disability blog. 20s. they/them. semi-crippled freakazoid. critical of psychiatry/the medical industrial complex. supportive of self-dx. white gentile/tme.
zionists read this. then get off my fucking blog. or die
âą late 20s, they/them + neutral terms
âą complex/multiple trauma survivor
âą hypo-dx'd congenital neuromuscular disorder + minor limb/facial/spinal differences + auDHD, cPTSD, POTS, etc.
âą sighted & hearing
âą PT/ambulatory mobility aid-user, but i spend the majority of my free time at home and in bed
âą white + TME
i block all "whump" blogs that interact unless you wanna pay me for using my suffering and my body as inspiration for your fandom bullshit xoxo
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survivor of several forms of abuse from multiple people spanning across the first 23 years of my life, i am relatively paranoid and asocial as a result of this; also a psych survivor
currently incapable of materially supporting myself, can only work part-time, applying for SSDI
university student studying for a BFA; my "thesis" is on disability, sickness, and the body as perceived by both society, the self, and the medical system
"alterhuman," living doll, etc. and various other things but i don't really wanna talk about it and i don't even like typing it out here honestly
things to know
i compulsively worry about my health and release that on this blog, the medical neglect is part of that as i'm having to play catch up, sorry
i'm a real-life person, not inspiration for fandom or original fiction (certainly not for free) unless i explicitly state otherwise
confusingly dissociative, obligatory not "anti-endo" but complex dissociative disorders =/= plurality and online CDD spaces mostly suck
nonverbal & nonspeaking aren't terms for autistic people who can speak most of the time but have temporary episodes of speech loss
physical & mental disability aren't the same thing because of body-mind dualism but because they are separate (albeit overlapping) sociocultural constructs with different histories, etc., "mental illnesses are brain diseases" or any variation has never been a radical statement (yes this also means means you're not one of the cripples for having ADHD)
the thing about "[x] is a disability" is people gotta remember that disability isn't an objective medical term or something, it describes a relationship
it's like "neurotypical" where nobody has a "normal" brain but there are still people who aren't socially located as having a "wrong" brain because their behavior or neurology conforms to conventional enough standards otherwise, and those people are "neurotypical" (IIRC its origin maybe functioned the same way as allistic but the meaning has since changed)
my boyfriend has several physical problems that don't significantly impact his life in any way, aside from needing to take a 1x daily OTC allergy medicine, and so he doesn't consider himself physically disabled because doing so doesn't really do anything for him or really describe his relationship to "functioning"
so, something like "phobias are disabilities" isn't what's necessarily true so much as "phobias can be disabilities"; i have phobias of both heights and insects but they're mild as phobias go, and i wouldn't classify either of them as things that factor into my status as a disabled person
that isn't the same as someone with a significant enough phobia that it limits their employment options, affects their ability to socialize or leave their house, affects their self-care, etc.; i've been asked to climb ladders at my jobs before to clean cieling tiles and such, which results in me freaking out and shaking and all that, but it's not nearly a regular enough thing that it affects my employment, for example
it's not a matter of "is this severe enough to be a disability" so much as "does this affect my relationship with society and the world around me in a routine enough way that i am excluded from full participation," because that can occur even if something is relatively mild (food allergies can be 'mild' and still have a risk of killing you!) if i had a phobia of things i had to deal with in day-to-day life, then it would probably be very different, even if the phobias were still as mild as the ones that i have are
but having a medical condition isn't what makes someone disabled, having a particular relationship to society and "being able to function" is, and that's part of why you see plenty of people with certain medical conditions will throw their siblings under the bus because they can function "perfectly fine" and therefore their "class interests" (so to speak) don't align with that of disabled people
"disability isn't a social construct because I'd still be dis-" Hey maybe before you poo-poo the entire foundation of critical disability studies learn the difference between "socially constructed" and "not real". You can't pride yourself on being "pro Disabled" and not have any actual interest in Disabled theory or liberation.
