Margaret Gillan Ritchie

I was on the phone with an evaluator, answering questions for a research study that our youngest son was enrolled in, when she asked whether anyone in the immediate family was autistic.

"Me," I said.

There was silence on the other end of the phone until her voice cut through it.

"You don't sound autistic."

I could only laugh in the moment because I felt blindsided. The reason I knew how to advocate for my son is the same reason she couldn't hear it in my voice: I had been doing it, unintentionally, for myself all my life.

Advocacy Is Not Primarily a Workplace Skill; It Is a Life Skill

No one taught me at work how to advocate. I didn't learn it during a training session, in a communications workshop, or even in a leadership development program. I learned it the way most parents do: slowly, privately, and through a thousand small moments of realizing that systems weren't built for our children-or with us-in mind.

Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) aren't always individualized. Cookie-cutter goals are often written with no specific child in mind. My husband and I have asked questions, pushed back, and started over more times than I can count. Neuro-affirming support doesn't come prepackaged; caregivers often have to fight for it. That fight is exhausting, and it's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it.

A late-in-life diagnosis explained a lifetime of explaining myself. I had built a 14-year career in communications, helping mission-driven organizations find their voice and reach the communities they serve. Everything I knew how to do professionally had been forged in those school meetings while advocating for my sons.

Here's what I know, and it's not said often enough in professional workspaces:

Advocacy is not primarily a workplace skill; it is a life skill. It's most often forged through lived experience.

You can take every course that teaches advocacy or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), read every framework, and earn every credential, yet still walk into a room full of people who feel failed by the system and have no idea how to reach them.

It's not because you aren't smart or prepared enough. It's because you may never have needed something from a system that wasn't designed for you.

The advocates who connect with people in those rooms are often the ones who learned through lived experience. This is not a credential you earn at work. It is something life teaches you without asking for your permission.

The Hardest Audiences to Reach

Through my work with mission-driven organizations-and through my personal life-I've learned that the hardest audiences to reach are rarely those who disagree.

They're the ones who have been let down so many times that they've stopped expecting anything different.

They are the ones who have learned, through experience, to be skeptical of polished messaging and well-meaning outsiders who speak about them instead of with them.

I understand that skepticism personally.

When you've spent years navigating systems that weren't built for the way you work, you don't just experience the gaps. You study them. You identify ways to fix them.

Being on the receiving end of a system that has failed you-and continues to fail you-can be painful. But learning from that experience is powerful.

I understand where the distrust comes from, and I see it in our sons. I see what it takes to sit in those rooms and keep asking for more support, not because they are being difficult, but because standard support wasn't designed with them in mind.

One day, the workplace may hand them that same cookie-cutter approach and set them up to fail-unless they can get into the rooms where decisions are made and real change can happen.

Don't Believe That

I think about other women who have worked hard throughout their careers just to be seen.

There is a subtle message in many workplaces that those of us who have struggled should leave that part of our identity at the door.

Whether it's our sensitivity, our pattern recognition, or our refusal to accept things as they are, these are qualities we're not always encouraged to bring to the table.

Don't believe that.

The empathy that develops through struggle is strategic. It gives you the ability to read a room and help drive change in systems that have failed people. It's what makes true advocates effective in what they do.

It's Work That Builds Trust, Not Manages Perception

To the evaluator who told me I don't sound autistic, I know you meant well.

But I also know that what you were really saying was that I had learned to sound like what the world expected.

That is not my goal.

And I refuse to let it become the goal for our sons.

My diagnosis, the masking, and the personal understanding that comes from needing something from a system that is failing have shaped how I approach this work. The goal is to bring all of it together and do work that truly reaches people.

It's work that builds trust, not manages perception.

It's work that doesn't treat lived experience as a liability. Rather, it recognizes it as a credential.

It's the kind of work that needs to be done.

And those skills can't be built in a boardroom.