I had a very specific idea of what an advocate looked like.
Confident. Articulate in the moment — not just in their head on the drive home. Organized. Not visibly afraid. The kind of person who could walk into a room full of people who disagreed with them, say the thing that needed to be said, and hold the floor without their voice shaking.
Someone who had, at some point, figured it out. Who had processed enough of the hard stuff to be able to talk about it from a place of solid ground instead of from the middle of the quicksand.
I was not that person. I am still, honestly, not always that person. And for a long time, I used that gap — between the advocate I imagined and the person I actually was — as a reason to stay quiet.
I’m writing this now because I think a lot of people are in that gap right now. Not just the quiet-because-you’re-still-figuring-it-out kind of quiet. The quiet that comes from watching what’s happening in this country in 2026 and feeling something between rage and paralysis and not knowing which direction to send any of it.
So let’s talk about this. Honestly. From the inside of it.
The First Time I Said Something
It wasn’t eloquent, it wasn’t planned, it was a meeting — one of those situations where something was being decided that affected people like me, and the people making the decision clearly had no idea what it was like to be a person like me, and something in me reached a point where the discomfort of speaking was finally less than the discomfort of sitting there in silence while the wrong thing happened.
So I said something. Imperfectly. With my voice doing the thing where it’s technically words but the energy underneath them is barely contained and you can hear that if you’re listening. Not in the composed, well-organized way I would have scripted if I’d known it was coming.
And it mattered. Not because it changed everything in that room on that day. But because someone else in the room — someone quieter than me, someone who had been sitting in the same silence — found me afterward and said they were glad I said it. That they’d been thinking the same thing and couldn’t get the words out.
That’s the thing I want you to hear underneath all the rest of this: advocacy is not always about being the most prepared person in the room. Sometimes it’s just about being the one who says it first, so the person next to you knows they aren’t alone in thinking it.
That’s it. That’s the whole job sometimes.
What’s Actually Happening Right Now (And Why It Makes the Silence Feel Safer)
I want to name the context we’re all sitting in before I go further, because I think it’s relevant to why so many people who care deeply are staying quiet.
It is July 2026. The United States government has, in the past several months, released a DOJ memo quietly arguing that states don’t have to provide community-based care to disabled people — directly threatening the Olmstead decision, which has been the bedrock of disability civil rights for 27 years. Nearly a trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts are working their way through implementation, with the services that allow disabled people to live in their communities — not in institutions — directly in the crosshairs. Trans protections are being rolled back at the federal level. DEI offices are being gutted. Rights that people fought decades for are being dismantled, sometimes through legislation, sometimes through executive action, and sometimes through a quiet memo dropped on a Friday afternoon when they’re hoping nobody’s paying attention.
If you are autistic, disabled, queer, trans, nonbinary, a person of color — or some combination, as many of us are — you are watching things happen to your life and your community in real time, from a position of often limited resources and frequently depleted bandwidth.
And then someone tells you to use your voice.
I understand why that can feel like a bad joke.
But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the people making these decisions are counting on exactly this. They are counting on your exhaustion. On the overwhelm being so complete that you decide there’s nothing you can do, or that whatever you could do is too small to matter, or that someone else — someone more qualified, more organized, more put-together — will handle it.
Silence is not neutral. It never has been. And right now, in this particular moment, it is especially not neutral.
So. The advocacy conversation. Let’s have it.
The Myth of the Put-Together Advocate
We have this cultural story about what advocates look like. They’re the people who have transcended their struggles. Who speak about their pain in the past tense, from the other side of it, with the earned authority of someone who has arrived somewhere safe and is now reaching back to help others up.
Those people are real. They are powerful. The world needs them.
But here’s what that story leaves out: nobody started there. Every single person who now speaks with that hard-won clarity once had no idea what they were doing. Once said the thing imperfectly and waited, heart hammering, to see what happened. Once got it wrong and had to come back and say so.
The myth of the put-together advocate does two harmful things. First, it makes people who are still in the middle of their own hard thing feel like they’re not qualified to speak yet — like you need to earn the right to have a voice by first getting through the worst of whatever you’re carrying. Second, it actually produces worse advocacy. Because the most powerful thing about lived experience is that it’s lived. Present tense. Ongoing. The person who is still figuring it out, who is telling you what it actually feels like right now rather than what it felt like from the cleaned-up perspective of three years later — that person connects with the people who most need to feel less alone.
Actually autistic advocacy didn’t get built by people who had everything figured out. It got built by autistic people who were exhausted and still typing. Who were in burnout and still writing. Who were in the middle of something terrible and unresolved and decided that putting it into words might help someone else know they weren’t the only one in the middle of something terrible and unresolved.
That is not lesser advocacy. That is often the most powerful kind.
The Particular Weight of Advocating When Your Brain Works Like Mine
I need to be honest about something that advocacy guides don’t usually include: for neurodivergent people, this is genuinely harder than it is for most people. Not impossible. Not not-worth-doing. But harder, in specific ways that I want to name rather than gloss over.
Advocacy asks you to communicate, often in real time, in formats that aren’t always natural for autistic brains. It asks you to manage the emotional weight of talking about things that are actively hurting you while you’re still being hurt by them. It asks you to take criticism and pushback — from people who disagree, from people within your own community who see things differently, from people who are just being unkind on the internet because it costs them nothing — and keep going anyway.
