In the house where I grew up, “diversity” wasn’t a celebrated buzzword or some noble ideal to be embraced; it was treated like a dirty word, something suspect, something inconvenient, something that threatened the illusion of order my family so desperately wanted to preserve. It was a threat to a very specific, very rigid status quo, one that demanded a performance I could not, and would not, give. On a daily basis, I was interrogated about why I couldn’t just be “normal,” a question that carries its own kind of quiet violence because it is never really a question at all. It is an accusation dressed up as concern. It is a demand that you shrink yourself until you become manageable. I was shamed and derided every single time I reached for any semblance of authenticity, every time I let some honest part of myself surface in a room that had no interest in honesty unless it was convenient. It’s a strange thing to realize that your own family views your intrinsic self—the way your brain actually processes the world, the way you move through it, the way you survive it—as a personal affront to their comfort. In that environment, my neurodivergence was never understood as a different way of being. It was treated like a defect of character, a moral failure, a deliberate refusal to comply with a system that was never built to accommodate me in the first place.
Welcome to Blind Spots in Focus: a series dedicated to prioritizing voices that are consistently overlooked in mainstream spaces by drawing critical attention to the perspectives that shape our world, challenging the status quo, and broadening our collective understanding. In this series, I will bring to light the vital perspectives that have historically been pushed to the background.
In a sea of 'performative allyship,' her voice acted as a lighthouse—the kind of sudden, glaring clarity that hits with the force of a dead stop at the end of a fall. And so, it is my privilege and with great pleasure to introduce to you, Bri Speaks. |
Sheena MonsterThey/Them/Theirs 
Naming the things that society works hardest to ignore, to reclaim the humanity stripped by systemic deception.
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