#disabled erasure

[bnyrbt]

“i don’t think i count as disabled but [describes the most obviously disabled experience you can imagine]”

“i don’t think i count as intersex but [describes the most obviously intersex experience you can imagine]”

[enbycrip]

I spent the entire weekend in bed there. Literally just got up for a 15 minute conversation we had about potentially going to IKEA to get some stuff for Plan Turn Spare Room Into A Usable Space Instead of a Giant Cupboard With a Window, got a tape measure, measured one bit of the room, got dizzy, had to lie down on the floor and then crawl back to bed.

I spent big chunks of Saturday asleep because I literally couldn’t keep my eyes open. I got a small bit of writing done for Against the Dying of the Light (queer post-apocalyptic zombie larp I’m Co-running in under a month now argharghargh) and sewed half a patch on some dungarees. Otherwise I listened to a lot of podcasts, played a bunch of mobile games and cuddled my OH a lot.

I mean, I clearly needed it. I’ve managed to get up, get dressed, clean the bathroom and dust the bedroom already today, which is more than I achieved the entire weekend.

One of my podcasts, The Constant, which I was bingeing this weekend, did a bit of a deep dive into Darwin on some of the episodes I was listening to. It was talking about his deep study of barnacles - Darwin was instrumental in discovering they were crustaceans rather than molluscs.

But it went into Darwin’s letters while he was discovering this and how frustrating he found the process because he was chronically ill with Chagas’ Disease and never had more than a couple of hours a day when he was capable of working. Sometimes much less.

I *really* needed to hear that this weekend.

Trying to study when you are just so fucking ill that you are capable of Doing Stuff so few hours in a day is so bloody heartrending sometimes. The level of sheer frustration in “I have SO FUCKING MUCH TO DO AND YET APPARENTLY I’M NOT EVEN CAPABLE OF SEWING A SEAM OR WRITING IN A STRAIGHT LINE WHILE LYING FLAT” is almost impossible to convey.

I *really* hate how much the experiences of disabled people who do manage to achieve stuff (usually because of class/wealth privilege) are absolutely erased. The way “if you can do something you obviously were never disabled at all!” is so baked into our society really gets to me.

How many people think of Darwin as a disabled person? Or Frida Kahlo? How much of the vast majority of their life experiences are flattened out into nothingness because they achieved things that made it into the public consciousness?

[jezunya]

Little ableist things: University sends out an announcement about an upcoming natural disaster response drill, including instructions on what people are supposed to do to comply with the drill, but many of those instructions are inaccessible and include no information about where disabled students & faculty should go or what we should do for the drill