By Marina King

Before we begin: This unconventionally written, non-neuronormative  piece, prioritises depth, transformation and complexity. It is for people who’ve done some inner work and who get a buzz from having their ego challenged; neurodivergent (nd) people who have had their rights denied one too many times; allies; manifesto-lovers; creatives, spiky profilers and systems-thinkers. It is not for people who uphold ‘professionalism’ over being human; prefer a sanitised, neutral tone; fans of the medical model; a tidy ending or anyone who dumped their imagination along with their humanity.

The problem with inclusion policies as they currently stand in most workplaces, corporate or otherwise, is that they are a superficial solution to an existential problem. Having inclusion policies does not inherently make your organisation a safe place for employees, which, in essence, is what they are meant to do. 

It’s the same issue as having your pronouns on your email signature because it’s the “right thing to do,” rather than because you are deeply acquainted with the fight for autonomy of people of different genders.

And, I get it. Unless you’ve got skin in the game, these are complex, potentially overwhelming, and demanding topics, requiring deep thought and assessment of belief systems, values and practices. Who’s got time for these deep dives these days? I also get that you are a person who wants to meet this moment with compassion and awareness. You want to do your bit. You definitely don’t want to be part of an oppressive structure; you don’t want to actively be oppressing your co-workers or dehumanising them inadvertently through not knowing any better. The thought horrifies you. You want to learn, to grow, and to contribute to a better society.

Which is why I am writing this for you, to you. I want to offer you a lens through which you can have a broader and deeper understanding of why inclusion is harder than you expected and what you can actively do about it. My aim and intention is to demolish some inner obstacles that you may not even have been aware of and provide perspectives that illuminate the choices that are available to you.

In full disclosure: this is not a fast read; it is an excavation. It invites you to slow down, circle back, and let the concepts settle in the silence between breaths. This density is both intentional (a refusal to sanitise complexity) and unintentional (the natural, non-linear architecture of my mind).

If you choose to work through the friction, you may find it an invigorating shift in perspective: a transformative excavation of your own humanity and a bridge toward meeting the other whole humans at the intersection. And, we could all do with some more of that.

The First Point: It’s About Your Safety

The first point may take you by surprise. This is not about disabled people. It’s not even how you feel about disabled people. It’s not how you feel about the government or your workplace policies.

The first point is about safety. Your safety.

Most of us see ourselves as “good people.” But confirmation bias (which is found in the majority of humans, including you and including me), ensures we only look for information that supports our beliefs. It is a mistake to expect anyone to change their identity purely because it’s the “right” thing to do. People rarely choose the incredibly uncomfortable and inconvenient experience of identity transformation because it’s moral; they choose it because they have to, to survive. They choose it because, paradoxically, they don’t have a choice; life circumstances are thrust upon them (an accident; an illness that turns into a disabling, chronic condition) and they ‘have’ to, to survive.

Or, their identity is shattered or destroyed or dissolved through loss, traumatic as well as extremely joyful events, and they suddenly have a much bigger and broader perspective than they did and now they can easily include more human variation in their scope of compassion.

The irony is that the more our social construction of western ‘civilisation’ disintegrates, the more our identities will also collapse. 

As our identities collapse, the bigger our perspective will become and the more integrated we’ll be willing to be. The more we’ll have to depend on the kindness of strangers, the more we’ll have to trust those that colonialism has taught us to distrust, or, if our egos will not allow us to do otherwise, the more we’ll have to fall on our swords and (metaphorically) die. 

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Yet, while our internal landscapes are undergoing this seismic shift of existential proportions, the external structures of our work-lives remain rigidly anchored in a performance of the past.

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The Narrative of Supplication

When you ask people to include you or make space for your needs, first prepare yourself by acknowledging that it’s unlikely to happen quickly or easily. Or, it may be in place and then a new boss or manager comes in and our adjustments are up for review and we’ll have to be in the humiliating position of again having to metaphorically hold up the Equality Act and point out our rights. 

Having to ask for “reasonable adjustments”, immediately identifies us as “different” and “vulnerable” due to having “protected characteristics”. For an already hypervigilant and anxious person, this dehumanising othering can be excruciating to experience, tapping into as it does our deepest human need, to be accepted and included and, therefore, safe. If we have to ask to be included, it’s obvious that we aren’t, even though we are all human beings.

Not only is this othering inaccurate, but this narrative perpetuates oppression by positioning disabled people in positions of weakness. Let’s look at it this way: In order for someone to be in ‘power’, there has to be someone else who is subservient. Otherwise there would not be a power dynamic. So, how is this type of power dynamic created?

