When Disclosure Is Weaponised

What happens when you disclose Autism? Or a ‘mental health condition’? A hidden Disability? Madness? Or anything that diverges from the performance of normal?

One of the things that can happen is that when you express that you are struggling to someone you have previously disclosed to, their ableism will prompt them to focus on your Disability/Autism/mental health instead of the gravity and breadth of what you are trying to navigate, the systemic causes of your suffering, or the lack of adequate support that is readily available.

I recently got very emotional when I was in the presence of someone I had disclosed my Autism to some weeks earlier. I talked about how much I have going on at the moment and how overwhelming it all is, and how I’m just about getting from one day to the next without any time to feel or process or rest rather than sleep. They were tender and kind, and listened to me. But then, when it came for them to speak, they immediately talked about how difficult change can be when you are Autistic. How tough transition and unfamiliarity is. Thankfully, I have done enough work by now that I was able to immediately shut this down. I said that I didn’t think this was about being Autistic, and that anyone would be feeling overwhelmed by what I was navigating.

I know I am Disabled, I know being Autistic in an ableist world means that I can and do struggle with things that non-Autistics do not struggle with or do not struggle with to the same degree. My response was not MY ableism coming to the surface, I am aware of my own ableism and am able to recognise it when it crops up. This was someone else weaponising my diagnosis against me in order to play down my experience. This behaviour blames my Autism for how I am feeling, instead of the very real circumstances I am navigating. Am I finding it all harder because I am Autistic? Maybe. Would it be hard anyway? Definitely. This internalising of harmful systems is how we continue to perpetuate an entire psychological industry built on the pathologising of normal reactions to harmful systems, environments and expectations.

It’s important to point out that the person who said this to me does not identify as neurodivergent, not to say a neurodivergent person isn’t capable of this behaviour - they are, but it matters because it speaks to the paternalism that also plays into the way Disabled, Neurodivergent and Mad people are treated. This idea that those who can perform neuronormativity and identify as neurotypical somehow know ‘what’s good for us’ - despite not having any lived experience of what we go through. Do some non-Autistic folks know what Autistic people need? Yes, some caregivers who know Autistic people incredibly well and are responsible for caring for them on a daily basis do know what those specific Autistic people may need, but in all the cases of this that I’ve witnessed, there is a humility present in these caregivers and they do not ever claim to know ‘better’ than their Autistic kin, just that they know their loved ones very well, through sustained and attentive care.

The person who weaponised my Autism against me may know other Autistic people well, but they don’t know me well. They saw I was emotional and overwhelmed, added in my diagnosis, and made ableist and dismissive assumptions that removed responsibility from those who designed the systems harming me (and them!) and focused the entirety of my suffering on the way my nervous system functions.

As weaponising diagnoses goes, this was a relatively harmless example. In that, I was equipped to manage it in the moment and the person who did it has no power over me in any meaningful way beyond them holding deliberately advantaged identities. They can’t take away my livelihood, they can’t impact my access to healthcare, they can’t take my home away. But it had echoes of so many times when my tendency towards openness and vulnerability has led me to disclose parts of myself to people who do have power over me, and who have ended up causing me great harm.

I don’t touch on my work history very much. So much of the trauma I have experienced has been in corporate workplaces. I know it all started with racism - targeted for the identity I wear on my face and in my name. I know that it continued with misogyny, sexual harassment and in one workplace - sexual assault (I’m not including pre-corporate jobs - I’d need an entirely separate article or that). Next came mental health, and indeed my desire to make the places where I worked fair and equitable - both made me targets. Later it was transness, then finally Autism. It is important to share here, that I know I also caused harm in some of these places. I was given power very young, power that I was not ready for, and in the earlier years I was focused much more on holding on to that power through assimilating to whiteness and normativity than to creating equity or justice. Some of it is still so muddy, so mixed up, that I can’t tell who was responsible for what, and where accountability should have lain. I do know that whatever my ‘crimes’, I paid for them many times over. And many others, did not. I also know, that toxic workplaces change you, and not the other way around. I don’t like who I was at many moments throughout those years. I also know there were many times I tried to do better and to make things better. I stood up for myself, for others with less power within the organisation, for those experiencing the greatest degree of colonial oppression within those structures, and it backfired or was squashed - pretty much every single time. Ultimately the lack of safety, years of harm and the seemingly impossible task of changing things from the inside is what led me to leave for good.

What does this have to do with the person who weaponised my diagnosis? A lot, actually. While it was an unpleasant experience, it caused me no real or lasting harm. Leaving the internal workings of corporate workplaces freed me of some of the most traumatic and harmful experiences of my life. Is there privilege in the decision to leave? Yes. I have a support network who will do their best to ensure I am never without a roof over my head. There are many who have no such security. But I also think that there are many for whom the fear of what life could be like with less money, less security, is part of how they keep you trapped. My salary is a fifth of what it was five years ago. And it’s four times as much as it was last year! And yet, I am the most contented, peaceful and purposeful that I have ever been (even when I am struggling!). I am liberated through transforming my life into one where when someone weaponises my diagnosis against me - there is a much smaller chance that it could have a material impact on my life or wellbeing. Am I entirely free? No, I still have to exist within harmful systems. Medical people, police, politicians, even family, could easily harm me through weaponising my race, my biology, my transness, my queerness, my diagnosis. But scrubbing ‘employer’ from that list was huge. Gargantuan. Life altering - in the best possible way.

And I won’t be adding it back anytime soon.

-AJ

Thank you so much for being here! My newsletter has been completely free to access since its inception two years ago, and this model is no longer sustainable for me. I have moved to a tiered model, where paid subscribers retain access to all content, including one article every two weeks and access to the back catalogue. Free subscribers will have full access to every 4th post (including this one), the rest will be paywalled, as will past articles. Thank you for supporting my need to navigate capitalism while doing my best to dismantle it.

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Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• Do people underplay the harm caused to you by systems of oppression? Do they weaponise aspects of your identity to blame you for your experiences? What are the power dynamics at play? How can you challenge this narrative - both in your own mind and externally?

• Are you aware of the systems of harm that are causing you the most trauma? The most harm? Where are the opportunities to divest from these? What will you risk? What might you gain?

• What are you sacrificing for money and security? What parts of you are neglected for boons of whiteness and normativity? What freedoms and joy may exist outside of this?

• Who in your life and circles is the most oppressed under harmful systems? How can you support them? What could you do to give them more freedom, more choices?