🧭 Session 2: Positionality Isn’t Optional

🌿 Transformative Education for Neurodivergent Liberation

“To not name your location is to risk making your experience the universal truth.”
— bell hooks (paraphrased with love)

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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 learn how this space is held.

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We all come into this work from somewhere.
But not everyone says where.

In disability and neurodivergent spaces, I’ve seen again and again how easy it is to slip into speaking as if our story is the story. And the people most often heard—white, verbal, formally diagnosed, middle-class, and university-adjacent—are usually the ones who’ve been told their voices belong.

I don’t say that to shame anyone. I say it because I’ve been there too.
I’ve been uplifted for how well I speak, and erased for what I’ve said.
I’ve been praised for seeming put-together, and punished when I fell apart.

There were times I didn’t name my location because I didn’t fully understand it.
And there were times I stayed silent because I was afraid I’d be flattened.

But part of transformation is learning to name what shaped us—so we stop confusing our lens with the whole view.

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📍 What Is Positionality?

Positionality is your location within systems of power, privilege, and harm.

It’s not just who you are—it’s where you stand in relation to the forces around you.
It’s how you’ve been shaped, seen, silenced, or supported.

It’s shaped by your:
– Race, class, and family history
– Gender, sexuality, and body
– Diagnosis (or lack thereof), trauma, and neurotype(s)
– Language use, communication style, and ability to navigate systems
– Relationship to formal power (education, employment, healthcare, justice systems)
– Whether or not you’ve been believed

It’s not about performance or guilt.
It’s about orientation.
How you move through the world—and how the world moves around you.

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When I was growing up, we were poor, but we didn’t look like it.
I was a high-achieving kid. I made straight A’s, excelled in gymnastics, and was praised for my “potential.” No one noticed how anxious I was—how often I dissociated, or how carefully I masked. I learned to survive by being exceptional.

That ability to pass gave me protection in some ways.
But it also made my pain invisible. I internalized it. And I broke.

Being white, articulate, and “gifted” got me access to rooms where I could be heard—but also rooms where I was misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and dismissed.
I was given medications for disorders I didn’t have.
I was told I was anxious, dramatic, avoidant, arrogant, agressive.
No one ever said I might be autistic.

Now, as a late-diagnosed autistic adult, I look back and see the layers clearly:
how race, class, masking, language, and social norms all interacted.
My positionality gave me some advantages—and still, I almost didn’t survive.

Naming my positionality now isn’t about centering myself.
It’s about locating myself in a broader map—so I don’t mistake my experience for the whole truth.

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🌐 Why Positionality Matters in Neurodivergent Spaces

Because not all autistic people are seen.
Not all neurodivergent people are believed.
And not all stories are told.

We exist in a world where whiteness, class privilege, education, and articulation shape whose experiences get uplifted—and whose get erased.

I’ve seen this over and over again:
White, late-diagnosed creators with academic or clinical language get celebrated.
Meanwhile, nonspeaking Black autistic people get criminalized.
Undiagnosed autistic moms in survival mode are told they’re just “anxious.”
Poor or houseless autistic adults are treated as failures rather than survivors.

We can’t talk about liberation if we’re not naming how proximity to power shapes who is visible and who is left behind.

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There was a time—before I had the language for any of this—when I believed I was the problem. I’d walk into a workplace and build justice, only to have that justice unravel in my home. I was praised as a systems thinker while I was silently breaking down in systems that refused to see me.

I didn’t know, then, that I was autistic. Or that I was carrying multiple forms of trauma.
I just knew that I was “too much” and “not enough” in all the wrong places.

Now I understand:
My positionality made me legible to some people, and invisible to others.
I was both seen and misread.
Protected and targeted.
Centered and excluded—often at the same time.

That’s why positionality isn’t optional.
Because when we don’t name these dynamics, we replicate them.
Even in spaces meant for healing.

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🚫 What Happens When We Don’t Name It?

When we don’t name our positionality, we risk doing harm—even when we have good intentions.

We start to believe our story is the story.
We confuse being articulate with being right.
We confuse being visible with being safe.
We confuse being believed with being correct.
And in doing so, we make others invisible.

We speak over people we’ve never taken the time to understand.
We uphold the same systems of exclusion that harmed us—only now, we’re the ones doing the excluding.

We talk about “support needs” as if they’re obvious.
We say “all autistic people should be able to…” without knowing who has been left behind, institutionalized, incarcerated, misdiagnosed, or undiagnosed entirely.

We claim space without making space.
And that’s how movements meant for liberation become spaces of performance and harm.

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I’ve been in those spaces.
I’ve led in some of them before I fully understood the dynamics at play.
And I’ve had to repair harm I didn’t mean to cause—because I hadn’t yet unpacked how my access, language, and whiteness positioned me differently than others in the room.

This work asks us to do better—not to be perfect, but to be honest.
It asks us to pause before we speak, and to notice what systems we might be unconsciously reflecting back.

When we skip positionality, we skip context.
And when we skip context, we erase people.

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✅ What Happens When We Do Name It?

When we name our positionality, we create space—not just for ourselves, but for others.

We invite nuance.
We shift from “speaking for” to “speaking from.”
We stop performing knowledge and start practicing relational humility.

We become more trustworthy.
Because people can feel the difference between someone who sees themselves clearly—and someone who needs to be seen as “right.”

We recognize that liberation isn’t found in becoming the most visible or most followed voice in the room—it’s in creating spaces where more people can speak, more truths can live, and more pain can be held without collapse.

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When I began naming my full context—being white, being economically unstable, being autistic, gifted, ADHD, traumatized, queer, a parent, a system survivor, a suicide survivor—my work changed.

Not because I was more “correct,” but because I was more accountable.

It allowed others to say:
“I’ve lived that too.”
Or:
“That’s not my story, and here’s why.”
And neither one threatened my truth.

When we name our positionality, we allow truth to become a network instead of a competition.

That’s the kind of space I want to be in.
That’s the kind of space I want to help build.

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🧘🏽‍♀️ Reflection Prompt

Take a few moments to sit with these questions—not to impress anyone, but to deepen your relationship with yourself:

• Where do I experience power or protection in my life?

• Where do I experience harm, erasure, or misunderstanding?

• How has my story been shaped by both?

• When I speak in neurodivergent spaces, who might I be centering—and who might I be forgetting?

Let your answers live in you.
You don’t need to share them unless you want to.
But being able to see your own position clearly is a skill that will carry you through every conversation, every community, every movement you are a part of.

It’s not always comfortable. But it is powerful.
And it’s how we begin to build trust—in ourselves, and with one another.

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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 3 – What Is Intersectionality, Really?
We’ll explore what intersectionality actually means beyond buzzwords—where it came from, how it’s misused, and why it’s essential to any conversation about neurodivergence and justice.

👇 Drop a comment if you’d like to be tagged in future sessions, or just follow along at your own pace. This space is for you.

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💖 A Note on Support

This work will never live behind a paywall.
It’s here to be accessible, co-created, and shared freely.

But if you have the means to support it through a paid subscription, please know it makes a real difference. It helps sustain this series, supports my ongoing work as a neurodivergent creator, and directly contributes to The Compassion Collective—our community rooted in justice, mutual care, and transformative change.

We are deeply grateful for every subscription, every share, every note of encouragement.
Thank you for helping keep this space alive and open.

❤️
Shamani of The Compassion Collective