lysikan:

jenroses:

crpl-pnk:

crpl-pnk:

a culture fixated on sniffing out “fakers” to protect “real disabled people” inevitably harms every single disabled person within that culture & only maybe a relative handful of “fakers”, who are usually mentally ill or economically disadvantaged to the point of having no alternative. stop saying your skepticism is for my benefit. stop saying my oppression is for my benefit. yes the idea of people with no grasp of my struggle claiming it is infuriating & insulting beyond belief. yes that is also oppressive. but in practice, i’d rather a dozen able bodied people successfully pass themselves off as disabled than one disabled person die in poverty because they couldn’t “prove it” to an abled person’s content

setting aside the fact that People Die From This, just the impact of faker witchunting on the emotional wellbeing of disabled people is enough to make it inexcusable
i’ve heard someone crying, literally sobbing & vomiting from pain frantically promise me that they’re not exaggerating when i never indicated for a moment that i disbelieved them, because they’re so used to the accusation. i’ve heard someone in the aftermath of a seizure quietly mumble as they regained lucidity, “are you sure i’m not faking?”
i don’t know a single chronically ill person who hasn’t at one point or another seriously questioned if they were ever really that sick at all because we’ve been so brainwashed to challenge the validity of disability that we begin to doubt the reality of our own definitive lived experiences

Things that have been said to me:
“You just need to lose weight.” (That won’t fix the genes that are off)
“Are you sure your problems aren’t psychological?” (The majority of my “psychological problems” come from PTSD and anxiety stemming for a lifetime of not being believed. And no, exercise intolerance is NOT psychological)
“You really like getting diagnoses, don’t you? Why do you want another one?”

I almost died because I was “too young to have a pulmonary embolism.” So no one investigated until it was massive and involved both lungs despite me literally saying in so many words, “I”m short of breath, I’m on birth control pills and my mother had an embolism while pregnant” to every doctor I spoke to in a 3 week span.

I had a person ask me if I had a hang tag once when I parked in a handicapped spot AND HAD A HANG TAG. 

To people like that I say the following:

Look, that thing is my state license to NOT DISCUSS my medical history with random strangers, but hey, if you really, really want to know, I can tell you about how my collagen is shit, so my ankles are shit, my intestines are literal shit and if you keep talking to me I might actually shit myself because I have alternating IBS, but maybe, just MAYBE you shouldn’t be harassing anyone because not all disabilities are visible. 

And your response to “I am really frustrated with how many people accuse people of faking it” should NOT EVER be to immediately jump in with “Well, I know so and so and they are able to run a marathon and used their kids hang tag to park in the handicap spot the other day” because that is LITERALLY the least helpful thing you can possibly say.

There is such a stigma, such a pervasive notion that people fake things, and the fact of the matter is that while yes, some people misuse these things, there’s a far more troubling tendency for people who legitimately need them to be shy about using them because they don’t want to be questioned about it.

A friend of mine has a child with spina bifida, and while talking to people with spina bifida about what they wish they’d done as kids… almost all of them said, “I wish I had used a wheelchair more, sooner, rather than pushing so hard to avoid being seen as a wheelchair user.”

It took me nearly shutting myself in to actually realize that it made more sense to go to events and rent a scooter for them, so that I could enjoy them. I’ll likely be getting a motorized wheelchair in the next year so that I can go to things I want to do and actually enjoy them rather than being too tired to even try. 

There’s an argument made that “if you become dependent on a wheelchair you’ll never get better” and it’s bullshit. 

Adaptive devices are there to help us be in the world. They tend to be more work than just “doing the thing” if we are able to do the thing, so people need to just get over the idea that they’re anything but a tool, to be used as needed.

I’ve had a wheelchair since I was pregnant with my son. I now take it to school functions because I can lean on it when I walk, and then sit without shooting pains from the tiny little kiddy chairs they make the grownups sit in. I’m not “confined” to it, but it actively helps preserve spoons, and I’m never going to apologize for that.

Peoples get mad a LOT because we have hang tags in our vehicles but all they see is two hyperactive children running out of control and either an ancient man with cane trying to get them to stop by whispering ‘knock it off’ or a muscly man shaking his head and scooping them up in his arms because it’s easier than trying to tell two deformed (we like that word, don’t tell us not to use it) Autistic Adults that don’t do words well what to do.

http://lysikan.tumblr.com/post/163191644400/candidlyautistic-i-would-rather-let-a-special