Just a turtle trying to survive

Multiply Disabled. Queer. Trans. AAC User. Eternally Exhausted. Tumblr is Inaccessible why it gotta be like this. I'm that person who taught introductory abstract algebra to the people you refused to show multiplication saying they were "too disabled" They/them

[tuttleturtle]

Don't feel like pinning this but I have any sort of energy for writing an About Me so feel like I probably should: 1. Multiply disabled. Multiply neurodivergent. No I don't mean "autism and ADHD". 2. I won't ever bother listing all my disabilities. Whether or not I have a label likely to be relevant to me isn't relevant to anyone besides those closes to me. However, what I'll most likely end up talking about re: disabilities is autism, chronic complex migraines, hEDS, MCAS, or adrenal insufficiency. These interact weirdly. 3. AAC User. Part time manual wheelchair user. Part time eyegaze user. Sure wish it was easier to leave my home than it is. Having things I need to help is a huge privilege. 4. Depends on human support. Gives support to others. We're not all either Needing Support or Giving Support. People are complicated.

5. Queer. Trans. My pronouns are they/them. 6. I do yarn things. Yarn holds my brain together. Yarn is how I can focus yarn is how I can keep myself able to do what I want yarn is how I can feel like I belong in my body. It's necessary and the importance of necessity isn't what makes it important. What we do because we want to is important. 7. I have a super cute fluffy cat who is my medical alert cat. He is a task trained service animal. 8. I'm also absolutely gonna be squeeing about the process of getting a service dog since I've literally been wanting a service dog for over 15 years but known I needed life to line up before it'd be right for me. 9. My primary fandoms are Young Wizards and Discworld. 10. Into sci fi, fantasy, ttrpgs, board games, the like

11. Math, math education, teaching disabled students, no really people should be taught, opinionated, unable to be working, miss it so much. 12. Being quite literal when I say I taught introductory abstract algebra to people who were told they were "too disabled" to be ever shown multiplication. Did that at multiple different schools. It's not what I'm most proud of [there's so much more about existing and survival that I'm more proud of] but its one of the best ways to understand who I am.

13. There's things i'm good at. There's things i need help with. Sometimes these are the same things.

[stuckinapril]

“You may not be hurting me intentionally, but even then I have a right to walk out of this relationship” has revolutionized my concept on human connection for real. Like someone doesn’t have to be an awful person for me to walk out of something that’s making me uncomfortable?? I can still decide enough is enough in spite of a person’s best intentions??? Mind blown

[troutfur]

Ultimately, you can like or dislike any character for whatever arbitrary reason. It's neither activism nor a moral failing, don't let the internet convince you otherwise. On the other hand, if you consistently find yourself lacking any interest in the, e.g., female characters of the media you engage with that may be a sign of some unconscious biases you need to examine.

[troutfur]

You say "be aware of your biases" once and all of a sudden your notes become filled with the most un-selfaware people on the whole website tripping over each other to justify themselves.

[northstareclipse]

what nobody likes admitting about things like "healing" or "recovery" or "growth" is that they, too, are forms of labor that it is okay to need breaks from. they are emotional, intellectual, and philosophical forms of labor. but, tumblr culture likes to frame rest from these types of labor as "ego" and "toxicity."

right now, I am experiencing burnout in no small part due to the pressure of constant internal growth. a sort of "philosophical burnout", if you will. being under constant construction. constantly monitoring myself and asking "am I doing enough?" and for what? so that my journey looks nice on someone else’s feed? so all the pain I've gone through is consumable without challenging the comfort of observers? tell me, how is that any better for me, or anyone, than the conventional "grind culture" mindset? from where I'm standing, all our generational culture has done is put a Calico Critters veneer on it.

when plants winter, are they "failing" to grow? is their natural dormancy a "doctor's note" they're waving egocentrically in the face of the gardener, begging for absolution? no! seasons of not growing, not budding, not fruiting are just part of their natural life cycle, and they don't owe it to anyone to be in season all year.

humans also deserve time and space to just exist, even when that existence is not the perfect picture of unscarred and declawed serenity.

