the ugly truth

[truepenny]

(I said this on Twitter, I might as well say it here.)

So, yesterday I outed myself as mentally ill. Which was a conscious choice & one I'm not fully happy about, but it needed to be done. It also means that I have admitted I have a disability. (Actually, I have several.) Which I'm also not happy about, but facts are facts.

However, I'm now waiting for the person who's going to come along and tell me I'm not disabled enough:

• "You don't look/act disabled." (You're not really disabled, just making excuses/trying to make yourself look special.)
  
• "You're not on disability." (You fail to meet a arbitrary, quantifiable standard of disability, therefore you are not disabled.)
  
• "I don't think you have a real disability." (You fail to meet my arbitrary, unquantifiable standard of disability, therefore you are not disabled.)
  
• "You have a job." (You can't really be disabled. You're too functional.)
  
• "Your description of your disability does not match with other people's descriptions of their disability/with my experience of my disability." (You're not disabled, you're just lying.)
  
• "Other people have disabilities that are much worse than yours." (How dare you claim to be disabled.)
  
• ETA 2017 06 25 "You can totally overcome this disability if you think right/eat right/exercise right/pray right/take the right supplements/buy the right Lucky Special Stick." (You're not really disabled, you're just not trying.) [I forgot this one, as I said to rachelmanija when she reminded me of it, because it's the one I still say to myself.]
  

Well, if that's how you think, I have news for you:

1. FUCK YOU.

2. Disability is not a competition. Yes, there ARE people whose disabilities are much worse than mine. That doesn't make the issues I struggle with less real.

3. You have no idea of how hard I may be working to not "look disabled."

4. Also, and I repeat, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Whoever you are and whatever your credentials, you do not get to constitute yourself the disability police and tell me, once again, that I'm not disabled enough to count.

I don't want to be disabled. (Jesus fucking Christ, who would?) I don't want to acknowledge that I'm disabled. I'm doing so now because the Republicans are trying to make people with disabilities disappear, and it's time to BE VISIBLE as a person with disabilities who doesn't "look disabled," instead of just passing for "normal" as best I can.

So stop telling me to shut up because I don't meet your standards.

I have disabilities. They're real. By the definition of the health care that I'm in danger of losing, HELL YEAH are they real. I *do* have a dog in this fight, and me and him, we're gonna go down YELLING OUR FUCKING HEADS OFF.

Comments

[bubbleigh]

1 Have been thinking a lot about #2 on your list lately, with all that's been going on. You are right, disability is not (and should not be) a competition and yet people feel more and more entitled to comment and judge and give out prizes.

A friend of mine's elderly mother has gotten (mild) grief about her handicapped sticker on her car. She doesn't look elderly (because she works at it because our society does not value the elderly) and you can't see the serious nerve damage in her feet that makes walking more than a yard or two painful and so people have asked her to justify herself.

What kills me about this situation is that people seem to feel no shame about their willingness to both comment and judge other people and what they go through. The lack of willingness to think the best instead of the worst (IE if you don't look disabled you are gaming the system) and to have and show compassion is very disheartening.*

Footnote: The above statement is a broad generalization and therefore is as true as those statements generally are.

[mrissa]

It's a hard word the first time you apply it to yourself, isn't it? And yah, there's always the not disabled enough/don't look disabled/misery poker problem. Yah. For all of us. Literally all. It sucks, but there it is.

I'm just going to sit here with you on this one. Good reasons.

[tournevis]

Yes to all of this. For me too.

[sovay]

So stop telling me to shut up because I don't meet your standards.

Amen.

[pameladean]

I'm sorry you had to do this before you ready, and sorry for both of us that our well-being and needed medical treatment are threatened by a bunch of psychopaths.

I swear that I know more people with some kind of, often not very visible, disability than I know people without one. I don't think "normal" is really very normal.

P.

[rachelmanija]

You missed "You're only disabled because you're not thinking positively enough." I hope that's because you managed to skip that one.

[truepenny]

Whoops. Forgot that one. Probably because it's the one I catch me saying to myself. >:( (This is your own fault, so you're not really disabled.) See also, VP Pence and his moronic comment about "personal responsibility."