof of legitimacy, and anyone who uses a tool to reduce that struggle is borrowing credibility they haven’t earned.

What he was actually defending, without appearing to recognize it, was a social hierarchy in which the cost of entry to written public discourse is the ability to produce legible text without assistance. That cost has always been distributed unequally. It has always fallen hardest on the people for whom the translation is most expensive. And it has always been invisible to the people for whom translation was never required.

The institutional layer

If the social layer is where informal bias lives, the institutional layer is where it gets a job title, a policy number, and a procedure manual.

Institutions are the mechanism through which cultural preferences for particular kinds of minds get codified into official systems — and then presented as neutral measures of merit. The school that designs its assessment entirely around written expression and then diagnoses the child who struggles with it as having a deficit. The employer who lists communication skills as a core competency and means, specifically, the ability to write in a register the institution already recognizes. The healthcare system whose intake forms, clinical notes, and treatment protocols all assume a particular relationship between inner experience and outer language — and labels the patient noncompliant when that assumption fails.

This is where the translation tax gets formally collected. Every form, every application, every assessment, every eligibility determination charges the person whose communication style doesn’t match the institutional register an extra toll — in time, in energy, in cognitive load, in the labor of self-translation — that the legible person never sees on the bill. The legible person fills out the form in ten minutes. The person for whom institutional language is a second language, or a third, or an almost inaccessible register that requires enormous effort to approximate, spends an hour — and still submits something that gets flagged as incomplete, unclear, or noncompliant.

Institutions do not experience themselves as gatekeepers. They experience themselves as standards. And this is precisely what makes the institutional layer so resistant to examination: it has successfully convinced itself, and most of the people operating within it, that what it is measuring is capability rather than proximity to a default.

The school that calls the autistic kid a behavior problem is not lying. It genuinely believes the problem is the kid. The employer who says the candidate wasn’t a culture fit is not consciously discriminating. The healthcare system that marks the patient noncompliant is not being deliberately cruel. They are all operating exactly as designed — sorting people by their legibility to the institution and calling that sorting merit.

When a tool arrives that helps people navigate institutional language more easily — that helps them translate their inner knowing into the forms institutions are built to receive — institutions often respond with suspicion rather than relief. Because what the tool is doing, from the institution’s perspective, is not increasing access. It is disrupting the sorting mechanism. It is making it harder to use communication style as a proxy for capability, which is what institutions have been doing, quietly and confidently, for a very long time.

A personal note on merit

I want to pause here and say something directly, because the merit argument will arrive — it always does — and I would rather address it plainly than let it hover unexamined at the edges of this essay.

I think in systems. I always have. My mind does not move in straight lines — it moves in layers, in simultaneous dimensions, in interconnected ecologies of meaning that are always operating at once. For most of my life, this was experienced by the institutions around me as a problem. Too much. Too complex. Too non-linear. Not the right format. I was systematically excluded from the very spaces where this kind of thinking is most needed — not because I lacked the capacity for the work, but because I lacked the translation tool that would make my thinking legible to the people gatekeeping access to it.

I have paid for that exclusion in my body. Across decades of navigating systems that were not built for the way my mind works, of translating myself into registers that cost enormous energy to approximate, of producing legibility at the price of exhaustion — I have paid, and paid, and paid. That is not a metaphor. That is the material reality of being an autistic woman in institutions designed for a different kind of mind.

And I have done the work. I hold a master’s degree in Transformative Social Change. I am a doctoral student in the same field. I am a disability justice scholar and a scholar of transformative social change — not despite being autistic, not after overcoming it, but as an autistic thinker whose cognitive architecture is precisely what generates the kind of multi-layered, systems-level analysis this work requires.

That is my merit. It was not handed to me. It was not generated by a machine. It was built across a lifetime of rigorous engagement with ideas, at considerable personal cost, in a body and a mind that the institutions I navigated were not built to accommodate.

What AI gives me is not my thinking. It gives me a bridge between the multi-dimensional truth of how my mind actually works and the linear format that other people can receive. The thinking was always there. The analysis was always there. The scholarship, the framework, the lived knowledge — always there. What was missing was not effort or merit or intelligence.

What was missing was a tool that could help make it legible.

I am not embarrassed about using it. I am, finally, able to share the full architecture of what I actually think — and that is not a loss for authentic expression. It is, at long last, its arrival.

The cultural layer

What counts as good writing is not a natural fact. It is a cultural construction — one with a specific history, serving specific interests, produced by specific institutions that have, until very recently, been accessible only to specific kinds of people.

The authentic voice these essays celebrate is not some essential human thing untouched by social formation. It is a culturally trained product of particular educational systems, particular class formations, particular linguistic inheritances. Every generation redraws the line around the tools it grew up with and declares everything outside that line illegitimate. This is not a defense of writing. It is the sociology of cultural taste operating under a moralized vocabulary.

The printing press was not considered authentic writing by scribes. The typewriter was not considered real writing by people who wrote by hand. Spellcheck was not considered legitimate proofreading by people who learned grammar. Word processors, digital art, photography — each tool that expanded access to a form of expression was greeted by exactly this reaction from the people who had mastered the previous mode and understood their mastery as identity.

What is different now — what produces the particular anxiety visible in the current wave of these essays — is not that the tool is especially dangerous to authentic expression. It is that the tool expands access at a scale and to a population that was not supposed to be expandable. When written public discourse begins to become genuinely accessible to people with processing differences, language barriers, trauma histories, and neurological architectures that make the conventional translation expensive — when the playing field begins, even imperfectly, to level — the people who benefited from its unevenness will feel that leveling as threat.

What they will call that threat is the death of authentic writing.

What it actually is, is the redistribution of a privilege they had mistaken for merit.

The spiritual layer

Underneath all of this — the neurology, the psychology, the social hierarchy, the institutional gatekeeping, the cultural construction — is something that does not get discussed in arguments about AI and writing, because it requires a register most of these arguments refuse to enter.

Human beings need to be known. Not evaluated. Not assessed for the correctness of their grammar or the independence of their word choice. Known. This need is as fundamental as any other. It is what drives us to write at all — to reach across the gulf between self and other and say: here is what I see, here is what I have understood, here is what it has been like to be me in this particular time in this particular world. This is the spiritual dimension of communication — not religious in the institutional sense, but spiritual in the sense that it concerns what makes a human life feel meaningful rather than merely operational.

The people who have spent their lives unable to make that crossing — whose inner world was too expensive to translate, whose expression was consistently received as wrong before it could be received as true — have been denied something at this level. Not just practical access to public discourse. The experience of being understood. Of making meaning with another person. Of sending something true out into the world and having it arrive.

When a tool becomes available that helps them make that crossing, what is happening is not the corruption of authentic expression. What is happening is the repair of a long exclusion from the most essentially human activity there is.

To stand at the door of that repair and tell the people finally crossing the threshold that they should be embarrassed — that their way of arriving is illegitimate, that their access to being known is somehow fraudulent — is not a defense of writing.

It is a failure to understand what writing is for.

The comment thread I described at the opening did not surprise me. A man whose own language was once taken from him by his nervous system told a disabled woman to toughen up for using tools to help her communicate. A woman decided the presence of a tool erased the presence of a person. A man invoked meritocracy in a domain that has never been a meritocracy and called it obvious.

None of them were villains. They were people operating inside systems so familiar they had become invisible — systems that had always worked for them, that they had never needed to examine, that felt, when questioned, like the natural order of things rather than a constructed hierarchy serving some people and excluding others.

What they cannot see — what the entire architecture of their position prevents them from seeing — is that the silence of the people now finally speaking was never chosen.

It was the only option that didn’t cost more than the person had.

And now, for some of them, it finally isn’t.

Sher is a doctoral student in Transformative Social Change, founder of The Compassion Collective, and the originator of the Cognitive Ecology Model. She has been running support groups for late-identified autistic adults for three years. She writes The Cognitive Ecologist on Substack. The Lost Girls: What It Cost a Generation of Neurodivergent Women to Be Seen is available now on Kindle, with the paperback launching July 16th. There are over a thousand essays available. And if you believe in reciprocity, paid subscriptions are how you practice it.

There is a woman on the internet with two hundred and seventy thousand followers. She is, by any reasonable measure, suffering. Her suffering is visible in the way she speaks, the register she inhabits, the contempt that edges every sentence when she talks about the people she has decided are frauds — in this case, the profoundly gifted, the people who gather in spaces designed for a particular kind of cognitive loneliness, seeking each other out across the ordinary world’s indifference to what they carry.

She is not hiding anything. That is the thing to notice first.

When someone — a woman, let’s say, who has spent decades learning to carry things quietly, who built an entire competency around not being a burden — enters the comment section and gently suggests that what is being said may not be accurate, that other explanations exist, that there are communities of support available to anyone interested: the comment disappears into the current. Not because it was wrong. Not because it was unkind. But because kindness, in that moment, was not the currency the platform was built to reward.

What happened next was ordinary, in the way that revealing things are ordinary once you’ve seen the mechanism. The woman with two hundred and seventy thousand followers received what platforms are designed to provide: amplification, agreement, the dopamine architecture of mass validation. The woman who offered a different frame received what comment sections have always provided to those who interrupt the emotional consensus: correction, dismissal, the low-grade social violence of being treated as the problem.

Nobody orchestrated this. That is also the thing to notice.

The woman with the platform was not performing. Her distress was real. The ridicule was the form her suffering took in public — its legible expression, the version that the algorithmic infrastructure could detect, amplify, and reward. Two hundred and seventy thousand people had found their way to her because suffering, when it takes this shape, becomes recognizable. It generates response. Response generates reach. Reach generates more response. The platform does not ask whether the distress is proportionate, or accurate, or pointing at the right target. It asks only whether the distress is visible.

The woman who typed carefully into the comment section was also, in all likelihood, suffering. But her suffering had been trained into a different shape — the shape of competence, of measured language, of offering rather than demanding. She had learned, over many years and in many rooms, that her discomfort was not the point, that other people’s experience of her discomfort was the thing to be managed, that to be legible in her distress was to be a problem rather than a person. She had become, through long practice, illegible.

And illegibility, it turns out, has a social cost that nobody budgets for in advance.

This is not a story about who is more autistic. It is not a story about who is more deserving, more real, more legitimately in pain. It is a story about infrastructure — about what social systems are actually built to detect, and what they are built to reward, and how those two things diverge from need in ways that have consequences nobody intended and almost nobody examines.

The claim worth making here is a precise one: social support does not flow toward the greatest suffering. It flows toward the most legible suffering. These are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where a great many people are quietly disappearing.