some of it is the hunger maybe but started having a silent meltdown at the end of my shift today because no matter how to the letter i try to be at this job there is always something my general manager is correcting me on and when it seems like someone only ever notices what you're doing wrong and not the monumental effort you're having to put forth to do things right and also make up for what your co-workers aren't doing at the same time i start feeling like everything i'm doing is potentially wrong and that i have to walk on eggshells because i start questioning what i know about how to do my job and this includes a comment he made this morning after he was 30 minutes late that implied i'd been sitting around at home when in fact i was in the parking lot until he got there and had been there for like 20 minutes and i couldn't contest that because i didn't understand what he said until like 10 minutes later
i've also been working with my shoulder and back injury for weeks as the only person doing my job, nobody else that he's hired for food prep has stayed
but thinking about the fact he's so casual heehee haha jokey with seemingly everyone but me is what triggered me today like i don't even want much i just want to be left alone or told that i'm doing good work for once or fucking something positive instead of only noticing what i'm doing wrong, but if i know anything it's that it doesn't matter how hard you work what matters is how likable you are and if you're an autistic freak like me then the only thing you are is "difficult"
there's a reason i keep my goddamn earbuds in and try to hide them from him because if i'm not listening to podcasts or something i start thinking about every single bad things that's happened to me and i start thinking about things like this and then i have a meltdown
i mean, at least he's not trying to starve me to death like the last one did
orthopedist put me on a taper dose for methylprednisone and for a while on it i was pain-free and maybe starting to wonder if my shoulder/back injury was finally fixing itself but then missing a few of the pills brought some of the pain back lmao too good to be true to think i'd just need some pills for this to go away
even if you were to word it 'correctly' and say that "physically disabled people who don't experience any noteworthy impairment from whatever condition they have" (lol who in the world does this describe?) as opposed to "non-ill" that sentiment would still be wildly off
there's people who misunderstand the social model of disability and what its purpose is (which is the same thing that people who think it's "false" are doing because they don't understand it either) but that's not some defined sect of the community who thinks that the only important parts of advocacy is societal accommodation and not treatment
what world does anyone live in where physically disabled people aren't somehow dependent on or regularly interfacing with the medical system in some capacity (unless they are systemically barred from doing so due to poverty, lack of access, etc.)? who is out here legitimately arguing that things like autoimmune diseases or terminal illness or whatever are "natural" variations that shouldn't be "fixed"? are we talking about able-bodied neurodivergent people who insist that autism et. al. aren't disabilities? because that's an entirely different conversation
there's a very very very big difference between saying "society should be focused on fixing itself before fixing disabled people because its focus on the latter is something borne from ableism and a society that sees us as subhuman and is influenced by eugenics practices of course is going to focus on the latter" and saying "trying to cure any of us is bad and rooted in ableism" and i genuinely have never seen anyone argue the latter for chronic fucking illness lmao in my 10+ years of being on this website long enough to remember that X-Men post exists
i think i've been way more on the mark in terms of how online physical disability communities behave as if chronic pain is central to the disabled experience/is the main way in which we experience physical impairment (genuinely i have seen posts that imply this, or something close to it) like the person in that post does but well (not to say that people for which it is significant don't get treated a certain way by the system of course)
For real though. Storm has stopped an entire tsunami before. âMakes clouds my assâ she can conjure lightning and tornadoes and is revered as a god in her tribe. She literally changes atmospheric pressure and thatâs how she flies. So fuck you. Storm is flawless.
I think you missed the part where the GIRL WHO KILLS EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES wants to NOT KILL EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES and everyone dismisses her incredible misfortune just because the lady who is the AVATAR OF THE STORM won the fucking SUPERPOWER LOTTERY
And here we see X-Men perfectly illustrating the disparity between the larger disability community (Storm) and the chronic illness community (Rogue). One wants society to accept & respect them & their various different needs, which is surely a noble cause, while the other would like to NOT BE IN PAIN EVERY FUCKING DAY, which is just as important but often gets shouted down by non-ill disabled people who only want to talk about disability as a social construct.
i was thinking about this post the other day and how stupid i thought it was (as if there is genuinely any meaningful material division in "disabled" between "ill people" and "non-ill people" and as if chronic pain is what defines that division..?) and 'lo and behold it's on my dash again, crazy
the dissociation sure does its job because there was a post on my dash a while back talking about what it's like having medical trauma from things like procedures and stuff deemed as "necessary" or genuinely being life-saving so you're expected to be "grateful" for it, and i got so confused and also frustrated when reading it because i swore i'd been through something like that but maybe i was over-identifying with fictional characters or others' experiences?
