🧃 Session 14: The Problem With “Awareness” Campaigns

🌿 Transformative Education for Neurodivergent Liberation

“Awareness without accountability is like a tree without roots—visible, perhaps even striking, but ultimately disconnected from what sustains life.”

🛑 Content Note: This session speaks candidly about tokenization, projection, and the ways our stories are sometimes co-opted in the name of “allyship” or “awareness.” It may bring up feelings of being used, misinterpreted, or invisibilized. Take care of yourself while reading.

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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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🌀 A Note on How This Space Is Held

In recent sessions, I’ve shared some of my most vulnerable truths—about system harm, burnout, and the complex terrain of advocacy. And I’ve paid attention to how those truths have been received. Sometimes, resonance opens into connection. Other times, it slips into projection. Sometimes, what’s offered as support can begin to re-center the very dynamics we’re here to unravel.

So I want to name something clearly, and with care:

This is a shared space—but it is not an unbound one.

It is spacious—but also held with intention.

It is welcoming—but not open to unexamined extraction.

It is reflexive—not performative.

I do not hold this space as an expert to be revered, or a screen onto which others can project their stories. I hold it as someone walking a path of integrity, tenderness, and clarity—with a heart that is open, but not unguarded.

Your truth is welcome here.

Your reflection is invited.

But it must arrive with attunement, not appropriation.

With curiosity, not entitlement.

With the humility to ask, not the urgency to insert.

Discomfort may arise. That’s okay. Discomfort can be a wise teacher.

But this space is not here to soothe dominant unease. It is here to support collective liberation—and that requires edges. Edges made of love. Edges that protect what is sacred.

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🔁 "Awareness" Without Redistribution Is Just Branding

We live in a world saturated with awareness campaigns: Autism Awareness. Mental Health Awareness. DEI statements from corporations. Rainbow logos in June.

But what does awareness actually do?

Often, it centers the spectator—not the subject. It amplifies the onlooker’s insight—not the impacted person’s truth. It rewards recognition—but avoids responsibility.

It makes people feel good for knowing we exist—while doing nothing to shift the structures that make our existence precarious.

Awareness that doesn’t shift power is just optics.

Awareness that doesn’t lead to redistribution is performance.

Awareness that doesn’t center lived experience becomes a brand—one we didn’t consent to.

And when it’s repackaged as progress, it often becomes harder to critique. Let’s dig into why.

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🫧 Awareness That Centers Comfort Over Change

Most awareness campaigns aren’t built to challenge power. They’re built to maintain comfort—especially for those with the power to change things.

They invite you to see us, but not to listen too closely. To feel inspired, but not implicated. To admire our resilience, but never ask what made it necessary.

That’s how “awareness” becomes a product:

• Autism is packaged as quirkiness or genius—not systemic exclusion.

• Trauma becomes aestheticized as survival—not a mirror of institutional violence.

• Neurodivergence is celebrated when it boosts creativity or productivity—but pathologized the moment it resists.

Even in interpersonal spaces, this shows up. We become awareness objects. Our posts, our breakdowns, our breakthroughs are consumed as insight—but not supported as human experience.

“You inspire me,” someone says. But underneath it, the power dynamic remains: they’re still the interpreter. Still the centered one. Still the safe one.

If your awareness makes you feel good but doesn’t make you examine your power—it’s not solidarity. It’s consumption.

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🔨 When We Become Raw Material for Someone Else’s Self-Construction

Sometimes “awareness” doesn’t just distort us—it uses us.

Our stories become scaffolding for someone else’s persona. Our trauma becomes texture for their insight. Our language gets lifted, stylized, and repackaged as proof of their allyship or spiritual depth.

It can happen subtly:

• A colleague starts using our phrasing without credit.

• A commenter reframes our disclosure as something they “sensed.”

• A wellness practitioner reinterprets our survival as part of their healing lineage.

It can happen blatantly:

• A workshop lifts our lived experience and recasts it through a clinical or academic lens—without consent.

• A social media creator uses our pain to build a brand—while we’re still living it.

And while it may come from a desire to connect or uplift, we need to name what’s happening clearly: this isn’t resonance. It’s appropriation in relational drag.

And here’s the deeper harm: When others build themselves using fragments of our truth—without consent, credit, or accountability—they blur the origin of insight. They overwrite the labor. They collapse our clarity into their brand.

“I’m so glad you said that,” they tell us— But what they mean is: Now I can say it, too.

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👁️ Not All Visibility Is Witnessing

Being seen is not the same as being witnessed.

Visibility can be forced. It can be curated. It can be flattened. We’re held up as symbols—but not held as people. We become metaphors, case studies, campaigns.

Witnessing is different. It doesn’t extract. It doesn’t interpret. It doesn’t tokenize. It sits beside. It asks. It listens. It follows our lead.

Visibility says, “I see you.” Witnessing asks, “Do you feel held?”

