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.
it is. so weird to me that I'm having to say this again after a real-life cartoon supervillian already once ran for president on a platform of hatred & fascism and won, but.
MK’s monkey form doesn’t feel right to me so i wanted to break up his transformation into stages. Maybe as he learns to accept that side of himself it becomes part of him, instead of changing between human and monkey randomly (which is probably painful). Love yourself, NOW!!!
I finally have some free time to draw sketches and tell you about my headcannons with (young) Harvey and Dr. Stone!! 💥💥
The first headcanon: Harvey really likes to touch Stone's funny sticking-out hair with his antennae (I have no idea what to call it lol). OF COURSE, Dr. Stone gets angry, and Harvey just giggles and watches him—
The second headcanon: I thought it would be funny if Dr. Stone had (and maybe still has) a secret hobby of collecting minerals and stones. it's pretty funny that a sullen and angry dude collects and examines all sorts of stones, and then writes something in his book, muttering something under his nose. if Harvey somehow found out about his husband's hobby, he could throw him beautiful stones while he was going somewhere.
The third headcanon: Harvey loves hugging Dr. Stone very much, when he does this, this old fart immediately starts to get angry and swear, but after 15-20 minutes calms down and falls asleep. maybe Harvey does this on purpose so that his husband at least sometimes gets a full sleep
What Is Vegan Leather Made Of? Many Plant Leathers Are Being Used (greenmatters.com)
Yes, plant leather is a great idea (not better than animal leather, in my personal opinion, but that's down to each individual's thoughts on the matter). But unfortunately much of it just can't replicate many of real leather's beneficial properties- and a lot of plant leathers heavily involve plastic in their production. (source)
Look, ALL clothing production needs to be more sustainable at this point. The chemicals involved in tanning actual leather, unless it's organic leather, aren't good for the environment either. And I will never rag on someone for their choice to avoid real leather- we're all just trying, I hope, to make the best choices according to our values and within the confines of a broken system (as long as we're not hurting anyone else). For me, the massive habitat loss and environmental destruction caused by plastics production and waste is a greater evil than the deaths of individual animals in the production of meat and/or leather. So I choose real leather and try to make each piece last as long as I can, aware that any choice I make will have environmental impacts and is not perfect. Someone else might see it differently, and I really am not in a position to judge their choices.
However.
The term "vegan leather" is blatant greenwashing, and 99% of the time it applies to plastic. If people prefer to wear plastic to avoid real leather, that's fine, but they- and moreover companies -need to be honest about that. Just like synthetic fabrics should be called plastic, so should synthetic leather. Even some of the allegedly "plant-based" stuff, it turns out.
I'm honest that my real leather is animal hide. Time for the faux-green fashion industry to display some honesty of its own.
i wanted to try my hand at slamming Home with the puppetification beam. i told myself i wasn't gonna get attached. im attached. not sure about the outfit tho
a pet headcanon of mine is that after they're done with the sigil removal, emira expands her horizons and starts studying the psychological side of healing, pulling in some resources from the human realm and combining it with boiling isles methods (i imagine the field of psychology in the boiling isles, while existent, was often pushed aside as just a lesser branch of the healing coven back when belos was in charge. i do imagine there's often magic like the memory tweezers involved)
and i imagine she ends up focusing in on like, art therapy and self-expression, because she knows how important that can be, after having her individuality stifled so hard when she was young
Hey, you're being lied to about what fitness constitutes. If you can't work in an hour-long crossfit slog, but you can work in a five-minute walk, then that is still fitness. If you can't use your legs but you can do arm circles every now and again, that is still fitness. If you're moving around at work, that's still fitness. It can be intentional or incidental, but here's the best part: your body doesn't care if you're dedicating specific work-out times. It doesn't care if the "only" fitness it gets is your nine to five on your feet. It doesn't care, fitness is fitness is fitness. Some of us do it differently, but the end result is more or less similar.
If you can do any type of fitness safely, your body isn't going to care if you're doing it like an Olympic athlete or if you're just a casual.
a quite simple outfit, trying to use the little blue and white apron thing (which is actually a dress I think, that I just leave un-buttoned in the back and added an apron-like tie to lol)
cobbled-together mammon + ik specialist dance! remember that post i made the other day? it turns out i do not have self-restraint so i did it (youtube link in case tumblr player breaks)
i had to enlist some help from jo (who is much more tech-savvy than me, but equally illiterate when it comes to this new-fangled 3d tech), but we managed to frankenstein this all together in the end!
(i fucked up while editing it so the end of mammon's arm just disappears at some points. pretend you didn't see that, for my sake)
song - specialist
motion source
models by me, trying my best with the default assets in vroid studio (hence why mammon does not look quite right.. ^^;)
i feel like the frequency with which governments ban dancing, a fundamentally harmless, although obviously vital, form of individual and cultural expression. really does emphasize how much the state (any state) is hostile to human life