It is created through subtle and overt displays of dominance. Language, propaganda, social constructs, medical model, access to tools and resources, privileged positions that allow access to tools and resources. As a white, cis person, living in the UK and speaking English, I acknowledge my privileged position and intersectionality of also being multiply neurodivergent, queer, with a chronic pain and variable health condition.

Through a myriad of interconnecting social conditions, morals, beliefs and stories of who can and who cannot, the cannot’s are ‘branded’ with ‘less-than’ epithets, so as to highlight their distinguishing features, whether physical or intellectual or emotional or psychological and thus make it clear who to exclude. Otherwise they could be mistaken for being just another human, who doesn’t ‘look autistic’.

The excluded ones’ identities are then reinforced by the dehumanising treatment they receive from their culture and then they begin to internalise those identities for themselves. This internalisation effectively does the work of differentiation for the ones in power. The ones in power get to live their lives undisturbed by the hardships of the excluded ones because of their ease of access to resources, means of control, education etc. Of course, they still face hierarchies and hurdles, because having someone ‘at the top’ is a colonial and capitalist value and striving and effort to attain footholds on the ladder leading ever upwards is seen as virtuous effort and is applauded.

Whereas striving and effort as a dehumanised person within a system designed to thwart our efforts is ‘inspiration porn’, and we’re infantilised for ‘trying so hard’, or ’getting so far’. The subtext being; ‘in spite of the difficulties you face’ as a person disabled by society.

So that’s the narrative all of us in the Western world have inherited and are living within.

It is a script that requires one of us to beg and the other to judge. This is what that performance sounds like from the side of the excluded:

• Cap in hand; please change for us!
• Please change for us! We can bring so much value with our superpowers!
• Please change for us! It’s the right/moral/correct thing to do!
• Please change for us! If you don’t, you’re missing out.
• Please change for us! We ‘should’ be included!
• Please change for us! Yes, we’re a version of humanity you’ve been conditioned to avoid, but overcome all of that and choose us!
• Please change for us! Remove the cognitive dissonance and be honest that:
  • a) you don’t know how
  • b) you don’t know if you really want to
  • c) you’re afraid of change
  • d) the power you have is the power you want to keep while scarcity snaps at your heels
  • e) disabled people aren’t the version of ‘human’ that you’re comfortable with

If we survive what the Trump administration is trying to do to this world, we will all become more disabled, more sickly, less capable, less strong, and less attractive (by most cultural standards) with time. So every cruelty that we extend to the ones we find old or hideous now, we cast as a curse upon our future selves. Dr. Devon Price

The Shift: What If We Stopped?

This is what is alive in me and which I am releasing: What if we stopped pleading? What if we stopped asking, explaining, justifying and pointing to proof? What if we stopped agreeing with the narrative that maintains positions of oppression?

What if we said no? What if we said yes to us?

• What if we said yes to unshaming our shadows?
• What if we said yes to skill-sharing and non-hierarchical structures?
• What if we said yes to creative, experimental, explorations?
• What if we said yes to our own inner work and our multitudinous nature?
• What if we said yes to self-validation and self-trust?
• What if we said yes to honouring and healing the parts that love to be hurt, the parts that people-please, appease and fawn?
• What if we said yes to honouring ourselves as fully incarnate, sovereign beings, here to fuck around and find out, just like everyone else?

We don’t need to separate ourselves into good and bad parts. That’s the lie we’re growing out of believing. We’re whole. We’ve always been whole. We can accommodate our whole selves far more easily than dismantling ourselves to accommodate the demands of the Western world all our lives.

As we’ve survived this far, by our wits, our shapeshifting, our empathy, our wily ways, we can also survive the radical metamorphosis of discerning the sacred symbol of the vesica piscis; of what is ours, what is not, and surrendering into that sweet, sweet spot where we finally meet each other as humans…not perfect, we don’t need to be.

The Shift: What If We Started This?

So, how does a typical day go once we’ve stopped pleading? What happens when we stop trying to fit our spiky profiles into a 9-to-5 “pace”? What is life like after the sweet surrender?

Navigating the Intersection
Fawning Boundaries:
Context: 9.30am – 11.30am work meeting in a local community hall. It’s known to be coldly floored, with linoleum, with overhead fluorescent lights that buzz and flicker. The wooden chairs grate across the floor as they are dragged out and grate as they are dragged back once seated. With the 30-odd people doing that in the space of 5 minutes, it’s a cacophony that you know will continue to reverberate and echo around your skull for the rest of the day and into the evening.

