BADD: Something

I didn’t think I’d have something to say today. I haven’t been able to organize my thoughts in the way I need to to write here, and I have a list of things I need to get done that. . . well, it just hasn’t thus far. I thought that I wouldn’t have something to say for Blogging Against Disableism Day, or at least not something that was worth posting here.

I was wrong.

I just finished reading Amanda B’s first post for this year’s BADD (she wrote two) and . . . Well, I found myself upset. And not just because her posts are on distressing issues around abuse by caregivers, but because I had just recently been trying to articulate some of the things she wrote about being conditioned to believe our support needs are unreasonable. Amanda was talking specifically about issues with staff and care givers being abusive, and about the cultures that support that within provider systems. But the conditioning is something I’ve been working on fighting out of my own head, and I’m someone who isn’t getting adequate supports or services. (I have less extensive support needs staff care wise and equipment wise as my health and skills  are very different from Amanda’s, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need supports.)

I’ve been depressed lately because of how long it has been taking for me to get housing, and because the type of support that I need to navigate that type of system it is more complicated. As a result, my family has been truly over taxed in trying to make sure I’m not living under a bridge or someplace where predatory individuals would have access to me. My family members have disabilities of their own to provide self care for, as well as not really having the financial resources to support me in a way that respects their own needs. It’s not that I have super intensive care needs in general- once I have a place and can set up my charts and other adaptive methods, I might need a couple hours a week to help coordinate bills, cleaning schedules, and transportation. But they are still needs that are amplified by not having a permanent home that I can set up as an environment that is suited to developing or maintaining my Daily Living Skills.

However, I also know that I cannot cope at all when I don’t have some obligations or responsibilities to meet. Accessible, meaningful involvement. Unfortunately, none of the things that are immediate to my situation are things I have the skills to navigate. Instead, online things and meetings and disability justice work are the things that allow me to cope, to endure not knowing for sure where I’m going to be sleeping next week.

But my needs for this sort of meaningful activity, and the relatively easier and less expensive to provide supports I need to do them, are characterized over and over as unreasonable. Unreasonable in light of  how I haven’t been able to get housing. Unreasonable in light of needing someone to work one-on-one uestion by question with me to fill out assistance forms, or even in writing an advanced directive when I know basically what I want.* Unreasonable because I need some help in managing my money, because when I try I end up just not buying the things that I need and doing without until it hits crisis even when there’s money for something.

*That set of needs in and of itself is called unreasonable in light of how “smart” I am, how I can be involved in national level policy review, how I scored so high at English in high school. That I can write and review policy somehow means I must be able to apply each step to my own life accurately, without assistance. That there’s a different set of neurological skills between writing big things or reviewing big things and applying those to a very specific case in a way that uses standards measured from the outside is not fathomable.

This past weekend, it didn’t work out that I could go to a family member’s. So I went to the cheapest hotel in my county with wifi, and checked in. (I even agreed to watch my niece on Friday night, as she and I get on well and my sister  needed the support that having someone else handling her  would accomplish. The sort of support that if the dad had been willing to provide when it is needed two nights or so a week, wouldn’t be a problem.) But when the hotel’s internet was not operating appropriately, all the things that I’ve been told- the things I’ve listed in a heavily limited way above- came into my head.

That daring to have obligations to fufill was an unreasonable thing for me to have done, even though they are obligations that aren’t terribly extensive. That needing reliable internet access because I had been asked to complete one thing was something that somehow made me an extra burden above and beyond. That contributing at all can’t happen somehow when you can’t hold a job that supports yourself.  That while my disabilities do not make me something aweful, that my daring to participate in the ways that are accessible to me somehow does.

I know that it is all programming, that it is the sort of behavioral training in action that Amanda is talking about when she says that you don’t need locks or restraints to practice seclusion and restraint on someone. I am someone who has picked apart the details of how society trains us into compliance for the ease of others. How being a part of a marginalized group means that we have epic fights against the things inside our heads in order to survive. I’m someone who films myself daring to reject indistinguishability, who knows that we make tiny revolutions by demanding that our determinations of what we need are listened to.  Someone who lives and metaphorically breathes disability rights.

And I’m still digging out the conditioning in my own brain that reduces me to a something, to a burden and an unreasonable. My mother is still unraveling the complexity of what access is vs “enabling” (which is a complex mess to dig around in itself). My sister is still without her GED because when she has to directly interact with her acquired learning disabilities, the things she’s internalized over the years both when she was a norm with a disabled sister and after she acquired disabilities collapse her incredible demonstrations of self confidence.

When we talk about the impact of disableism, we are talking about trauma, a trauma that can be obvious enough to shriek or subtle enough to make being explicitly told that others will help us access our world a shock, a pleasant surprise. We are talking about outposts in our heads, and the outposts in other people’s heads.

We are talking about how some  nights I lay awake worried about the day when my niece no longer thinks I’m awesome, no longer misses her buddy Skylar, no longer meets a family friend’s kid at his level of interaction because it seems horribly inevitable that she’ll learn the memes of disableism in our culture. Because even with some of the amazing bits of joy and hope that people share- Dave talking about Ruby’s dance class, Brenda talking about her love for her son as a whole person- it’s hard to believe that the hope that it gives will turn out.

It is so hard to believe something that amazing can last when you live in a world where it’s socially acceptable to exercise disableism, to raise children with disabilities around language about brokenness and tragedy into adults whose hearts break daily because it’s hard to unlearn that stuff.

But somehow, it is still something worth writing, and fighting, for.

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(A different, positive, musical Something to play you out.)