And I refuse to call us disabled just because we have a different perception of the world.
I myself have more abilities, resilience, understanding and intelligence than many people and I consider myself an average person, so I will asume that the rest of you, disorder-catalogued folks are the same.
No, my anxiety disorder doesn’t cause me any symptoms, these are behavioural conditionings due to trauma that have helped me, like changing the way of walking can help a person with a leg injury to not have pain.
Yes, I’m on the mending, and will be all my life because this behaviours I’ve learnt at a very young age and now I have to unlearn them.
No, the ways on which I decide to/help me reroute this behaviours cannot necessarily be applied to others, every body has the way that works for them; I only can set an example in case someone finds it useful for them also.
Yes, exercise helps by promoting creation of endorfines and serotonine, but it is in no way an excuse for not having conversations about how we’re dehumanized by performance, market, productivity….
And yes, society is ableist, wether consciously or not, and this does, indeed have a great repercussion on us, specially at education or work enviroments; because of this “oh, no she’s going to break” thought conversations are eluded, workload not trusted on yourself, and in general an “I don’t think that X person can do this job/ is fit to do this” general treatment.
Would be nice, from time to time, to be taken seriously and not infantilised.
Would be nice to be acknogledged, read it carefully, not a pat in the back, no congratulations, not be measured differently, just acknowledge that in order to function like someone whose thinking is not a little bit to the left we need to make an extra effort.
That we have a limited amount of energy, and that we must be extremely careful on what or who we spend it
To sum up I could simply say we’re, more often than not, just wanted to be treaten like normal people; the problem is that it’s so normalized to treat people like shit that, when we ask for respect of our boundaries or triggers, ableist society says that they have to treat us with “kindness” or that we’re “fragile”, no dear, maybe we should just normalize treating everybody with basic respect.
MercuRea 