I have always been someone who made people uneasy unless I carefully managed my presence—someone whose attention lands too directly, whose knowing shows too quickly, whose intensity disrupts the emotional choreography expected of mothers who ask nicely, grieve quietly, and remain grateful for whatever scraps of support are handed down. I carry detail and radiate certainty and memory and urgency in a way that institutions cannot tolerate.
In schools, especially, I have learned that emotion does not simply live inside bodies; it moves between them, collects in files, clings to names, and saturates air. And that some emotions—grief, anger, clarity, moral refusal—stick harder than others. They stain.
This is what Sara Ahmed calls an affective economy—a structure that regulates which feelings can be expressed, whose emotions matter, and what kinds of bodies are allowed to show pain without being treated as dangerous. In this economy, schools do not just handle complaints or concerns; they manage affect. They interpret tone. They assign emotional value to people. And in this system, I have become expensive.
Stickiness
I remember the moment the story turned. We were deep into kindergarten chaos: my son was cycling through dysregulation, assigned to one hour a day, nearly strangled a teacher after weeks of neglect. I was cutting my work hours to triage school failure. And one day, sitting in a meeting during which they were telling me they were going to cut his support again, I smiled—too tired to be furious—and said, “I bet the media would have a heyday over a story like this.” There was a long pause and then one of them turned, tightly, and said: “What you are is an activist, aren’t you?”
That’s what Ahmed means by stickiness. The emotional residue of my past meetings, past emails, past tone, past grief, had already congealed around me. That smile was heard as threat. Telling the truth was received as menace. My presence was processed through history, not action. They no longer heard my words. They heard their own memory of what it felt like to be near me. And that memory stuck.
The angry subject
I became the one who had used the word “fuck” in a meeting. I became the one who cried, who never stopped asking, who dared to ask for more for her daughter, even after her son had already been “given so much.” I became a character. An affective figure.
And then I began to notice that I was being read before I spoke.
They prepared for my anger before I arrived, treated my sadness as volatility, interpreted my insistence as instability. Ahmed describes this pre-figured body as the angry subject—the one who is always presumed to be unreasonable, always received as a problem, no matter how calmly she speaks or how carefully she documents.
They positioned my anger as the reason they could no longer listen.
Circulation of affect
By the time I enter a room, the meeting has already started. My presence is preceded by tension. I know what it feels like to walk into a review process and recognise, before I sit down, that the emotional script has already been passed around. I know what it means to carry affect as atmosphere.
I once met with the district treasurer—the treasurer—who had been assigned to adjudicate my child’s support appeal escalation. That detail alone made the priorities clear. I was requesting care; they were calculating cost. He smiled carefully, exuding smug composure. I knew, instantly, that his job was not to deliberate. It was to deliver a pre-set no with emotional precision. I could have brought charts. I could have brought blood. Nothing would have changed. The circulation had already occurred.
Accumulated emotion
The institution remembers everything it wishes to hold against you. I cried too long, refused to give up, pushed past every “we’ve done our best” and kept asking. Over time, my presence carried the weight of every prior interaction. I was no longer received as myself. I was received as emotional memory.
Eventually, even I became tired of myself.
I started to dread my own advocacy. I started to sigh when I caught my reflection in the window on the way to a meeting, heavy and slouched, like an impoverished doppelgänger of my prior self. I started to wish I could sit next to someone else—someone softer, someone joyful, someone who made art and laughed and still had room inside them for pleasure. I started to long for the version of me who hadn’t been hollowed out by years of procedural grief.
That, too, is accumulation. When institutional rejection becomes self-contempt.
Pain as threat
For a while, I tried to stop. I told myself that if the children didn’t want to be at school, they could just stay home. I stopped sending emails. I stopped requesting meetings. I tried to go quiet.
And I watched my children collapse.
I watched them shut down, disappear, grow small. And I returned to advocacy as the alternative was too painful. I plotted late at night, to sell my apartment, and get a very expensive lawyer to sue my ex for decision making, so I could withdraw my kids from school. These were my dreams now, so depraved and sad.
What I had been trying to say all along was that my children were suffering. But every time I named that pain, the institution treated it as an attack. My fear was interpreted as rage. My grief was reframed as threat.
Ahmed writes that pain becomes dangerous when it implicates power. When a mother’s suffering makes visible what the system has done, she is treated as the problem to solve.
Economies of emotion
They allowed themselves to cry. They allowed themselves to speak of exhaustion, of effort, of personal investment. But they did not allow me to do the same.
There was a teacher with a neurodivergent daughter. She mentioned it often—used it as a credential, as a badge of empathy. She told me she got it. But she sent my daughter to the time-out desk every time she spoke out of turn. She forced her to eat there too, even with a medical accommodation to eat at her desk. When my daughter was touched without consent by a child three times her size, this teacher simply said she was trying her best.
Her sadness was humanised. My fury was disqualifying.
Ahmed names this structure precisely: the economy of emotion. The institution decides whose feelings count as currency. And it always seems to value the feelings of staff above the safety of children. Their safety, their dignity, their processes that protect them.
The proximity of pain
One day, I told the truth.
They asked how I was doing, and I said I had developed diabetes. That despite a lifetime of careful eating, of avoiding sugar, of doing everything right, the stress of advocacy had entered my bloodstream and settled into permanence. I told them it might shorten my life. That the work of protecting my children in this system had changed the shape of my body.
There was a wince. A quiet, formal “sorry to hear that.” And then, distance.
Ahmed calls this the proximity of pain. Institutions tolerate pain only when it stays polite, abstract, and far away. The moment pain arrives in the room—visible, cellular, unavoidable—it becomes intolerable. They treat the suffering parent not as a witness, but as a disruption. The response is not to reckon with the harm, but to close the door against it.
I remain
This is what affective economy means in the context of public education. It means that mothers are treated as emotions rather than experts. It means that advocacy is reinterpreted as disruption, grief as instability, refusal as aggression. It means that institutions build emotional ledgers, and once you are considered overdrawn, nothing you say will count again.
And still—I remain.
-
Debility versus disability: what the system cannot acknowledge
My son Robin took to bed two weeks before March break. He had been…
