Where do the ideas come from?

Note: This post is part of the Voices for Education Justice series—a practical guide for anyone ready to speak out about harm in schools. Whether you’re building a blog, drafting your first post, or finding the courage to hit publish, this series is here to remind you: your words carry weight, your story matters, and silence is not the price of survival.

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You know the feeling—when you leave a meeting and your brain feels like it’s on fire, your throat raw from the effort of swallowing words that clamour to be spoken, because you’re still trying to keep the peace, to stay strategic, to give staff one more chance to do the right thing for your child?

Those unsaid words don’t disappear—they lodge in the tissue, they become a kind of psychic poison that saturates the body, and unless they’re given form, they fester.

When you commit that poison to the page—whether as a private diary entry, a voice note whispered into your phone while you pace, or a few disjointed sentences hammered out in a document—it becomes something else entirely: a process, a practice, a reclamation.

And when you take that truth one step further—when you shape those thoughts into a post and thrust them into the world—you convert that personal rage, grief, or despair into public memory.

And one day, someone just beginning their own advocacy journey will sit down at 1:00 AM and search the word gaslighting with shaking hands, and they will find your blog. They will read your words. They will feel that strange, chest-loosening moment when you realise the shame was never yours to carry. And they will understand, perhaps for the first time, that school exclusion is not a private failure—it is systemic, sustained, and a form of collective punishment waged against disabled and neurodivergent children with terrifying normalcy. And now they’ll know: they are not alone.

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This post is in a series, and here was the prior post:

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Write from the fronts you’ve already survived

This is a field guide—a survival text for parents who’ve sat through too many meetings where care was promised, repackaged, and quietly withdrawn. You already know the script. You already carry the glossary. Every moment you felt enraged, erased, or dismissed contains the beginning of a post.

Let’s name them.

• “Let’s build independence”
  We’ve decided your child doesn’t qualify for support, and we need to reframe that as a virtue. Expect less. Celebrate it.
• “She’s so high-functioning”
  We don’t see the shutdowns, meltdowns, sensory overload, masking fatigue, or trauma aftermath—so we’ve decided they don’t count.
• “They’re doing their best”
  You’re being too direct. You’re making us uncomfortable. Please rephrase your concern in a way that doesn’t require us to act or feel bad.
• “Not a good fit”
  This environment will not adapt. Your child is the variable we intend to remove.
• “We want to set them up for success”
  We are preemptively denying access to something they need, by declaring it will be too hard for them.
• “It’s a capacity issue”
  We’re rationing support based on adult energy, not student need—but we’ll phrase it in a way that sounds like logistics, not triage.
• “They just need to ask”
  We’ve designed the system to serve only the children who can self-advocate in neurotypical, verbal, regulated ways. Everyone else is out of luck.
• “We’ll keep an eye on it”
  We’ve done nothing, and plan to continue doing nothing—but we need to close this email thread.
• “This isn’t the right time”
  We are waiting for you to burn out so we don’t have to say no directly.
• “Thanks for your input”
  We will now be ignoring everything you said.

These phrases operate as a kind of bureaucratic choreography—policy masquerading as politeness, structural violence softened by language designed to obscure its function—each one marking the edge of institutional comfort where support ends and spin begins, and together they form a script meant to coax you into lowered expectations.

These phrases are not just irritating. They are exhausting. They eat time, sap trust, and quietly rewrite the story of what our children deserve. And every single one of them could become the title of a blog post.

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A field guide for naming what they won’t

What you’re living through is not interpersonal drama. It’s structural harm disguised as politeness. The words you hear in meetings—no matter how calmly spoken—often function as tools of delay, coercion, and refusal. Some definitions:

Lip service

Lip service happens when educators or administrators affirm your concerns in words but offer no meaningful action. It often comes with nodding, affirming language, or written commitments that never materialise. Lip service exhausts families by forcing us to re-express the same needs in meeting after meeting. It preserves the illusion of collaboration while silently reinforcing institutional priorities.

The bait and switch

You are promised something—an EA, a safety plan, a support strategy—and that promise is used to extract compliance: agree to the plan, stay calm, keep your child in class. But just as you exhale, the promise dissolves. The EA is reassigned, the plan is paused, the district “reevaluates.” This is a bait and switch. It destabilises families while insulating institutions from accountability.

Goalpost shifting

You meet the criteria. You provide the documents. You do everything right. But the criteria change. Suddenly your child is too regulated, too verbal, too independent. Then too disruptive, too complex, too unpredictable. Goalposts shift to protect adult comfort, not to meet student need. It is a strategy of delay that places all blame for failure onto families.

Microaggressions and professional condescension

You are spoken to in a tone that implies your worry is excessive, your language inappropriate, your grief irrational. These interactions wear down your confidence and subtly reassert hierarchy. They say: you are not the expert here. But you are. These microaggressions accumulate into a system of gatekeeping that punishes you for speaking plainly.

Pulling the rug

Just when your child begins to stabilise—after months of work, after a fragile routine emerges—support is withdrawn. The staff person changes. The setting is reorganised. The strategy is discontinued. This is not coincidence. This is a system that prioritises staffing and optics over continuity and care. It punishes families for success, then blames them when children unravel.

Triage by tolerance

Support is rationed based on who can endure the most without intervention. Your child’s ability to “manage” without screaming becomes a reason to deprioritise them. But that endurance comes at a cost. Internalising harm is not resilience. It is compliance purchased through pain.

Strategic delay

“We’re working on it.” “It’s being discussed.” “Let’s revisit this next term.” These are the bureaucratic lullabies of inaction. The real goal is your silence, your withdrawal, your exhaustion. Strategic delay counts on your burnout to make the problem disappear.

These are institutional patterns—codified forms of structural harm wrapped in civility—and naming them affirms your clarity, expresses your accuracy, and enacts your rightful authority to make a record of what you have lived.

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What counts as a post? Anything you survived

You do not need to start with a perfect plan. You do not need to be calm or polite or spell right or read and reread your message, trying to guard those in power from pain. You do not need to write for anyone but yourself.

Here are just a few places you can begin:

• The timeline of what happened to your child last year
• The letter you were too afraid to send
• A comment that haunted you for days
• A policy phrase that enraged you
• An email you wrote and rewrote ten times
• The phone call that made you cry in your car
• The strategy you wish someone had told you sooner
• The sad thing our child did, which revealed the impact of institutional harm. It accumulates or time and it’s heart wrenching.

You can start with a quote. A sentence. A question. You can start with a line from your journal, a voice note dictated through tears, or a ChatGPT summary of an IEP you’re still trying to process. There is no right way. There is only beginning.

Your story does not need to be whole to be meaningful. It only needs to be yours.

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Once you begin placing your personal feelings within a structural frame—once you begin to name the patterns, the spin, the performance—you may feel an even deeper wave of rage and sorrow rise to meet you. That clarity hurts. That grief burns. But it also confirms what your body already knew: this system is brutal, and you have every reason to be furious. You are not alone. You are not fragile. You are seeing clearly. If you want a companion piece to this moment, here is my series on maternal rage—written as a record of how it feels to know the truth and still be expected to smile.