[tuttleturtle]

Having Feelings about how I'll see someone describe a situation and talk about how its medical trauma. And how I'll describe a situation and be like its abnormally good medical care! And how these two descriptions will be so similar you can't tell them apart.

[audarcy]

Really glad randall xkcd made that "experts often misjudge the average layperson's knowledge of their field" comic bc my prior touchstone for easily conveying the same idea to people was this other xkcd

and now i no longer have to confuse people by saying shit like "i think we're having a joe biden mayonnaise moment here"

[chimingsoul]

Normalize including schizospec & psychotic disorders in ur mental health pride stuff. We aren't evil and out to get you!

[five-thousand-loaves-of-bread]

can we advocate for nonverbal nonspeaking autistics without resort to “autistic ppl can be nonspeaking and intelligent”

[flowercrowncrip]

You want to help that disabled person? It’s nice that your instinct is to help people.

But please ask yourself, are you actually helping them, or are you just making yourself feel better?

Do they actually need help, or are they just doing things a little differently?

Have you asked what they need, or are you just making assumptions?

[wolf-soup]

here’s your daily reminder that ALL developmentally disabled adults deserve to be treated like adults

yes, even people with autism, downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, fetal alcohol syndrome, fragile x syndrome, tbi’s, AND/OR deafness/blindess

[humanfist]

A question most people successfully avoid asking: can institutionalized patients ever have sex? The answer is ‘mostly no, unless they are very good at sneaking past nurses’. They also can’t kiss, hold hands, cuddle, or have any other form of romantic contact.

I worked in a mental hospital where two patients snuck past nurses and had sex once. It was treated as a public health crisis of approximately the same urgency as somebody throwing a bucket of Ebola-laced chimp blood all over the dining room. Both patients lost all their privileges, earned themselves 24-7 supervision by nurses, got restricted to their rooms, and had to go through a battery of tests for every STD in the book. We the doctors got remedial training with helpful tips like “If two patients seem to like each other too much, put them on opposite sides of the unit so they’re never in contact.” -SSC

[goldensunset]

advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

[concerningwolves]

You get bigger so you can store even MORE love and appreciation for the world inside of you

[monsieurenjlolras]

It means you'll be at the antique mall looking at a coffee table and thinking "blorbo and Squimbus would LOVE this coffee table"

[byjove]

reasonable people: the drop in fertility rates is at least partially due to the economic circumstances we are living in. perhaps more people under 30 WOULD be interested in having children if there were resources like universal healthcare and universal childcare, making it more financially feasible to start a family at-

unreasonable people: no. wrong. we need to ban abortion and also bring back teen pregnancy in a big way.

[istra-ish-sucha-geek]

Some of us would be having more kids if fucking fertility treatments were fucking covered by fucking insurance and not reserved for the INDEPENDENTLY WEALTHY.

[hyperlexichypatia]

^THAT.

Fertility treatment not being covered by insurance is eugenics.

[tuttleturtle]

Sometimes I'm reminded that people don't have techniques for saying "hey. We all are human" And this is so very weird to me and I'm jealous that they didn't need this. But the thing to say isn't "you're lucky not to know that" It's offering "hey, here's some tools you might not have had. Because we all are human and I hope so very much that you can help support others and they can help support you and we can all pull each other up more effectively"

[dragon-in-a-fez]

y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the "brain fully develops at age 25" thing? and the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing? yeah they're all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them

