So I went to an art exhibit recently, a collection of Native American art from pre-colonial times to the present. As you might guess, there were a few pieces whose artist was lost to time or erased. But instead of the usual “artist unknown” credit, the curators instead chose to label the artists as “Name Once Known”.
I think that’s amazing. It says, “we don’t know your name any longer; we’ll never know who you were, exactly. But you were a person once, and you mattered. You had a name, and you were loved, you had a life, and you made this art. And that means something. Your name was once known.”
getting a lot of shit for a comment i made that my very disabled husband enjoys gardening. "well if he can garden he can work! lazy fucking leech!"
he can garden because i've put the work in to make it possible for him to garden. there is a chair that lives by the raspberry patch so he can sit down while he picks berries. i've single handedly dug ditches and leveled ground to build raised beds that he can sit on when he weeds. i'm not a huge fan of the beds i've built now that i've fenced it all in (thankfully i've only built four) so i'm switching them out for livestock tanks. those tanks i'm going to place so his walker will fit through them to plan for his body further deteriorating as he ages.
it takes him hours to do tasks that i take for granted. when i'm tilling up the in-ground beds he goes behind me on his hands and knees-VERY slowly-taking out clumps of grass and weeds (because he can't bend over.) he waters my rose garden every morning. after that he has to sit for two hours to recuperate.
he helps me harvest-by sitting on the raised beds. i built them out of cinder blocks so he has space to sit. moving to livestock tanks, he'll be able to sit on his walker to harvest.
when he helps me process our harvests to be canned or frozen, he sits on a bar stool for as long as he can. eventually his back cramps up and he has to go lay down. and his "help" is primarily putting things in bags and drying off blanched vegetables because the nerve damage in his hands he can't uniformly cut things or funnel stuff into the canning jars.
disabled people CAN and DO have labor intensive hobbies BECAUSE people have taken the time to make it possible for them to do. i saw a comment that disabled folks that claim to like to hike are "lying leeches." we're about to go to mammoth cave-with his walker-and walk the trails that are specifically built for wheelchair users. when we get home he'll probably sleep for three days.
but sure. because i took the time to completely build an area for him to engage in a meaningful hobby, he can totally go out into a world that will absolutely refuse to accommodate his mobility issues, his nerve damage that ruined his fine motor skills, his traumatic brain injury that prevents him from being able to function in the general public. disabled people deserve whole lives. WHOLE LIVES. including the shit you think they don't deserve to do.
I would like to see more people talk about how jobs treat disabled employees.
I used to prep, wash dishes, and cook at mellow mushroom. I had chronic pain that wasn't NEARLY as bad as it is today, but it was still very debilitating. I told my employer "i cannot stand more than 4 to 6 hours. I CANNOT do shifts longer than this due to my illness." And even though i made my boundaries VERY clear, everyday i worked it was 8 hours at the least and 10 or 12 at the most. I would go up to my manager and say "look i really need to leave, my shift is over, my chronic pain is killing me." And he'd say "we really need to here, you HAVE to push through." And so i did, and after one, ONE month of that job my crps got incredibly worse to the point where i could no longer walk my dog around the block which was .5 miles. I quit, and that was FOUR years ago, and ever since that day I HAVE BEEN BEDRIDDEN AND HAVE TO USE A WHEELCHAIR. It is my biggest regret in life.
My best friend who has seen my whole journey has recently developed undiagnosed chronic pain, and she is in the EXACT same scenario i was 4 years ago. Busting her ass at a pizza place with extreme pain that hurts her so much she tells me "im in so much pain i don't even feel like a person." She doesn't feel LUCID. And her manager and coworkers are saying the same thing "if you don't help us you will let us down, we'll be in the shit."
That job thats hurting you isn't fucking worth it. I promise you no money is worth losing all your physical abilities and never getting them back. Your coworkers and boss do not give a shit about you, so don't you dare suffer for them. They will never understand your struggle and they will never try. They truly think being understaffed is worse than whatever pain you experience. They would rather you permanently damage yourself than inconvenience them. FUCK THEM. DON'T FUCKING DO IT!
Dude, kids literally want to go outside and do stuff sooooo bad, and I think anyone who says otherwise should stop and take a second to think about why they view the younger generations as unable to separate from technology. Spoiler alert: it's not their fault. There is nowhere to go.
A skatepark recently opened up near my house, and that place is always FILLED to the BRIM with kids on the ramps and hanging out. I'm not even sure how some of them are able to get there, but they must, because I see them every day.
I'm 16 and I don't have a job. The main hangout places for my friend group are the mall and getting ice cream somewhere, which is good and fun, but I don't always want to spend money. Hell, we sometimes meet at the local pharmacy to buy candy and stuff.
Again, kids want to go outside and do stuff, but when everything is either far away or costs money, they don't have much of a choice.
When a space cares a lot about making sure its members are queer enough to participate, you get a space that aggressively polices the queerness of its members. There's no way around that, it's pretty much tautologically true. Only by paradoxically not actually caring if you're queer or not can a group really accept the full range of what queerness can look like.
Also, a space that has room for a cis straight guy who means well and wants the best for his friends has two crucial things going for it.
1) it has space for people who are learning and might fuck up a bit while they figure things out, and that learning process is probably not so godawful and unpleasant that a guy with other prospects would have to be a fool not to go find some nicer friends. This is nice because it is very difficult to personally embody the entire alphabet at once, and learning how to be good allies to one another is a crucial part of queer solidarity. It's nice for that process not to be painful.
