In September 2021, a regional council in the West Midlands won a national award for its autism employment programme. Twelve people had been placed in paid roles over eighteen months. The council’s communications team posted about it fourteen times in one week. A photographer came. The twelve employees were asked to pose together outside the building, holding a framed copy of the award. I know this because one of them told me, in a forum, that she had called in sick the day of the photo. She said the fluorescent lighting in the atrium where they staged the shot made her nauseous, but she couldn’t figure out how to explain that without sounding like she was complaining during the council’s best week.
That is the whole argument. The rest is detail.
A good week has its own physics. It generates a pressure field around itself that makes certain kinds of speech impossible. Not forbidden. Impossible. The week is warm. Everyone involved is proud. The press officer sends the numbers out and the numbers are real. Nobody fabricated them. Twelve people in paid roles. That is good. And inside the warmth, a specific silence forms.
Siri Sage wrote recently about a corridor in Rotterdam designed for Deaf spatial perception. Sage is a disability justice researcher and architect whose work focuses on how spaces can be designed for specific sensory and neurological needs. Clear sightlines, high contrast, white walls. Siri described it as orientation made architectural. Here is where Siri and I diverge. That corridor, for me, would be a sensory flood. White walls bounce light. High contrast signage in a narrow field competes for attention. Clear sightlines mean no visual rest, no alcove, no place where the eye can stop processing. What Siri experiences as clarity, my nervous system reads as volume. Siri is not wrong about the design. The design just assumed one kind of body in the space. This is not a flaw in Siri’s thinking. It is proof that even the best disability-led design becomes a new norm the moment it stops asking who else is in the room.
The good week does the same thing. It picks one story, tells it well, and the warmth it generates makes the other stories temporarily unspeakable.
Gregory Bateson argued in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, an influential systems theory book published in 1972, that a system’s pathology is located not in any individual component but in the pattern of relationships between them. The council’s employment programme was not pathological. The press coverage was not pathological. The woman who called in sick was not pathological. The pathology was in the relationship between the good week and the fluorescent atrium and the impossibility of saying this light makes me vomit while someone is handing your employer an award.
I have been in that pattern. In November 2022, a tech company in Dublin invited me to speak on a panel about neurodivergent innovation—innovation by people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other forms of neurological difference. Their office had just been profiled in a design magazine for its sensory rooms. Quiet pods. Adjustable lighting. Fidget tools in every meeting space. The panel was held in a different room. Open plan, two hundred people, no mic check, a Q&A format where audience members shouted questions from the back. I asked a staff member afterward whether anyone had flagged the contradiction. She said: not this week. They had just won the award for the sensory rooms.
The problem is not that institutions lie during good weeks. The problem is that good weeks are the mechanism by which institutions become unable to hear.
Nick Walker’s neuroqueer framework—a theory that neurological variation is not a deviation from a standard but a form of knowledge worth learning from—insists that neurological difference produces its own insights. Fine. But knowledge only exists when someone can speak it. The good week does not silence anyone. It just saturates the room with a frequency that makes certain signals undetectable. Not censorship. Interference.
The woman from the West Midlands forum told me she went back to work the following Monday. The framed award was hanging in the atrium, under the fluorescent lights.