Legibility, as a concept, does specific work. A person is legible when their condition can be read — when the signals they emit match the pattern-recognition capacity of the system receiving them. Medical systems have legibility requirements. Legal systems have legibility requirements. Social systems have them too, though we rarely call them that. We tend to say instead that someone is relatable, or that their story resonates, or that they seem like they really need help. What we mean, underneath those phrases, is that their suffering has taken a form we already know how to see.

Visible distress is legible distress. Tears are legible. Anger is legible. Contempt, expressed with enough force and enough followers, is legible. These are forms of suffering that social systems — and human nervous systems, and algorithmic systems — have evolved to detect and respond to. The response may not always be helpful. It may be amplification without accountability, attention without care, reach without repair. But it is response. And response is what the isolated person, the person in pain, the person who has been carrying something alone for a very long time, is reaching for when they reach for a platform.

What is not legible, in these same systems, is suffering that has been successfully concealed. And this is where the story becomes structural rather than individual, because concealment, for a particular population of women, was not a choice so much as a curriculum.

Late-diagnosed autistic women. Profoundly gifted women. Chronically adaptive women. Women who entered a world that could not accommodate what they actually were and learned, with extraordinary efficiency, to become accommodatable. The education was rarely explicit. It arrived as feedback — the raised eyebrow, the social withdrawal, the teacher who said you were too sensitive, the mother who said nobody likes a girl who makes everything about herself, the workplace that rewarded performance and penalized authenticity until performance became the only self available. The lesson, absorbed across decades and contexts, was consistent: your discomfort is not the point. Make yourself manageable. Handle it privately.

These women became, many of them, spectacularly competent at invisible suffering. They developed what looks, from the outside, like resilience — the ability to continue functioning under conditions that would visibly destabilize someone less practiced in concealment. They learned to frame their distress as curiosity, their overwhelm as perfectionism, their grief as productivity. They kept it together. They showed up. They handled it.

And then they arrived, many of them late, in online spaces that had evolved their own economy of distress — spaces where suffering, to be supported, needed to be witnessed.

The adaptation that had allowed them to survive the neurotypical world had made them illegible to the support infrastructure of the neurodivergent one.

There is a particular cruelty in this that deserves to be named without sentimentality: the women most skilled at not burdening others are the ones who receive the least support. Not because they need it less. Because the skills required to minimize one’s burden on others are structurally identical to the skills required to become invisible to support systems. Competence and illegibility travel together. Resilience and undetectability travel together. The ability to handle it privately and the inability to be seen as needing help are, functionally, the same thing.

This is not a problem with any individual. It is not a problem with the woman who expressed her suffering as ridicule and received two hundred and seventy thousand people’s recognition in return. Her adaptation is real. Her suffering is real. The platform responded to what the platform was built to respond to, and she gave the platform what it was built to amplify, and none of that makes her culpable for the structural logic she is operating within.

But it does mean that the support ecosystem — online and off — has a selection problem. It is not selecting for the people in the greatest need. It is selecting for the people best able to communicate need in the forms the system has been built to recognize. And those are, increasingly, the same forms that algorithmic architecture rewards: visible, emotive, immediate, high-engagement. Suffering that generates clicks. Distress that produces shares.

The woman who types carefully into a comment section, who offers rather than demands, who frames her intervention as possibility rather than correction — she is not playing the game wrong. She is playing a different game entirely, one whose rules were written before the internet existed, in rooms where the cost of being too much was social annihilation and the only safe form of need was no visible need at all.

The platform does not know this about her. The algorithm does not know this about her. The comment section does not know this about her.

And so she disappears, again, into the practiced invisibility that has been, all her life, the price of belonging.

There is a thing that gets said, in certain corners of these spaces, to women like the one who typed carefully into the comment section. It gets said with the confidence of a framework recently acquired, deployed as explanation, occasionally as accusation: you have internalized ableism. What is meant by this is that the woman who does not perform her suffering visibly, who does not center her distress, who manages herself in public with a competence that looks like comfort — this woman has absorbed the logic of a system that devalues disabled people and turned it against herself. She has, the argument goes, learned to hide what she should be free to express.

This is not entirely wrong as a description of the world. Ableism is real. The pressure to perform functionality is real. The cost of visibly failing to meet neurotypical standards of composure is real and has been paid, in full, by enormous numbers of people across their entire lives.

But it is not what is happening here. And the misdiagnosis matters.

What has been internalized is not ableism. What has been internalized is resilience — and resilience, in this context, is not a virtue. It is a scar that learned to look like a skill. It is the long record of a nervous system that was handed an impossible set of conditions and found a way to continue anyway, not because continuing was easy, but because the alternative — visibility, need, the exposure of genuine distress — had been demonstrated, repeatedly and convincingly, to be unsafe.

The women who carry this are not hiding because they believe their suffering doesn’t count. They are hiding because every room they have ever been in taught them that the expression of their suffering would cost them more than the suffering itself. They learned to absorb rather than emit. They learned to process privately what others process publicly. They learned that their threshold for tolerating difficulty was, in most environments, expected to be higher than other people’s — and they rose to meet that expectation, because the alternative was to be a problem, and being a problem, for women like this, has never been safe.

To call this internalized ableism is to mistake the adaptation for the belief. It is to look at a woman who has been carrying an enormous amount, alone, with extraordinary competence, and to tell her that the way she carries it is the problem. It is to add, to everything she is already holding, the suggestion that her manner of survival is evidence of her own oppression of herself.

What she has actually internalized is the understanding that her resilience is the only currency that has ever been reliably accepted. And what she has never been told — what the support infrastructure, online and off, has consistently failed to communicate — is that resilience of this order is not evidence that she doesn’t need support. It is evidence of how much support she has never received.

The legibility gap is not, finally, a problem about platforms or algorithms, though platforms and algorithms make it worse. It is a problem about what we have agreed to recognize as need. We have built support systems — social, medical, communal — that respond to expressed distress and call that responsiveness care. And we have left, outside the reach of those systems, the people who learned too well, too early, and at too great a cost, that expressed distress was a luxury they could not afford.

They are not less autistic. They are not less suffering. They are not less deserving of the communities, the recognition, the simple act of being seen that they entered these spaces to find.

They are, simply, too skilled at being invisible.

And invisibility, it turns out, is not the same as fine.

Sher is a doctoral student in Transformative Social Change, founder of The Compassion Collective, and the originator of the Cognitive Ecology Model. She has been running support groups for late-identified autistic adults for three years. She writes The Cognitive Ecologist on Substack. The Lost Girls: What It Cost a Generation of Neurodivergent Women to Be Seen is available now on Kindle, with the paperback launching July 16th. There are over a thousand essays available. And if you believe in reciprocity, paid subscriptions are how you practice it.

Let me set the scene.

It’s a Tuesday. I am sitting in my house in Portland, Oregon, writing a Substack note about Maslow (well not really about Maslow). Not a post. A note. A doorway. An intentional invitation to step inside a larger body of work and begin thinking differently about what it means to be human in a world that keeps insisting we are all individual pyramids trying to reach the top.

The note said something like this:

Maslow was close. But I don’t think he was right.

He helped shift the conversation away from pathology and toward human potential. That matters. But every theory is a product of the world that created it. And Maslow made the same mistake modern Western culture makes over and over again. He treated the individual as the primary unit of analysis.

The pyramid asks: Do YOU have safety? Do YOU have belonging? Do YOU have self-actualization?

But what if that’s the wrong question? Or at least an incomplete one?

Because the older I get, the less human beings resemble pyramids. And the more they resemble ecosystems.

A child cannot self-actualize their way out of neglect. A worker cannot meditate their way out of exploitation. A family cannot positive-think their way out of poverty. A community cannot resilience-train its way out of systemic collapse. A nervous system cannot mindset-shift its way out of chronic exclusion.

And our collective response to all of this seems to be: have you tried working on yourself harder?

Meditate more. Optimize more. Heal more. Adapt more. Regulate more. Perform more. Journal more. Download another app. Buy another course. Listen to another podcast.

Fix yourself. Fix yourself. Fix yourself.

Meanwhile almost nobody is asking whether the ecosystem itself might be part of the problem.

Maybe belonging isn’t something individuals achieve. Maybe belonging is something communities create. Maybe thriving isn’t the top of a pyramid. Maybe thriving is what emerges when relationships, communities, institutions, cultures, and environments become life-giving enough for human beings to flourish.

Maybe thriving was always a living system.

That was the note. Intentionally scoped. Intentionally accessible. Written to meet people where they are and invite them into a much larger body of work — one that has been building for years, across over a thousand essays, rooted in a theoretical framework I did not read my way into.

I survived my way into it.

But we’ll get to that.

The response to the note was largely generous. Thoughtful, even. Someone connected it to Blackfoot cosmology and the Siksika understanding of human indivisibility from nature, which I appreciated — because I know that tradition, I have Indigenous ancestry, and I named it in the post.

And then the other comments arrived.

I had failed, I was told, to acknowledge the Indigenous roots of ecological thinking before I was permitted to make my argument. Not that the argument was wrong. Not that I had misrepresented anything. Not that I had caused harm. But that I had not performed the correct genealogical acknowledgment ritual before I was allowed to proceed.

In a Substack note.

I want to be fair here, because there is a version of this critique that is genuinely important and I am not dismissing it.

Psychology, science, and Western philosophy have extracted enormously from Indigenous knowledge systems — often without credit, often without relationship, often without reciprocity. That history is not small. It is not ancient. It is ongoing. Knowledge was taken. Cultures were destroyed in the process. People were murdered by the same colonial states that were busy appropriating their wisdom and building institutions on top of it. Epistemic accountability is real. It matters. It is part of what transformative social change actually requires.

I agree with all of that. I have written about all of that. At length. Over years. In a body of work that is publicly available to anyone who wants to read it before deciding what I don’t know.

But here is what I want to name carefully.

The framework being demanded of me — formal source acknowledgment, citation of cultural origin, the genealogical audit before the argument is permitted to proceed — is itself a product of Western academic culture. It comes from the same institutional apparatus that built peer review, intellectual property law, and the footnote as the unit of moral legitimacy. The very system that spent centuries extracting from Indigenous knowledge without credit also invented the citation protocols now being applied to Indigenous knowledge and called respect.

I have a friend — someone I trust, someone who cares deeply about attribution — who told me recently that she sometimes shares ideas without naming their source. Not because she’s careless about credit. But because she genuinely can’t remember where she first encountered something. She’d read it, lived with it, made it part of her thinking. She’ll say: I don’t remember where I read this, but it matters. That’s not theft. That’s how minds work. That’s how cultures work. That’s how knowledge has always moved — across people, across traditions, across centuries — long before the footnote existed as the unit of moral legitimacy.

No single culture owns an insight about human connection. And different Indigenous nations have radically different relationships to knowledge, sharing, and protocol. There is no single Indigenous standard. Imposing one — even in the name of justice — flattens the very diversity being defended.

Treating Western academic citation norms as the universal standard for honoring Indigenous knowledge is its own form of epistemic colonialism.

And demanding that a Substack note contain the full genealogical architecture of every idea it touches is not a justice critique. It is a misunderstanding of how writing works, dressed in justice language.

A note is not the house. It is the door. The house has over a thousand rooms. They are all open. The invitation was the whole point.

Sometimes leaving something out isn’t a sign that someone doesn’t know it. It’s a sign that they’re trying to stay on topic. It’s a sign that they know their audience. It’s a sign that they understand strategy — that meeting people where they are, with something accessible and human, and then inviting them deeper, is how minds actually change.

That was the strategy. It was intentional. It always is.

But then something shifted in the conversation.

When I responded — calmly, precisely, with my reasoning and my credentials and my ancestry named — I was told that my framing of knowledge as collective and evolving was a sanitizing narrative. That I was erasing the violence of colonial extraction. That acknowledgment was easy, just one sentence, the least I could do.

And then I was told that my interlocutor was present in this conversation to speak truth to power.

To speak truth to power.

To me.

I need you to understand what my week actually looked like when I was informed that I was power.

Several years ago I was a senior project manager at the Oregon Health Authority. I was good at my job. I was also, without knowing it, autistic — navigating a neurotype that no one had ever named for me, in a workplace that had no framework for what I was or what I needed.

What followed was not a gentle unraveling.

I was running into epistemic injustice at every turn. My ways of knowing, processing, and communicating — the things I now understand as features of my cognitive architecture — were being treated as dysfunction, as insubordination, as evidence of inadequacy. I was being abused in the workplace. Systematically. By an institution that described itself as being in the business of health.

And then one day, finally, someone said: maybe you’re autistic. Maybe you should get a diagnosis so you can get accommodations.

That sentence cracked something open.

What followed was two years of burnout so severe that my brain stopped working in the ways I had always relied on. I couldn’t read. Not really. The cognitive capacity wasn’t there. The neural pathways that had always been my lifeline went quiet.

I was bullied out of that job. By an institution in Portland, Oregon that considers itself progressive. By people who would have described themselves as being on the left.

I called 988. More than once. Not because I had a plan to hurt myself but because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I didn’t know what burnout was while it was happening. I knew something in my ecology had collapsed but I didn’t have the language for it yet. I just knew that the water I had been swimming in my whole life had turned toxic and my body had finally stopped pretending otherwise.

So I wrote.

That was all I could do. I couldn’t read, but I could write. I wrote my story. I wrote it in the dark and in the confusion and in the grief of discovering, at an age when most people assume these things have already been settled, that my entire life I had been excluded, misread, and pathologized for a difference I didn’t even know I had.

I wrote, and I kept writing, and somewhere in the writing a pattern emerged.

A model.

Not because I had read the right books. Not because I had extracted wisdom from cultures more connected to the earth than my own. But because I was a late-identified autistic woman with Indigenous ancestry trying to understand why her nervous system kept responding to social environments the way an ecosystem responds to pollution — and the existing frameworks didn’t have a name for that.

So I built one.

My lived experience came first. The theory came second. I found the academic language that confirmed what I had already mapped through survival. My ancestors were not a citation I reached for to legitimize my argument. They were present. They have been present through every word of this. The Cognitive Ecology Model was not appropriated. It was not borrowed. It was not extracted from anyone else’s tradition.

It was bled into existence.

With my Indigenous ancestors hovering over my shoulder at every moment.

And then someone arrived in the comments to tell me I hadn’t done enough to honor Indigenous knowledge.

I’ll let that land for a moment.

Here is what I want to say about the left, with love and a significant amount of exhaustion.

I am the left. I have been the left through the worst years of my life — including when the left in Portland was busy bullying me out of a job and into a breakdown. I believe in collective liberation. I believe in epistemic justice. I believe the stories we tell about knowledge and who gets to produce it are deeply political and I have given years of my life to making that argument in public.

And I keep watching something happen in progressive spaces that I think we need to name directly.

The left has developed its own class system.

The currency isn’t money. It’s ideological performance. And the people who get punished most by that class system are frequently the most marginalized — the ones without institutional backing, without credentials, without the bandwidth to perform every ritual correctly in every context — while people with considerably more structural safety use justice language to establish dominance in spaces that were supposed to belong to everyone.

This is not a new observation. Ignacio Martín-Baró was making it in 1980s El Salvador, in considerably more dangerous circumstances than a Substack comments section.

Martín-Baró was a Jesuit priest and social psychologist who watched Western psychology being deployed in a war zone not to liberate traumatized and oppressed people but to help them cope with their oppression efficiently enough to stop resisting it. Therapy for the traumatized poor. Resilience training for people living under state violence. Adaptation frameworks for communities being systematically destroyed.

Fix yourself. Adjust. Manage your symptoms. Function within the system.

He said: no.

He developed liberation psychology as a direct counter — a framework that insisted the problem was not inside the people but in the conditions they were living in. And any psychology that helped people adapt to unjust conditions without naming those conditions as unjust was not liberation.

It was a more sophisticated form of control.

He also documented what happens when oppression runs deep enough and long enough: people internalize the framework imposed on them. The dominant culture’s story about who you are becomes your story about who you are. The cage becomes invisible. And then you begin enforcing it on others. Not because you are cruel. Because the framework has become so naturalized that questioning it feels like a threat to your survival.

It doesn’t feel like oppression when you’re doing it.

It feels like protecting the community.

In 1989, the Salvadoran military assassinated him. The US government funded that militia.

I see what Martín-Baró described everywhere I look right now.

I see it in autistic spaces where late-identified people who have found expansive, non-deficit frameworks for understanding their own minds are attacked by other autistic people for not accepting the disability label as the only legitimate frame. You’re not allowed to frame it that way. You’re giving ammunition to people who want to deny us services. You’re not really autistic if you don’t accept the disability label.

These are people who have been misread, misdiagnosed, excluded, institutionalized, behaviorally conditioned, and told their entire lives that the way their minds work is a problem to be fixed. They have internalized the deficit framework — the one built by and for the neurotypical majority — so completely that they are now enforcing it on members of their own community who have found a different way to understand themselves.

Not as a deficit.

As a different cognitive architecture. A different way of processing the world. A different relationship to language, sensation, time, connection.

Self-determination is not self-determination if it only applies to people who agree with you.

And I see the same dynamic in the comments section of my Substack. Where the tools of liberation — epistemic accountability, justice frameworks, solidarity language — are being used to establish hierarchy rather than dismantle it. Where the performance of correct politics has become more important than genuine encounter with the human doing the work. Where someone can position themselves as speaking truth to power in a conversation with an unemployed autistic woman who built her theory in the dark when her brain wasn’t working and her ancestors were the only ones holding her up.

Power, in the context of transformative social change, is not an abstraction. It is material. It is structural. It is located.

I am not employed by an institution. I do not hold an academic appointment. I have no research grant, no publishing house, no professional body standing behind me. I am funding my doctoral education with the kind of creative financial optimism that would make an accountant weep. I am doing this work from the margins — not writing about the margins from a position of comfort.

When you position yourself as speaking truth to power in the comments section of my Substack note, you are not challenging an institution. You are not confronting a system. You are performing the language of resistance in a context where it does not apply — and in doing so, you are reproducing the very dynamics of epistemic dominance that the framework was designed to dismantle.

That inversion matters. A lot.

Because one of the things transformative social change scholarship teaches us is that justice frameworks can themselves become tools of rhetorical dominance when they are applied without genuine curiosity about the person being critiqued. When the ritual becomes the point — when demonstrating that you know the genealogy matters more than actually engaging with the argument — we’ve stopped doing intellectual work and started doing something else.

Something that functions more like a toll booth than a conversation.

And toll booths serve the person collecting the toll.

I am not interested in a left that builds a better pyramid.

I am interested in what Martín-Baró was interested in. What the Blackfoot cosmology that started this whole conversation was pointing toward. What my own Cognitive Ecology Model has been arguing — through survival, through burnout, through the two years when my brain wouldn’t work right and I wrote anyway because it was the only thing left — for years.

We are not pyramids. We are ecosystems.

And ecosystems don’t have a top.

They have relationships. They have reciprocity. They have the kind of radical interdependence that makes dominance — even progressive dominance, even well-intentioned dominance — ultimately self-defeating.

The river matters. The soil matters. The community matters. The relationships matter. The stories matter.

So does the unemployed autistic woman trying to think out loud on the internet on a Tuesday.

Even when — especially when — she doesn’t perform the ritual correctly.

Because sometimes the person who hasn’t performed the ritual correctly isn’t the one who needs more training.

Sometimes she’s the one who built the framework.

In the dark.

With her ancestors watching.

While her brain was trying to remember how to work.

And the ecosystem she was writing about was the one she was trying to survive.

Sher is a doctoral student in Transformative Social Change, founder of The Compassion Collective, and the originator of the Cognitive Ecology Model. She writes The Cognitive Ecologist on Substack. This theory was not extracted. It was lived. There are over a thousand essays available for anyone who wants to understand it before deciding what it’s missing. Learn more about my work at

https://thecompassioncollective.earth

A paid subscriber complained that I write too much.

She threatened to cancel her subscription if I didn’t slow down.

And I have been sitting with my reaction to that ever since. Not the anger — the anger makes sense. But the recognition. The way that single interaction opened something in me like a door I didn’t know I’d been holding shut.

Because I have been here before.

Not on Substack. Not with strangers on the internet.

In bathroom stalls. In locker rooms. In restaurant kitchens. In every social environment I have ever tried to enter as myself and found the entry conditional.

This is not a new story. I am just finally old enough to read it clearly.

Ten Years Old

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On Credentials and Authority: A Response to the Use of Expertise as Epistemic Closure

A mini dissertation

Abstract

This essay responds to a specific rhetorical move: the deployment of academic credentials as a mechanism for closing off rather than opening up inquiry into another person’s identity. The exchange in question involved a PhD-level researcher invoking their publications, dissertation, and advocacy work to assert that another autistic person does not have accurate access to their own experience of disability — that they are, in fact, disabled “whether they recognize it or not.” This paper argues that such a move is not a research finding. It is a power move — one that contradicts the central methodological and ethical commitments of the very fields the speaker claims to represent.

