yep.

you'll get different answers from different people on that, and many of them will be extremely vitriolic and even actively bigoted toward mentally disabled people. there's a lot of emotional manipulation and lateral ableism happening in this discourse, and if you're going to wade into it, you should be on watch for these things and prepared to emotionally handle the experience of encountering them.

you can check under the cripplepunk tag on my blog for some arguments i've made on the topic. you can also read opposing arguments from under bloggers on this site, and i'd encourage you to--don't just take my word as gospel.

disabled people who are lifelong, permanent dependents, i love you. you are my friends and my lovers and my siblings and you are me and i am you and i love you.

i'm really despondent sometimes over the ways society sees us. how conservatives see us as burdens and drains on society, yes, and also how liberals mock our lives, how the idea of being an adult dependent is seen solely as the result of poor life choices, how everyone all across the political spectrum sees things like "getting an allowance from your spouse" and "relying on one person for housing" as cause for mockery, jokes to make, nothing but a conceptual stick with which to beat people into performing well in work and school. still others see us as childish, as pitiable, perhaps not as worthy of mockery but definitely not as worthy of being treated as a social equal, never someone you could invite into your social spheres and make an effort to include--they're just not independent, no offense to them, it just makes them so childish, i can't have an adult friendship with them.

but we persist anyway. we're here. i'm lucky to love the people i'm dependent on, i'm lucky that they respect me as a person and would never leverage their power over me, i'm lucky that they're willing to constantly self-check to make sure they're not accidentally using that power. i hope to g-d you're lucky in the same ways, because i love you. and if you're not, i love you. i'm holding your hand and i'm standing with you and i'm going to try to make a better world for both of us.

speaking of your intro post (differant anon tho) what does self induced visions mean? haven't heard that term before

i'm in favor of being psychotic if you wanna be and i'm in favor of doing drugs if you wanna and im in favor of doing anything else you wanna do to yourself forever

hi what does the cockroach part of your intro post mean?? sorry

it means i won't fucking die and if you try to kill me i'll get into your pantry and make all your rice unusable

disabled people who are lifelong, permanent dependents, i love you. you are my friends and my lovers and my siblings and you are me and i am you and i love you.

i'm really despondent sometimes over the ways society sees us. how conservatives see us as burdens and drains on society, yes, and also how liberals mock our lives, how the idea of being an adult dependent is seen solely as the result of poor life choices, how everyone all across the political spectrum sees things like "getting an allowance from your spouse" and "relying on one person for housing" as cause for mockery, jokes to make, nothing but a conceptual stick with which to beat people into performing well in work and school. still others see us as childish, as pitiable, perhaps not as worthy of mockery but definitely not as worthy of being treated as a social equal, never someone you could invite into your social spheres and make an effort to include--they're just not independent, no offense to them, it just makes them so childish, i can't have an adult friendship with them.

but we persist anyway. we're here. i'm lucky to love the people i'm dependent on, i'm lucky that they respect me as a person and would never leverage their power over me, i'm lucky that they're willing to constantly self-check to make sure they're not accidentally using that power. i hope to g-d you're lucky in the same ways, because i love you. and if you're not, i love you. i'm holding your hand and i'm standing with you and i'm going to try to make a better world for both of us.

I'm writing a research paper on how having a feeding tube impacts a person's social life, but most of the research that's already out there focuses on how a person's feeding tube impacts their family's/caretaker's life. If you:

have ever used a feeding tube,

are 18 or older,

are an american,

would like to share your experience of having a feeding tube, and

have half an hour or so free before April 27,

please dm me so we can chat! quick preemptive faq:

I do not need to know your name, I would be using a pseudonym for the paper

I do need to know your age, or at least an age range

I'm probably only going to talk to a couple people

Our conversation would be typed, not oral

I know "research paper" makes it sound high stakes but it would really be just a chill casual conversation

sometimes, when someone is criticizing the stay-at-home-wife movement being sold to young women by conservatives, it loses focus on the "selling you a repressive and authoritarian worldview" point and slides into... well... implicitly leaving disabled people to die.