and only recently i remembered "oh yeah i was lying in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV to prevent organ damage/failure having needles stuck in me every 30 minutes and the machine would beep at me every time i moved even while trying to sleep, and then i got thrown in a psych ward, and ever since i developed NCS in response to blood draws"
same thing happened once with "why do i identify so strongly with the concept of having an abusive older brother always punishing me forâ oh wait yeah i have one and he used to beat me until i got hematuria" (although that part is from when i was too young to remember, i don't actually remember being hit by him that much i just remember wanting to defend myself from him)
except both of those things took like a week for me to piece together despite me already "knowing" the information, in a sense...very annoying to not be a cohesive person eh?
by the way it turns out i'm not gonna die in a few months because my boyfriend finally found us an apartment (only place i would have to go is my mother's, if my dad didn't let me renew my lease, which is 2 states away and she's getting slightly better i guess but being in that house would be tantamount to suicide so i just don't believe that i would actually survive that experience lol), which i want to be able to move ASAP on one hand but on the other i gotta work shit out and adjust to the idea of a major life change first
one could say "oh i don't think your dad would do that to you" but this is the man who forced me to live full-time with the woman who he knew was beating me as soon as he could legally kick me out because i hurt the feefees of child-beating wife no. 2 and who likely still doesn't think anything that either of them did to me was abuse or neglect, and lets child beating wife no. 2 continue to terrorize her daughter so i do not trust him. teehee
makes me think of how it's rude to cut people off but that's something about my impaired response inhibition that i genuinely cannot control (as much as people never want to believe me about that); some autistic people seem to only ever talk about their special interest because that's pretty much their primary or only avenue of communication and connection
this is coming from an autistic person who has had a lot of "spats" with other autistic people because it's clear the way we think and interact with the world just clashes with each other and there's not much either of us can do to really budge about it, i'm able to not get on with someone and still be like "they're doing this because they're like me and think a certain way and it doesn't necessarily mean they're an asshole or mean-spirited" (which isn't something that all autistic people can acknowledge tbf), like how my autistic younger brother used to drive me to literal tears barraging me with questions about certain things i did that didn't make sense to him and it distressed me because he was questioning my "system" due to it clashing with his own "system"; it's very different to the allistics i have bent over backwards to try and please and they treat me like i'm subhuman shit in return
idk, i think it's a given that people with a social/communication disorder aren't always capable of acquiescing to the social standards of people who lack those same struggles, and the problem is that the broader culture often isn't graceful enough towards us and expects us to adapt (or be left behind), like any other disability, and so it should follow that the goal is "allistic people shouldn't apply the exact same social expectations to us as they do to other allistic people" and not "autistic people need to try their best to acquiesce to the norm"
I don't know who my intended audience is here, so whoever needs to hear this, I am begging you to learn to participate in conversations that are about things you aren't interested in.
Part of socializing and having friends is being a good listener even when you don't actually give a shit about the subject.
Your are hurting other people's feelings when you bluntly respond with "Anyway..." and then change the topic.
It can not always be about your preferred topic.
You are being rude. Yes, even if you are neurodivergent. You can be both autistic and rude.
the problem is that some autistic people genuinely cannot do this (or do it consistently) no matter how much the concept is explained to them, because that's how the mental "rigidity" (perserveration) thing works, which means they get pushed out from socializing altogether because the expectation continues to be "no one should adapt to you, only the other way around" and so those who experience more significant social disability get hung out to dry; autism is a communication disorder so naturally the norm for us is having difficulty with "proper" communication and socializing "correctly," and not simply due to a lack of willpower or committment
yes, some of us are capable of adjusting this, but at the end of the day posts along these lines seem to be saying "you HAVE to do this thing that is directly runs against how your disability works" and don't seem to acknowledge the nuances of that type of request, and that is an uncomfortably common perspective when it comes to autism on social media
i dunno, bit of a discompassionate post considering the subject matter
trying to get my meds delivered from walmart because no venlafaxine = me having a hard time doing literally anything from the heart palpitations but Walmart is deciding that now is the time to have technical issues so i just gotta sit here and hope i can place to eventually since i don't wanna drive like this and i need my meds before i work tomorrow so i can stop having heart palpitations, awesome sauce
"my obnoxious and difficult-to-read typing quirk is because of my brain problems" buddy deliberately going out of your way to replace every S with a Z (because that's the only way you can possibly, consistently do that) in what you type out is simply not a disability thing
