carfuckerlynch:

powerfulkicks:

We need to start sexualizing mobility aids

[transcript: torrin a. greathouse

Sick4Sick

I think my lover’s cane is sexy. The way they walk like a rainstorm stumbles slow across the landscape. How, with fingers laced together, our boots & canes click in time-unsteady rhythm of a metronome’s limp wrist. All sway & swish, first person I ever saw walk with a lisp. Call this our love language of unspokens: We share so many symptoms, the first time we thought to hyphenate our names was, playfully, to christen ourselves a new disorder. We trade tips on medication, on how to weather what prescriptions make you sick to [maybe] make you well. We make toasts with acetaminophen bought in bulk. Kiss in the airport terminal through surgical masks. Rub the knots from each others’ backs. We dangle FALL RISK bracelets from our walls & call it decoration. We visit another ER & call it a date. When we are sick, again, for months -with a common illness that will not leave-it is not the doctors who care for us. We make do ourselves. At night, long after the sky has darkened-in-something like a three-day-bruise, littered with satellites I keep mistaking for stars-our bodies are fever-sweat stitched. A chimera. Shadow-puppet of our lust. Bones bowed into a new beast [with two backs, six legs of metal & flesh & carbon fiber]. Beside my love, I find I can’t remember any prayers so I whisper the names of our medications like the names of saints. Orange bottles scattered around the mattress like unlit candles in the dark. /End transcript]

adhd-and-asd-dandelion:

A reminder that you can’t outplan your mental disability/illness. There’s never going to be a schedule that will magically make your disability disappear, that will make you be able to do things as if you weren’t disabled.

No amount of telling yourself that ‘this school year will be different’, ‘this semester I’m going to attend all the classes and do all the work and take all the exams on time’ and ‘I’m going to get this huge list of tasks done tomorrow’ will make any of that true.

In fact, setting such high expectations and putting so much passive pressure on yourself will only make everything worse.

But what will work is being honest with yourself, and planning with your disability in mind, whether that means taking into account that you won’t be able to do anything for a couple weeks at a time, or that you can only work an hour a day, or learning how to recognize when your disability/illness is about to act up (if there are signs) and preparing for it by messaging professors and prepping whatever you’ll need to get through it- meds, snacks, water bottles, etc.

Most importantly, learning to be kind to yourself will help you get through things far better than being unrealistic and mean ever will.

section-69:

I think the issue I have with Pike’s SNW concept is how hard it’s focussing on the aesthetics of disability - i.e., what should be the least frightening parts. Part of this might just be a lazy attempt at showing rather than telling, but it looks like Pike is primarily terrified of ending up in a (60s attempt at creating a) powered wheelchair, and of becoming disfigured through facial burns. So far, they’ve shown us Pike seeing his future self in reflective surfaces and recoiling from it, and it feels like such a horror trope.

I don’t mean to imply there’s nothing frightening about disability. I walk with a stick and am in pain 90% of the time, amongst other problems. My symptoms are getting worse, and I am frightened about what will come next. The things I’m frightened about, though, have nothing to do with aesthetics. I’m worried about how I’ll cope with the pain getting worse. I’m worried I’ll need to significantly change my lifestyle to accommodate a different activity level, and lose the ability to do some of the things I love. I’m worried I’ll end up in a wheelchair, yeah, but not because I’m frightened of the fucking chair, just because it’d mean I’d have to move somewhere without stairs and consider whether or not everywhere I want to go is accessible.

Show us Pike reliving the pain of the accident, flinching away from flames, since he’s said he lived it all out in his vision of the future. Show him pointing out all the doorways and steps he’d be prevented from going through in the chair, talking to other physically disabled people, planning in advance how he’s going to cope with this when it happens. Show us him musing on how much longer he’ll be able to live out in the woods riding horses. Just please, Please quit equating physical disability to death, and having his future face haunting him like a fucking monster

shakespearevillain:

zetablarian:

Something to add to the long list of things I wish able bodied people wouldn’t do:

Please don’t wrap decorations on the railings of stairways.

It’s a common practice for the winter holidays, and a museum I visited today had fake autumn leaves wrapped around the metal railings running down their very steep steps.

Here’s the thing: I can’t safely go down steps without relying heavily on the handrail. This is ESPECIALLY true when the weather is cold and icy. If there’s clutter between my hand and the rail, I’m way more likely to slip and fall.

Please save your festive decor for the architecture that isn’t vital to the mobility of others.

I’m just going to give my two cents on this.