and what i mean by that is, it's all well and good to say you should do everything in your power to make sure you're not financially dependent on another person... but what if "everything in your power" is "nothing?"

what if how society is structured means you have absolutely no choice but to be financially dependent on another person? what if it's that, or simply die? this is the choice disabled people are faced with. not even uncommonly... frequently. people who need full-time carers, or who have very expensive medication and assistive tech needs, or people who simply can't work in the current job structure, often have the choice of... well... find someone to be financially dependent on, or face a slow, painful death, usually without housing. even if you're lucky enough to get on a fixed income, it's never enough to even make monthly rent, and that's not counting the extra costs of food, toiletries, medicine...

in fact, a lot of disabled people (certainly notably women, but absolutely not limited to, and in fact i see this happen to trans men over and over again, and i've lost a dear transmasc friend because of this) are funneled into being stay-at-home parents and homemakers, forced to do all of the domestic labor and childcare in exchange for a roof over their head and access to their medications/assistive tech, and isolated in all the same ways tradwives are isolated. in fact, this even happens with leftist partners/parents. all the time, i see disabled people disappear from public life entirely, lose contact with all their friends, and consign themselves to a life of cleaning up after someone while struggling to handle their own health needs, even having their disabilities exacerbated and their lifespans shortened by the amount of domestic labor they're required to do.

but it isn't a choice... it can't be fixed by focusing on academia or work... and it's not due to buying into conservative propaganda. all i ask is, please remember this, and please never leave us out of these discussions.

i wrote this in the notes of another post originally and am copy + pasting it here because im right but "tell the cops nothing, tell the doctors everything" is such a stupid ass fucking abled take. doctors engage in policing idk how to explain to yall that some people cannot in fact just tell doctors everything without it putting them at risk

like im not gonna go into the myriad of ways this is bs but like a quick example is i cant tell my doctors about my substance use issues because if i get that listed on my medical records it will actively endanger me. It will impact how I'm treated in emergency situations and will get me labeled as "drug seeking" when i try to get other issues dealt with.

i dont say this to scare people but because this is actually important information for people to have. if a medical professional claims this isnt an issue, they are NOT "one of the good ones". they are either straight up lying or theyre utterly unaware, which is frankly not better. doctors are cops. never forget it

like YES tell ur doctor abt being sexually active but stop saying "tell the cops nothing and the doctor everything" before i start killing in cold blood

It's so tempting when doctors are like "actually, [outdated and flat out wrong misinfo]" to pull out a six inch thick stack of scientific studies and be like "ah, so you disagree with the findings of Dr Hurglerboburgler et al of the Institute of They Know Everything About This Diagnosis?"

Alas, if I were to do that, I'd get "patient capable of advocating for themself that knows doctors are full of bullshit - kill on sight" put in my chart. Sad!

a little diary about trying to find a middle ground between being spiritual and being a schizophrenic

I don't think I've ever met a disabled person who didn't have the idea of themselves as an abled person haunting them. That is the yardstick by which our many of our successes are measured, and our failures pitied.

It's great that you achieved that! If only you didn't have your disability holding you back, imagine what you could do!

It's too bad that you weren't able to do it. If you didn't have your disability, you may have been able to.

You start doing it yourself, too, comparing everything that you can do to what you could have done if you just didn't weren't disabled. Seeing yourself as an inferior version of yourself.

But we aren't inferior versions of ourselves. We are the only us who exists. There is not an abled version of us waiting to outshine us. We should not have to live in the shadow of someone who doesn't exist.

a bottom-tier autistic experience is being told throughout your entire childhood that you are just an overthinker when it comes to social situations and later finding out that your friends did, in fact, hate being around you and tried to communicate that through weird little hints

yeah i just wanna explicitly acknowledge this on the post tbh, normally i'm a bit more careful about avoiding us-centric language and core assumptions when i'm writing for a larger audience outside of just my followers, but i genuinely did not expect this post to leave a small circle of like 500 people that already follow my blog, as i'm used to anything i write about disease safety & public life not really getting any attention. my bad on this one, but yeah this post is by a usamerican writing about usamerican policy and shouldn't leave that implied.

