Interiority Is Sovereign

A Decolonized Ethic for Understanding Minds (Especially Neurodivergent Ones)

Interiority, uncolonized (April 10, 2020). Painted at the beginning of a long season of unlearning what others had claimed to know about me. A map of the meanings that don’t translate neatly—and don’t need to.

About the Author

Sher Griffin (they/she) is an Autistic, neuroqueer educator and writer working toward a doctorate in Transformative Social Change. They study trauma, communication, and the strange, beautiful ecologies of meaning that neurodivergent people carry inside them.

Sher’s work blends scholarship with lived experience (because separating them never made sense). They call this mutual aid scholarship—research as care, writing as reciprocity, theory as something we survive with.

Influenced by Black feminism, disability justice, and decolonial thought, Sher writes about interiority, sovereignty, and the art of not letting other people colonize your meaning. When in doubt, they believe in opacity, gentleness, and the slow, ethical work of witnessing.

I. Interiority Is Sovereign

(Even If People Treat It Like a Community Garden)

There’s a familiar cultural fantasy—one that slips into the room like it owns the deed—that other people’s inner worlds are decipherable if you’re just perceptive enough, spiritual enough, radically honest enough, or (my favorite) wounded enough to “see through” them. The myth goes: if you squint hard enough at another person, their whole psyche will bloom open for you like a cooperative flower. (Spoiler, again: it won’t. And if it does, that’s not blooming; that’s trauma compliance.)

Your interiority—your thought currents, sensory textures, symbolic patterning, the way meaning condenses inside you like weather—is not a public park. It is not a community garden with tidy rows and helpful signage. It is not the intellectual equivalent of “take a cutting, leave a cutting.” It is not a democratic space. It isn’t even a shared space.

It is yours.
Full stop.
Solar sovereignty.

And yet, there is this strange social entitlement—something between colonizer impulse and spiritual bypass cosplay—where people assume your inner life is not simply readable but theirs to read. As if “attunement” means “interpretive squatters’ rights.” As if the ability to observe your micro-expressions, your hesitations, your linguistic shards, somehow grants them access to the architecture behind your eyes.

It’s not curiosity. Curiosity asks questions.
This is something else.
This is interpretive trespass.

Glissant’s insistence on opacity lands like a boundary stone here. Opacity is not secrecy; it is ethical contour (Glissant, 1997). Opacity is what allows a self to remain a self, not a projection screen for someone else’s personal theater. It is the structural integrity of being.

But the world we inherit—and the interpersonal cultures we swim through—operate on the opposite assumption: that transparency is a virtue, that legibility is moral, that interior life should be illuminated for inspection like it’s evidence waiting to be entered into court.

And here’s the trick: once people believe they’re entitled to interpret you, they believe they’re entitled to correct you.

That’s where Fanon steps in with his exquisite dissection of domination: before land is taken, meaning is taken (Fanon, 1952/1986). Before bodies are controlled, narratives are seized. Before the colonized are ruled, they are read—and misread so completely that the misreading becomes the blueprint for control.

Lugones, with her surgeon’s precision, shows how coloniality sorts interiorities into categories: whose inner worlds are treated as complex, and whose are treated as obvious or primitive (Lugones, 2007). It’s never just misinterpretation; it’s hierarchy embodied.

And in everyday life, this dynamic still whispers its spells:

• “I know what you’re really trying to say.”

• “I can tell what’s going on for you beneath the surface.”

• “Your tone reveals your real intention.”

These aren’t moments of insight.
They’re moments of appropriation.

Interiority becomes a commons—trampled, harvested, repackaged—while you are left standing inside your own body like a displaced resident wondering when the HOA voted you out.

What I’m saying is simple:
Your interior landscape is not a terrain for others to map.
It has its own weather systems, its own migratory patterns, its own symbolic ecology.
To enter it without invitation is not intimacy.
It is intrusion dressed as closeness.

Interiority is sovereign.
Even if people behave like they missed the announcement.

This is where the paywall lives.

If you’re able to support this work financially, thank you—your contribution keeps mutual aid scholarship alive, and helps me continue writing pieces with this much depth, care, and psychic labor woven into them.

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Either way, honor the work with presence, not pressure.