If confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would control the world’s largest public health agency, and its $
To all of the disabled people reacting to this with "YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE ME OFF MY MEDS 🤪"
Ummm... internalized abelism isn't cute? Suicidal thoughts, psychosis, mood swings, etc as some of the worst side effects of going off antidepressants, ADHD medications, anti anxiety medication, and so forth
The mental health side of the disability community really need to check your internalized abelism because "ILL BE CRAZY" isn't fucking cute.
It's 1) really fucking serious and 2) weaponizing people that are more disabled than you.
Not to mention, I've been on and off a lot of meds. You think your symptoms were bad BEFORE your meds? Wait until you quit cold turkey. That shit isn't only serious it's SCARY. There's a reason why they gave a very very very specific plan for going off medication. It's not just scary for the people around you, it's terrifying for YOU.
Not only will all of those symptoms that caused you to take the meds be ramped up times 100 as your hormones get thrown into a tailspin. All if those coping mechanisms that you've learned through years of suffering will be GONE because you've felt better for so long. Shit you didn't even realize you had.
So um... idk. Maybe shut up the "I'M CRAZY ASS WITHOUT MY MEDS" talk. It's abelist. And not in the "I can't be abelist, I have adhd." way. In the weaponizing ideas that are primarily used to involuntarily imprison mentally disabled people way.
Emergency First Aid: Self stitches/alcohol as sanitizer/it's just a scratch
Fandom: Daredevil
CW: I am terrible at tagging I have no idea what people tag, let me know if there's something you think should be tagged. Disability. Abelism. Internalized ableism. First aid.
--
A clatter in the bathroom is the first indication that something is amiss.
Foggy's ears pick up in a way they do when he's trying to be helpful. After living together as long as they have, he knows Matt is much more capable than many might give him credit for. And more fiercely independent than a clause that can stand by itself in a sentence. That's a grammar joke.
When they were first assigned as roommates, he stumbled into a few casually abelist situations in which he tried to be Matt's knight in shining armor, and only discovered how much Matt had no need of rescuing. But still, when your roommate is blind there are certain things you should watch out for. For example: you should make sure you shut the kitchen cupboards and drawers after opening them. You should always put the sharp knives in the same spot, and never sticking up in the dishwasher. You should refrain from accidentally moving the coffee table into the middle of the walking path in order to create more room for pushups in front of the tv. And you should keep your ears open for things like clattering in the bathroom, and the subsequent string of barely audible curses that seem to be happening now.
"Matt?" He ventures.
A *whack*, *thud*, and then *moan*.
Foggy gets to his feet and paces to the bathroom door cautiously, wincing. He doesn't want Matt to think that he's interfering, but... "Buddy do you need help? I'm just out here twiddling my thumbs. Happy to be of assistance."
A heavy sigh.
"Okay," Matt calls. "Come in."
Foggy braces himself. The fact independent clause Matthew Murdock is accepting an offer of help is already putting him on edge.
He pushes the door open and tries to parse the sight in front of him without causing a scene. "Uh...Matt...what the hell?"
Shirtless, Matt is bleeding from a sizeable gash on the back of his shoulder, and in his hand he wield's a needle and thread. He's twisted into something akin to a pretzel in his attempt to perform his own stitches, and appears to be failing miserably, the gash looking irritated and awful, the thread tugging awkwardly at both sides of torn flesh.
"I...can't reach," Matt admits sheepishly, gaze drifting to the left even though the pleading look in his eyes is obviously meant for Foggy.
"For God's sake- Matt!" Foggy gestures at his impossible roommate with his boxer-father toxic masculine trauma and his hyper-independent internalized ableism. "What the hell are you doing? What happened? Why didn't you go to the nurse?"
"It's just a scratch," Matt sighs, a sense of defeat in his tone. "Could you...help?"
"And what do you want *me* to do?" Foggy demands. "I'm not a doctor!"
"Look, a twelve year old could do this," Matt insists, doing that infuriating thing where he wets his lips and then talks down to you like you are, in fact, twelve.
"Speak for yourself," Foggy huffs. "When I was twelve *I* was playing Operation. And losing!"
"Come'on, Fog! It doesn't have to be pretty. Just has to keep my bleeding on the inside," Matt quips, lips tugging sideways in the charming way that Matt's lips tug right before Foggy agrees to do whatever he's asking.
Foggy rolls his eyes. He's already committed. "Sit down," he demands. "You're getting blood everywhere and you look like you're going to fall over."
