📛 Session 13: Visibility ≠ Liberation - When Systems Can’t Hold the Truth

🌿 Transformative Education for Neurodivergent Liberation

From Week Two: The leadership kickoff for “Behavioral Health Transformation.” Words like “Dignity,” “Agency,” “Healing-Centered” filled the board. I believed them. Until the system showed me what it actually rewards.

🛑 Content Note: This session includes personal reflections on burnout, workplace trauma, and systemic ableism. It’s being shared on the two year anniversary of the week I spiraled into a level of burnout I didn’t yet have language for. The week I found myself frantically calling 988. The week I made the decision to quit what I thought was my dream job—not because I wanted to, but because I had to save my own life.

*If you’re currently in crisis, you’re not alone. Call 988 or reach out to someone you trust. This space holds your pain with care.*

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📌 If you’re just joining us, I recommend reading [Session 1 – Why I’m Leading This Workshop (My Positionality)] for shared agreements and to understand how this space is held.

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⚖️ Believability Is Not Distributed Equally

Not everyone is believed when they speak their truth.
Not in workplaces.
Not in systems.
Not even in spaces designed for equity.

I learned this the hard way.

I was hired into a position through an equity initiative—meant to bring lived experience into leadership. On paper, it looked like progress. But when I began speaking from that lived experience—when I named trauma, sensory overload, systemic misattunement—I stopped being welcomed. I started being managed. Sidelined. Treated as unstable rather than insightful.

The irony? I worked for the Oregon Health Authority. Behavioral Health Unit. System Transformation and Alignment.

And still—when I disclosed that I was autistic, the system reacted not with support, but with suspicion. I wasn’t believed. Or worse, I was believed just enough to be seen as a liability.

And I am a white woman.
Imagine what that would have looked like for a Black, trans, autistic woman in my shoes.

The system said it wanted transformation—but only the kind that didn't disrupt its power structures. It wanted equity—but only if it came in a palatable, professionalized package. It hired me for my story—and then rejected the parts that didn’t fit the narrative.

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🏢 Systems Say They Want Lived Experience—Until It Disrupts the Script

There’s a growing trend in social service, nonprofit, and public health sectors: hiring people with “lived experience.” It’s branded as inclusive, trauma-informed, equity-centered.

And sometimes, it is.

But too often, what systems really want is a story they can showcase—not a voice that will question the structure.

They want lived experience that inspires, not experience that challenges. They want recovery stories with clean arcs. They want resilience without resistance. They want proximity to trauma, not analysis of how the system causes it.

So when someone with lived experience names harm as it's happening—when we say, “This system is activating my trauma,” “These deadlines are unsustainable,” “This workspace is not accessible”—we’re no longer seen as inspiring. We’re seen as inconvenient. Or worse, “too much.”

Inclusion becomes conditional.

And the conditions are rarely transparent.

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🔥 Burnout Wasn’t a Flaw in Me—It Was a Feature of the System

By the time I left, I was barely holding on. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think clearly. I was masking through every meeting, crying between Zoom calls, spiraling in silence while sending “all good!” Teams messages.

And yet—I still wondered if it was me. If I wasn’t resilient enough. If I wasn’t professional enough. If my autism made me “too sensitive” to belong in this space I was supposedly hired to improve.

But here’s the truth I came to:

I wasn’t burning out because I was weak.
I was burning out because the system was unwell.

I was in a workplace that said all the right words: equity, trauma-informed care, lived experience, system transformation. But when I brought my full self—the very self they claimed to value—I was met with silence, side-eyes, and exclusion.

The irony? I was working for the Oregon Health Authority’s Behavioral Health Division, on a team called System Transformation and Alignment. That’s what I was there to do—transform systems.

But when you name harm from the inside, the system doesn’t transform.

It ejects you.

And if this is how I was treated as a white woman with formal credentials—imagine the risk for a Black trans autistic woman in my position. The cost would have been far more devastating.

This is not about individual bad actors. It’s about a structure that cannot hold what it claims to center. A structure that rewards performance and punishes embodiment. A structure that decorates itself in “equity” while still being governed by the values of urgency, hierarchy, and control.

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🧱 The System Spoke Equity, But Operated in Control

They said all the right things.

Equity. Inclusion. Trauma-informed care. Lived experience leadership. System transformation.

But what I encountered wasn’t transformation—it was containment. What I felt wasn’t inclusion—it was surveillance.

When I brought ideas shaped by lived experience, they were either ignored or reframed by someone else with more perceived legitimacy. When I named trauma-informed principles, I was met with silence—or told I was “too emotional.” When I advocated for approaches rooted in actual community voice, the urgency of deadlines or politics always took precedence.

And when I finally said, plainly, “I’m autistic,” everything shifted.

I wasn’t met with curiosity. I was met with caution.

Suddenly, I was hard to manage. Suddenly, my clarity was seen as rigidity. My emotional honesty became unprofessional. My direct communication became a threat to team cohesion.

It was as if the invitation to bring my full self had a hidden asterisk:

As long as it doesn’t make us uncomfortable.

The irony is brutal.

I was hired into a system transformation role—by a division inside a state health authority—tasked with centering lived experience in behavioral health.

But the deeper truth is:
You can’t build trauma-informed systems inside a structure built on urgency, hierarchy, and image management.
You can’t center lived experience in a workplace that’s still shaped by the norms of white dominant culture.

The performance of equity is not the practice of equity.

And when those of us who live at the intersection of neurodivergence, trauma, and systemic insight bring that truth forward—we are not seen as assets. We are seen as disruptions.

And disruptions, in systems like this, get managed out.

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🔥 Burnout Wasn’t a Breakdown—It Was a Boundary

I didn’t see it coming.

Because burnout doesn’t always arrive as collapse. Sometimes it arrives as over-functioning. As pushing through. As staying late and showing up and taking the call because you care so deeply and can’t not care.

But slowly, my body stopped cooperating.

My nervous system felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t eat. My voice trembled in meetings where I used to speak with ease. I started doubting myself—wondering if I was the problem. I started spiraling into shame.

I didn’t know I was in autistic burnout. I didn’t have that language yet. All I knew was that I was unraveling—and no one around me seemed to notice.

Except when I cried. Then, suddenly, I was “too much.”

The week I quit was the week I called 988.

Not because I wanted to die—but because I couldn’t keep living like that. Because the place that said it wanted system transformation was actively breaking my system. Because I was watching myself disappear—again.

That call was my line in the sand.
My nervous system said: You can’t keep betraying yourself for a paycheck.
And I finally listened.

I walked away from what I thought was my dream job. Not because I failed—but because I was done performing for a system that could never hold what I actually brought.

Leaving wasn’t giving up. It was refusing to be erased.

It was choosing my life.

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🏗️ Equity Work Inside Systems That Aren’t Built for Equity

I was hired into a role at the Oregon Health Authority, in the Behavioral Health Unit, doing System Transformation and Alignment. On paper, it sounded like a dream—equity-centered, trauma-informed, community-engaged. I entered the role believing in its promise.

But here’s the contradiction:

You cannot transform systems from within if the internal structure is still operating on hierarchies, urgency culture, and the unspoken expectation that “equity” will only be pursued when it doesn’t make people uncomfortable.

What I learned—painfully—is that equity was welcomed in concept but not in practice.

I was brought in because of my lived experience, but punished when I spoke from it.
I was asked to advise on trauma-informed systems, but denied trauma-informed care in my own workplace.
I was expected to represent “community voice,” but when my voice didn’t match the institution’s tone—I became a problem.

And let’s be real: I am a white autistic woman with formal credentials.
If that was my experience, I can only imagine what it would be like for a Black trans autistic woman in my position.

