Your Accessibility Committee is a collection of essays written during and participation in a school district’s accessibility committee: a process branded as collaborative, but engineered for control. This series explores institutional betrayal, process theatre, and the architecture of performative inclusion. It’s a record of what happens when access is promised but the implementation falls short—and what it costs to keep showing up anyway.
If I could have walked away from this institution, I would have—but I couldn’t, and so I came, and the price of showing up was almost everything I had left to give.
Showing up is not the beginning—it is the aftermath
By the time I appear on your committee call or log into your engagement session, I have already survived dozens of silent decisions, navigated cascading bureaucratic failures, and spent days in my head and in my body preparing for the possibility that you will mishear me, erase me, or perform care while quietly resenting my presence. I have already reread the invitation email twelve times, memorised the names of facilitators, searched participant lists for familiar antagonists, rehearsed four different disclosures and deleted them all. I have already spent nights pacing in the dark, whispering out loud to myself in spirals, trying to decide whether I can risk being visible—again.
You see my name in the chat and you think the conversation begins here, but I have been bleeding toward this moment for months, and the blood is real.
I am here because I couldn’t afford to leave
There is no glory in my participation—only consequence. I do not attend because I trust your process or believe in your institution’s readiness to listen; I attend because I have children whose access to learning still depends on the whim of a system that has already shown it cannot be trusted, and because I cannot afford to look away while others walk toward the same harm that nearly broke us. If I had money, I would have left quietly years ago, enrolling my children in safer schools, building a bubble around our lives so they could learn without surveillance or coercion. If I had more energy, I would have become invisible—vanishing into privacy, shielding myself from the burnout of speaking. If I believed that silence could protect the next family, I would have chosen it.
But I do not have money or energy or belief. What I have is memory, pattern recognition, and a body that trembles when it knows danger—and this is how I know that if I do not speak, the harm will continue, and someone else’s child will pay for my silence.
There is no resilience prize
Every year I survive this system, I lose something else that once made me whole—my capacity for ease, my trust in professional goodwill, my belief that meetings are held in good faith, my sense of belonging in a world designed for other people’s children.
I used to be a person who laughed more easily, who entered rooms without scanning for exits, who thought that strategy and sincerity were enough to make things right. But surviving in systems that punish difference has trained me to speak with precision and to feel every word as a risk, and now I find that the cost of survival is often myself.
I do not want to be commended for resilience; I want systems that do not require it.
Every disclosure is a gamble
When I introduced myself during that first committee meeting—second on the list, no script, heart pounding in my throat—I made a decision in real time to be truthful, even though the terms of engagement were vague and the power imbalance was clear. I said I had been harmed by this institution, and I said I believed in change, and I said I wanted to contribute—but even as I spoke, my hands trembled with the knowledge that those words might be used against me in some future decision, some quiet disinvitation, some withheld support dressed in neutral policy language.
You cannot imagine the calculus unless you have lived it: every phrase is a doorway to possibility or punishment, and we do not always know which until later, when the minutes are published or the silence begins.
Inclusion is meaningless without safety
You asked us to share our lived experience; you framed this as courage, and you said our voices were important—but you offered no guarantee that our stories would be held with care, no explanation of how they would be recorded, summarised, or recontextualised by others who may not understand the stakes. You said you were listening, but you had already designed the process. You invited us to speak, but you had already chosen the narrator. You opened the door and called it participation, but the structure was still yours—and those of us who have been burned before recognised it instantly.
To share truth in such a space is to hand it over to people who may smile and thank you while quietly deciding whether your discomfort is worth the institutional inconvenience of doing something about it.
I cannot represent everyone, but I remember them
I do not speak for all those who have been harmed—nor could I ever, because many of those who might have spoken have already withdrawn, burned out, or broken under the weight of trying to participate in systems that treat their suffering as input rather than as indictment. I do not know what it is to face this system as a newcomer, or as someone whose first language is not English, or as someone without a degree, or as someone targeted in ways I have been spared—but I know what it is to sit at a table and feel the absence of those voices. I know what it is to think of the people who are no longer here because it cost them too much to remain.
So when I speak, I try to make space for them too—not by claiming their perspective, but by refusing to pretend that mine is complete.
Do not thank me. Change something.
You may want to tell me I was brave. You may think the right thing to do is express appreciation for my willingness to be vulnerable. But if your next sentence is not about what you’re going to change, then your praise is just another way of performing inclusion without doing the labour that justice requires. Do not admire my presence if it does not move you to reconsider the system that made my presence painful. Do not commend me for showing up unless you are ready to carry some of the cost that made it so hard for me to get here.
Because I did not come to impress you. I came because someone had to.
And because every time I choose to speak, I do so knowing it will cost me—and I still choose to speak.
The price of participation is always too high—and I pay it anyway
You cannot see the tears I cried preparing for this meeting. You cannot see the energy it took to write the words I spoke. You cannot see the migraines, the muscle tension, the hours I will spend later spiralling through whether I said too much or not enough, or whether I will ever be invited back. You cannot see the damage done to my health by years of forced advocacy in spaces that punish clarity and reward silence.
But I carry it.
I carry it because someone has to. I carry it because every parent I know has carried it too. I carry it because I have no illusions left that systems change because people ask nicely or because committees are well-intentioned.
They change when the cost of not changing becomes impossible to ignore.
And I am here to make that cost visible.
Your Accessibility Committee
A collection of essays written during and after my participation in a school district’s accessibility committee: a process branded as collaborative, but engineered for control. This series explores institutional betrayal, process theatre, and the architecture of performative inclusion. It’s a record of what happens when access is promised but the implementation falls short—and what it costs to keep showing up anyway.