Matt does as he's told, reaching for the bathroom vanity and following it to the corner before he lowers himself down to sit on the closed toilet. He straddles it, baring his shoulder and the jagged wound to Foggy.
Reluctantly, Foggy washes his hands and takes the needle. "So what *did* happen this time?"
Matt shrugs, which makes the wound a moving target. "I got caught by a branch while Elektra and I..."
"Elektra did this to you?" He dabs hydrogen peroxide on a cotton ball over the cut.
"No," Matt cuts in. "No, we were...on a bicycle. In central park. And we...went off trail."
"For the love of god, please tell me you weren't driving the bike."
Matt chuckles. "No, I was not."
"And you came all the way home bleeding like this?" Foggy poises the needle on one side of the gash, chewing his lip worriedly. Finally he gets brave enough to stab it through one side and push to the other. Matt barely flinches.
"It didn't seem so bad, but when I took my shirt off I think I made it worse."
Foggy's eyes flick to the discarded shirt on the floor. There's a good amount of blood on it. Some dark and dried. Maybe the wound scabbed over and reopened when Matt reached up for his shirt?
"Looks like it hurts."
Matt shrugs again, which causes Foggy to stab him with a sharp poke. That time he does flinch and Foggy makes a small sound of distress. "Stop moving."
"Right. It didn't hurt when it happened, I didn't notice till later. Hurts a fair bit now."
"Matty..." Foggy wets his lips. "You seem to get hurt a lot...when you're with Elektra." It's very clear to Foggy, since Matt and she have been dating, that if Elektra were Matt's roommate there would be no closing the cupboards and drawers, and the sharp knives would always be pointing up in the dishwasher. Blind or not.
"We just have a lot of fun," Matt insists. "She doesn't treat me like... You know."
Foggy takes a breath. Does he treat Matt differently? All those small accommodations he makes in his life to keep Matt safe and comfortable, does Matt notice the coffee table hasn't moved since he last hit it with his shin and think, Foggy only sees me as *disabled*? But he *is* blind. Treating him like he doesn't have a disability doesn't make his disability go away. A conflicted ball of thought is forming in Foggy's gut, but he's not sure how to verbalize it. Knowing him, at some point it will force it's way out wether he wants it to or not.
"Just...try to be safe," he manages. God, he sounds like someone's mother.
But "I will," Matt says.
The stitches or ugly. Uneven. They're the first ones Foggy's ever done, and hopefully, the last he'll ever do. He sighs.
"Good thing you're blind," he grumbles.
Matt freezes for a moment, eyebrows lifted, and Foggy worries he's stepped in it.
"I mean-"
But Matt starts laughing and then wincing and then apologizing all at once.
I fucking hate lyme brain. I hate that I can't read or retain information like I used to. I hate that I can never stay focused. I hate how hard this makes everything. I hate how this makes holding conversations with other people so difficult. I'm so fucking angry and devastated. I feel like I've lost such an integral part of myself.
i need to rant so here i am. i am autistic, and while i’m not ableist to others and would never look down on another autistic person, i have so much pent up internalized ableism because of my childhood and the things i was told. i love the fact that i see the world in another way, and that i get it experience things some people will never get to, but on the other hand, i hate myself and that part of myself because i know my life could have been so much easier if not for it. i listened to a world that told me that i was not good enough, and not normal enough, and i hate that i did. i hate that as a kid, i was told that talking about things i enjoy is wrong, and god forbid i be loud about it or *shudders* not make eye contact!!! /s. i hate that i was told that people were always laughing “with me” and when people bullied me and laughed at me, i laughed along with them because “the adults told me they were being nice, so my ‘friends’ must be too.” i hate that i’m now scared of conversation because i don’t want to raise my voice (because god forbid i’m excited about something /s) or talk too much, or repeat something over and over again because i feel like i haven’t been taken seriously, or because i don’t want to look over at one of my friends/people i sit with and see that they’ve been rolling their eyes and waiting for me to shut up already. i hate that i cant tell when someone is just sick of listening to my voice and i hate it when people lie and say they don’t mind. i hate that i feel like i’m not allowed to talk about things that excite me and bring me joy because to me, those things are really fun, and nice, and enjoyable, and they make me want to squeal with happiness because “oh my god have i told you about this one thing i noticed in my favorite movie that no one has really talked about before?!” or “guess what i read about this one astrological sign that i didn’t know before?” to me, these are the things that being me the most happiness and the only thing that can make me even happier is being able to share them with the people i hold dear, and it fucking *hurts* when i can’t, or i feel like i’m gonna get laughed at for liking it. i’m so sick and tired of being told that i am not enough and who i am is not “normal enough.” the things i’m most upset about right now are the whole conversation thing because it’s so stressful for me to have conversations with nt people because i am terrified of just annoying them, or making them mad, or getting laughed at, or just being straight up told to shut the hell up. i’m so upset that i can’t talk about the things that i love with the people i love, and i’m even more upset when i’m told that no one cares because “literally no one cares about that” or “that’s not even relevant.” like, okay, if something goes off topic, bring it back nicely. i mentally and physically cannot handle people telling me that i’m boring, uninteresting, or weird. this was a huge scramble of things, but yeah... yeah..