[dragon-in-a-fez]

okay people are doing nuance in the notes about the kernels of truth in neuroscience myths but I really really need you to understand that that is not important here. people don't believe there are "right-brained" and "left-brained" people because they've misunderstood lateralisation of the central nervous system, they believe it because that binary framework was deliberately pushed by people who wanted to define who was logical enough to lead, and surprise surprise, white adult heterosexual men are left-brained. people don't believe the brain "finishes developing at 25" because they've misunderstood life stage differences in neuroplasticity, they believe it because the idea that children, teens, and young adults have inferior brains is a convenient rationalisation for a society that marginalises them. people don't believe you "only use 10% of your brain" because they misread an fMRI study, they believe it because it's useful bullshit for everyone from hyperindividualist historical revisionists pushing the great genius concept of scientific progress to hucksters recruiting for cults that will teach you to unlock your latent telekinesis for just $5000 a month. that's why it's fucking important to know that many popular science ideas are false and to push back on them loudly and frequently, because they're not just mildly incorrect, they are often active components of systems of violence.

[hyperlexichypatia]

See also "chemical imbalance" and ~93% of anything involving "trauma."

[stopsignsworstenemy]

i was going to do a rant about this before seeing this tweet but imma just leave this here

[arrows-for-pens]

#been saying for years#rainbow capitalism isn't a movement but it sure is a fucking canary (via @runawaymarbles)

[deramin2]

This goes hand in hand with pushing for only queer people to play queer roles. Which in theory sounds like a good thing to push for authentic representation when so much of the past stuff was bad.

Except the actual real world outcome has become queer leftists abusively dog piling any actor they deem "inauthentic" leading to actors being forcefully outed against their will before they were ready in an attempt to make the abuse stop. Including children. People have been justifying psychologically tormenting literal children for not publicly disclosing (and being firm and set in) their gender and sexuality in order to work.

In many wants it's set back queer media and made people just as afraid of queer roles ruining their careers and their lives as they were when bigots were doing it. Which is not an improvement to the situation! It's really only giving cover to people who want none of this to exist.

We could have just praised the process we wanted to see. Personally I love seeing Jim Parsons take that big normative sitcom money and fucking off to make emotionally powerful queer films with it casting queer actors whenever he can. But praising that will always be more constructive than bullying Kit Connor. If Daniel Craig wants to spend the rest of his career making charming gay detective movies about helping marginalized woman get revenge on abusive rich assholes, then I don't care what his sexuality is because it's still pushing queer media far forward.

We could have positively addressed rainbow capitalism by supporting queer-owed business. We could have accepted that mainstreaming queer iconography at Target (much of it designed by queer people who got to pay their bills making it) would make space for people buying that small batch t-shirt at Pride. It's not like people only ever buy one t-shirt in their life.

A closeted-for-safety trans boy buying his first binder at Target could have created an opening for the next one to be from Shapeshifters. Instead he may never get the chance to know what it would feel feel like to take the first step because the wrong packaging could endanger him and the (fair) price mightbe unaffordable.

We can't built perils into doing better. We can't keep calling nigh-impossible next steps"the bare minimum" and tearing into them for every imperfection if we want people to do them at all. At minimum that's a burnout machine. At worst it gives bigots leverage to maker sure we have nothing. Kindness and enthuses support of what we want to see happen makes way more progress.

Unfortunately many leftists are still so stuck in the purity-sin-redemption mentality, even when they surface-level reject Christianity, that instead of growth and change everything keeps getting treated as blasphemy unless it's perfect. Even though perfection is impossible. So the whole well is primed to be poisoned by the people who genuinely hate us.

[chavisory]

“We can’t build perils into doing better.”

[tuttleturtle]

I do in fact actually multiple know closeted-for-safety trans boys who bought their first binder at target who then bought their next one from Shapeshifters. Now that you can't buy binders at Target I'm not gonna get to know another one unless that changes. Please have that change.

[psychotic-gerard]

maybe its because im an asylum seeker but i am of the opinion that even if immigrants and asylum seekers contributed nothing to a nation that nation should not have the right to deport them.

[psychotic-gerard]

"oh now no-one will do these jobs," well i think its bad that we take advantage of immigrants and asylum seekers' desperation to force them into exploitative jobs that the ordinary citizen is entirely unwilling to put up with.