I just left this comment on the Painkiller Troubleshooting/Medicine is the best medicine thread from last month:
I left this thread because I wondered whether my feelings about it were being unreasonably pissy. Now, nearly a month later, I’ve decided they weren’t.
So here it is: When I tag a post “disability”, which is right up top there, would able-bodied (AFAIK) people please not centre their concerns by talking about how they had a runny nose or a headache once, please? Treat this as you would any other post about being in an oppressed group of which you are not a member. You’re welcome to comment, but just keep in mind what we’re actually talking about, eh? Stops you looking like a numpty.
Just in case anyone’s still reading this.
And it was tagged disability. And it’s not like I and co-bloggers and commenters haven’t talked about our/their disabilities before.
But several comments were from people talking about how they love and embrace medication for their headaches and minor viral symptoms.
Here’s the thing: as I said, the post was tagged “disability”. And the Similar Posts were about disability (right there, you can read about what it actually means to me, except that I’ve got a bit worse since that older post).
That means the post is about disability. Not about able-bodied people: not about whether you had a cold last week, not about how Panadol or visualisations or a snifter of homeopathy fixes you right up and isn’t that great and aren’t I glad for you?
Whatever. Sure I’m glad for you. I’m just not glad for you here, in this post, this post which is about the day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out grinding experience of people with some disabilities.
PWD should be centred, in these spaces. You’re welcome to comment, as I said in the quote; but it isn’t ABOUT you. Your needs and experiences aren’t centred; they don’t offer insight into what it’s like to be a person with a painful disability all the time. It’s not just more of the same, chronicity is a very, very different experience.
If you’re a TAB (temporarily able-bodied) person with feminist identification and experience, perhaps it might help to think about how you might behave as you would if you were a man in a feminist space, then extrapolate from there? You wouldn’t barge into a feminist conversation about, say, menstruation or childbirth experiences, and talk about the bleeding mole you found on your dick last night. I would appreciate it if you would interpolate, analogise, derive, or deduce your responses accordingly.
Cheers.
Similar Posts:
- Telegram to TABs, on Spoon Theory by Lauredhel
- Invisible Illness Bingo. by Lauredhel
- Spurlock’s “30 Days in a Wheelchair”: A curmudgeonly synopsis (or two) by Lauredhel
- Quiz: Representations of Disabled Bodies in Logos by Lauredhel
- Amandaw is kicking arse and taking names when it comes to able-bodied privilege by Lauredhel
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I’ve been interested in disability rights since I was in primary school. I’ve been impaired (mental + physical) since ca 13. I’ve been on the disability dole (US: SSDI) since 1993.
Thank you for an outstanding thread which taught me a lot!
Thank you for this. This is my first visit, and I saw this post linked from a blog that I read all the time.
My partner has a chronic illness. Lots of people think they understand it. Lots of people try to identify with it, and end up saying and doing lots of stupid things because of it. And still it wasn’t until I read this post that the penny dropped and I realized that every person with a disability or chronic condition has to also put up with that level of stupid.
I think I’ll be sticking around and reading more. And my partner gets a big hug when he gets home.
*lurking, learning and sorry for not reading tags*
For me the important distinction is between my symptoms (headache, muscle pain, nausea, whatever) and my disability.
My headache is no worse than anyone else’s, my muscle pain isn’t somehow more valid than a TABs, my nausea is no more spectacular. What turns it into a disability is that I can’t, like a TAB, take a day or two off work to hide in bed and recuperate, dose up on max-strength painkillers, let the laundry slide until I’m well enough to deal with it, tell my friends I’ll see them next week instead. Because it already IS next week. And it’s been next week for years. And yet I am feeling no better, and the laundry still needs doing, and I have to go to work, and if I take any more of those painkillers I’ll be risking serious damage to my internal organs, and you know what, I’d quite like to see my friends as well.
No TAB has had that moment of realisation… when the novelty of coming over with a bunch of flowers and some fresh orange juice has worn off for your friends, and the sympathy of the sickroom has dissipated, and now you are expected to either die or get the hell on with your life because being “ill” forever is not an option in our society, even if it is the reality you face.
