When you have an illness, sometimes you have to be selfish and just focus on yourself. It takes so much energy to try and please everyone else and it’s not worth all the emotional and physical stress. You have to do what’s best for you, even if other people are critical of you or don’t understand. You know your body better than anyone else and you can decide what activities you can and can’t do.
No one understands the chronic fatigue a chronic illness fighter feels...
- Me: I'm so exhausted...
- Healthy person: Oh, I don't think so! You don't know exhausted until you've gotten up at 5:30 in the morning and worked all day!
- Me: ...Because having my body at war against itself all day is not exhausting at all... *sigh
“That image of the man using a wheelchair beside the elevator telling him to walk is a particularly vivid one, but here’s the other thing -- not all disabled people use wheelchairs. A great many disabilities are invisible to the outside world, meaning you might look at a disabled person and never have any idea that they had a disability, even one that has an extreme impact on their lives and mobility. If we’re encouraged to think of the stairs as the morally superior choice for those not using wheelchairs, where does that leave the folks who don’t use wheelchairs but for whom climbing stairs is just as impossible? ”
—ELEVATOR SHAMING and Ableism: Why Pro-Stairs Health Campaigns Kind Of Suck
I wish this post existed last year when ableist assholes were complaining on Facebook about coworkers that were “so lazy” they used the elevator to go up one floor.
Sometimes, it’s like being trapped in your body. You want to sleep, but you can’t. You want to wake up in time for class, but you can’t. You want to keep the plans you’ve made with your friends, but you can’t. You want to hit the gym like you used to, but you can’t. You want to drive whenever you feel like it, but you can’t. Learning that sometimes you physically just can’t is the hardest lesson in the world, along with the slowest. You’ve got to get knocked off your feet by your own body a few times before it even begins to sink in. I’m still learning, I’ll always still be learning.
^ This is the most perfect description I’ve ever read.. Thankyou http://strongerthanthischallenge.tumblr.com/ :)
“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
—Siri Hustvedt,
On Ableism Within Queer Spaces, or, Queering the "Normal".
prettyqueer.com“Our daily existence as two black queer men—one a (dis)abled queer femme man and the other an able-bodied (sometimes) masculine queer man—informs our belief that our quest for liberation from oppressions based on sexuality and gender expression must also account for the ways that ableism also often subjugates some queer people. Ableism shapes attitudes, policies and systems that ultimately dehumanize, pathologize and criminalize people whose bodies do not fit into socially constructed notions of what constitutes a ”normal” human being. Indeed, ableism shapes our understandings of gender expression.
As Eli Clare brilliantly puts it, “the mannerisms that help define gender—the way in which people walk, swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space—are all based upon how non disabled people move…The construct of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also on the non disabled body.” Ableism renders invisible those bodies not privileged by dominant definitions of ability, those bodies that do not fit the conceptions of gender that we often imagine.
We “read” the movement of bodies, the ways people walk, hair styles, and the ways our bodies interact with other bodies in social spaces without ever realizing that all of the aforementioned performances are gendered expressions that center on the privilege of physical movement. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on the body, and one’s use of the body, without attending to the fact that for some the use of the body is an impossibility. Indeed, for one of us, a queer who relies on attendants for personal care and grooming, such understanding wholly ignores the ways he exists in the world.
As a result, it is time to fully acknowledge ableism as a pervasive form of oppression within our queer communities. Take, for example, Pride Parades, which are visual representations of queer and trans* communities. Pride Parades are organized around the notion of marching and, therefore, requires that people are able to physically move to showcase their belonging. This does not account for the experiences of those who are not able to walk or who have to use special equipment to move. And so when we rely on our physical abilities to express ourselves, we inadvertently reproduce disability oppression. In addition, consider the ways that ablesim functions in queer dating spaces, virtual or otherwise. Pervasive in many queer and trans* dating spaces is a type of self-expression that centers on the body and the need to make ourselves desirable to others. Queer and trans* folks of different abilities, who live with chronic illnesses, or battle with addictions are left out of so many of the spaces that purport to be designed for “us.” The “party culture” that is ubiquitous within many of our communities alienates those who are not able to feel safe, validated, and affirmed within these contexts. Our lack of access to such spaces has an impact on our ability to claim our identifications and belonging within these communities.
That one of us is (dis)abled, black and queer makes his lived experience of the world unmistakably political. His corporeality cannot be separated from a broader sociohistorical context in which (dis)abled bodies are read as tragic and irreparable; queer bodies as immoral; and black bodies as criminal and expendable. These complex layers of dehumanization make it so that his body is deemed undesirable within society.
Those of us accorded with able-bodied privilege must do the work of analyzing our privileges and ensuring that we do the work of undoing ableism. While we might all be queer—resisting heteronormativity and bodying forth new ways of being in the world—we must attend to the ways that our resistance and new ways of being might easily render invisible those queers who are differently-abled. Ensuring that we respond to the diverse needs of queers during Pride, at events, at clubs, and other social spaces is a start, but the more difficult work is naming and mitigating ableist thought. In order to do that work, we have to be willing to listen, if we can, and vision, if we are able, a future that decenters our conceptions of the “normal” and truly celebrates the queer.”
- EDWARD NDOPU AND DARNELL L. MOORE
