Disability doesn’t mean “You cannot do X things”. Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. Maybe you can, weirdly. Maybe you can, and you’re exhausted afterwards. Maybe any combination thereof. This probably won’t be consistent. People aren’t consistent.
This. So much this.
I feel like it’s hard to talk about death around some people. They don’t want to let it into their consciousness. And they get so twitchy I regret bringing the subject up.
I have no desire to die, but I feel like I’ve “met” death and made my peace with the possibility. When you end up in the…
In the creation of supercrip stories, nondisabled people don’t celebrate any particular achievement, however extraordinary or mundane. Rather, these stories rely on the perception that disability and achievement contradict each other and that any disabled person who overcomes this contradiction is heroic.
To believe that achievement contradicts disability is to pair helplessness with disability, a pairing for which crips pay an awful price. The nondisabled world locks us away in nursing homes. It deprives us the resources to live independently. It physically and sexually abuses us in astoundingly high numbers. It refuses to give us jobs even when a workplace is accessible, the speech impediment, the limp, the ventilator, the seeing-eye dog are read as signs of inability. The price is incredibly high.
| — | Eli Clare. “The Mountain”. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. 1st.South End Press, 1999. pp. 8. (via nekobakaz) |
“Gifted” people are segregated. Seen as too broken to be around real people. And they’re taught to think of themselves as superior. And, for the most part, they don’t notice that they’re segregated and that the segregation isn’t for their benefit.
…being disabled…
…and being told everything comes easily to you…
And not being allowed to do anything hard…
…and being terrified of what will happen if anyone notices how you really are.
Signal boost, y’all
I am so upset again that cognitively disabled people of any and all kinds are considered by most other people to be just obviously inferior to themselves. To have less life in us than they do. To be incompatible with being considered “gifted” because “gifted” is not only “real” but the special chosen people and cognitively disabled people are everyone else and never the twain shall meet. But that’s just a teeny bit of what bothers me.
It’s they can’t see we are ever right about the world when they are wrong. They can’t see our lives are as rich as any life. That what they see as only restriction, isn’t necessarily. I don’t like it. I know they’re wrong but there’s so many of them.
And even among cognitively disabled people there is this attitude. Autistic people are thought better than the rest except when we are worse than the rest. People draw weird lines of what counts as being cognitively disabled, as if “any disability involving cognition” wasn’t damn clear enough. People think that things have to be medical, have to have names.
I know the differences that make me cognitively disabled aren’t just one thing. But they act as one, as often as not, because only one mind here. Some are constant. Others are intermittent. Others are always there but their type fluctuates all the time between various arrangements and possibilities.
Words I know medical people have related to them, or could relate to them, include autism, developmental disorder NOS, brain damage, delirium, hyperlexia, temporal lobe epilepsy, learning disability (some verbal, some nonverbal), sensory integration dysfunction, movement disorders (some of which involve where cognition and motion connect), all kinds of things.
But how I see it, I just know that right here, right ow, the way I understand and interact with the world are far from typical. People remind me of how wrong it is. And maybe some of it I don’t like. Some of it can scare me. But a lot of it I see as okay. And all of it I consider to be okay as one possibility for interacting with the world right then.
I don’t know how to say what I mean. The world as I see it is infinitely full, no less so for me than for most people. Maybe I’ve already written this so many times before. Maybe I don’t need to write it again while fighting against mild hypoxia. Maybe I do need to write it again while fighting against that, because that’s part of my cognitive problems right now.
That’s the other thing. Cognitive impairments are not divorce from the rest of the body. I often experience cognitive impairments, even severe ones, because of a condition considered physical. Because even though most people don’t think of it this way, the brain is a part of the body. It’s not separable. If the body is sick enough,so will the brain be. And that’s how my delirium normally develops and then hangs around for years in the form of brain damage.
I feel like it doesn’t exactly matter if I like or dislike a particular cognitive trait. It’s there. That’s what matters. It’s part of me. That’s what matters. Even if right now it’s something infuriating that makes my fingers type gibberish every few words, while my mind drifts off into la la land.
Right now my mind does want to drift, a lot. If I don’t seize control of it, it goes blank. Or even weirder, it skips along, through darkness, and sees little patches of things,and tries to make them out. And when it can’t make them out, they come in little lines and shapes and twisty things that can’t be themselves made out, and all that feels like a tunnel through some horrid underground place. I have to keep it from doing that. Writing sort of helps.
But that’s as much part of me as the parts I like. Even though it inserts these big holes in what I write and I get off track and stuff. It’s still there. And it doesn’t make me less of a person. Not even if for some reason — I’m not expecting it — I got permanently lost in that underground maze full of things that I can only partially understand. I’d still be here. I’d still be me. I’d still be a worthwhile person capable of experiencing good things in life and not just bad ones.
