🧭 Session 7: Support Needs Are Not a Hierarchy

🌿 Transformative Education for Neurodivergent Liberation

Apr 30, 2025

“Support is not a ladder—it’s an ecosystem. We each show up with different needs, different roles, and different gifts. There’s no hierarchy here—just interdependence, care, and collective wisdom.” Image: Social Change Ecosystem Map by Deepa Iyer (used with credit)

"Interdependence is a fact, not a flaw." — Mia Mingus (Disability Justice Advocate)

📌 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.

🎂 Today is my 46th birthday—and also my two-year diagnosis birthday.

I’m not just naming dates. I’m naming what it means to live with needs that went unseen for decades. What it means to finally see myself clearly—and to be seen without apology.

This session is personal. It’s political. It’s a reclamation.

The Myth of “More” or “Less”

For a long time, I didn’t know how much support I needed—because I had never seen anyone like me get any.

I was praised for being independent, articulate, gifted.
I masked through every room.
I powered through burnouts.
I convinced myself—and everyone else—that I was fine.

But I wasn’t fine.
I was surviving.
And eventually, I couldn’t anymore.

After my diagnosis, I was told I was “Level 1.”
But there was nothing “low” about the support I needed to recover from decades of misrecognition.
The medical model couldn’t see the complexity of my needs because I had already adapted to being unseen.

What saved me wasn’t independence.
It was interdependence.
It was building a life around what I actually needed—emotional regulation, PDA support, sensory consistency, trauma-informed spaces, peer co-regulation, and time. So much time.

Today, I have:

Four peer support meetings a week
Bi-weekly therapy
A partner who supports me emotionally and practically
A co-regulating home environment
Daily spiritual and somatic practices
Friends and family who understand I am not "low support need" just because I’ve built a life where my needs are now met

But none of that came from being “less impaired.”
It came from naming what I need without shame.

Context Is Everything

Support needs aren’t linear.
They’re contextual. Dynamic. Relational.
They shift based on environment, regulation, safety, and access.

One day I can lead a workshop, write for hours, connect in community.
The next, I can barely track a conversation or feed myself.
That’s not a failure—it’s how my body asks for support.

The problem is, the systems we live in are built on consistency as proof of competence.
If you fluctuate, you're seen as unreliable.
If you need more support in one setting than another, you're labeled confusing or difficult.
And if you can "pass" in certain spaces, your struggles are often dismissed altogether.

But we are not machines.
We are living systems.
And our ability to “function” depends on the conditions we’re in—social, emotional, physical, sensory, and systemic.

You could drop me into a high-demand work environment with fluorescent lights, layered expectations, and no emotional safety—and I would absolutely be high support need.

You could place me in a self-paced, relationally attuned, values-aligned community—and I would thrive.

Support needs are not a fixed trait.
They are a response to environment.

Support Levels Are a Clinical Tool, Not a Lived Truth

Support levels—Level 1, 2, 3—were not designed to reflect the lived experience of autistic people.
They were created as clinical shorthand under the DSM-5 to help determine access to medical and therapeutic services.

They are:

Systemic tools for gatekeeping resources
Simplifications for a deeply complex spectrum
Static assessments based on a single moment in time
Biased by presentation, language use, race, gender, and clinician familiarity

They were not built for nuance.
They were not built for context.
They were certainly not built for us to judge or sort each other in community.

When I was diagnosed Level 1, it said nothing about:

The trauma I carried
The cost of decades of masking
My inability to live alone safely
My total collapse during burnout
The supports I built to survive—because the system gave me none

Support levels don’t account for:

Fluctuating capacity
Co-occurring conditions
Gendered masking patterns
Socioeconomic barriers to support
Cultural and familial suppression of needs
The impact of late discovery and survival-based adaptation

To use these clinical levels as community categories is to misunderstand what they are.

They are not your identity.
They are not your moral value.
And they should never be used to determine who gets to name their truth.

When we say support needs are not a hierarchy, we mean:

Everyone’s needs matter.
Everyone’s needs shift.
Everyone deserves care, regardless of what a system did or didn’t diagnose.

Naming Your Needs Is Not a Crime

There’s a dangerous idea circulating—sometimes even within our own communities—that claiming high support needs is performative, attention-seeking, or “less valid” if you weren’t given a certain diagnosis.

That’s internalized ableism talking. That’s the system speaking through us. And it’s also fear—fear rooted in resource scarcity.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that support is a limited commodity. That if someone gets “more,” someone else must get “less.” That there’s not enough to go around. So instead of directing our anger toward the systems withholding resources, we turn it inward—or toward each other.

This fear fractures community. It convinces us to police one another’s needs instead of honoring them. It’s a distraction from the real issue: a society that chronically underfunds, undervalues, and miscategorizes neurodivergent lives.

Some people will say, “You’re not Level 2 or 3, so don’t claim high support needs.”

But what if the label was wrong?
What if you masked through the entire assessment?
What if your burnout, trauma, or sensory profile didn’t fit neatly into the boxes they used?

I was diagnosed Level 1.
But I have high support needs.

And I will not minimize them just to make someone else more comfortable.

Because when we shame people for naming their needs, we are not protecting community—we are replicating the very violence that harmed us in the first place.

Many late-diagnosed autistic adults have already internalized the message that they should “just try harder.”
We’ve masked through careers, relationships, parenthood, and illness.
And when we finally begin to name what we need—rest, slowness, flexibility, co-regulation—we’re often told we’re exaggerating or misrepresenting ourselves.

But naming your support needs is not a moral failure.
It is an act of clarity.
It is a reclamation of truth.
And sometimes, it is the very thing that keeps us alive.

Interdependence as Liberation

We’ve been taught that needing support is shameful.
That strength is independence.
That success is doing it all on your own.

But that’s not strength.
That’s survival under capitalism.
That’s the trauma of being told our worth is based on output, perfection, or palatability.

The truth is—we were never meant to do this alone.

Interdependence isn’t a fallback plan.
It’s the design.

When we create environments where needs are spoken aloud without penalty—
Where we build systems of care that respond instead of punish—
Where we trust that honoring someone’s limits doesn’t diminish their value—
That’s when liberation begins.

In my home, we practice this daily.
We build our lives around what each person needs to regulate, connect, rest, and contribute.
Sometimes I’m the one holding others.
Sometimes I’m the one who needs to be held.
And the beauty is—we stop needing to keep score.

Interdependence isn’t about codependence or dependency.
It’s about collective clarity:
I need you.
You need me.
And together, we find a rhythm that honors both.

This isn’t a utopian dream.
It’s a lived possibility.

And it starts with telling the truth about what we need—without apology.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Reflection Prompt

Take a breath. Sit somewhere quiet. Let these questions move through you gently:

What support do I actually need right now—not to perform, but to be well?
What environments help me feel resourced, and which ones deplete me?
Have I ever minimized my needs because I thought others had it “worse”?
What would it feel like to name my support needs without guilt?
What does interdependence look like in my life—and where do I long for more of it?

Let your answers be messy, non-linear, incomplete. Let them be true.

💫 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 8 – The Myth of Self-Sufficiency
We’ll explore how self-sufficiency has been mythologized in Western culture—and how collective survival, co-regulation, and interdependence offer a more sustainable, liberatory path.

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

💖 A Note on Support

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

If you have the means to support it through a paid subscription, it helps sustain this series, supports my work as a neurodivergent creator, and directly contributes to The Compassion Collective—a community rooted in justice, mutual care, and transformative change.

Every subscription, every share, every message of resonance helps keep this space alive.
Thank you for being here.

🌿
Shamani of The Compassion Collective