I. The Credential Gambit

The exchange began with a familiar rhetorical structure: Or, alternatively, I’m a PhD-level researcher who has an entire book-length dissertation and several peer-reviewed studies directly involving research on identity.

Let’s examine what this sentence is doing.

It is not introducing new evidence. It is not offering a counterargument. It is announcing a hierarchy. The implicit logic is: my credentials elevate my interpretation of your experience above your own account of it.

This is what we might call the credential gambit — the strategic deployment of institutional authority not to advance an argument but to foreclose one. It is a move that says: I have standing to define your reality. You do not.

From a purely logical standpoint, this is an appeal to authority — a recognized fallacy in which the source of a claim substitutes for its substance. But it is more than a logical error. It is a political one.

The fields being invoked here — identity studies, disability studies, disability advocacy — have spent decades developing precisely because institutional authority was being used to pathologize, define, and manage the lives of people without their consent. The history of disability is in large part a history of experts deciding what disabled people are, what they need, and what they should accept about themselves. That is the tradition this rhetorical move belongs to — not the tradition it claims.

II. Diagnosis Is Not Identity

The central factual claim in the exchange was this: Autism is disabling. You HAVE to be disabled to be diagnosed with it. You don’t feel disabled. That is fine. Good for you. That is not the same thing as not being disabled.

This argument contains a category error so significant it should be taught in methodology courses.

A diagnosis is a clinical classification. It describes a pattern of neurological difference that, in its interaction with particular environments and social structures, produces functional impairment sufficient to meet diagnostic threshold. The DSM-5 criteria for autism spectrum disorder require that symptoms “cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning.” The impairment is a threshold for clinical categorization, not a permanent, context-independent fact about a person’s ontological status.

Identity, by contrast, is — as the scholarship consistently demonstrates — personal, social, cultural, relational, historical, and contextual. Identity is not assigned at diagnosis. It is negotiated, embodied, revised, and inhabited over time.

Ian Hacking’s foundational work on “looping effects” in classification established that human categories are not inert descriptors: when people are classified, they respond to the classification, and the classification changes as a result. This is especially true for identity categories. To be diagnosed autistic is to enter a process of renegotiating selfhood — not to receive a permanent label that settles the question of who you are.

Disability studies, following the social model developed by Mike Oliver and others, has long distinguished between impairment (the physical or neurological difference itself) and disability (the social, structural, and environmental conditions that produce disadvantage from that difference). These are not the same thing. Whether a person experiences disability — and whether they identify as disabled — depends enormously on context, on access to support, on the environments they move through, and on the political frameworks they bring to their own self-understanding.

A person who was late-identified, who spent decades developing compensatory strategies, who lives and works in environments partially shaped around their own needs — that person may have a very different relationship to the category of disability than someone who was identified young, who experienced significant institutional barriers, or who holds a social model framework as their primary lens. Both of those relationships are legitimate. Neither belongs to the researcher to assign.

III. Who Gets to Decide? The Field’s Own Answer

Here is the irony that is worth sitting with:

Decades of work in identity studies, disability studies, critical theory, feminist standpoint theory, liberation psychology, and participatory action research have all converged on the same answer to the question of who has epistemic authority over a person’s experience of their own life.

The person living it.

Feminist standpoint epistemology, developed by Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, and others, argues that knowledge is always situated — produced from a particular position in social structures — and that the standpoint of marginalized people provides distinctive and irreplaceable insight into the conditions of their own lives. Donna Haraway’s critique of the “god trick” — the claim to see from nowhere, to hold a view unsituated by position or experience — applies directly here. The researcher who claims objective authority over another person’s identity is performing precisely the move Haraway identified: claiming transcendence while actually speaking from a very specific and interested position.

Participatory action research, as a methodology, was built on the explicit rejection of the expert-as-authority model. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the foundational text of transformative social change, opens with the argument that the act of naming one’s own world is not a privilege to be granted by those with more education — it is a fundamental human right. Liberation cannot be handed down. It must be generated from within. An expert who tells a marginalized person what their identity is, and closes the conversation with “whether you accept it or not,” has made themselves an agent of the system they claim to critique.

The disability rights movement’s foundational principle — Nothing about us without us — is not a preference. It is a methodology. It is the field’s own answer to the question of who decides.

IV. The Move Named

Let me be direct about what happened in this exchange.

The researcher was asked to engage with the possibility that another autistic person might have a different relationship to disability identity than they do. Rather than becoming curious about that difference — rather than asking why, exploring the context, or engaging with the epistemological complexity that their own field has spent decades mapping — they listed their credentials, accused the other person of conflating feelings with facts, and issued a verdict: you are disabled. Whether you recognize it or not. Whether you accept it or not.

This is not a research finding.

This is a power move.

It is the use of institutional authority to shut down self-determination. It is the positioning of the credentialed self as the final arbiter of another person’s identity. It is the deployment of disability advocacy credentials in the service of telling a disabled person who they are.

The accusation of conflating feelings with facts is particularly instructive. The irony is almost too precise: the researcher accuses their interlocutor of emotional reasoning while simultaneously assuming that a diagnostic category automatically settles the question of identity relationship — an interpretation, not a fact, dressed in clinical language. Feelings are messy and subjective. A credential, apparently, is not.

But here is what is actually true: the claim that you are disabled whether or not you recognize it is not an empirical statement with a settled evidentiary basis. It is a theoretical position within a contested field. Reasonable, rigorous scholars disagree about the relationship between diagnosis, impairment, and identity. The social model and the medical model produce different answers to this question. Crip theory, neurodiversity frameworks, and intersectional disability scholarship produce different answers still. None of them has the authority to resolve what a particular person’s experience of their own neurological difference means to them.

V. What This Framework Needs to Be True

A genuinely critical analysis cannot stop at naming the power move. It has to ask the harder question: why would someone need this to be true?

This is not about imputing bad faith. It is about taking seriously what critical theory has always insisted upon — that knowledge production is never neutral, that researchers are embedded in structures that shape what conclusions feel necessary, and that the most dangerous biases are the ones that arrive wearing the clothing of objectivity.

So: what does this researcher’s framework require?

It requires that autism be uniformly and unambiguously disabling — not contextually, not relationally, not in interaction with particular environments, but as a fixed ontological fact about every person who holds the diagnosis. A late-identified, high-masking autistic person who does not identify as disabled is not, in this framework, a person with a different relationship to disability. They are someone who is wrong about themselves. Someone who has confused their feelings with facts.

This requirement is not incidental. It is structural. Consider the incentives at play.

If a researcher’s dissertation, publications, and advocacy identity are organized around a particular model of disability — one that requires disabled people to occupy a specific, legible position — then someone who holds the diagnosis but rejects or complicates the identity threatens the framework itself. The counterexample is not interesting data. It is a methodological inconvenience. And the fastest way to resolve a methodological inconvenience is to disqualify the source: you are conflating feelings with facts.

There is also the question of community gatekeeping. There is a real and documented tension in disability communities around late-identified, high-masking, or ambivalently-identified people — a concern that they dilute the category, claim resources without the associated costs, or weaken political solidarity. The credential gambit can be a sophisticated, academically laundered version of you don’t look autistic. The credentials make it sound like science. The underlying move is the same.

And then there is what Haraway would call the god position — the seductive authority of the knower who can see your experience more clearly than you can. This is not a small thing. The researcher who can tell a marginalized person who they really are gets to be necessary in a way that the researcher who says tell me about your experience does not. Epistemic authority is professionally and personally rewarding. The incentive to hold it is real, even when it is entirely unconscious.

None of this means the researcher is acting in bad faith. People are rarely aware of the structural incentives shaping their interpretations. That is precisely why research ethics exists — to build in the methodological humility that self-interest makes difficult to sustain on its own.

Which brings us back to the ethics course.

The foundational principle of research ethics, particularly in qualitative and participatory work, is that the researcher’s interpretive authority has limits. Those limits exist specifically to protect research participants — and the broader communities researchers claim to represent — from the imposition of frameworks that serve the researcher’s interests more than theirs. The IRB process, informed consent, member checking, reflexivity requirements — these are not bureaucratic formalities. They are the field’s institutional acknowledgment that researchers have incentives, and that those incentives need structural counterweight.

Telling a research subject — or a member of the community you advocate for — that they are wrong about their own experience, and closing the conversation with whether you accept it or not, is not a research finding.

It is a failure of research ethics.

And yes — that is exactly what the ethics course is for.

Conclusion

The central question in contemporary identity studies is not what are people? That question belonged to an earlier era — one characterized by the belief that marginalized people could be classified, studied, and understood from outside, by those with sufficient institutional authority to do so.

The question the field has moved toward — the question that feminist theory, disability studies, liberation psychology, and transformative social change have all arrived at — is simpler and more demanding:

Who gets to decide?

The answer those fields have produced, at great effort and over many decades, is not the person with the most credentials.

It is the person living the life.

Expertise is real. Research matters. Credentials represent genuine work and genuine knowledge. But none of that — not the dissertation, not the peer-reviewed studies, not the advocacy history — grants any researcher the right to tell another person who they are and close the conversation with whether you accept it or not.

That is not scholarship.

That is paternalism in academic clothing.

And the field you are claiming to represent has a word for it.

Sher Griffin is a researcher, writer, and cognitive ecologist. She holds a master’s degree in Transformative Social Change from Saybrook University and is a doctoral student in the same field. She is the founder of The Compassion Collective and publisher of The Cognitive Ecologist on Substack.

Yesterday, I wrote a note to myself that I was taking the day off from posting an essay.

Not because I had nothing to say. But because the essay I was holding needed something before it could be released. It needed space. It needed precision. It needed care. It needed integration.

It needed to be ready before it became public.

Which is, as it turns out, exactly what this essay is about.

What the Fuck Just Happened

If you are healing from a narcissistic system, there are stages to this process. And the first one doesn’t feel like healing at all.

It feels like sitting on the edge of your bed staring into space.

It feels like vertigo.

It feels like the floor you’ve been standing on for years just turned out to be a painting of a floor.

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In this episode of We Weren’t Supposed to Exist, I sit down with Cecile Green of Round Sky Solutions to explore power, governance, collaboration, and the often invisible assumptions that shape how we work together.