When I’m having a vertigo attack, stairs are incredibly dangerous for me. The handrail is pretty much the only thing keeping me from breaking my neck. When that handrail becomes covered in tinsel or ribbon, my chances of making it safely down a flight of stairs are halved. Or, to put a distinction on this, my chances of making it safely down a flight of stairs while not grasping on to the torn remnants of your decorations because I had to use them to break my fall becomes halved.

I look “normal.” I have no visible handicap. Sometimes my brain flips out and decides that it doesn’t like giving me a sense of where my body is or where other things around me are. Even if you don’t think there are any disabled people who will be interacting with your decorated handrail, don’t risk it.

Other places to not put decorations: door handles.

I feel that one shouldn’t have to be explained, but then again I’m the one who was just barely able to open a door with a decorated handle, pushed at the door, didn’t realize how heavy the door was, had the door fall back on my fingers, and then had to start the whole process over again, now with injured fingers. I know this one only has a bit to do with my spatial impairment because this particular door was in a school and we constantly had children trying to get into their classroom and failing because the handle wouldn’t work. 

In short: If the thing you are decorating has to do with a person getting from one place to another, don’t decorate it. 

cuntess-carmilla:

cuntess-carmilla:

When you have multiple disabilities that differ vastly in nature (autism vs chronic illnesses in my case) it’s kind of insane to watch people having such a difficult time managing narratives and politics on disability.

Like, when you can clearly tell they’re only significantly familiarized with one disability narrative and one single stance on disability politics based on the single “type” of disability they’re close to.

They always end up mangling things up with the implications of what they’re applying to all disabilities as a blanket statement. :|

I want autism and the diversity of humanity to be accepted, no questions asked. I want what society makes out to be disabling about my autism despite those things (at least as far as they occur in me) not being inherently impairing to become normalized and as accommodated as their opposing allistic traits are. Fuck a “cure” for autism, there’s nothing to cure about it.

There is, however, a lot to fucking cure about my blood vessels being made of fucking plasticine, about my pained and messed up joints that cause me both joint AND muscle pain, about my migraines, about my inability to properly absorb the nutrients from the food I eat, about my blood flow not properly reaching my intestines OR MY BRAIN, about my mast cells throwing everything off balance and reacting in absurd yet inconsistent ways because they’re FUCKING INSANE, about my body being so distressed and deprived constantly that I live in a state of permanent pain and devastating exhaustion that doesn’t let me live my life.

Both not wanting my autism to be cured and wanting either a cure or at least better treatment for my chronic illnesses coexist perfectly as part of my disability liberation politics, because they’re very, very different disabilities in nature with very different repercussions in my life and they’re mistreated by Societé very differently, from different sources of bigotry despite the many things in common that different disabilities share. It’s not a one size fits all.

betazoa:

startrekmemequeen:

andorianjem:

anyway love it when people are like “there wouldn’t be any disabled people in a sci-fi utopia bcos they’d all be cured etc” and of course star trek is mentioned in these discussions and i’m over here like

first of all! there were definitely disabled people in star trek, not a lot, but they were there (geordi, nog, melora* off the top of my head)

and when you talk about “curing” people, are you perhaps referring to something like the illegal procedure done on one julian bashir? the kind of medical intervention that was specifically banned as a result of the eugenics wars?

anyway think before you write bad shit on the internet

*a great example of how disability exists in the context of the environment

!!!!!!

nog is also an excellent twofer example because he’s an amputee and he’s got ptsd. even if all physical hardship was “solved” in the future (lol it won’t be), mental illnesses and disorders will always need care and consideration.

justsomeantifas:

justsomeantifas:

justsomeantifas:

veeronic:

justsomeantifas:

it is literal violence against disabled people to make necessary medications so expensive that only the rich can afford them. it is insurance companies supporting eugenics. It is in fact a death sentence. It’s not just “good business” It is literally “good euthanasia” 

After receiving FDA approval my steroid; Deflazacort, just went from 800$ a year to 89,000$ a year.

I’m told my insurance will now cover all of it but to say the least I am skeptical… especially if(when) the ACA gets repealed.

It’s not life saving but it probably adds some years.

Yeah, repealing the ACA [obamacare] will kill millions of people, they’re getting rid of us as fast as they can. These prices are not possible for the average disabled person to pay, because most of us can’t work.

need I remind everyone, disabled people at most make around $8000 a year, the poverty line starts at around $11000 for a single person. and disabled people can’t even save over $2000 or they are removed from their disability benefits, which means we cannot even save up to the poverty line.

some of these medications that keep us alive are so absurdly out of our reach without it being covered we would die, either faster than normal, or as soon as we run out. There is absolutely no way around this. 