Most importantly, it asks for consistency, which is one of the hardest things to deliver when your capacity isn’t a steady stream but a variable one that depends on what else is happening in your life, how much sensory input you’ve processed today, whether your sleep was any good, how full the demand tank already is.
Advocacy is not free. Especially not for people who are already spending significant cognitive and emotional resources just navigating a world that was not built for them. The executive function cost is real. The emotional processing cost is real. The recovery time after a hard conversation or a piece of writing that required you to go somewhere vulnerable — that’s real too.
I want to say plainly, because I mean it: you are not obligated to advocate. You are not failing your community if what you have right now is going entirely to staying upright and functional. Surviving is enough. More than enough. The fact that you’re still here is genuinely not a small thing.
But if you have something left over — even a little — even just enough to share one post that says “this is my experience and it was real” — that counts. That is advocacy. That matters more than you probably realize.
Visible Advocacy Is Not the Only Kind
Here’s something I wish someone had told me earlier: you don’t have to be loud to be in this.
Sharing a post that tells the truth about something. Leaving a comment that shifts a conversation. Having a real talk with a family member who didn’t know. Showing up to a town hall even if you don’t say anything and just being a body that counts. Donating to an organization doing the legal work you can’t do yourself. Writing to your state rep even when it feels futile, because the futility is the point — they’re hoping you feel that way.
And yes — wearing the thing.
I know merch can feel like the least serious form of advocacy. Like it’s the version for people who want to feel like they’re doing something without actually doing the thing. I’ve thought about that, and I’ve landed somewhere different.
Visibility is a form of speech. When you wear something that says what you believe in a space where most people are saying nothing, you are making a statement. You are announcing: I am someone who has decided not to pretend this is fine. And sometimes that’s what someone else needs to see. Not a speech. Not a sign. Just someone, in a grocery store or at a cookout or on the subway, whose hat tells them they’re not alone.
That’s why I made the No Kings Then, No Kings Now collection. Not as a replacement for the harder work. As part of the spectrum of what it looks like to show up in the ways available to you.
You can get the t-shirt or the relaxed fit if you want to walk through your Fourth of July cookout making a point. You can get the distressed hat, the trucker hat, or the vintage cap if you want your headwear to do some of the talking. There’s a pullover hoodie for when the political climate and the actual climate are both a lot. A tote bag for the farmer’s market or the protest, depending on your weekend. A mug for the people who do their most passionate thinking before 9am. Stickers and vinyl decals for the laptop and the water bottle and the car bumper. Even a throw pillow, because sometimes the statement you need to make is in your own living room, for your own reminder as much as anyone else’s.
Every purchase supports this page. Which, right now, means supporting the writing of things like this — the actual ongoing cost of showing up, researching, and putting it into words on days when it would be easier not to.
On Getting It Wrong, Publicly, and Continuing Anyway
I have said things in this space that I’ve had to go back to and revisit. I have had my thinking challenged by other autistic people, by people in communities I was writing about but not of, by people who had more direct experience with something than I did and were generous enough to tell me.
I’ve had to learn in public. I’ve had to say “I was wrong about that” in the same place where I said the wrong thing, which is significantly less comfortable than being wrong privately and quietly correcting course where no one can see you.
This used to feel like a reason to stay quiet. To only speak when I was certain, only enter conversations where I couldn’t be wrong, only contribute when I’d done enough research that I could be confident nothing would need revision later.
Here’s the problem with that standard: it would mean I never said anything. Because certainty is not the available option. Learning is the available option. And learning requires saying something provisional and being willing to update it.
The conversations that actually change things are not the ones where everyone already agrees. They’re the messy ones. The ones where someone says something incomplete and someone else says “here’s what you’re missing” and the first person says “oh, you’re right” and the conversation moves. That’s the whole mechanism. It requires people willing to be in the middle of learning, in public, where it’s uncomfortable.
That’s what this space is for. Not authority delivered from somewhere high up. One voice. Figuring it out in real time. Saying the thing out loud and meaning it and being willing to mean something slightly different as the understanding deepens.
What “Ready Enough” Actually Looks Like
If you’ve been waiting until you’re ready — until you’ve processed enough, healed enough, researched enough, gotten certain enough — I want to be gentle but direct with you: that day is not coming the way you’re imagining it.
Ready enough is available right now. It looks like: you care about this, you have something to say about it, and the discomfort of saying it has become less than the discomfort of staying quiet while things that matter keep happening without your voice in them.
That’s the threshold. That’s actually all it is.
You don’t need a platform, you don’t need credentials, and you don’t need the perfect words. You need to mean it and say it and be willing to keep going when it’s hard.
One voice. Even a shaky one. Especially a shaky one, sometimes, because the shaky ones are the ones that make other people feel like they’re allowed to be shaky too.
Say the thing.
We’re listening. And there are more of us listening than you probably know.
Want to Support This Work?
If this piece meant something to you, here are a few ways to stay in it:
- Wear it: The No Kings Then, No Kings Now collection — hats, shirts, hoodies, stickers, mugs, and more — because visibility is a form of advocacy too.
- Share it: If something in this piece said what you couldn’t, send it to someone who needed it.
- Donate: Support Just 1 Voice directly — this page runs on time and on care, and both of those cost something.
- Keep reading: Advocacy | Autism & Neurodiversity | Gender & Sex