We begin with a conversation about Gestalt language processing, embodied knowing, and making meaning through feeling and experience. From there, we dive into organizational design, shared leadership, sociocracy, collective decision-making, and why so many systems struggle when decision-making becomes disconnected from accountability.

Cecile introduces her Power Matrix framework and shares insights from years of helping organizations develop healthier ways of sharing authority, resolving conflict, and building cultures where participation is both meaningful and sustainable.

Together we explore:

• Gestalt language processing and holistic meaning-making
• Feeling as a pathway to understanding
• The relationship between power and organizational health
• Shared leadership and distributed authority
• Sociocracy, holacracy, and collaborative governance
• Decision-making and accountability
• Repair, conflict resolution, and collective learning
• Why clear processes can be profoundly neurodivergent-affirming
• Building organizations that move beyond domination and hierarchy

This conversation offers a glimpse into the kinds of experiments already happening around the world—people actively creating new ways of organizing ourselves that are more collaborative, participatory, and humane.

Learn more about Cecile’s work at Round Sky Solutions:

https://www.roundskysolutions.com

People hate it when autistic women become selfish.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

People hate it when autistic women stop carrying things that were never theirs to carry.

They hate it when we stop anticipating everyone else’s needs before our own. They hate it when we stop translating, accommodating, smoothing, managing, remembering, organizing, and absorbing. They hate it when we stop making our lives smaller so everyone else can remain comfortable.

And because they hate it, they call it selfishness.

I know because I used to call it selfishness too.

What We Were Built to Carry

For most of my life, I thought being a good person meant enduring.

Enduring discomfort. Enduring overwhelm. Enduring exhaustion. Enduring environments that hurt me. Enduring relationships that required more from me than they ever offered in return. Enduring a life that looked successful from the outside while quietly destroying me from the inside.

I thought that was maturity. I thought that was love. I thought that was what everyone else was doing.

What I didn’t understand then — what nobody had given me the language for — is that I was operating inside a system specifically designed to extract that endurance from me. Philosopher Miranda Fricker calls it epistemic injustice: the harm that happens when someone is wronged not just in what they can do, but in what they can know — about the world, and about themselves. For autistic women, this operates at a profound level. We are handed a false account of our own experience from the beginning. We are told that our needs are excessive. That our pain is exaggeration. That our exhaustion is weakness. That the problem is always, always us.

We internalize that account. We carry it like a second nervous system — one that constantly overrides the first.

This is what sociologist Kimberlé Crenshaw means when she describes how overlapping systems of oppression don’t just stack on top of each other — they shape the very terms by which we understand our own lives. Being a woman, being neurodivergent, being raised in a culture that demands compliance from both: these aren’t separate experiences. They produce a specific kind of person who has learned to distrust her own signal.

And so we endure. Because we have been taught that our discomfort is not data. It is drama.

The Burnout Is Not a Personal Failure

Then came the final burnout.

Not my first. Not even close. But the last one.

The one that stripped away every illusion I had about what I could survive. The one that left me staring at my own life wondering how I had gotten so far away from myself. The one that made continuing exactly as I had been feel impossible.

Autistic burnout has only recently begun to receive serious research attention, and what that research confirms is something many of us already knew in our bodies: burnout is not a personal failure. It is the predictable outcome of a system that was never designed to sustain us. Researcher Damian Milton’s Double Empathy Problem reframes the central question entirely — the difficulty is not that autistic people lack the capacity for connection or endurance. The difficulty is that we are required to endlessly translate ourselves into a social language that was not built for our neurology, while neurotypical people are rarely asked to translate at all.

The energy that translation demands is real. It is neurological, somatic, cumulative. And it is never fully replenished, because rest itself is hard to access when your baseline is already hypervigilance.

This is not metaphor. This is the structural architecture of neuronormativity: a set of invisible social norms that treat one kind of nervous system as the default and every other as deficient. The harm is not always intentional. But it is always consequential. And it lands, over and over, in the bodies of autistic women who have been told for decades that trying harder is the answer.

The burnout is not the problem. The burnout is the evidence.

Diagnosis as Rearrangement

Around the same time came an autism diagnosis.

People often imagine diagnosis as an answer. For me, it felt more like a rearrangement.

Suddenly, decades of confusion reorganized themselves into a pattern. The exhaustion made sense. The masking made sense. The loneliness made sense. The feeling that life seemed harder than it looked for everyone else made sense.

I wasn’t discovering something new. I was finally seeing what had always been there.

This is what philosopher Patricia Hill Collins calls a shift in standpoint — the moment when a person gains access to knowledge about her own experience that the dominant system had been systematically obscuring. The knowledge was never absent. The framework to hold it was.

Late diagnosis for autistic women is not a neutral administrative delay. It is the result of assessment tools built almost entirely on the presentation of autistic boys and men — tools that were never designed to see us. It is the result of a medicalized model that treated compliance and social performance as evidence of normalcy, never asking what those performances cost. It is the result of a culture that rewarded our masking so thoroughly that even we forgot we were doing it.

The diagnosis didn’t give me a new identity. It gave me permission to trust what I had always known.

The Instructions That Nearly Killed Me

But the diagnosis wasn’t the reckoning. The reckoning was realizing that if I wanted to stay here, I had to learn how to stay here. And nobody could teach me how.

The life I had built was based almost entirely on other people’s instructions.

Work harder. Push through. Be flexible. Be grateful. Don’t make things difficult. Think about how everyone else feels. Try harder. Try harder. Try harder.

I had followed those instructions faithfully. And they had nearly killed me.

What I was following — without ever naming it — was a set of norms that philosopher Judith Butler might describe as regulatory ideals: the standards a culture enforces not through explicit rules but through the constant social pressure to perform an acceptable self. For autistic women, those ideals are doubly binding. We are expected to perform femininity: warmth, attunement, self-effacement, care. And we are simultaneously expected to perform neurotypicality: intuitive social fluency, emotional regulation on demand, an easy and graceful fit into spaces that hurt us.

Neither performance is sustainable. Both are demanded anyway.

The instructions were never neutral. They were a system of extraction dressed up as self-improvement.

The Dangerous Questions

So for the first time in my life, I stopped asking everyone else who I should be. I started asking myself.

What hurts? What helps? What drains me? What restores me? What am I pretending to enjoy? What am I forcing myself to tolerate? What would my life look like if I stopped treating my needs as inconveniences?

Those questions felt dangerous. They felt selfish.

Because when you’ve spent your entire life carrying more than your share, putting any of that weight down feels like a betrayal.

But these questions are not merely therapeutic. They are epistemological. They are the act of reclaiming yourself as a legitimate knower of your own experience — what Fricker calls recovering from testimonial injustice, the specific harm of having your own account of your life systematically discredited.

For many autistic women, asking what do I actually need is a radical act. Not because the question is complicated. But because we have been trained for so long to treat our needs as suspect that accessing them requires a kind of deliberate, sustained practice. It requires, in the language of transformative social change, a conscientization — the process Paulo Freire described as becoming critically aware of the conditions that have shaped your own oppression, and beginning to name them in your own voice.

That naming is the beginning of transformation. Not just personal transformation. Political transformation.

Because the system that extracted your compliance did not only harm you. It depended on your silence. Your reclamation is, among other things, a withdrawal of consent.

The Backlash Is the Proof

The people around you notice when you start taking yourself seriously.

Some become uncomfortable. Some become angry. Some accuse you of changing.

They’re right. You are changing. You’re no longer willing to disappear for their comfort. You’re no longer willing to sacrifice your wellbeing so everyone else can avoid inconvenience. You’re no longer confusing self-abandonment with kindness.

The backlash is not incidental. It is structural. Audre Lorde wrote that caring for yourself is not self-indulgence — it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. She wrote that in 1988, from within the specific context of a Black woman with cancer navigating a medical system that was not built for her survival. The parallel is not perfect. But the architecture is familiar: when you belong to a group whose compliance has been systematically harvested, your refusal to comply is experienced as aggression. Your boundaries are read as attacks. Your self-preservation is called selfishness.

The people who benefit from your sacrifice will not thank you for withdrawing it. That is not a reason to continue.

What Selfishness Actually Is

The truth is that many autistic women are raised to become experts in everyone else’s experience.

We learn to study people. Predict reactions. Manage emotions. Avoid conflict. Perform acceptability. We become extraordinarily skilled at carrying things.

What nobody teaches us is how to carry ourselves.

And eventually the bill comes due. A body can only withstand so much. A nervous system can only absorb so much. A life can only be built around everyone else for so long before there is nothing left of the person living it.

That is the moment selfishness becomes necessary.

Not selfishness as greed. Not selfishness as cruelty.

Selfishness as survival. Selfishness as refusing to disappear. Selfishness as believing that your needs belong in the room too. Selfishness as understanding that a life cannot be sustained on self-abandonment.

In the framework of transformative social change, this is sometimes called prefigurative practice: the idea that we must begin living, in whatever partial and imperfect way we can, according to the values of the world we are trying to build. If we are working toward a world that recognizes neurodivergent lives as fully human — fully deserving of rest, accommodation, joy, and care — then we must begin enacting that recognition in our own lives now. Not when it is convenient. Not when it stops being costly. Now.

The autistic woman who begins choosing herself is not suddenly taking more than her share. Most of the time she is finally taking back what she gave away years ago.

And if that feels selfish to the people who benefited from her sacrifice, so be it.

You Don’t Heal If You’re Not Selfish

Some of us spent our entire lives learning how to survive everyone else. Eventually we have to learn how to survive ourselves.

This is not a story about becoming a worse person. It is a story about refusing to disappear. And those are not the same thing, no matter how insistently the people around us conflate them.

Healing — real healing, not the performance of recovery — requires that you become the primary authority on your own experience. It requires that you stop outsourcing your needs to systems and relationships that were never designed to meet them. It requires that you treat your body’s signals as legitimate data, your exhaustion as evidence, your grief as knowledge.

It requires, in the most precise sense of the word, that you become selfish.

Not because selfishness is a virtue in the abstract. But because for women who have been systematically trained to treat themselves as the least important person in every room, learning to matter to yourself is the work. It is the threshold every other healing depends on.

You do not get to the collective by erasing the self. You get there by finally, fully, becoming one.

If this resonated with you — l just released a reflection guide called Becoming Selfish: A Guide to Guilt-Free Reclamation. It's a workbook companion to this essay: pages for mapping your guilt, reclaiming what you gave away, and practicing small acts of selfishness without apology. Just $4.99. Keep an eye out.