People are dying because of these prices, and make no mistake, this is intentional. They’re not just “stupid” and “don’t understand what their actions entail.” They want us dead. These people do not want disabled people to live, that’s all it boils down to.

thought i’d specify disabled people who arent on disability benefits, I know for a fact not enough people get the disability benefits that they deserve, and that was a mistake on my part not to include. These people who haven’t been granted disability money make either nothing, or far less than non-disabled people, some places it’s legal to pay disabled people 22 cents an hour. 

This too is violence, and further proof that no matter what we do we cannot afford such outrageous prices of life-saving medications on our own.

And you know what, there are disabled children who cannot work, and if they only have one or two parents …. minimum wage isn’t even going to cut paying for these medications, and even the national average income would not cover some of these life saving medications, surgeries, and treatments. Commodifying medicine is genocide.

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

neddythestylish:

memelordrevan:

rosslynpaladin:

iamthethunder:

s8yrboy:

“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”

We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”

Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.

Or, backing up FURTHER

and lots of people think this very likely,

“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”

The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.

To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science)  indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.

Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.

Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.

I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.

But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.

I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.

“Disability exists in the context of the environment” is pretty much the definition of disability, really. I mean, a shit ton of people do not consider themselves visually impaired because they wear glasses. But in a time or place where glasses aren’t available? Hello visual impairment. Without mine, I’m pretty much blind. Not full white-out blind, like, but if I hold my own arm out in front of me at full stretch, my hand is blurry.

Hey, here’s another: what about asthma? I’m asthmatic. Salbutamol is my god. To be honest, my lungs are now at a point where I’m Mostly Fine, but if I didn’t have inhalers to fall back on, I would have to be so, so careful every winter of not over-exerting myself for fear of cold air + exercise giving me an asthma attack. My husband would be royally buggered, and basically confined indoors.

The fact is, we have invented some ability aids that negate some disabilities. We have not bothered to invent or accommodate some others. We have created environments that remove some disabilities entirely; we have created environments that worsen others considerably. Disability always exists in the context of the environment.

doomhamster:

realsocialskills:

I’ve encountered a lot of parents and professionals who are reluctant to talk to disabled children about their disabilities.

People often believe that children with disabilities are innocent, and that they can protect their innocence with silence. They express concerns along the lines of “I don’t want him to think something is wrong with him,” or “I don’t want her to feel different,” or “I don’t want them to feel bad about themself.”

You can’t protect disabled kids this way. They know that they are different, and they know that this difference is perceived negatively.

Some examples of how kids figure out that they are different:

• Kids watch what other kids do.
  
• Typically developing younger siblings develop skills that they still haven’t mastered and may never master. They notice. They also notice how their parents react to this.
  
• Kids with disabilities often see other kids their age doing something that looks fun, try to join in, and find that they can’t keep up. They notice, and they have feelings about this.
  
• They also notice when other kids think they’re weird or boring and avoid them.
  
• If they go to a special education program, they notice that other kids don’t take the short bus to school (and they hear what other kids say about the short bus, or they see it in their body language.)
  
• They also notice that their school is really different from schools on TV and in stories.
• All the kids their age on TV and in stories can do things that they can’t do. They notice.
  
• Disabled kids often struggle to understand something that’s clear to everyone else in the room. They notice that this happens a lot.
  
• Kids with disabilities get called the r-word, or the moral equivalent. 
  
• Adults expect them to do things that they can’t on a regular basis. Other kids their age can. Adults are disappointed or angry. They notice.
  
• Kids notice when they have to go to therapy and other kids don’t.
  
• Kids notice when doctors hold them down for painful procedures while they struggle and cry. They notice that this doesn’t happen to kids in stories and that it’s not in any of the books about being a kid.
  
• They notice that they have a lot of tests and that they’re talked to in ways that other kids aren’t.
  
• They are often required to follow rules that other kids don’t have to follow. They notice that, too.
  
• Parents talk about how tired, scared, and overwhelmed they are by their child’s needs or navigating the systems. Kids overhear. 
  
• Many kids also eventually overhear the name of their condition and google it. 
  
• And any number of other things.
  

Your silence doesn’t protect them from any of these experiences; it just isolates them. Kids are already bearing the pain of disability and of other people’s reactions to their disability. If no one will talk to them about it, they are also very, very alone. You can’t protect their innocence; you can break the silence that isolates them.

Yes. This. Your kid IS going to know that they’re different. The world is not going to allow anything else. What you CAN do is help them feel as though being different doesn’t make them wrong, and doesn’t mean they can’t live a good life.