Impact

[Content: mentions of murder, attempted murder, and ableism; internalized ableism; suicidal ideation]

This is a difficult post to write. It’s always difficult, of course, to touch on the subjects of murder and ableism, and on how they are excused. It’s more difficult to talk about the impacts in personal ways, ways that are your own lived responses and realities, rather than as abstracts. There’s a distance to the abstracts that keep you feeling safe, even though you know you aren’t. And this doesn’t even account for the risks that writing about those impacts can have on you personally. It is, plainly, all around difficult.

As a child and teen, I mainly just shrugged off these representations as I heard them. They may not have been as prevalent in the media I consumed, but they were, as they are today, “normal” things to hear. But just because something is de rigor doesn’t mean they are truly forgotten at all, even when they hold no special importance in the moment. Those words and memories are still in there, waiting for another train of thought to hook into them and pull them to the surface. It might be later that day or a decade away, but when you fish for something to carry you out of distress, sometimes you hook a poisonous fish instead.

A couple of months ago, I had a melt down that morphed quickly into a break down. I had spent the day cleaning and babysitting. I did have my mother around to help, which is why I was able to overcome my initiation problems, but this is still a major energy expenditure. By the time we got to the laundromat, my spoons were spent with several hours still left to go.  So when my niece put laundry in the wrong machine I snapped out “What are you doing” instead of a “That’s the wrong dryer honey.” She cried, and my mother responded with a “She’s still 4, you can’t expect her to know what to do.” And at that point the last spoons that I use to guard my thoughts was gone. I couldn’t stop crying, or saying horrible things about myself.

Instead of falling on the ground in a ball, as I sometimes do when I have a meltdown from spoon loss, I tried to latch on to something mentally to restrain myself from melting into a quivering mass on the floor in public. I needed to finish there instead of going home to melt in private, both because it’s less private there on cleaning days and because I didn’t have any more clean clothes. That was not a good situation, and pushed beyond the point that I could handle all I could reach were the “poisonous fish” in my attempts to keep afloat.

Aloud, I said things and used words about myself that I would never say in a normal state. I’ve reformatted my language so I don’t use the R-word, yet here I was calling myself one aloud in public. There was no filter left through which to moderate my speech, let alone my thoughts. As things escalated, the thoughts got worse even when the words got less specific. In that state, with nothing left to hold off the combination of anxiety and traumatic memory, my thoughts started regurgitating things I’ve heard in Tetris like reconfigurations.

Why didn’t they kill me when I was a kid and they could have some sympathy for it? Why would they keep such and expensive burden?  Why am I still alive?*

It’s a horrible set of thoughts to have. It isn’t about the sort of person my mother is- my mother is wonderful and doesn’t really understand how someone could intentionally kill their child with or without disabilities, and doesn’t even get why anyone was okay with the “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” post. As much as much of my sense of worthlessness when I’m at a bad spot are an effect of the first two men she married, where my thoughts ended up going weren’t, as far as I can recall, a direct reference to my past.

It is, however, an internalization of the messages, responses, and dehumanization within our media. It’s every time a parent acts like having homicidal fantasies, masked in “mercy” language or not, about their disabled kid is “normal” or “natural,” every time telling them it isn’t is met with “you don’t know what it’s like.” It’s certain groups of people deciding it’s okay to lay blame at the hands of autistic adults for not giving up everything to put themselves between an autistic child and their would be/actual murderer- even when we’ve provided resources for those who are willing to listen. It’s every time the media calls reporting sympathy for the murder of the disabled making things “fair and balanced.”

These things are pervasive. And when something is culturally pervasive, it does become internalized. Even when you are someone that actively fights for cultural change, someone who can, if only in text, tell you exactly why and how oppressive structures damage people in our society. Even when you are someone who knows that the diversity of disability is evidence of humanity’s strength as a species.

If you think that these murders, or the way that our media talks about them, makes sense then I’m sorry- you are, as Beth said in her recent post, already at rock bottom. All I’m asking is that you don’t drag me and other people with disabilities down with you.

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* Please don’t worry. I have support networks in place, I’m not actually in danger of attempting anything. I shouldn’t have to say this, but trust me I have family that will help me if I actually am at the point of needing to decide if the hospital is the right choice. And no, right now it is not. Thank you. 

I started this back in September(the “A Couple of months ago” was initially “a couple of days ago”), but it took me until today to feel like I had finished it. Originally I was going to link to writings on how media portrayals of this type of violence impacts how other people treat us, but was unable to work through it. Feel free to share links on the subject below.