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Sher Griffin is a researcher, writer, and cognitive ecologist. She is the founder of The Compassion Collective and writes about neurodivergence, systems, and the conditions for human flourishing.

This essay was provoked—in the best sense—by Germane Marvel’s “True Transcendence: A Diunital Approach to Post-Apocalyptic Consciousness,” published June 2026. Marvel is a developmental philosopher and theorist whose Model of Human Development offers one of the more rigorous and culturally grounded challenges to mainstream Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics currently in circulation. Reading his work against the Cognitive Ecology Model produced the questions I try to work through here.

The Cognitive Ecology Model began with a refusal.

It refused to locate consciousness inside the individual. It refused to treat neurodivergence as malfunction. It refused the diagnostic gaze that asks what is wrong with this person when the more honest and more generative question is what is this person’s ecology asking of them that they cannot give? That refusal opened something—a way of thinking about mind as relational, emergent, distributed across the architecture of environments, relationships, cultural narratives, and structural conditions. Cognition, on this account, is not housed in the skull. It is an event that happens between a person and a world.

It is worth pausing on the word model. The name has always sat uneasily with what the framework actually is. A model, in the conventional sense, implies a closed structure—a fixed map that describes a territory from the outside, stable regardless of who consults it. But an ecology cannot be closed. By definition, it is changed by what enters it. Every person who brings their experience to bear on CEM, every thinker who pushes on its edges, every encounter with a framework it had not yet met—these do not merely test the model. They become part of it. They alter the territory the map is trying to describe. That is not a flaw in the framework. It is the framework behaving ecologically, as it should. This essay is itself an instance of that process. Germane Marvel’s work entered the field, and the field responded. What follows is that response.

That move was the relational turn.

What I want to propose here is a second turn. Not a correction, and not a departure. A deepening.

The question the Cognitive Ecology Model answers brilliantly is the present-tense question: how does consciousness emerge within a relational field? What it has not yet fully asked is the temporal one: how do relational fields themselves evolve? These are not the same question, and the difference matters more than it might initially seem. An ecology is not merely spatial. It is not just the arrangement of relationships and conditions that surround a person at any given moment. It is also the accumulated residue of everything that came before—every adaptation that hardened into expectation, every expectation that calcified into culture, every cultural practice that became invisible enough to pass for nature itself.

History, in other words, is an ecological condition.

Consider what it means for repeated relational patterns to become durable structures. Every family system carries inherited adaptations—ways of managing threat, proximity, difference, and grief that were shaped by conditions the current family may no longer face but still reproduce without knowing it. Every institution encodes the priorities and fears of its founding moment, long after those moments have passed. Every cultural narrative about normalcy, productivity, intelligence, or belonging carries the sediment of a thousand previous decisions about who counted as fully human and who did not.

This process—call it sedimentation—is not metaphorical. It is the actual mechanism by which historical ecologies become present conditions. What gets sedimented is not merely memory. It is perception itself. People inside a heavily sedimented ecology do not experience it as one historical arrangement among others. They experience it as reality. The categories it installs become the only available categories. The kinds of persons it can recognize become the only recognizable kinds of persons.

This is why inherited architecture is not merely personal history. It is ecological inheritance made durable through time.

The Cognitive Ecology Model already describes, with precision, how individuals become coherent or incoherent within an ecology. It maps the dynamics of masking, rupture, exclusion, and repair. What Temporal Ecology adds is attention to the ecology itself as a developmental entity—one that accumulates, sediments, and either metabolizes complexity or collapses under it.

There is a tradition of developmental theory that has attempted something adjacent to this. The Integral frameworks, the Spiral models, the metamodern philosophers—all of them are circling a real phenomenon: consciousness does not simply stay the same across historical time, and cultures do not simply repeat themselves in an eternal present. Something changes. Meaning systems shift. What counts as possible expands or contracts. New forms of perception emerge under new ecological pressures.

Marvel’s work is particularly sharp on this point. His identification of hypermodernism as a missing stage in existing developmental maps—the system-to-system collision that neither postmodernism nor metamodernism adequately names—forces a developmental framework to reckon with historical specificity rather than retreating into universal abstraction. And his critique of the grammatical bias running through Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics, the way those frameworks structurally privilege the cognitive over the relational, is a challenge worth sitting with seriously. His proposed alternative insists on relational interaction as the generative mechanism of developmental movement. That insistence is precisely what brings his work into productive tension with the Cognitive Ecology Model—not because they contradict each other, but because they are asking adjacent questions from different starting points, and the friction between them illuminates something neither fully resolves alone.

The problem is not with what the developmental tradition is reaching toward. The problem is how it has theorized the reaching.

The dominant image is vertical. Stages ascend. Development is upward movement through increasingly integrated, increasingly complex levels of consciousness. Even where the language softens—transcend and include, no stage is better, only more complex—the underlying geometry remains a ladder. And the ladder creates problems that cannot be engineered away by qualifying the metaphor. It ranks. It situates some persons, some cultures, some civilizations as earlier and therefore less—less evolved, less integrated, less awake. It converts ecological difference into developmental deficiency. It looks a great deal like the pathologizing move the Cognitive Ecology Model was built to refuse.

Temporal Ecology proposes a different geometry entirely.

Not a ladder. A field unfolding through time.

The fundamental claim is simple: development is not ascent. Development is ecological becoming. Ecologies encounter complexity, and complexity produces rupture, and rupture reveals sedimented structures that had been invisible precisely because they were functioning, and the revelation of those structures makes them available for reorganization, and reorganization opens new ecological possibilities. This is the developmental cycle—not a staircase, but a recursive process of accumulation, disruption, and reconfiguration.

The unit of development, on this account, is not the individual. It is the ecology.

Rupture, in this framework, changes meaning entirely.

Traditional developmental theory struggles with disruption. Burnout, collapse, crisis, upheaval—these tend to appear as regression, failure, or breakdown. The developmental subject is supposed to be moving forward. Rupture pulls them back.

But if development is ecological, then rupture is information. It is the moment when the mismatch between inherited structures and present conditions becomes legible. When an ecology can no longer metabolize its own complexity—when the adaptations it has sedimented produce more exclusion than coherence, more rigidity than responsiveness—something breaks. And that breaking is not dysfunction. It is disclosure.

The question rupture asks is not what went wrong? It is what historical adaptation is still organizing perception long past the conditions that made it necessary?

This is not, I think, an unfamiliar question to anyone who has spent significant time in a late-identified neurodivergent community. The experience of receiving a diagnosis after decades of constructed normalcy is precisely an encounter with this question. The masking strategies, the compensatory exhaustion, the self-narratives that translated systemic mismatch into personal failure—these are sedimented ecologies, made durable in the architecture of a self. The rupture of late diagnosis does not reveal what was always wrong. It reveals what the ecology required, and what that requiring cost.

That is a temporal insight. And it demands a temporal framework to hold it.

Development, in this framework, is also recursive rather than linear.

Ecologies do not simply progress through crises and come out transformed on the other side, never to encounter those tensions again. They return. The same unresolved patterns reappear under new conditions, at different scales, with different stakes. What changes is the position from which they are encountered. The spiral does not repeat—it revisits from somewhere new. Each return makes available a reorganization that was not possible before, not because the ecology has become more advanced, but because the conditions have shifted enough that what was previously invisible has become, finally, seeable.

This is spiral logic as developmental principle. Not ascent. Not mere repetition. Recursive return to the same territory under different conditions of visibility.

The most important implication of a Temporal Ecology may be what it does to the concept of flourishing.

Flourishing, in this framework, is not happiness. It is not productivity or wellness or any of the metrics that sedimented institutions use to evaluate the adequacy of persons. Flourishing is ecological coherence across time. It is the capacity of an ecology to metabolize complexity without requiring exclusion—to encounter difference without expulsion, to experience rupture without collapse, to remain connected to its own history while still being capable of transformation.

An ecology that can only maintain coherence by narrowing who belongs, by hardening against disruption, by transmitting its accumulated traumas without interruption—that ecology is not flourishing, regardless of how stable or successful it appears from the outside. And the persons inside such an ecology are not failing to develop. They are developing under conditions that make certain forms of coherence impossible.

What Temporal Ecology insists is that those conditions are historical. They did not arrive from nowhere. They were made. And because they were made, they can—given the right conditions of rupture, visibility, and reorganization—be remade.

There is one further move that Temporal Ecology makes, and it is perhaps the most philosophically significant.

The developmental traditions it departs from are, at their root, transcendence theories. They imagine consciousness climbing toward something it is not yet—a higher integration, a more complete inclusion, a stage that supersedes and contains all that came before. The movement is vertical, and the future is the destination.

What Temporal Ecology proposes instead is something closer to emanation.

Consciousness does not climb. It unfolds. Ecologies do not progress toward a final form. They reveal potentials that were always latent within their relational fields, becoming visible only when the conditions for their expression are present. Rupture is not regression from a developmental path—it is disclosure of what the field was already carrying but could not yet reveal. The history of an ecology is not a record of its approximation toward some telos. It is the record of what became possible to see and to reorganize, under what conditions, and at what cost.

This means the image of development must change. Not a ladder. Not a mountain. Not even a staircase.

A spring.

Water emerging from a source does not become more itself by climbing. It becomes itself by continuing to move, to find the paths available to it, to take the shape of the terrain it encounters. The spring does not transcend its source. It unfolds from it.

History, on this account, is the process through which relational possibilities become progressively visible to themselves—through which ecologies gradually become capable of recognizing the structures that organize them, and through that recognition, of reorganizing toward greater coherence, greater responsiveness, greater capacity to hold complexity without exclusion.

The question Temporal Ecology asks is not what comes after this.

It is what is trying to emerge through this.

The Cognitive Ecology Model made the relational turn. It shifted the unit of analysis from the individual to the relational field, and in doing so, it changed what questions were possible to ask about neurodivergence, consciousness, and human difference.

The temporal turn is the next extension of that move.

It does not abandon what CEM built. It asks CEM to do something it has not yet been asked to do: account not only for how consciousness emerges within ecologies, but for how ecologies themselves develop, accumulate, rupture, and become available for transformation through time.

If the relational turn taught us that mind is ecological, then the temporal turn asks us to recognize that ecology is historical.

And if ecology is historical, then development is not something that happens to a person.

It is something that happens through a field—slowly, recursively, through rupture and sedimentation and return—until what was latent becomes visible, and what was visible becomes, at last, available for something new.

There is a word I keep coming back to. Not a dramatic word — an economic one, the kind that shows up in policy papers and budget discussions and the dry language of how societies account for the movement of resources from one place to another.