Dina: The trouble with the idea of trying to extrapolate from one TEMPORARY experience with the superficial symptoms of some short-lived illness to a life-long disability is as follows:
1. Most people’s imagination is usually far more limited than they think.
2. It’s not just about the physical sensations of the symptoms that you experience. Those are actually, for most types of disabilities, secondary.
Several people in this thread have talked about how chronic pain and fatigue simply grind you down in a way that JUST. DOESN’T. HAPPEN. When it’s temporary. I don’t have chronic pain (only recurring) or fatigue so I won’t try to address that. But what I DO have experience with is the SOCIAL aspect of disability, which someone else had mentioned. Though admittedly the social aspect of being deaf, or having any of my other disabilities, is different from the social aspects of pain/fatigue conditions, so you can’t really quite extrapolate from my description here to those types of experiences, or vice versa. But this is what I know, so I’ll give it a shot:
For me, simply being unable to hear certain things is actually a fairly trivial aspect of my experience as a Deaf person. What is far more infuriating for me is how OTHER people respond to me being Deaf, and how completely unnecessary barriers prevent my full participation in things that could be so easily made accessible. The way that service providers who are supposed to be legally responsible for ensuring my access by providing me sign language interpreters refuse to do so, leaving me with no services. The way that some hearing people refuse to look at me so I can lipread them even after I have explained 17 times that I NEED TO SEE THEIR FACE TO UNDERSTAND THEM. And the list goes on. How do you propose to extrapolate from your nasal congestion-related attenuated hearing to the social experience of sitting in a room of hearing people who don’t sign and having everyone ignore you because they don’t know how to communicate with you and can’t be bothered to learn how?
I have several different disabilities, including two since birth (though one wasn’t diagnosed until age 26), and another very minor disability that I acquired 9 years ago. This third one involves a foot condition that means I cannot run or jump (and haven’t done either for 9 years), sometimes have a little difficulty coming down stairs, and perhaps most significantly I have to be careful how much weight I carry and how far I carry it. Prior to this foot injury, I did have a few temporary injuries along the way that did temporarily affect my ability to walk or carry heavy things. But, no, NOTHING in those very temporary experiences was really that similar to what my experience has been like for the past 9 years learning ways to adapt to the new limitations of my foot (as someone who doesn’t drive, for example, this has important implications for how I bring my groceries home.) If I had tried extrapolating from my earlier, walking-related injuries then I probably would have completely missed some pretty significant aspects of what life has actually been like for me the past 9 years. Because my imagination, as big as it is, just wouldn’t have stretched far enough.
You won’t “get” disability until you understand the limits of your imagination, sit back, and JUST LISTEN. Thanks.
@Andrea S.: Exactly. For me, too, my disability issues are much less stressful and difficult than trying to navigate the social elements. Even down to little things, like, no, I can’t sit on the side of the table in tutorials that faces the window, because I have to manage my distraction levels carefully (ADHD) and the window is too much. I can handle the constant pain, so long as I’m not perpetually having to justify myself in the things I do to manage it.
I remember a scene in an old TV show that actually conveyed a bit of the pervasiveness of disability discrimination for a change. It was also a deafness thing – on Reasonable Doubts, which starred Marlee Matlin as a lawyer. Professionally her character used an interpreter in court and so on, but she could lipread and speak so didn’t always need him there.
In one episode, her car had been impounded. In trying to get it sorted out, she was dismissively directed to deal with an employee who had a thick, bushy moustache that concealed his lips. Her character’s frustration with this and the injustice it represented was an awesome touch to include – I was about twelve when I saw it, and the only deaf people I knew were family friends who themselves had never learned sign language at all (so I hadn’t really learned yet about the serious Issues surrounding anti-sign language prejudice, because the family friends were kind of down on it themselves), and yet that scene left an impression on me more vivid than just about any other scene in the series.
Man, that show needs to come out on DVD.
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