I'm really gonna need people to let me, a person with chronic pain, write about that pain and label it what it is (chronic pain) without jumping my ass telling me it's "your" tag for "your" community.
It's my community, too. I'm allowed to write about it.
This hostility to the just the idea of fiction being anywhere near chronic pain spaces is so self-destructive and just perpetuates already painful isolation. I would have loved to find Word of Honor posts tagged "chronic pain," it would have led me to the series (whose main character has chronic pain! finally, rep that isn't some asshole doctor with a show about what an asshole he is) a lot sooner.
Here's the thing about this blog and the reference posts I make:
This is not an exaggeration. It was the only place I could talk about pain where it would be not only not taboo, but appreciated. When my ME/CFS hit critical mass, I was more alone and powerless than I'd ever been in my life. I had lost my job, my "friends," my apartment, my independence, my health. Everything. I was devastated. I couldn't even write anymore. Everything was pain. That was the lens I now had to view life through, and in the able world, talking about pain is impolite and burdensome to others. So my existence became impolite and burdensome to others.
But then I found the whump community. I could write about pain and it wasn't weird. People didn't leave when I talked about pain, they were interested. They had questions. They wanted to improve their understanding of it. They wanted to improve how they represented it in their own writing. So I started making reference posts.
Now my pain was useful. It was positive. It connected me to others instead of cutting me off from them. Not all of these others have chronic pain or even disabilities, but I refuse to push away people just because they aren't like me. I literally have to live in a world where I'm on the receiving end of that every day, why would I continue it online?
If all my posts about chronic pain are meant only for those who also have it, what good have I done? We all know what pain is like. We all agree it's isolating, we agree isolation feels terrible, so why defend that isolation with both barrels?
Why attack anyone who unites real experiences with better fictional representation of those experiences and assume the person talking is an abled idiot who's in it for the "blorbos?" (I hate that word, by the way. Am I allowed back into my own community yet?) That's what's insulting. The idea that writing about my pain and allowing for the possibility that others might connect to me through both their writing and mine makes me no different from an abled person who's never felt a moment of pain in her life.
I have a chronic illness. I have chronic pain. I write about both. And I don't owe you an explanation.
Block me if you don't like it. But don't jump my ass about "your" community like it's not mine, too. Don't jump my ass about "the" community/tag as if writing about it means I have to turn in my disabled badge.