There are good things in places where the cognitively exalted — that is nondisabled — can’t or won’t go. There are strange depths that are scary to them, even, often, to those of us that inhabit them, but that still contain good. There are places that are scary to them but that are almost entirely good to those of us who inhabit them. There are places where the goodness or scariness seems to depend more on personality than on the places themselves. And there are good things that can ONLY be found outside the realm of typical cognition. And I ain’t talking “gifted” FFS, that’s a classification I don’t believe in. I’m talking there are actually good parts of thinking only accessible to certain cognitively disabled people, just as there are actually good parts of thinking that are only accessible to people without certain cognitive impairments.
It’s too complex. Most people don’t want to know how complex. They just want easy answers about the whole thing.
But one thing I know, is people are people regardless edemdedekddfls. Leaving that gibberish in to explain what I have to delete every sentence or two. People are people regardless of how their mind works. And that’s important. Dd dddfśdkd.
I wish I could describe more of the unusual ways my mind works, both for good and bad, and in a way that collects them all together at once in one big description. But I have trouble dioippp doing that. Çm ,c I want to be able to show the mistakes and the good parts and the weird parts and the parts that are both much maligned and utterly beautiful.
But I can’t. I can’t even keep deleting my weird strings of leggy legs. K do dddfśdkd. Screw it. Posting now. Want to be able to post things here even when the letters or words are clearly totally wrong. Makes it easier to see this as so renters fomgnmfmdfk ldsfbblddd. I mean make it easier to see this as I wrote it, not in a finished state of construction. And make it easier for me to get used to writing things and putting them out there when they atr incomplete.
Didn’t mean to turn myself into Exhibit A or anything, it just happened, because I’m trying to write with too littlest genres dddfśdkd c. Arrrrgh. I’m trying to write with too little in my head working right for writing. There. Now publishing n hoping it actually got to a fucking point somewhere in there.
Yeah. This, just… all of this. I didn’t experience it as drastically as you did, but I’ve experienced some of the bizarre cognitive whiplash that comes from things like being told at one point in your life that you were “gifted” and “special” and suggested or told outright to consider yourself better than others. And going from that to things like being seen as an unperson and ignored outright by a caseworker who assumed I couldn’t understand what was going on in a meeting about me and acted really surprised to hear that I could talk. And going from thinking that everyone admired me for being “gifted” to the realization that a lot of people see me as having “something wrong with me” at the very least. Someone who cannot be a friend, a family member, a lover, a dreamer or anything else in the same way they, the “normal people,” are. I don’t know what they think my life consists of, but it’s probably very different from the reality.
I’ve heard this argument made so much that it makes me want to put my fist through a wall now: that cognitively disabled people are worth less and maybe should be prevented from existing to begin with because they “can’t enjoy the same richness in life” that normal people can. And that this “richness” is some objectively real thing and its existence should be obvious to everybody. And also remembering how I used to panic over not knowing what the results of all my IQ tests were because gifted education culture had led me to believe that there was some kind of sliding scale where people with higher IQs could absolutely understand more and therefore experience the world more richly and experience some kind of beauty that people with lower IQs couldn’t. Remember being told that I had tested in the “genius” range as a child and that I shouldn’t tell that to other people, not even in gifted education because they would be jealous of me. And it was seen as a normal and understandable thing to be jealous of. Therefore afterwards I obsessed over trying to find out other people’s IQ scores and always wanting them to be lower than mine, and after I found out the real number, worrying whenever I met someone who had gotten a higher score, what they “got out of life” that I feared was closed off to me.
Then somehow in adulthood my IQ score dropped by a lot from my childhood score and wasn’t “genius” any more. Might have been that most tests measure relative to what’s “expected” at your age, might have been loss of skills, might have been actual brain damage, probably a combination of all three. And I started to realise that many of the things about me that I valued, that I thought were parts of being “gifted” as a child, were still with me. That were not byproducts of a number but just how my brain worked, and sometimes even more with me when I was “less functional” by others’ standards. That I could do and understand things now, that I couldn’t do and understand as a child. And things that I didn’t like about my own brain and thought I was just “holding back on,” like usually having great difficulty reading fiction above a children’s level, are still with me too. I have found workarounds for some things. Although some of them just involve knowing I will always hit my “limit” for how much I can process, long before most people do, and so I have to do a lot of things, like reading, in a lot of tiny increments.
Reblogged again because of commentary, and because ALLTHEPOINTSMADEARESOPERFECTOMG !
I am so upset again that cognitively disabled people of any and all kinds are considered by most other people to be just obviously inferior to themselves. To have less life in us than they do. To be incompatible with being considered “gifted” because “gifted” is not only “real” but the special chosen people and cognitively disabled people are everyone else and never the twain shall meet. But that’s just a teeny bit of what bothers me.
It’s they can’t see we are ever right about the world when they are wrong. They can’t see our lives are as rich as any life. That what they see as only restriction, isn’t necessarily. I don’t like it. I know they’re wrong but there’s so many of them.
And even among cognitively disabled people there is this attitude. Autistic people are thought better than the rest except when we are worse than the rest. People draw weird lines of what counts as being cognitively disabled, as if “any disability involving cognition” wasn’t damn clear enough. People think that things have to be medical, have to have names.
