We Were Never Meant to Be Polite: A Reckoning with the Professionalisation of Lived Experience Spaces

There is an insidious trend infecting lived experience spaces: the demand for professionalism. A quiet call to civility. A push for us to be palatable, articulate, and polite, for the comfort of those who have never lived what we’ve lived, but who still hold the positions of power, pull the strings, and run the show in our name.

They speak of centring lived experience, but they are the ones writing the agendas, holding the purse strings, chairing the meetings, and deciding who gets through the door.

This isn't just about manners. It’s about power. About control. About who is allowed to speak—and who gets silenced, reshaped, or polished into something that won’t disturb the meeting minutes.

Criminalised voices, dissenting voices, angry voices, grieving voices - raw and real voices - are often shushed, sidelined, or told to “bring it down a notch” for the sake of funders, facilitators, or fragile egos. We are told we can never be angry. Never be raw. Never be unscripted. We must perform our pain in ways that flatter the room. Speak of suffering, but only in soft tones. Wrap our rage in ribbon. Cry quietly, and never rage aloud.

We’re expected to fit into rooms we were never meant to survive in, let alone thrive in. The unspoken rule: speak your truth, but only if it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.Only if it affirms their role, flatters their frameworks, and doesn’t threaten their control.

But the truth is not polite. It is not tidy. It does not ask for permission.

Still, time and again, we see the polite and the quiet - those who can neatly package their trauma into PowerPoint slides - being elevated, platformed, and praised. It’s always the ones who speak softly, who thank the system for their survival, who smile through the violence and wrap their wounds in grant-friendly language, that are called “brave” and “resilient.”

Even in so-called “lived experience” spaces, the old binaries persist: the deserving and the undeserving. The clean and the dirty. The broken and the redeemed. The reformed and the irredeemable. The compliant and the confrontational. The ones they can point to and say: “See? The system works.” And the ones they avoid, erase, or silence, because we are the reminder that it doesn’t.

Those who rage, who refuse to make their trauma digestible, are branded as difficult. “Hard to work with.” “Can’t play well with others.” Not because they’re wrong - but because they’re real. Because they won’t perform gratitude for crumbs. Because they know too much.But, our anger is not the problem. Our anger is insight. Our fury is forensic. It is the most natural response to systems that have caged, disappeared, violated, and dehumanised us. But rather than listen, they call us unprofessional. As if being destroyed by a system and daring to speak it without a smile is bad manners.

The people who are rewarded with platforms are not give them because they are honest, or wise, or because their testimony shakes the foundations of carceral logic. They are given platforms because they are safe. Because they don’t make demands. Because they know their place. Because they won’t bite the hand that offers them a seat at the table, even if the table was built from our bones.

And far too many in our community have bought into it.

There is a deep, painful loyalty to the systems that oppress us - one born of desperation, of stolen stability, of criminalisation that robs us of everything and leaves us clinging to crumbs. I see people in these spaces scrambling to be the model survivor, the palatable advocate, the “safe” criminalised person. Performing professionalism as if it will save them. Performing for the very people who convene these groups, who gatekeep the resources, who decide which stories are useful and which are too messy to touch.

And in that performance, something more insidious happens: they hand their power over to them.

In the desperation to be accepted, people begin to defer to those in charge: validating them, endorsing them, elevating them as the experts. They lend those in power credibility they have not earned, simply by sitting next to them and nodding along. It’s tacit approval dressed up as collaboration. But make no mistake: it reinforces the same hierarchies that have always kept us small.

Why do you continue to seek their validation as if they can wash us clean?

The truth is: they need us more than we need them.

Without us, they are just a theory. A research brief. A half-formed idea about systems they’ve never survived. A spark of an idea dressed up as insight.We are not their case studies. We are the conditions they try to analyse. We are the evidence. We are the expertise. We are the knowers, not just the testifiers.

We are knowledge embodied.

Our bodies carry the wisdom their frameworks cannot hold. Our lives are the curriculum. Our survival is the citation. Everything they claim to know about these systems: prisons, child removal, poverty, criminalisation, violence - they learned by watching us. Listening to us. Reading us.

And yet still, they position themselves as the experts.

They speak with borrowed authority, and you’re letting them.

But let’s be clear: without us, they have nothing. No insight. No legitimacy. No so-called “impact.”

They are only elevated because of our stolen knowing - extracted, sanitised, repackaged, and handed back to us with our names scrubbed off.

We are not raw data waiting to be refined.

We are the original source.

And yet, people are giving their power away. Handing it over, willingly, for a moment adjacent to the flame of faux fame.

Worse still, some are stepping over their own kin to climb to the top of a pile built on proximity to whiteness, respectability, and the illusion of safety. I have watched people trample the voices of those still inside, those still silenced, to position themselves as the “right kind” of lived experience expert. The polished. The professional. The palatable.

This is not a call for more inclusion into these spaces. This is a reckoning.We were never meant to survive these systems, and certainly not to make them comfortable.

So, I say: let us be unapologetic. Let us be messy. Let us be angry. Let us be whole.We do not need to be made clean. We do not need to be saved. We are not broken.

We need to be heard, and we need to be the ones holding the mic.But more than that - we need each other.

This moment demands solidarity, not individual ascent.

We must stop stepping over the bodies of our kin and comrades for a seat at the table built on their backs.

We are not here to perform respectability.

We are here to tear down what harms us and build something rooted in care, resistance, and collective power.

We must wrest power back into our communities - not divest from each other and hand it to gatekeepers.

They were never meant to speak for us.

We are the source. And we must move together, or not at all.

Original Source by Tabitha Lean