Let me share a story:

I was once invited to contribute a piece to an internal newsletter at my workplace. It was a rare opportunity to share something real—so I did. I wrote openly, honestly, about my lived experience as an autistic person navigating that system. I named the trauma. I used a word that was true and necessary.

And then… I was asked to change it.

Not by leadership directly. No. A peer was tasked with delivering the message—one that framed the truth of my experience as "not trauma-informed." I was told the word might hurt others who read it.

But the harm had already happened—to me. And now, I was being asked to sanitize that harm to protect the comfort of the system.

The visibility was conditional.

And the witnessing? It never arrived.

Too often, awareness campaigns stop at visibility. They “raise awareness” by making us visible in predetermined ways:

• The palatable autistic child

• The sanitized survivor

• The smiling “diverse hire”

• The “inspiring” story of overcoming

These narratives don’t liberate. They contain.

And when we disrupt them—when we say, “This isn’t the full truth”—we’re told we’re ungrateful. Or angry. Or divisive.

Because true witnessing disrupts the narrative. And discomfort, when power is involved, often leads to silencing.

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🎯 Who Is Awareness Actually For?

Let’s ask a hard question:

When someone says they’re “raising awareness”—who are they raising it for?

Because if the people being "seen" already know the reality—already live the harm—then awareness is not for them.

It’s for the spectators. The funders. The gatekeepers. The ones with influence, but not necessarily integrity.

Our complexity gets flattened into messaging that teaches about us, without being with us.

Awareness becomes a performance—a way to say “we care” without shifting power.

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🏷️ The Branding of Identity

In nonprofit, corporate, and public health sectors, awareness has become a commodity.

• “Lived experience” is a buzzword.

• “Diversity” is a checkbox.

• “Trauma-informed” is stamped on spaces that are anything but.

Organizations love to say they’re inclusive. They love to feature us on their websites and reports.

But when we speak from our center—when we challenge the very structures they claim to be transforming—we’re often met with silence. Or surveillance. Or removal.

Commodification of identity is especially harmful when the source of the insight is excluded from power, safety, or authorship.

That’s not inclusion. That’s assimilation, packaged as progress.

We become extractable: hired, but not heard. Quoted, but not cited. Celebrated, but not protected.

Awareness without rooted accountability is like a tree with no soil—it may look like it’s standing, but it’s already dying.

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🚨 Case in Point: Institutional Awareness Campaigns

Autism Speaks is one of the most cited awareness organizations—and one of the most criticized. Their messaging has often portrayed autism as a tragedy or disease to be cured, while sidelining the voices of autistic people themselves. That’s not awareness. That’s erasure.

Corporate DEI campaigns also often lack substance. Statements of solidarity are released without policy changes, leadership shifts, or resource redistribution. They offer visibility—without protection. Inclusion—without transformation.

Performative allyship is often more harmful than silence, because it cloaks inertia in the language of progress.

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🔍 Reflexive Journal Prompt

Reflect on a time you encountered an institutional awareness campaign.

• Did it lead to real change?

• How did it feel in your body—as someone directly or indirectly impacted?

• Whose voice was centered? Whose voice was missing?

Write. Draw. Speak. Feel. Let your body hold the answer.

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✨ Closing Reflection

True awareness requires more than slogans. It requires structural honesty. It requires people with power asking, What are we willing to give up so others can be safe?

As we move forward:

• Let’s stop being objects of awareness.

• Let’s start being architects of accountability.

• Let’s stop asking to be seen—and start demanding to be followed.

You deserve more than a hashtag. You deserve wholeness. You deserve truth.

Let’s build that world—together.

Take a breath. Notice where these words land in your body. What do you want to protect in yourself, and in others, going forward?

💫 New Sessions Every Monday & Wednesday

This 12-week journey unfolds twice a week—every Monday and Wednesday—with each session building on the last. Each one is a living inquiry. A co-created space for truth-telling, not performance. For liberation, not optics.

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

✨ Session 15 – From Inclusion to Belonging: What We Really Need
We’ll explore how “inclusion” often functions as a metric of proximity to normativity—while true belonging asks something deeper. It doesn’t just invite us in—it asks what we’re building together, and how we protect what matters once we’re here.

💬 Share Your Reflections
This space grows through our collective presence. Your stories, questions, and sensations are part of the learning. You’re invited to comment, respond, or simply let the words move in your body. If it’s safer to share privately, that’s welcome too.

💖 A Note on Support
This work is freely offered, because liberation shouldn’t be locked behind a paywall. But it is labor—emotional, intellectual, spiritual.

If you have the capacity to support this offering through a paid subscription, you’re not just supporting me—you’re sustaining a community practice. All support helps keep this series accessible to those who need it and fuels the broader work of The Compassion Collective: a space rooted in mutual care, justice, and systems transformation.

Every subscription, every share, every moment of resonance helps this container hold.

Thank you for walking this path with me.

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With care,
Shamani of The Compassion Collective