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

this is not a callout or an intentional argument; i'm genuinely saying this in good faith, because i want to improve the discussion. a gentle reminder, based on these tags but directed toward everyone who's been commenting similar things regarding the school point on this post, your experiences are not universal.

many schools do not allow readings to be available in a centralized online platform--there are, in fact, still plenty of teachers that prefer to use paper handouts, and there is absolutely nothing stopping them. many schools do not have a standard method for submitting homework online, and many teachers still assign and grade homework on paper, or assign it verbally and receive it via email rather than standardized web portal. additionally, in-class work is sometimes graded.

in much of the US, it is not a universal standard for students to be given material they missed, and in fact, if a student is sick for a week or more, there are many schools that will expel them or put them on probation, completely regardless of their health. disabled students frequently cannot complete high school, or even drop out as early as middle or elementary school (often being funneled into the juvenile detention system as a result), because they have missed more than a few days' worth of school. this is through a combination of attendance monitoring and students receiving 0s on in-class work and homework they missed while sick.

when i was a disabled student (with an IEP and heavily involved parents, no less), i received many dozens of 0s on work i was absent for due to illness. my in-person peers went to school sick all the time because they simply could not afford to miss work and still pass their grade. they could not get doctors' notes because how can you get a doctors' note for a cold? you'll be entirely better by the time your appointment rolls around.

unfortunately, simply not working while you're sick is a surefire way to fail american high school. there is no structural way to allow students to fall behind without failing their grades; between standardized testing and the deeply-embedded effects of NCLB standards, if you miss any chunk of work & lectures, you're set up to fail that entire year completely regardless of if your absence was excused or not. even if your teachers excuse you from every individual assignment, you are still primed to fail the standardized tests in your state, the content of which is specifically designed to be difficult-to-impossible to complete unless you have completed the very specific work in class prior and have attended the very specific lectures.

allowing students to submit work online and placing a webcam in front of the teacher's desk will not be perfect solutions. in fact, i think they will not really improve the educational quality of school at all; i'm a major critic of the current school system and i do not consider it salvageable. i do not think public school is appropriately educating or socializing children to begin with. but i think that, in terms of mitigating disease spread, we need to attack schools as a major vector. we stand no chance of eradicating standardized testing and the effects NCLB had on the education system are far-reaching and systemic. as best as i can tell, the only policy-level adjustments we can make are enforcing that every school has an option to complete assignments online, making the lectures physically accessible to students who are at home even if they don't get one-on-one instruction, and enforced ventilation upgrades.

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

it's an individual mitigation, not a systemic one. the best mitigations to make public life more accessible affect everyone without distributing the majority of the effort among individuals (who may not be able to comply, may not have access to education on how to comply, or may be actively malicious).

it's a post-hoc mitigation, or to put it another way, it's a band-aid over the underlying problem. even if it was possible to enforce, universal masking still wouldn't address the underlying problem that it is dangerous for sick people and immune compromised people to be in the same public locations to begin with. this is a solvable problem! we have created the societal conditions for this problem!

here are my policy focuses:

upgraded air filtration and ventilation systems for all public buildings. appropriate ventilation should be just as bog-standard as appropriately clean running water. an indoor venue without a ventilation system capable of performing 5 complete air changes per hour should be like encountering a public restroom without any sinks or hand sanitizer stations whatsoever.

enforced paid sick leave for all employees until 3-5 days without symptoms. the vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through industry sectors where employees come into work while experiencing symptoms. a taco bell worker should never be making food while experiencing strep throat symptoms, even without a strep diagnosis.

enforced virtual schooling options for sick students. the other vast majority of respiratory and food-borne illnesses circulate through schools. the proximity of so many kids and teenagers together indoors (with little to no proper ventilation and high levels of physical activity) means that if even one person comes to school sick, hundreds will be infected in the following few days. those students will most likely infect their parents as well. allowing students to complete all readings and coursework through sites like blackboard or compass while sick will cut down massively on disease transmission.

accessible testing for everyone. not just for COVID; if there's a test for any contagious illness capable of being performed outside of lab conditions, there should be a regulated option for performing that test at home (similar to COVID rapid tests). if a test can only be performed under lab conditions, there should be a government-subsidized program to provide free of charge testing to anyone who needs it, through urgent cares and pharmacies.