2) it has space for people who aren't yet willing to or comfortable with presenting an externally queer label to continue to exist and soak up the queer vibes and information, which means it's welcoming to actual questioning people rather than the theory of questioning people. Probably it therefore has more interest in actually doing things rather than hierarchy politics.
3) it's probably not a radfem tar pit interested in weaponising you against people they've decided to hate in a social smear war that benefits nobody and nothing but their need for a power trip
Oh it’s even more than that! The cis straight guy is very often a ride home, dad or husband. Or a Bob which I will explain in this essay is a signifier of a healthy ecosystem, like frogs are.
This is a 3 am take so consider this a blanket apology and a readmore but if you hate this post you were warned.
If he’s someone’s ride home, then his presence enables queer people to show up. Note this importance in, say, rural America or where the person might use a wheelchair or need care or can’t drive. Or where the meeting place is generally awkward.
If he’s someone’s dad, his presence enables kids to show up. I know a 5 year old trans kid in real life. I know a nonbinary teen in real life who’s allowed to do a lot on their own, but their parents worry, and if they’re hanging out with adults the parents want to attend and meet the adults. Teenagers are so liminal with this.
If he’s someone’s husband, that’s a perfectly common accessory for a bisexual, nonbinary, or trans person. I think it adds a delightful dimension to queer spaces. I think it’s great that there’s a whole class of sexuality that’s “bi wife energy” or “straight except for loving this person” or “straight since I think nonbinary people are considered a different gender to my own - actually I’m completely lost about whether that’s true but we’ve been married ten years?” or “straight except for the fact that my partner transitioned, and we’re still married, and it’s none of your business.” At this point they’re so common that they’re their own subspecies. I think all spaces should have a slightly bewildered guy in his late forties who owns a set of good screwdrivers. I am bi and have one myself; it is a common pairing. “Why would your husband come to your social thing” idk this is a genuine thing people do sometimes in non-tar-pit spaces. They stop by. It’s almost like birds. You meet this incredible ornate, splendid older queer person and then they introduce their husband Professor Robert “Bob” Kevinsworth, who’s just this extremely straight old big fat Linux geologist in a 90s t-shirt with a trout on it, they’ve been married 45 years. Evolutionary pressures mean that the Bob must be relatively drab in order to camouflage themselves on the nest or something; if you want to attract the flashy half of the couple to your garden, then you have to provide habitat for Bob. idk it’s 3:46 am right now. But it’s like frogs; the presence of Bobs indicates a healthy and established ecosystem, like Grison and Derin indicate. Because frogs, who absorb environmental toxins readily through their skin, are an indicator species for pollution and biodiversity; a Bob means there is going to be less toxicity and more diversity.
[And also it’s none of our business but there are an awful lot of queer Bobs (Bob himself, again, possibly being queer) and it’s really none of our business. Sure, maybe that person looks like a straight grandpa. A lot of people do/did. I have always hated the idea that you can “spot” a queer person by their haircut, clothes or youth (largely because I don’t look very unusual or amazing myself.) the oldest nb person I know is a sort of Bob with a big white beard and grandchildren, and I’m sorry but at their age they are NOT going to be getting a different haircut! Let alone pink Shein dungarees and black circle sunglasses to signify their queerness to gatekeepers. A lot of people seeing them would assume they are cishet. Nope! Just old, fat and unfashionable.)
So a space that doesn’t have room for a cishet guy is a space that has made decisions about children, non-drivers, a large proportion of bi and nonbinary people, straight trans women, dads, and so on.
Which is fine in itself I suppose, but what they’re clearly kinda selecting for is a population of able twentysomethings who can all have sex with each other. and the thing is that there’s often a vibe they feel annoyed by seeing people they don’t want to fuck (children, middle-aged people, unfashionable queer people, people unironically wearing trout t shirts).
So in my admittedly highly limited personal experience, the exclusionary “queer spaces” just tend to be an elaborate drama-production exercise for twentysomethings to date each other, the rituals are intricate etc.
And all the rest of the weird queer people are just. at the seed swap.
You know when you write something that seems to shimmer with brilliance on one side of the clock and you have to check it on the other just to make sure you haven’t, like, destroyed your reputation or something
On a somewhat related note... I've found that some of my favorite spaces (online and IRL) are those that attract and welcome a lot of autistic people, but aren't specifically Autism Groups. There's less infighting and more fun.
Aren't plushies beautiful? They were created so a sick child had something to hold. They were created so an adult living alone might have a friend to keep them company. They were created for a teenager to clutch to her chest as she cries. They were created to accompany a college student to his geology classes. They were created not for any material benefit, they don't change tires, but to be loved.
a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up
Instead of telling a psychotic person that "it isn't real", try empathizing with how scary it would be if it was. Offer them a safe place to vent about what they're going through without facing judgment and invalidation. And ask them what they need to feel safer. Just try to take their experiences and distress seriously even if it seems silly to you. Because it is very real to them
A post for the psychotic people who'd rather live with their psychosis than with the side effects of antipsychotic medication. You're not making an inherently wrong choice. You're not dangerous. You're not too sick to know what you actually need. You know your needs better than anyone else. No one else gets to dictate what's right for you
