[2025 Reflection 3-6 (of 8?)]: on noise, disobedience, and sankofa

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.

☺️ Hello!

To get me back into the habit of newslettering, for the next eight (or nine?) days of 2025, daily, I will share a 2025 reflection.

Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth up: on noise, disobedience, and sankofa

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I share a lot of cutesy neurodivergent memes on my Instagram — the autistic urge to… or how a person with ADHD tells stories. And they are fun. We all laugh. But, admittedly, I have participated in a pernicious rebranding campaign that reframes neurodivergence as a set of quirky personality traits that “we all have a little bit of,” rather than what it is: a set of neurodevelopmental disorders that affect how we process the world and, in turn, how we are excluded or minimized by it.

I received an autism diagnosis on April 3, and I am still grieving.

I still have nights when I am angry. Angry that no one caught it. Angry that so much has been hard, but I was never believed. Angry that nothing about me could be “normal.” Nothing is easy or default.

Clearly, I have not arrived at the influencer-motivational speaker-powerhouse arc of the late-diagnosis autism storyline. You know the one where the despondent and overwhelmed overachiever knows something is not quite right, but cannot name it. She finally gets a diagnosis, and suddenly, everything in her life clicks into place. She leaves her full-time job to become an inspirational speaker, reminding us all that we have powers we can leverage, scale, brand, and optimize. Even neurodivergence — a literal divergence — still has a “right way,” a brand. How silly!?! There is a correct way to be disabled.

I did not reach this powerhouse-autistic-influencer arc because I do not want to.

I created a series over a decade ago called “How to Suffer Politely (and Other Etiquette).” That “tell your humor with triumphant humor” and “lower the pitch of your suffering” are pedagogical routines: we are trained to heroically render the emotional distress of having our difference weaponized as minimally offensive and disruptive.

And please, don’t forget to make us laugh.

I once recounted a bullying story from my childhood. I was bullied mercilessly. And yet, in telling it, I made about five jokes, one of which was, “I do not agree with being bullied, but I understand it,” then proceeded to read an entry from my fourth-grade class journal.

None of this shit is funny.

That ostracism and exclusio left indelible marks. However, I minimized them because it has never been safe to say, “I can still remember how it felt to know I wasn’t the right kind of person, being reminded every day of this social designation, yet not knowing how to terraform my identity quickly enough to be an acceptable person, to be safe. I can still see their grins.”

But there, I just said it.

Lamenting over my neurodivergent struggles isn’t an admission of wrongness in me; it is a very reasonable response to being a part of a system that refuses to “process” us. We are noise. We are dirty data (Hito Steryl). In The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk (2021), John Melillo writes, “For Attali [who wrote a great book on noise], noise is both an index of power - for those who control what counts as noise - and a principle of subversion.” All parts of us cannot pass through the sieve; what remains are the obedient bits.

And this shit is annoying—point blank.

I do not feel bad about being autistic or having ADHD; I feel bad that some folks thought they could trick me into hating myself, rather than hating the system that has determined I am unworthy of curiosity. And sometimes, they get me, lol. Sometimes, I am mad at my brain, my heart, my spirit. Then I take magnesium, sleep, and try again not to internalize the ableism.

There is always a sanctioned plot to follow, always consequences for disobedience. When you hop off the teleological train headed to wherever has been deemed an acceptable destination, you fall into a void of unintelligible noise. Unreadable and unreachable. That void is out of sight. How convenient is that? You can’t see me. You can’t find me. I am not showing up in the database. There is a glitch. There is a 404 error. These end-of-year reflections explain why I have spent the last 18 months writing about noise and disobedience. As I have written (for a previous writing commission that was not a good fit, but is now part of my artist statement):

I continue

We must return to the scene of presumed certainty. InshaAllah, 2026 will be the year I go back and fetch all the parts of myself, all the noise, all the dirty data.

Thank you for reading. All the best, always,

Kameelah 👽

Finally, while I don't organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this little newsletter let me take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at USD 70 :)

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL