Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
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Steddie Upside-Down AU Part 77
Part 1 Part 76
He’s growing – Steve can feel it eating away at the pathways in his brain. He can almost feel the way the connections drop, making way from something else, something more. It’s like he wants Steve to be able to see the paths he’s carving out of his brain so he can.
They’re dark, and winding, and there’s nothing in there at all. Steve’s being hollowed out, for a holy purpose he can’t quite grasp, but he can feel it, coiled cold and hard in the back of his skull, waiting to give him his own divine prophecy. When the time’s right.
But the time’s not right, and he’s lost in the tunnels of his mind, winding fast, fast, fast through corridors he doesn’t recognize.
It’s like, double vision. He’s looking at Eddie sitting beside him, twirling his frizzy hair in front of his mouth, but it’s dark, too, and the tunnels are winding. Winding, and empty until they’re not.
It’s not until he sees the man that Steve wonders if he’s looking at something internal at all. Because there’s a man he doesn’t recognize walking inside them. He watches him stumble, he watches him fall.
Steve doesn’t recognize the man. But, still. Something twists inside as he watches him collapse, He’s supposed to collapse. Steve knows, he can feel it.
But there’s still something pulling in his sternum. He can feel it, sometimes, when Eddie’s looking at him with big, sad eyes. He wants to wring the sadness straight out of him but can’t – he doesn’t know what’s wrong.
“Something’s wrong.” he says, but he’s not sure if he means the man or the look in Eddie’s eyes, or the way he’s not sure where he is right now.
“What is it, honey?”
The woman who says it looks frazzled from where she’s kneeling in front of him. He doesn’t know her, but she’s holding Will’s hand. He looks at Will, and his eyes match hers – both wide and worried and trained on him.
“There’s a man,” he says. There are vines circling the man’s wrists, legs, trailing up his neck. Steve rubs his own throat, esophagus convulsing in sympathy pain. And just for a second, there’s a flicker of that same man smiling down at him, settling something over his face, letting him breathe.
“Where?” the woman asks, at the same moment Eddie asks, “who?” and reaches out his burning palm to clutch Steve’s knee.
He turns back to Eddie. Eddie who’s touch burns straight through him, who he can feel pulling pulling pulling him in like he wants to incinerate him whole. Steve would let him.
So, he ignores the woman’s question and focuses on the man. “I don’t know him,” Steve whispers. He’s not sure it’s true, he can still feel the way his warm hand had cradled Steve’s jaw as he breathed life back into him.
Eddie’s boring his gaze into him, like maybe he can scoop out the images and muddle through them on his own. “But he’s in trouble?”
Steve nods.
The woman stands up with a grunt, hands braced on knees as hauls herself up. “I’ll try Hop again.”
The name twinges. “Hop, Hop, Hopper,” Steve murmurs, looking back down at Eddie’s hand on his knee like it’ll tell him what he’s thinking. Like it’ll make his brain work better.
“What about him?” Will asks quietly. He’s watching the woman pick up the phone, turning the numbers by rote.
Steve doesn’t know Hopper, but there’s a man with a dirty name plate attached to his dirty chest that reads the same name. “The vines,” he starts, before stalling out, unsure of what to say. “They’ve– they’ve got him.”
Eddie sits up, squeezing Steve’s knee tight, the bite of his fingernails into burnt flesh aching. “Hopper’s who’s in trouble?”
He nods, and sits, watching Hopper struggle, watching Will and Eddie trade looks around him, watching the woman hang up the phone with a sigh.
“Where?” Eddie asks.
Steve doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, but it’s Eddie who’s asking, so he closes his eyes. He closes his eyes and focuses. “There’s dirt,” he says, “and vines, and—”
There’s nothing else. No discernable features of the landscape he both can and cannot see, but he’s squinting into his own mind hard enough that the back of his skull starts aching like it’s splitting open and that’s when he feels it: a pull.
It’s coming from the back of his head, like a migraine, aching at the join between his neck and skull. He lets his head sway with it, then points with the sway.
He closes his eyes, focuses on the man, and lets the pull take him.