That’s a no. It’s a no to the disabling environment; it’s a no to the increased labour of extra processing; it’s a no to the inadequate accommodations (10 minute break) being paraded as inclusion-aware.
You state: “I cannot contribute effectively in that space. I will be joining via the link or we can move to the quiet zone.” You are being a steward of your own capacity.

Superpowers Capacity
Context: It’s Thursday afternoon. You have a deadline tomorrow. Monday and Tuesday were spent staring from your window at how the tree moves in the wind. Your brain makes connections that ‘pop’ or ‘reveal’ in a really fun way when you give it the space to do so. Staring at nature doing its thing, especially if there is motion involved (trees in the wind, fish in the water, birds swooping or flying purposefully), somehow facilitates movement in your brain. The outcome of the staring isn’t linear and no-one, including you, can say for sure when it will ‘do anything’. Guaranteed that if anyone asks you, “How’s it going?” with any hint of pressure or subtle demand, your equally subtle and molecular brain-based machinations will jangle up and crush or dissolve themselves into an unrecognisable soupy morass. Hence, avoiding people. But, when processing has had its correct amount of time and space, it does deliver, it really does! It’s really exciting and satisfying and high energy and, again, you need more space on the floor to write, space and big paper on the wall to draw, room to stride or lie down, and really don’t like to be interrupted or distracted as it pours forth like a crystal-clear, life-nourishing hidden spring spurting through the surface and sparkling in the sun.

You state: “My output is non-linear. I have completed the task (as well as the next quarters’ and have developed several innovative possibilities for adjacent services and offerings). I am now unavailable for the rest of the week as I process, rest and re-regulate.” No to the lie that your worth is a calculation of average daily output. You are an ecosystem, not a machine. Ecosystems have seasons, storms, and silence.

Life after the sweet surrender looks like the end of the construct of the Standardised Human.

• The End of the Human Pace Myth: We stop pretending there is a correct speed for a human being to work. I mean – when we take a minute to actually think of the concept…it’s obviously flawed due to being impossible for a biological being to have a “speed”. We acknowledge that pacing in this context is a capitalist tool, not a biological reality. For some of us, work is a 14-hour in-the-zone intensity of ADHD (Attention Dialled to a Higher Dimension) hyper-focus that we cannot stop, sometimes, even if we want to. For others, or for the same person the next day, work is staring at a tree for four hours until the pattern emerges. In the vesica piscis, both are free to exist without the tree-starer dealing with conditioned guilt of “wasting time” or the hyper-focuser having to justify their intensity as a “superpower.”
• From Justification to Occupying Space: We stop explaining why we are doing what we are doing. If you are staring at a tree, you are working. If you are vibrating with the energy of a thousand ideas downloading at 2:00 AM, you are working. No more providing the user manual for your brain to our managers as if we are a piece of faulty software that needs a workaround. We simply occupy our state of being.
• The Death of Professionalism: We all realise that professionalism is yet another colonial dress code for mind control and internal policing. In the inclusive workplace, we allow for the messy incarnation. We allow for the fawning to be named, the shadow to be seen, and the boldly inconvenient rhythms to play out. We stop trying to be reliable in the way a machine is reliable, and start being authentic in the way an ecosystem is authentic.
• Sovereignty Over the Flux and Flow: We no longer allow the system to harvest our hyper-focus while shaming our stasis. We claim both. We are both, and more. We know that our survival isn’t dependent on meeting an arbitrarily dictated pace, but on the refreshing and radical act of refusing to be measured by one.

Dear reader…fellow edge-walker…does this land? That the safety we find isn’t the safety of being understood by our boss, or our co-workers. It’s the safety of no longer needing their understanding. When we say “hell yes, baby!” to our own multitudinous nature, we are doing far more than simply changing our work habits; we are dismantling the foundations of the productivity model itself. We meet at the intersection, the sweet spot, where the work is no longer a performance of productivity, but a byproduct of sovereign humans being free to fuck around and find out in their own time, in their own way.

Image by Gemini and me
Alt-text: A Vesica Piscis diagram showing the intersection of two human states.

• The Standardised Human: A blue-grey circle on the left with a clock icon, representing the pressures of conformity, performance and capitalist pacing.
• The Sovereign Human: A green, textured circle on the right featuring the Neurokin Network tree logo, symbolizing a guided, grounded, growing ecosystem.
• The Intersection: A central, illuminated space labeled “WHOLE HUMANS.” It depicts a multi-tonal circular embrace of three arms hugging in a circle, representing authentic connection.
• Caption: “Moving from Supplication to Sovereignty at the Intersection.

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