I know the differences that make me cognitively disabled aren’t just one thing. But they act as one, as often as not, because only one mind here. Some are constant. Others are intermittent. Others are always there but their type fluctuates all the time between various arrangements and possibilities.
Words I know medical people have related to them, or could relate to them, include autism, developmental disorder NOS, brain damage, delirium, hyperlexia, temporal lobe epilepsy, learning disability (some verbal, some nonverbal), sensory integration dysfunction, movement disorders (some of which involve where cognition and motion connect), all kinds of things.
But how I see it, I just know that right here, right ow, the way I understand and interact with the world are far from typical. People remind me of how wrong it is. And maybe some of it I don’t like. Some of it can scare me. But a lot of it I see as okay. And all of it I consider to be okay as one possibility for interacting with the world right then.
I don’t know how to say what I mean. The world as I see it is infinitely full, no less so for me than for most people. Maybe I’ve already written this so many times before. Maybe I don’t need to write it again while fighting against mild hypoxia. Maybe I do need to write it again while fighting against that, because that’s part of my cognitive problems right now.
That’s the other thing. Cognitive impairments are not divorce from the rest of the body. I often experience cognitive impairments, even severe ones, because of a condition considered physical. Because even though most people don’t think of it this way, the brain is a part of the body. It’s not separable. If the body is sick enough,so will the brain be. And that’s how my delirium normally develops and then hangs around for years in the form of brain damage.
I feel like it doesn’t exactly matter if I like or dislike a particular cognitive trait. It’s there. That’s what matters. It’s part of me. That’s what matters. Even if right now it’s something infuriating that makes my fingers type gibberish every few words, while my mind drifts off into la la land.
Right now my mind does want to drift, a lot. If I don’t seize control of it, it goes blank. Or even weirder, it skips along, through darkness, and sees little patches of things,and tries to make them out. And when it can’t make them out, they come in little lines and shapes and twisty things that can’t be themselves made out, and all that feels like a tunnel through some horrid underground place. I have to keep it from doing that. Writing sort of helps.
But that’s as much part of me as the parts I like. Even though it inserts these big holes in what I write and I get off track and stuff. It’s still there. And it doesn’t make me less of a person. Not even if for some reason — I’m not expecting it — I got permanently lost in that underground maze full of things that I can only partially understand. I’d still be here. I’d still be me. I’d still be a worthwhile person capable of experiencing good things in life and not just bad ones.
There are good things in places where the cognitively exalted — that is nondisabled — can’t or won’t go. There are strange depths that are scary to them, even, often, to those of us that inhabit them, but that still contain good. There are places that are scary to them but that are almost entirely good to those of us who inhabit them. There are places where the goodness or scariness seems to depend more on personality than on the places themselves. And there are good things that can ONLY be found outside the realm of typical cognition. And I ain’t talking “gifted” FFS, that’s a classification I don’t believe in. I’m talking there are actually good parts of thinking only accessible to certain cognitively disabled people, just as there are actually good parts of thinking that are only accessible to people without certain cognitive impairments.
It’s too complex. Most people don’t want to know how complex. They just want easy answers about the whole thing.
But one thing I know, is people are people regardless edemdedekddfls. Leaving that gibberish in to explain what I have to delete every sentence or two. People are people regardless of how their mind works. And that’s important. Dd dddfśdkd.
I wish I could describe more of the unusual ways my mind works, both for good and bad, and in a way that collects them all together at once in one big description. But I have trouble dioippp doing that. Çm ,c I want to be able to show the mistakes and the good parts and the weird parts and the parts that are both much maligned and utterly beautiful.
But I can’t. I can’t even keep deleting my weird strings of leggy legs. K do dddfśdkd. Screw it. Posting now. Want to be able to post things here even when the letters or words are clearly totally wrong. Makes it easier to see this as so renters fomgnmfmdfk ldsfbblddd. I mean make it easier to see this as I wrote it, not in a finished state of construction. And make it easier for me to get used to writing things and putting them out there when they atr incomplete.
Didn’t mean to turn myself into Exhibit A or anything, it just happened, because I’m trying to write with too littlest genres dddfśdkd c. Arrrrgh. I’m trying to write with too little in my head working right for writing. There. Now publishing n hoping it actually got to a fucking point somewhere in there.
Wow… This Is so Important, and talk about things that need so much being said… There are so many people only seing value in finite manifestation of their vision of intelligence life or worth, and they have to much power while denying our existence, our diversity and the very real value of our experience.
I don’t quite believe in development the way most people do. There is no rule that you have to do x or not do y by a certain age. I say this as someone who’s witnessed several people grow up.
YES this!
So, would anyone be interested in a blog dedicated to animals with disabilities that is 100% inspiration porn free? Instead of posting a picture of a cute disabled animal with some pithy caption about beating the odds or whatever, I’d just post pictures of cute disabled animals. And people can send in pictures of their cute disabled animal friends. Yes? No?
Yes! 1000x yes!
I’d be interested :D Especially kitties!
Fuck Yeah Disabled Animals! is go. If you have a disabled animal friend, please share cute pics/stories/videos of them.
This is a blog now! :D Spreading this in case my followers also want to follow.