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

the thing that allistics talking about social skills never seem to grasp is that i do not SEE body language or facial expressions. i am not some innocent adorably stupid little darling who's never been taught what a frown means and so now i feel like everyone is hostile to me because i'm not participating in the Necessary And Unbiased social ritual that lets everyone know i'm Safe and a Real Person.

no, i spent 10 years regularly attending social skills courses. as in, weekly at minimum, for a lot of it daily. i still cannot read body language or facial expressions because i LITERALLY CANNOT SEE THEM. i am partially faceblind. my visual processing is ganked to the point that even though i am not blind i need to use IDs to understand images. these are VERY common traits in autism, this isn't a special "just me" thing. if someone makes a face at me, i can't SEE it. sometimes i can tell that some of their facial muscles are moving, but i have no idea what they're doing and very little ability to piece together what the end result looks like as a whole picture. sometimes i can see when someone is leaning away from me, or if their whole body is shaking or something, but anything less whole-body and cartoonish than that is literally invisible to me.

allistic social norms are built around treating me as scary and unsafe for not participating in them, and i LITERALLY CANNOT SEE a good portion of what they're based on. the less physical bits--implications and social context, etc--are 10x harder when you essentially can't speak half the language, and that's not even touching on how those parts can be near impossible on their own if you have a slow processing speed--which i also do. it takes me 30-60 seconds minimum to fully process a spoken sentence and understand what the unspoken and nuanced implications of it could be, and by then i have already been slotted into "unsafe creep" territory by being entirely silent for 45 seconds. and i am considered socially adept and to have very fast processing among my autistic peers. my barriers here are MINOR compared to someone very severely socially impaired.

this is why explaining to autistics the purposes of allistic social rules and nuances and giving us tips on how to navigate them is condescending and cruel as hell. you're dangling in our faces how important and necessary and integral it is to do something we literally CAN'T do and implicitly justifying us being seen as dangerous and socially undesirable for not doing it. and you're framing it as helping because you're "teaching" us. but it's like teaching a colorblind person color theory; maybe once in a while someone will be interested, but it'll always be significantly harder for them to learn than someone who isn't colorblind, and their experience with it will always be profoundly qualitatively different and produce different results, even subtly. and their existence doesn't mean that the REST of colorblind people who don't have that energy and time and investment should just put up with literally every road sign being written in red on green when you could just make signs that are black on white to begin with.

There's this perception on here among neurodivergent people that neurotypical social behaviour is all fake and arbitrary. That it's a cruel, baseless game played to "weed out" ND people or to cause pain and complicate things on purpose.

This is wrong. All of those social rules and nuances ARE communication. Sorry if this is rude but it's not the NTs' fault if things don't gel- the gap goes both ways. Just because communication doesn't make sense to you, doesn't mean it's random or purposeless. Remember this post?

Every interaction in an NT conversation has purpose, and communicates something, and I don't understand why nobody ever explains this to ND people. There's information on basic stuff like facial expressions, but never what any of it actually means.

Small talk about the weather isn't about the weather. It's about how nice it is to be around the people you're talking to, or feeling out their understanding of the world, or just saying that you're both present and people and you're being people together. It's not literal. The words are, but the broad scope isn't.

A conversation is not just an exchange of words, it's an exchange of acknowledgement, attention, and emotional understanding. Of course it confuses people when their part in that exchange is met with flat affect or unembelished words. It's like looking in a mirror and not seeing your reflection.