I am always thinking about words. My dad used to say that one word can change the entire meaning of your intention. I remember the way he would pause on that, like language wasn’t just something we used, but something we were responsible for. I think about that a lot now. Because I was never fully comfortable with the rise of “inclusion” as the word everyone seemed to reach for, even as it became the language of the moment. And lately, I have been sitting with why I no longer feel like myself when I write posts for Facebook. Not fully myself, anyway. Not the me that swears. Not the me that writes instinctively, bluntly, yes, even more bluntly than usual, honestly. Not the me that started with a page called Anywhere But Centre before I changed it to BEE – Neurodivergent Buzz…before Facebook decided I was apparently no longer me and deleted me, along with years of work.
There is something beyond the deep frustration and uncertainty that came with that. Because maybe this is actually about what happens when words get too polished. Too co-opted. Too emptied out. When words that once pointed toward justice become branding. Performance. Something safe, marketable, and detached from the risk, mess, and relationship they were supposed to demand of us. And one of those words, for me, is inclusion. I am not going to use it as easily anymore. Not because I do not care about justice, access, or people being able to exist fully as themselves, I care about those things deeply. I care about them in the marrow. But the word 'include' catches in my throat now, which has nothing to with the dyspraxia or situational mutism I experience, because it quietly assumes something we do not question enough.
It assumes there is a centre. A place where decisions are made. A place where some people already belong, and others are invited in. And if I am honest, peeking-through-the-curtains honest, the centre usually looks like power. It looks like whiteness. It looks like respectability. It looks like institutions, platforms, professionals, gatekeepers, polished advocates, funded organisations, people who know how to sound “right.” Does it look like us? Like me? And if it does, then the question is not how we include others. The question is: Who built the centre? Who benefits from staying close to it? And why are we still standing in it while calling others in? If inclusion begins with us, then maybe it was never inclusion at all. Maybe it was management. Maybe it was optics. Maybe it was saviourism with softer language. And that is where I keep coming back to something else. Not inclusion. Decentring. Because relationship exposes this in a way nothing else does. If you want to understand people, care about people, and be altered by other lives enough to actually change something, relationship is the way.
But relationship does not begin with announcements. It does not begin with curated posts about who you care about. It does not begin in public. It begins in private. It begins with your relationship to yourself. To your conditioning. To your privilege. To the stories you have inherited and mistaken for truth. It begins with undoing what you think you know. And that is not glamorous work. It is quiet. Uncomfortable. Slow. Often unflattering. And crucially, it is mostly unseen. This is what I think gets missed when people talk about decentring. It is not something you perform. It is not something you post. It is not something you curate into a version of yourself that looks aware, informed, accountable. If you're decentring only exists in public, it is not decentring. It is positioning. Real decentring shows up in what you do when no one is watching. What you read when no one will praise you for reading it. Who you are in your relationships when there is no audience. How you sit with discomfort when you cannot turn it into content. Whether you allow yourself to be changed without needing that change to be seen. That is the work.
So I keep asking myself, and I think this matters beyond me: Are you in real relationship with the people you speak about? Not symbolically. Not professionally. Not occasionally. In your actual life. Are you learning from them? Are you reading their work? Are you sitting with what you do not understand, about communication, about Indigenous sovereignty and reparations, about motor differences, about apraxia, about access, about the harm that gets disguised as “critical thinking” or “just following the science”? Or are you staying just far enough away to remain comfortable, credible, and intact? Because those are not the same thing. I see people with privilege and platforms doing harm in exactly that gap. Shutting down communities while calling it rigour. Dismissing lived experience while calling it evidence. Producing content that sounds careful, measured, intelligent, and never once sitting with the consequences of what it does in the world. And I see how often those people are protected. While the people most affected are expected to absorb it. Explain it. Survive it. And somehow remain gracious. That is not advocacy to me. What troubles me more than people getting it wrong is how much effort goes into looking like they are getting it right. The language is better now. More polished. More aware. Sometimes it even sounds like justice. But underneath it? Same platform. Same centrality. Same control. Same distance. Same benefit. Just better wording. And I am not outside of this. I am in it. I am white. I benefit from whiteness. I benefit from being read a certain way. I benefit from language, from written articulation, from being able to explain myself and be understood in the written word.