I'm in an argument with people on tiktok, so I need to make a post here.
Here's the original tiktok. Watch the video. Follow her. She's amazing.
But there's A LOT of people arguing with her (a disabled woman) on whether not needing glasses is a disability. She says it is.
If you have a note on your drivers license saying you can't drive without your glasses/ contacts (your disability aid). Yes. It's a disability.
Refusing to accept your disability is internalized abelism. 90% my disability doesn't limit my ability. I'm just in pain. But it's still a disability. Disability isn't a competition.
Especially if you have REALLY SHIT vision (like mine used to be) and need to pay the extra $$ for thinner lenses. Your disability aid isn't accessible. None of these programs that help make glasses affordable can make well-fitting glasses accessible.
If you have an unusual prescription (like mine), your disability aid isn't accessible. I can't get contacts. Not because of how bad my vision is. It's actually not that bad. But because my prescription isn't common. Most companies don't make it. (I hate glasses because my vision was so shit I was severely bullied for them growing up. It literally caused panic attacks.)
I need glasses, and I can see well enough to function in life but they will never be able to correct me to 20/20 vision. It's PRETTY DAMN CLOSE. But they'll never be able to get it perfect. It's not even about prescription strength. It's just my eyes are shit.
Stop with the internalized abelism. Stop using every excuse in the book to refuse your disability. Because every time you refuse to accept YOUR disability, you're just discounting the people less fortunate than you.
The people who need to pay hundreds of dollars for their glasses.
The people who will never be able to be corrected to perfect vision.
The people who can't take the time off to go to the optometrist to get their prescription.
The people whose prescriptions aren't easily accessible.
That'd be like... if I said I wasn't disabled because of my migraines because I have access to medication that makes it so I can function. I can't say I don't have a disability because I have access to accommodations, because it discredits the people that can't get these medications or don't have medications that work for them.
They have the same condition as me. The only difference is I have access to a doctor that's affordable and can get me access to the medication I need.
(I'm not saying just because you have glasses, you have a say in walking around arguing with other disabled people about disability rights. I'm just saying recognize that you have a disability, and think about how difficult your life would be if you couldn't access your accommodations. Because a lot of people can't.)
The weirdest thing about disability is disabled people NEVER question me when I say I'm disabled. In fact a lot of disabled people have been learning from me and my experience. I've not even seen one disabled person disapprove of the term "dynamic disability" which I was really worried about because I thought the whole "I'm not disabled all of the time" thing would be used to invalidate me.
But the abled people. Jeez.
I've had an abled person tell me that I'm not disabled so I can't have an opinion on the term "disability".
I've had an abled person (whom I asked to drive me to the store because I had a migraine) bitch at me when I asked why he parked so far from the store when I was having severe back pain and muscle weakness in my leg (yay sciatica!)
I've had abled people straight up accuse me of not trying hard enough.
I've been SO afraid to talk about my experience because I thought disabled people would accuse me of faking or otherwise invalidate me because I can be 100% fine most of the time, because the abled people got so fucking mad at me in the behalf of the disabled community.
But nah. If anything disabled people have gotten more upset that I would invalidate my experience like that. Legit, some of the responses I get I feel like disabled people are bonking me on the head like "You. Are. Disabled. Enough. Stop. You're. Internalized. Abelism."
It's so fucking weird because abled people are so quick to call you abelist that they're being abelist and causing internalized abelism in the disabled community.
I hate being disabled so goddamn much. I feel like a child but I also don't even feel lIke a fucking person. I hate this shit n I'm so fuckkng miserable wtf