The word is subsidy.

A subsidy, in economic terms, is a transfer. A situation in which one party receives a benefit at below-market cost because someone else is absorbing part of the actual cost. The recipient of a subsidy often doesn’t know they are receiving one. The cost is just... lower than it would otherwise be. The service is just... available. The person providing it has just... managed to make it work, somehow, through mechanisms that are not examined because the examination is inconvenient and the not-examining is free.

I want to talk about a subsidy that most of us have been running for most of our lives. One that nobody named, nobody counted, and nobody — including us — fully understood we were providing.

Think about what it costs to replace the things many of us have provided, casually, continuously, as the background condition of every relationship and workplace and community we have ever moved through.

The emotional management — the reading of rooms, the sensing of tensions before they surface, the quiet work of keeping the temperature calibrated so that things don’t escalate into the kind of conflict that costs everyone more than the prevention did. If you tried to obtain this through formal channels — a therapist on retainer, a mediator on call, a consultant trained in organizational dynamics — you would pay a great deal of money for something approximating a fraction of what many of us have provided as simply the way we are.

The institutional memory — the knowing where things are stored and why decisions were made and which relationships need careful handling and what the history is. The employee who becomes, over years, the person everyone goes to when they need to understand how something actually works, as distinct from how it is supposed to work. If you tried to formalize this function, to hire for it deliberately, to compensate it at the rate it actually contributes — you would discover that it was worth considerably more than it was being paid.

The crisis absorption — the person who, when something goes wrong, becomes the stable point around which everything reorganizes. Who can hold the distress of a system in crisis without being destabilized by it herself. Or who can be destabilized by it and still function, because functioning is what she has always done, because there was no other option, because the crisis was happening and someone had to absorb it and she was there.

The coordination — not the formal kind, not the kind that shows up in job descriptions or gets compensated with a title, but the invisible coordination of the needs of people who are not communicating with each other but whose needs are, nonetheless, in relationship. The person who holds the whole picture because she is the only one who can see all of it. The labor of that holding, which falls between every formal role and responsibility, which lives in the gaps, which everyone relies on and no one counts.

These things have market value. They have significant market value. They are not free. They just appear free, because the person providing them has been absorbing the cost herself. In her nervous system. In her sleep. In the years that might have been spent differently.

I want to be careful here about something, because I think it matters.

When I say that the labor was uncompensated, I am not saying it was unwillingly given. Much of it came from genuine care — from real empathy, real attentiveness, real investment in the people and systems being supported. The love was real. The commitment was real. The desire to be useful, to be needed, to contribute something that mattered — these were real, and they were not pathological, and I am not interested in an analysis that retroactively converts every act of generosity into a symptom.

But here is the thing about love and labor when they become entangled in this particular way: the love can be genuine and the extraction can still be real. These are not mutually exclusive. A person can care deeply about the people she is supporting and also be absorbing costs that should be distributed differently. A family or workplace or community can receive enormous value from one person’s labor and have absolutely no malicious intent while also never once asking what the labor costs or whether the current arrangement is remotely equitable.

Extraction does not require villains. It requires only that the labor be available, and that no one ask too carefully about what making it available costs the person providing it.

Systems sustain themselves on what they don’t examine. The care was there. It continued to be there. The system learned to route its needs through the reliable source, the way water finds the path of least resistance — not through intention but through the simple logic of what works.

What fascinates me — what I find myself returning to, again and again — is the moment when the subsidy stops.

When she burns out. When she becomes ill. When she finally, for whatever combination of reasons, can no longer provide at the rate that had been established as normal. When the infrastructure fails.

The response, almost universally, is confusion. Genuine confusion. What happened to her? She was always so capable. She was always so together. There is no malice in the question. There is only a framework that cannot account for what it is seeing, because the framework was built without reference to what had been happening all along.

The subsidy had been running so long that its withdrawal looked like a failure. The extraction had been so thorough that its limit looked like a deficiency. The person was the same person she had always been. What changed was only that the account, finally, had run out.

And here is what I want to say about that, as clearly as I can:

Running out is not failure. Running out is arithmetic. Running out is what happens when a system spends faster than it replenishes, for long enough, regardless of how capable or committed or generous the person running it is. You cannot will your way out of a depleted account. You cannot be resilient enough to make an unsustainable arrangement sustainable. You cannot try harder at a problem that effort alone cannot solve.

The account was always going to run out. The only question was when.

I have been thinking about what it would mean to take this seriously — not as a personal insight, not as a thing individuals recognize about their own lives and then manage more skillfully going forward, but as an accounting problem. A structural problem. The kind that requires structural responses.

Because the subsidy is not incidental to the systems it has been supporting. It is load-bearing. The families and workplaces and communities that have been running on this labor are not going to stop needing what it provided just because the person providing it has reached her limit. The needs will continue. The question is what happens to them — whether they get redistributed, formalized, compensated, and met in ways that don’t concentrate their cost in one person’s body. Or whether the system simply finds another source and the process begins again.

Individually, the most useful thing I know to do with this is name it. Not as a complaint, not as an accusation, but as a description — an accurate account of what the arrangement actually is, so that it can be seen clearly enough to make genuine choices about it.

What am I providing that has not been counted? What would it cost to obtain elsewhere? Who is receiving the benefit of this, and do they know? Is the current arrangement sustainable, and if not, what would a sustainable version look like?

These questions don’t have easy answers. But they are the right questions. And for a long time, many of us were not asking them — because we didn’t have the framework to understand that we were the ones absorbing the cost, or because the framework we were given told us that absorbing it was simply what good people do.

It is what good people do. It is also, when it is one-directional and unexamined and structurally reproduced across a lifetime, a form of extraction. Both things are true. The goodness doesn’t cancel the extraction. The extraction doesn’t cancel the goodness.

It just means the accounting has never been done.

I have been doing this accounting, in various forms, for several years now. It has taken me places I didn’t expect — into feminist economics and disability studies and the philosophy of knowledge and the particular experiences of women who were never supposed to need anything at all.

What I found, in that accounting, is the subject of something I have been writing for a long time. I’ll tell you more about it soon.

For now, I just wanted to name the subsidy. To say: this is a real thing, it has a real structure, and the cost has been real even when it was invisible.

You knew it in your body before you had words for it.

This is me, trying to give you some of the words.

Before anyone else, I want to tell you something.

Read more

People often ask me what I believe.

The question is understandable, though I have never found it easy to answer. Depending on the conversation, I might describe myself as Buddhist, spiritually curious, agnostic, or simply uncertain. On different days I have found wisdom in Hindu philosophy, Indigenous worldviews, Taoism, recovery spirituality, Christianity, psychology, systems theory, and science. At various points in my life, I have also called myself an atheist.

The honest answer is that I have never fully belonged to any tradition.

For many years, I viewed this as a failure. Most spiritual stories seem to move toward resolution. A person searches, struggles, discovers the truth, and eventually arrives. My own experience has been quite different. The older I get, the less interested I become in arrival. What once felt like indecision increasingly feels like a commitment to exploration itself.

This was not always the case.

As a child, I desperately wanted certainty.

I grew up fascinated by religion, though perhaps not in the way religious people would have preferred. I was less interested in worship than investigation. While other children seemed content to accept the beliefs of their families, I became preoccupied with a question that struck me as both obvious and urgent: if there are hundreds of religions, how does anyone know they have chosen the right one?

Read more

Later this today, I’ll be publishing a new essay called The Spirituality of an Unsettled Mind.

Before I do, I wanted to look back.

Not because the new essay represents a conclusion, and certainly not because I believe I have finally answered the questions that have followed me for most of my life.

If anything, the opposite is true.

The older I get, the less interested I become in certainty.

What I have discovered instead is that some questions are worth carrying even when they resist resolution. They become companions rather than problems. They shape the way we move through the world. They quietly reorganize our lives.

Spirituality has been one of those questions for me.

That may surprise some readers.

After all, there have been periods of my life when I identified as an atheist. There have been periods when I was immersed in Buddhism, periods when I was studying Hindu philosophy, periods when I was obsessed with psychology, systems theory, neurodiversity, collective intelligence, and eventually Cognitive Ecology. Looking across the archive, the inquiry often appears fragmented, as though I kept abandoning one subject for another.

Looking back now, I don’t think that’s what happened.

I think I have been investigating the same mystery for decades.

I just kept encountering it through different doors.

Before the Archive

Long before there was a Substack, there was a kid asking uncomfortable questions.

I was fascinated by religion from an early age, though perhaps not in the way religious institutions would have preferred. I wanted explanations. I wanted coherence. I wanted to know how anyone could be certain they had found the correct worldview when hundreds of other worldviews existed alongside it.

The more I studied religion, the more complicated things became.

I met thoughtful Christians and thoughtful atheists. Compassionate believers and cruel believers. Wise people and foolish people in every camp imaginable. The labels never seemed to predict the person.

Eventually I drifted toward atheism.

Not because I had solved the question of God, but because I had become skeptical of certainty itself.

Years later, during recovery, the question returned in a different form.

A chance encounter with a spiritual teacher named Ravidas introduced me to Eastern philosophy and set off a period of intense study. I devoured books on Buddhism, mindfulness, Hindu philosophy, meditation, neuropsychology, and consciousness. In the span of a year, I read well over a hundred books, trying to understand why so many contemplative traditions seemed to arrive at insights that modern psychology was only beginning to rediscover.

Around the same time, I wrote an essay called No Self, No Matter.

It explored one of the most influential ideas I have ever encountered: the Buddhist doctrine of non-self.

At the time, I thought I was writing about Buddhism.

Looking back, I think I was writing about identity.

More specifically, I was beginning to ask a question that would follow me for years:

What if the self is not a thing but a process?

I didn’t realize it then, but that question would eventually reappear in almost everything I wrote.

July–August 2024: Building a Framework for Wonder

When I launched this Substack, I wasn’t planning to write about spirituality.

At least not explicitly.

The early essays were eclectic, even chaotic. They explored intuition, imagination, neurodiversity, collective intelligence, education, psychology, and social change. Yet hidden within many of them was a recurring fascination with meaning-making itself.

Illuminating Harmony: The Meta-Religion of the Nine Lamps was one of the first clues. Rather than arguing for a particular religion, I found myself imagining a framework capable of learning from many traditions at once.

In Unlocking Intuition: The Journey of Synpraxis and Dissociation, I explored intuition not as magic but as a form of pattern recognition emerging from lived experience.

