What We’re Not Talking About When We Talk About Autism
A transformative education series on identity, systems, support, and liberation.
Welcome.
This is a different kind of workshop.
This isn’t about mastering the right language or becoming the most “informed.”
It’s about coming home to truth—yours and ours.
Transformative Education is a 25-session co-created workshop series exploring identity, power, systems, and liberation through the lens of neurodivergence and disability justice. It's a space for nuance, compassion, and unlearning. And it's rooted in my lived experience—and yours.
🔭 What to Expect
Each session will focus on a theme that moves us from internal reflection to systemic analysis to liberatory practice. We will explore, disrupt, and reimagine together.
Here’s the full journey we’ll take:
🧱 Foundations (Identity, Truth, and Positionality)
🔍 Systems, Structures & Paradigms
🌱 Liberation, Healing & Reimagining
Interdependence Is a Birthright
The Power of Self-Definition
You’re Not Broken: A Love Letter to the Wild Mind
Rest as Resistance, Rest as Repair
Co-Creation Is the Future
🧭 Why I’m Leading This Workshop
(A Living Positionality Statement)
Before we begin, I want to be clear about who I am, why I’m offering this space, and how I hold it.
I'm 45 years old. I'm autistic, ADHD, gifted, and a survivor of trauma, poverty, and systemic neglect. I’m white, raised working class, and I currently live with fluctuating access to resources and employment. I’m also a late-diagnosed, multiply neurodivergent, queer-identifying parent, and system-informed trauma survivor.
I’m a parent of neurodivergent children—and part of a large, mostly late-discovered/discovering autistic/neurodivergent family. Our experiences span generations, genders, and masking styles. That lens shapes everything I do.
I’ve been on a path of healing and transformation for six years. I’m a few months away from completing my master’s in Transformative Social Change, and I’m a cofounder (and humble member) of The Compassion Collective—a community rooted in justice, care, and radical belonging. 🤲
I’m a liberationist and a meta-theorist.
That means I think in systems, work across paradigms, and center freedom—not performance or purity—as the goal of any real change. 🌀
I created the Cognitive Ecology Model because every dominant framework—clinical, activist, academic—kept leaving people out. Especially those with the highest support needs and the least access to legitimacy.
I’ve been doing justice work since I was ten. I thought I’d join the Peace Corps.
Instead, I became a mom of twins at 22 and started building justice in my home, my workplaces, and my communities. 🏡
I’ve survived addiction. Misdiagnosis. Systemic gaslighting. Complex trauma.
I’m also a suicide survivor—more than once. That truth lives in my body and in this work.
I do this so those who didn’t make it are not forgotten. I carry them with me in every word.
I’m a gestalt language processor, which means even though I’m highly verbal, I often speak in whole-pattern, intuitive ways. People hear my words but miss the meaning. That misrecognition shaped much of my life. It’s also why I communicate the way I do—with rhythm, depth, and care.
Being white gave me access to systems many never reach. But those systems still harmed me.
They uplifted me when I performed well, and discarded me when I couldn’t.
I was diagnosed with everything except what I actually am—until I finally refused to be erased.
That shapes how I’m received.
It shapes who I’m accountable to.
And it shapes how I hold this space—with fierce love, clarity, and humility.
I love transformative education because I love growing with people—not above or ahead of them. As your facilitator, my role is to share what I’ve learned and ask the good questions.
Your role is to engage at the level that feels right for you—by reading, reflecting, commenting, or taking the work into your own community.
✨ Co-creation is the goal.
Your presence and participation—whatever it looks like—is what makes this work transformative and alive. 🌱
🤝 Shared Agreements
(So this space can hold all of us)
This is not a course.
This is not a one-way transmission.
This is a co-created space for transformation.
And transformation requires relationship.
Relationship requires trust.
And trust is built through clarity, consent, and care.
Because I’m holding this space, I ask that we agree to a few things:
1. 🌬 Reflect before you speak.
Pause. Breathe. Ask yourself:
Is this coming from ego, fear, defensiveness, care, curiosity, or connection?
We’re not here to prove. We’re here to presence.
2. 🗣 Speak from lived experience.
No one here represents a group.
You are the expert in your own story—and only your own story.
3. 👂 Practice deep listening.
Read to receive, not just to respond.
Let something land before you offer your take.
4. 🔍 Name positionality, not authority.
Tell us where you’re speaking from, not what is universally true.
Knowing your lens is more powerful than trying to claim the whole view.
5. 🔁 Stay in the process.
Discomfort is not harm. Disagreement is not danger.
We hold complexity here—and that means learning to stay with it.
6. 💔 Honor nuance.
No flattening. No binaries. No one is just one thing.
You can be both privileged and oppressed. Healed and still healing.
7. 💬 Offer feedback with care.
This is a living space. I evolve. So do you.
Let me know what lands—and what doesn’t.
You don’t have to agree with everything here.
But you do have to agree to engage with respect.
This is how we create a space where no one has to perform their trauma to be believed.
Where no one has to disappear in order to belong.
Where we can hold each other in complexity—and grow, together.
✨ The Invitation
This work is not theoretical for me.
It’s not abstract.
It’s survival—and it’s love.
I’ve spent most of my life being misunderstood, misnamed, mislabeled, and misdiagnosed.
I’ve also been praised, promoted, and placed on pedestals I never asked for—because I could speak in ways others found palatable.
But visibility isn’t liberation.
And legibility isn’t safety.
I created this series for all of us who live in the in-between.
Too complex to reduce. Too human to pathologize.
Too aware to keep pretending we can change a system by simply learning the right words.
This space is for those who want to go deeper—into the real work of unlearning, reframing, and remembering what we’ve always known in our bones:
We were never broken.
We were never alone.
We were never the problem.
🌿 How to Participate
🌀 Subscribe to receive each session in your inbox
💬 Comment if something resonates—or if it doesn’t
🧘🏽♀️ Reflect quietly, or take this into your own community
📌 Share with those who are hungry for this kind of space
👇 If you’d like to be tagged in future sessions, drop a comment or reply—I’ll do my best to keep up
🧭 Session 1 – Positionality Isn’t Optional launches soon
💖 A Note on Accessibility and Support
This work will never live behind a paywall.
No one will be turned away from this space because of money.
But if you have the capacity to contribute, please know your support helps me continue this work—and it helps sustain The Compassion Collective, our cooperative of disabled, neurodivergent, and justice-centered humans building liberatory alternatives to the systems that failed us.
We are deeply grateful for paid subscriptions, mutual aid, and any form of generosity.
Thank you for investing in accessible, heart-led education and collective healing.
Thank you for being here. For showing up with your truth, your contradictions, your brilliance, and your grief.
We begin with truth.
And we move from there—together.
❤️
Shamani of The Compassion Collective
so excited for this! as someone who is ambivalent to labels, i am so interested in exploring people’s ideas of how to gather, connect, conflict and repair *in community* without all this constructed noise that doesn’t allow us to hear one another. 🫀
Oooh I like your explanation of positionality. That made something click in my brain. Thanks.