That does not disappear because I feel uncomfortable. It does not disappear because I have good intentions. It does not disappear because I am trying. That is the point. Privilege does not dissolve under self-awareness. In fact, one of the clearest signs of privilege is how survivable it is to be publicly wrong. You can be called out and still be safe. You can make a mistake and still be heard. You can cause harm and still be given room to repair. And that matters, beyond you. Because being called out is not the worst thing that can happen. Avoiding accountability is. The sting, the shame, the defensiveness, the fear, those are real, but they pass. They are not the same as structural harm. They are not the same as being denied voice, credibility, safety, or access. Sometimes being called out is the most generous interruption we are given. Because it forces a different set of questions: Not: How do I explain myself? Not: How do I make this go away? Not: How do I still be seen as good? But: What have I centred? Who paid for that? What am I defending? What would accountability actually require of me now? And this is where performance becomes obvious.
Because it is easy to look accountable. It is easy to sound reflective. It is easy to produce content that signals awareness. It is much harder to change. To let your thinking shift. To let your position shift. To lose comfort, certainty, or status in the process. This is why I cannot sit comfortably with the way “inclusion” is often used. Because so much of what gets called inclusion still keeps the same structure intact. Reaching out to someone because they are Black, or non-speaking, or Autistic, or Disabled, without relationship, without care, without knowing who they are, is not respect. It is not solidarity. It is not inclusion. It is extraction. And people feel that. If you have ever been invited into a space not because of who you are, but because of what you represent, you know exactly how that lands. You know when you are being related to. And you know when you are being used. So I come back, again and again, to decentring. Not as a word. Not as a trend. Not as something to be seen doing. But as a practice. A private one. A daily one. A relational one. Decentring asks us to question why we need to be seen as good. To interrogate the comfort of being the helper, the host, the one doing the inviting. To notice how easily language becomes a shield that protects us from deeper change. And for me, this is tied to decolonising too. Not as aesthetic. Not as metaphor. But as an actual unsettling of dominance. A refusal to keep reproducing control, hierarchy, extraction, and centrality under kinder names.
Especially now, when everything is so polished. Even this piece. Me in written form. Because that is the tension I keep sitting with, how easy it is to produce language that sounds right. How easy it is to create something articulate, thoughtful, convincing. And still be untouched by it. Still unchanged. Still central. Maybe that is why I miss the earlier version of myself sometimes. The less filtered me. The Anywhere But Centre me. Because even the name held the argument. Anywhere but the centre. Anywhere but the place that keeps presenting itself as neutral, reasonable, good. Anywhere but the point from which power keeps inviting others in. What I want now is not to sound more correct. I want to be less central. I want the work, in my private life and my public life, to be about learning how to listen better, how to be interrupted, how to be wrong without collapsing, how to take responsibility without performance, and how to build relationships that are not transactional. I want to keep unlearning the habits of dominance that sit quietly inside language, advocacy, and identity. I do not think inclusion is enough for that. I think what is required is deeper. Messier. More demanding. Less visible. And maybe the real question is this: Who are we when no one is watching our “inclusion”? What would remain of our values if they were never seen? Because this is not new. The fact that it keeps returning, in waves, in trends, in language cycles, tells me how much of it is still performance. If statements and events and polished declarations were enough, we would not still be here. This is everyday work. Private work. Relational work. Ongoing work. And I think that is where anything worth calling justice begins. Not at the centre. Not with ourselves as the starting point. Not with a polished invitation into a room we still control. Anywhere but centre.
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