The rooms we learn to disappear in, and the spaces we reclaim

So now, when you ask me, “What does it mean to actually be heard?” just know that I’ve sat with this question for decades, but the answer never came easy. Perhaps because the cream-coloured walls of my room started looking more familiar than the people I’ve shared my house with my entire life. Growing up neurodivergent in a desi family meant ignoring my own pain, silencing and shrinking myself to the point I forgot how my own voice sounded like because centring other people’s comfort somehow felt safer. Safer, but it came with a cost. It was life draining, like living with grapevines growing underneath my skin, gripping my throat, yet no one noticed.

I forgot my own voice because I was always listening for everyone else’s. I remember sitting down with my cousins at 13. They talked about how hot Karan Singh Grover was in Dill Mill Gayye, cackling and showing off their pretty Eid dresses, the green and gold embroidery catching the light, while I was learning how to disappear in a room full of people. Everyone else seemed to know how to belong, and I didn’t yet know what belonging even means.

I may have left that room a long time ago, but it followed me like a shadow. It showed up in different places, at different ages, with different people. For years, I forced myself to fit into rooms that weren’t built for me. Leaving felt like abandoning that younger self.

As I grow older, I realise that my younger self taught me some very important things. They taught me that disappearing was a survival skill. They taught me to notice and really listen to the pauses, the flicker in someone's voice, the moment someone shrinks into the background, hoping no one else would notice them. I learnt to hold space, to witness the pain that often went unspoken.

And then, I met people who really spoke my language. Who taught me that belonging wasn’t a place; rather, it was a practice. It is something that we make together. They held my existence with so much care that, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was truly witnessed. Someone stayed with my discomfort instead of rushing to fix it.

In that room, I stopped pretending to be neurotypical; I was free to be myself, messy but human. That’s when I finally began to understand that my lived experiences and my story had value. And my dear reader, so do yours.

But learning my story had value didn’t mean I was always met with the care to hold it. So, as a therapist, I found myself back at the question: what does it mean to actually be heard in professional spaces?

As I sit with this, I am reminded of that moment during my Master’s. I was sitting around a table with my colleagues. We were gathered there for a professional conference. It was a hot summer evening, sticky and honestly a sensory nightmare. I rolled up my sleeves.

Everything was fine until a coworker pointed out the old scars on my arm peeking from under my sleeves, perplexed but certainly not out of concern. In that moment, the room shifted. The conversation had been flowing and suddenly, everything was still and I could feel the grapevines rising again.

I remember thinking to myself, "you do not point out someone's scars; that’s like mental health care 101." There was something so jarring about watching such a vulnerable part of my story becoming the entire room, yet I wasn’t the one at the centre. The conversation steered towards how someone going through mental health struggles, or those who have in the past, shouldn’t be therapists.

In that moment, what stayed with me wasn’t that someone noticed; it was how quickly pain can become spectacle when lived experiences aren’t held with care. Suddenly, I was back in the room with my cousins, a part of me wanting to shrink in the background, but this time, I was angry and not afraid to take up space.

Something shifted in me that day. In the moment, I knew the kind of therapist I did not want to be. The anger I had spent years swallowing started to feel less like an open wound and more like a compass.

This time, I wasn’t questioning my own voice or whether or not my lived experiences mattered, but I started questioning who builds the room and who actually gets to take up space in them, and who was excluded and who makes that decision. I started exploring more about neurodivergent-affirmative and queer-affirmative therapy, along with an anti-oppressive framework, wanting to make therapy more inclusive, where lived experiences are centred and truly heard.

We are taught that therapists are supposed to be blank slates, that politics don’t belong in the therapy room, but neutrality usually ends up protecting the same dominant narrative that tries to silence ours. As people of colour and therapists, we are overtly taught to serve as a colonial tool by labelling people’s responses as “pathology” and “fixing” them so they can “deep-breathe” their way through capitalism, while never really addressing or questioning the systems that are causing harm.

Instead, we get stress management workshops for overworked and underpaid employees, where someone earnestly says, “breathe,” and we all fight the urge to scream or laugh or both.

I am still learning to navigate through these questions, and I don’t have all the answers, but I've spent much of my life in spaces where I felt out of place. Neurotypical spaces, homophobic spaces, being around cishet people, where I constantly had to do the emotional labour of explaining, educating and/or justifying my right to exist. And it is so exhausting.

But sometimes I speak, and then someone reaches out and says that what I said resonated with them, or me being vulnerable or being true to myself gave them the courage to trust their own voice. That always reminds me of how important it actually is to centre lived experiences and diverse voices. All stories matter.

Throughout my journey, I feel like my lived experience has slowly become so much more than something I carry alone; it has become something I bring into the work I do and how I connect with others, in and out of my professional life.

I have met some really beautiful people along the way. People who reinforced something I held very close to my heart: lived experience cannot just be something we hold space for after decisions have already been made. It needs to be part of how we think about problems, shape solutions, and imagine change.

These spaces for me are a constant reminder to me that changing the narrative also means changing who gets to be part of the conversation.

I have spent years learning how to disappear in rooms full of people, but now, I’m learning how to stay, and also how to leave the door a little wider for those who come after me.

For over a decade, I carried those invisible vines around my throat, mistaking silence for safety. Now, I’m really learning to loosen their grip, not only for myself, but for those still finding their voices. And perhaps that’s what being heard means to me now.

Maybe that is what change looks like for me for now: existing as a form of resistance, drawing upon the ancestral wisdom that I carry within me, not speaking for people, but making room for people to speak for themselves because perhaps, we were never meant to carry this alone.