I’ve come to a place, lately, where it feels like most of our basic story has been told—at least in the rough contours, at least enough to breathe. But something keeps happening in the writing. I’ll be trying to explain a single moment or follow the thread of one thought, and suddenly an emotion breaks free—grief I had coded as exhaustion, shame I once filed away as private failure, or a fury that returns not as heat but as knowing. I’ve been reading more deeply into disability justice, and the words in those texts have begun to create bridges between things I used to carry as isolated fragments—quiet irrational shame, embodied rage, tears long soaked into my pillow and forgotten by morning.
I’ve been thinking about institutional harm, and about how to name the elements that make up the wreckage: trauma, mental health degradation, burnout, moral injury. I’ve been trying to understand how those categories overlap and diverge, and what they offer when placed beside the lived shape of advocacy over time. I’ve also been thinking about coercion—not just the overt kind, but the subtler compliance logic that tells us we’re being difficult when we stop participating in our own erasure. The way parents are drafted into systems that harm our children, and how desperation to stop the pain can become the very mechanism that keeps us inside.
I’ve been circling, too, around the economic conditions that structure these harms—the long afterlife of austerity, the quiet collapse of public institutions under pressure they were never resourced to withstand, and the strategic fog that accompanies even well-meaning attempts at revival. Through Kim Block’s writing, I’ve returned to law as a framework that affirms rather than discredits our truth—to the reminder that “fierce advocacy” is protected, that legal clarity can sharpen rather than chill moral clarity. And through all of this, I’ve been gathering frameworks—new language, better models, ways of imagining education that go beyond the compliance trap and offer something more than tired permutations of the same punishing ideas.
Moral injury is not burnout. It’s betrayal made cellular.
This piece began with tinnitus. With the screaming in my ears and the screaming I had been swallowing for years. I had been calling it exhaustion, or burnout, or trauma maybe—but as I read about moral injury and secondary trauma stress, something clicked that felt more than intellectual. I realised this wasn’t just fatigue. This was what happened when a system you trusted harms your child, and then makes you the problem for noticing.
See: The unseen wounds of advocacy
Compliance is a trap. Readiness is a lie.
This one came from rage. From watching my child punished for not being “ready” for something that was never accessible to begin with. From hearing the word “independence” used like a finish line in a race he never entered. Writing this helped me unravel the ideology baked into every school meeting—the idea that good parenting is compliance, that good kids are silent, that readiness is earned through obedience. But I also found something steadier underneath: the disability justice frameworks that name care as interdependence, that refuse coercion disguised as support, that offer a home for our children and for us.
See: Compliance discourse vs. disability justice in BC’s education system
Exclusion is engineered. Scarcity is a decision.
It’s easy to think school failure is accidental. That people mean well but are under-resourced and if we just explain clearly enough, they’ll help. I used to believe that. But the deeper I looked, the clearer it became that scarcity is not natural—it was manufactured. Writing this essay meant tracing exclusion back to its policy roots: to the 2002 School Act amendments, to the business logic that still governs education, to the incentives that reward compliance and punish need. It gave me language for the cold calculation underneath the care language. And it helped me forgive myself for all the times I thought we failed because we weren’t trying hard enough.
See: The afterlife of austerity
Fierce is fair. Politeness is not protection.
I’ve edited emails until they bled. I’ve stayed up late rewriting myself into someone more palatable—softening every edge, deleting lines that felt too sharp, too sad, too real. I’ve let out screams in the car that no one heard, because I believed that composure might buy us safety. For years, I performed grace under pressure because I thought I had to. And when I read Kim Block’s essay and saw the words “Fierce advocacy is even supported in case law,” it dredged something up—grief, mostly, but also rage. Because I realised I had been allowed to feel enraged all along. They still should have helped us. They still had a duty to accommodate.
This piece was written from that place—from the quiet indignation that comes when you begin to re-encode your own story. It’s about tone policing and maternal composure, about the way clarity is framed as hostility when spoken by women who refuse to mask their grief. But it’s also about legal grounding. About learning, finally, that calm is not a prerequisite for justice. That we were never meant to stay small to be believed. That the law does not require grace—only truth.
See: Fierce is fair: when institutional tone policing meets legal obligation
Legal language can hold shape when everything else is falling apart.
This piece emerged from the tightrope I’ve walked in every meeting—wanting to stay collaborative, but knowing that too much softness invites erasure. I’ve felt the chill in the room when I use the word discrimination. I’ve seen how even gentle mention of the Human Rights Code can be treated as an escalation. And I’ve also felt the internal recoil—my own worry that being firm will make me “difficult,” my own rehearsals of softer phrasing, my own edits that removed what needed to be said. Reading Kim Block’s series reminded me that legal grounding is not a threat—it is a form of care. It is a way of saying: my child deserves access. This piece is about holding both things at once—values-based language that speaks of dignity and relationship, and the legal clarity that reminds us: rights are not optional. They were always ours.
See: Shining a legal light on advocacy conversations
Naming something changes it. Even on Wikipedia.
This was a quiet moment of defiance. It took five minutes to make the edit, but the ripple of it felt deep. Because I’ve heard too many people say collective punishment isn’t real, or isn’t that bad, or only happens in authoritarian regimes. And yet our children are living it every day. When one child acts out and the whole class loses gym, when an autistic child is framed as the reason everyone misses recess, when discipline is group-based instead of support-based—that is collective punishment. Adding it to the record felt like a small act of resistance.
See: Why we added schools to the Wikipedia page on collective punishment
We are allowed to want better. And we are allowed to name what we refuse.
Periodically, I find myself circling back to the same place—how enraged I am by positive behavioural support, and by every other euphemism used to disguise the pain of applied behavioural analysis. Fuck you to sticker charts that reduce children to compliance metrics; to forced partial days framed as “support” when they are really punishment; to extinction-based strategies that demand children suppress the very signals of distress that could guide adults toward care. This piece began from that rage, but it didn’t stay there. I wanted to gather a list of frameworks and models that don’t rely on coercion, and that offer something more than controlled compliance in neurodiversity’s name. But I also wanted to give language to the refusal—to say, clearly and publicly, that we are allowed to walk away from systems that hurt our children. We are allowed to want more than behaviour control. We are allowed to expect care. We are allowed to say no, and have that no mean something.
See: Non-coercive, trauma-informed alternatives to PBS and ABA in BC schools