It’s like walking through purgatory – following the lines in his mind. He’s going the right way, can feel it just as surely as he can feel Eddie’s burning hand on his elbow and Will’s burning fingers on his ankles.
He doesn’t open his eyes, just walks, and walks, until there’s nowhere to walk anymore.
It’s not until he stops that the implications of the pull yanking him down sink in. He wants to drop to his knees and scrabble at the ground with his nails. But he’s down too deep, and time’s running out.
He opens his eyes and looks down. There’s a rotten pumpkin under his shoe, foot turning it to mush. Beneath that, there’s dirt. Dirt and vines. Steve points down to it, and looks up to meet Eddie’s worried eyes.
“He’s running out of time,” Steve says, watching both Eddie’s eyebrows furrow, and the way the man’s fingers are still flexing on the vine around his throat, keeping it at bay.
“He’s down there?” the woman asks, unhelpful in her hysteria.
Steve watches the reality unfurl in Eddie’s eyes and then looks down at the dirt beneath his feet and watches the man struggle.
People flit around him like ants. He doesn’t pay it any mind. Will and Eddie are here, and everything else is just killing time.
Part 78
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Something that confuses me a lot is some people's reactions/analysis to Sonic saving Shadow in the void in Sonic Prime.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE it, and its parallels to what happened in SA2. That is incredible. But what confuses me is that a lot of people assume that in this show, SA2 happened and Sonic is losing Shadow again.
But I don't think that's the case...? I know it was said that the show follows modern games/everything is canon, but I dont think that means what some people think it means. I've seen some people criticize this interpretation of Sonic BECAUSE they think all of the games happened in this universe.
What I understood is that this is simply using the current ongoing personalities/traits/styles of the modern Sonic characters in games, but this is NOT the same universe. Its a different one. The direction they are going with the characters in Sonic Prime is writing them closer to their mainline game counterparts, just in a different universal setting. The universe is just not as drastic of a difference as say, Movie!Sonic or Sonic Boom's universe. (Which i think is why they made a point to say its following mainline Sonic; because Boom is a universe with its own games, Sonic, and canon as well.)
This is also why I think so many people judge Sonic Prime on what Sonic should know, how he should act, and what he should have learned from. But this is a different universe Sonic! He's a lot more naive and learning to get around. Its why I interpeted that Sonic catching Shadow was not ptsd of losing him again, it was fear of losing him period. This is very likely this Sonic's first world-saving scenario; he's use to just stopping Eggman's latest 'Robot of the week'. He is out of his depth with the shatterverse situation.
Now, I think its totally fair if this kind of 'new & naive' direction with Sonic's character turns people off, or if they dislike/hate it. This is not me trying to pursuade people into liking it if they don't. This is not me saying 'hey if you dislike this, its prolly because you're interpreting it wrong and if you see it this way you will like it.' But I constantly see people criticize the show for not taking into account things that happened in games. Or in this case, praising it for taking account events in the games. Those things didnt happen here! This is a different Sonic!
Of course, I could absolutely be wrong, and if I am, that's fine. But honestly it feels like they're making a different Sonic altogether, and frankly it wouldnt make sense for this to be the exact same Sonic.
So I guess my overall point is that I kind of feel like Prime is being saddled with game expectations it literally cannot meet, via being a different universe. Like I said, hate it, love it, idc I'm not your mom. I just think that this needs to be said and added to the conversation.
('Everything is canon' means 'every interpretation is valid'. Sonic has different universes, so its a lot more validating to fans to say everything happened, instead of alienating entire swathes of fans who all experienced Sonic differently through different media, by saying their experience isn't 'real' or 'true' anymore. And I think the more people realize this, the less people will argue 'evidence XYZ in game and this comic and the Japanese version of this podcast, and this game dev, and this episode, and this writer contradict your theory of Sonic hugging people' you do not need canon as gospel to validate why you like or dislike a certain take.)
Sonic in general is so fun because of how freeform and multiverse and endless it is. We haven't had that in a long time. There are things I love and things I hate, but not because of how closely they follow mainline. Its because I just like or hate it. We should cultivate this new growth and diversity, not prune it to fit into one shape. 🌱
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