This wasn’t about individual bad actors. My colleagues were, for the most part, kind people doing their best. But the structure itself—the chain of command, the culture of professionalism, the performance of inclusion—it was incompatible with the kind of relational, embodied, reflexive work true equity demands.

It broke me.
Not because I was weak—but because I was no longer willing to contort myself into a version that could “pass” in systems built on invisibility.

And I’m saying the name of the organization not to shame, but to disrupt the myth that harm doesn’t happen inside the places that claim to be doing better.

It does.
Because systems can’t be trauma-informed if they aren’t willing to be transformed.

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🧭 For Those Still Inside

If you're reading this from the inside of a system—trying to hold your truth while holding a paycheck, trying to create change without collapsing yourself—I see you.

If you're masking your sensory needs in the name of professionalism,
if you're translating your lived experience into palatable language to be "heard,"
if you're naming harm gently so others don't flinch while you bleed inside—
you are not weak.
You are not too sensitive.
You are not the problem.

You are doing something profoundly hard:
surviving with integrity in a space that was never designed to hold your wholeness.

Maybe you're not ready to quit.
Maybe you can’t quit.
Maybe you’re figuring out how to build something new while still surviving what is.

That is sacred work.

But I also want you to know this:
You don’t have to shatter to be taken seriously.
You don’t have to lose your voice to prove you belong.
You don’t have to martyr your body and your spirit for someone else’s version of equity.

Leaving wasn’t failure.
It was survival.
And eventually, it became liberation.

Because my life didn’t end when I walked away.
It began.

So to anyone still navigating the impossible contradictions of advocacy inside systems:
Hold your truth like a compass.
Rest when you need to.
Name what you see.
And when you’re ready, remember—
you’re allowed to walk out the door and build a new one.

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🌀 Closing Reflection: When the Center Is the Only Place to Begin

I want to name something clearly:
Yes, I centered myself in this session.
And there was no other way to tell this truth.

Sometimes, the only way to show the cracks in a system is to speak from the inside of the break.
To trace the harm not as a concept—but as a lived rupture.
To walk readers through what it means to survive structural ableism in real time.

This wasn’t a theoretical takedown of a workplace.
This was the story of my own body, my own voice, my own unraveling inside a system that said all the right words—equity, trauma-informed, transformation—but couldn’t hold a truth that challenged its design.

And I also know: if I were Black, trans, or nonspeaking, the outcome could have been even more devastating.

So let this be a thread, not a spotlight.

Let my story become part of the larger tapestry of voices still waiting to be heard.
Because naming your pain isn’t the opposite of solidarity—sometimes, it’s the bridge into it.

✨ Embodied Integration Prompt

Place your feet flat on the floor.
Notice the contact.
The weight.
The ground that holds you.

Take a breath in. And out—with sound.

Then ask gently:

• Where has your truth been made unwelcome?

• What have you learned to silence in order to survive?

• What would it mean to let yourself be centered—without apology?

Feel the answers.
You don’t have to explain them.
Your body already knows.

“If you feel moved to share, know that your truth belongs here—in whatever form it takes.”

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💫 New Sessions Every Monday & Wednesday

This 12-week journey unfolds twice a week—every Monday and Wednesday—with each session building on the last.

You can view the full session lineup here, and here’s what’s coming next:

✨ Session 14 – The Problem With “Awareness” Campaigns
We’ll explore how mainstream awareness efforts often center comfort over change, optics over equity, and palatability over truth. What happens when being “seen” is just another way to be misunderstood?

💬 Share your reflections, stories, or sensory impressions in the comments—or send them privately if that feels safer. This space deepens through our truths.

💖 A Note on Support
This work will never live behind a paywall.
It’s here to be accessible, community-rooted, and sustained through care.

If you have the means to support it through a paid subscription, you're not just supporting me—you’re helping make this journey available to anyone who needs it.

Every message, every share, every moment of resonance keeps this space alive.

Thank you for being here.

🌿
Shamani of The Compassion Collective