In Embracing the Unknowable, I began wrestling directly with uncertainty itself. Rather than treating ambiguity as a temporary condition to be overcome, I found myself wondering whether uncertainty might be a permanent feature of human existence.

At roughly the same time, I wrote Enlightenment for Sale, a satirical critique of spiritual consumerism. Behind the humor was a serious concern: what happens when spirituality becomes another product in a culture obsessed with optimization and self-improvement?

Looking back, I can see a tension emerging.

I was searching for meaning while simultaneously becoming suspicious of anyone claiming to possess it.

The Metamodern Turn

One of the most important discoveries during this period was metamodernism.

At first, it seemed like an intellectual framework.

Later, I realized it was becoming a spiritual one.

Metamodernism offered a way of inhabiting uncertainty without collapsing into cynicism. It rejected both naïve certainty and detached irony. Instead, it encouraged oscillation: between skepticism and hope, between seriousness and playfulness, between knowing and not knowing.

This perspective began appearing everywhere.

The ‘Burbs: A Metamodern Manifesto in Suburban Surrealism.

The Whimsical Week.

Oscillating Truths.

Discovering Metamodernism Through the Darkness of Dark.

Even pieces that appeared unrelated were increasingly concerned with the same underlying challenge:

How do we remain open in a world where certainty is unavailable?

The question wasn’t merely philosophical.

It was deeply personal.

September 2024: The Inquiry Deepens

If I had to identify a turning point in the archive, September 2024 would be a strong candidate.

Several essays published during this period now read like early drafts of ideas that would eventually become central to Cognitive Ecology.

The Sacred Journey of Reconnection explored spirituality through somatic awareness, trauma healing, and the integration of internal systems. Spirituality became less about belief and more about relationship.

Synpraxis: The Metamodern Convergence of Complexity, Quantum Mechanics, and Hindu Spiritual Wisdom attempted something ambitious: placing systems theory, science, and spirituality into conversation with one another.

Then came The Hidden Truth of Our Interconnected Existence.

Even the title now feels like a preview of everything that followed.

The essay explored a simple but profound possibility: perhaps separateness is not the most accurate way to understand reality. Perhaps relationship comes first. Perhaps identity emerges from connection rather than existing prior to it.

At the time, I was still using spiritual language.

Soon I would begin using ecological language.

The underlying insight remained the same.

The Self Becomes a Question

Around this period, I noticed another thread emerging.

Many of my essays were becoming preoccupied with identity.

What If You Could Meet Every Part of Yourself? explored internal multiplicity.

For the Ones in Between questioned personality categories and fixed identities.

Reviving Bella examined selfhood through a metamodern lens.

What struck me later was how closely these questions echoed the Buddhist inquiry that had captivated me years earlier.

The language had changed.

The question had not.

What is a self?

What remains when identities shift?

How much of who we are emerges through relationships, contexts, and stories rather than fixed essences?

I was still chasing the implications of anatta.

I just hadn’t noticed.

October 2024: Spirituality Becomes Relational

By October, the inquiry had moved decisively beyond religion.

The Dance of Particle and Paradox drew on Taoist wisdom.

Walking the Path of Inclusivity explicitly connected spirituality, neurodiversity, and unity.

The emerging SYNPRAXIS essays increasingly emphasized paradox, emergence, inclusion, and the limitations of binary thinking.

At the same time, my writing on autism, giftedness, exclusion, belonging, and social systems was becoming increasingly ecological.

I didn’t recognize it then, but spirituality was no longer functioning as a separate topic.

It had become embedded within everything else.

The focus had shifted from belief to relationship.

From doctrine to participation.

From individual transformation to collective emergence.

The Phase That Didn’t Look Spiritual

This brings me to perhaps the most surprising realization of all.

For much of 2025 and 2026, I stopped writing explicitly about spirituality.

Instead, I wrote about giftedness.

Autism.

Collective intelligence.

Burnout.

Inclusion.

Cognitive diversity.

Ecology.

Artificial intelligence.

At first glance, these topics appear unrelated to spirituality.

Looking back, I no longer think they are.

The giftedness inquiry asked how potential emerges.

The autism inquiry asked how environments shape flourishing.

The collective intelligence inquiry asked how minds think together.

The Cognitive Ecology inquiry asked how meaning, intelligence, identity, and relationship emerge within larger systems.

These are not separate questions.

They are variations of the same question.

The question that began with religion eventually became a question about emergence itself.

How do selves emerge?

How does meaning emerge?

How does wisdom emerge?

How does belonging emerge?

How does intelligence emerge?

And what kinds of environments help those things flourish?

The Spirituality of an Unsettled Mind

Looking back, I can see that I never found the religion I was searching for as a child.

Instead, I found a lifelong inquiry.

I found Buddhism’s non-self.

Hinduism’s interconnectedness.

Taoism’s paradox.

Recovery’s humility.

Psychology’s insights into human suffering.

Systems theory’s emphasis on emergence.

Ecology’s understanding of relationship.

None of these traditions provided a complete map.

Yet each illuminated part of the territory.

The Spirituality of an Unsettled Mind is my attempt to tell that story.

Not the story of a conversion.

Not the story of finding certainty.

But the story of what happened when certainty stopped being the goal.

Because after all these years, I have become less interested in determining which worldview is correct.

And far more interested in understanding the conditions under which wisdom emerges.

That inquiry continues.

And, I suspect, always will.

There is something about contemporary conversations on narcissism that I find increasingly difficult to ignore.

The more attention the topic receives, the less certain I become that everyone is talking about the same thing.

One person describes years of confusion, chronic self-doubt, shifting standards of accountability, and the strange feeling that reality itself has become unstable. Another responds by explaining that narcissistic personality disorder is a clinical diagnosis. The first insists they are describing harm. The second insists they are describing a category. Both may be entirely correct, and yet both often leave the conversation feeling misunderstood.

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This semester I’m taking a course in Practices of Transformative and Restorative Justice. One of the things I appreciate most about my professor is that she gives us a great deal of freedom in how we engage the material. Some students are drawn primarily toward theory. Others toward praxis. Some are interested in understanding existing frameworks. Others are focused on developing facilitation skills and practicing restorative approaches.

You can probably guess where I landed.

Both and.

Always both and.

Theory and praxis. Reflection and action. The map and the territory.

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People ask me sometimes how I got to where I am.

The question always catches me off guard because it requires me to stop and look backward. Most of the time I’m focused on whatever question is in front of me, whatever idea I’m wrestling with, whatever essay I’m writing. Then someone asks me how I got here and I find myself thinking, Oh. I guess I did get somewhere.

That’s a strange realization.

For most of my life, I wasn’t trying to get somewhere. I was trying to figure out why I felt so out of place. Not in a dramatic way. Just in that persistent, background-hum kind of way. The feeling that everyone else understood something about being human that I had somehow missed. Like there was an instruction manual floating around that never made it into my hands.

I didn’t have language for it then, but looking back I think what I was searching for was belonging.

Long before graduate school. Long before autism. Long before peacebuilding, systems thinking, and all the theories I would eventually become obsessed with.

The inquiry started with connection.

It started with a question about where I came from.

Years ago, I reached out to a Cherokee psychologist because I wanted to understand more about my ancestry. Like many people whose family stories have been shaped by assimilation, silence, and time, I had questions. I wanted to know what had been lost. I wanted to know what remained. I wanted to understand my roots.

To my surprise, she agreed to meet with me.

What I remember most is how wonderfully odd the whole thing was.

Not a university office.

Not a conference.

Not some grand spiritual retreat.

A tiny Japanese restaurant in Salem, OR.

We sat drinking tea together—a Cherokee woman and a woman trying to untangle her own ancestral story. Looking back, it feels almost symbolic, though I don’t think I noticed that at the time.

At the time, I was focused on my questions.

I arrived wanting information.

What I left with was something else.

At some point in the conversation she told me that belonging wasn’t about blood. That we all belong to the Earth.

I wish I could tell you that the heavens opened and I immediately understood the profundity of what she was saying.

That isn’t how it happened.

I nodded. I drank my tea. We continued talking.

But her words stayed with me.

The best truths seem to do that. They don’t arrive as answers. They arrive as companions. They sit quietly beside you for years while you continue living your life, only to discover later that they have been reshaping your understanding the entire time.

I don’t think I realized it then, but that conversation became the beginning of an inquiry that would eventually shape much of my life.

I started noticing belonging everywhere.

In recovery.

In community.

In conflict.

In exclusion.

In education.

In systems.

In the stories people tell themselves about who they are and where they fit.

Years later, I would find myself writing papers about belonging. Studying it formally. Examining it through psychology, social change, peacebuilding, and eventually through what would become my own work around cognitive ecology.

But the funny thing is that the deeper I studied belonging, the less it seemed to behave like a destination.

For most of my life, I treated belonging as something that lived somewhere in the future. Something I would eventually earn. Maybe after enough healing. Maybe after enough success. Maybe after enough self-discovery. Maybe after I finally figured out what was wrong with me.

The older I get, the less convincing that story becomes.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped asking, Where do I belong?

And started asking, What if I already do?

That shift changed everything.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. More like a compass slowly turning north.

These days people sometimes tell me that I seem confident. That I seem comfortable in my own skin. That I know who I am.

What they don’t see is that I arrived here with more uncertainty than I had when I started.

The difference is that uncertainty no longer feels like a threat.

I don’t have imposter syndrome anymore.

Not because I know everything.

Quite the opposite.

I know how much I don’t know.

But I also know I belong here.

And perhaps that is what changed.

Not my certainty.

My relationship to myself.

When I think about the beginning of that journey, I don’t think about a classroom or a book or a theory.

I think about a small Japanese restaurant in Salem.

A cup of tea.

A Cherokee woman.

And a sentence that took years to unfold.

You belong to the Earth.

Maybe I spent all those years studying belonging because part of me recognized the truth before I could understand it.

Or maybe life simply has a wonderful sense of humor.

Either way, the inquiry continues.

As I finished writing this, I found myself thinking about my recent conversation with Analise Gonzalez. We spent a good portion of the episode talking about belonging—not as a concept, but as a lived experience.

Listening back, I was struck by how much of my life has quietly revolved around this question.

The funny thing is that I spent years looking for belonging as though it were a destination, only to discover that it keeps showing up as an inquiry.

A conversation.

A relationship.

A cup of tea in a tiny Japanese restaurant.

A podcast years later that somehow circles back to the same place.

If you’ve listened to the episode, thank you for walking alongside me in that inquiry.

And if you haven’t, perhaps this is your invitation.

The conversation continues.