jumpingjacktrash:

i think a lot of us, when we’re growing up, we learn kind of the opposite of self-care. a kind of self-disregard, if that makes any sense.

especially those of us who have invisible disabilities, we needed extra rest or extra help or something different from other kids, but not only did we not get it, we were made to feel greedy or lazy for needing it. so we internalized that, and we grew up with this feeling that having needs is weakness.

hands up if you were shocked to discover that not everyone goes through life being exhausted and hungry and strung out all the time. o/

for the longest time i just thought everyone else was better than me at hiding the fact that they were constantly in pain and sleep deprived.

myceliorum:

To prove that you’re a good enough in-the-know-enough person to listen to.

And some people are really good at doing it even though they’re horrible people doing horrible things to people.

And some people (Eli Clare comes to mind) are both really good sincere people who happen to be really good at all that language stuff and at saying and covering all the right topics.  Nothing against them at all.

And some people are bad at it for all kinds of reasons.  (If I were good at it, I could list all the reasons.  I can’t.  I know them.)

I know a lot of things, in ridiculous amounts of depth, about certain topics.  I can’t write about some of those topics to save my life.  I have a complicated language disability, it goes with the territory and you would not be able to predict from the outside what those topics were.

I’m also expected to use and understand a wide variety of words that cause me problems of many different kinds.  Some I can use (seemingly appropriately) but not understand.  Some I can understand but not use.  Some I can only understand with difficulty.  Many cause a miniature painful silent explosion in my head every single time I try to read them.  I am penalized for not being able to use this vocabulary.  I am treated as ignorant or bigoted for not learning it and not being able to learn it.  I am treated badly for using alternative words for similar concepts.  I am treated badly for even bringing up that these words are a problem for a lot of people.

I was recently also penalized for not being able to cover every topic at once.  I have trouble writing about any topic.  No matter how eloquent I am, writing is always a struggle.  Language is always a struggle.  I often have to focus in on one particular topic, one particular angle on one particular topic, in a way that seems extremely narrow.  This is seen as not understanding wider issues or the big picture.  This is not the fucking case.

it’s becoming increasingly required to describe every aspect of every kind of oppression when you discuss any kind of oppression.  If you don’t do so, you’re seen as not being ~intersectional~ enough.  (Intersectionality is one of those words that gives me trouble.  This is not because I don’t understand it, please don’t give me shit for a language/cognitive issue, you’d just be proving my point.)  I can’t do this to save my life.  It doesn’t mean I don’t fucking understand the situation, it means I can only write what I can write when I can write it.  I can write what I am writing today.  I could not write it yesterday.  I could not write it five hours ago.  I may not be able to write it 30 minutes from now.   I have worked incredibly hard at writing, and gotten good at it in certain respects, but what I can write and when I can write it is not under my conscious control.

Also it’s not really every aspect of every oppression you’re supposed to describe.  Some aspects of some kinds of oppression are considered more important than others.  If you don’t describe them in depth (even if you don’t know them – but even if you do know them you might be unable to describe them) then you’re not intersectional enough.  (But you can leave other ones out entirely, or even do really horrible things related to them, and never get told that, ever.)  And nothing you have to say about anything else matters.  I think it’s important to look at how these things interact, but expecting everyone to talk about all of them all the time (even if they have an inability to talk about some of them at all, regardless of actual knowledge), and everyone to be knowledgeable on every topic, is not reasonable.  (And don’t tell me I don’t understand the importance.  I’m talking about whether or not you’re capable of certain rote social/language displays, not about whether considering lots of groups of peole is important, so please don’t twist my words, there’s enough of that going around.)

Also, if you use the wrong words, like language that’s become outdated or declared bad in some way, woe be it to you.

I can’t self-describe my own identity using my own preferred words without lengthy explanations because of the level of shit I’d get, not to mention sheer misunderstanding.  That’s how bad it is.

I’ve had people dig through my writing to find one phrase I used years ago and extrapolate an entire worldview out of it that I didn’t have and have never had, then orchestrate shunning campaigns largely on that basis.

Try wading into an abortion argument and accidentally using (or failing to use) baby or fetus or pregnancy or bundle of cells or child in the wrong context.  People will decide which side you’re on entirely based on which word you used.  Even though people say you lost the baby when you have a miscarriage but it has to be fetus if it’s an abortion at the same date in pregnancy.

I’m extremely pro-choice, but I’ve been told I’m secretly pro-life because I said baby in the wrong context.  Nothing I said could convince the person otherwise. 

And I’m not even getting into issues about a total lack of tolerance of variance in opinion among people who agree on the basic principles.

The total lack of tolerance for people who use language even slightly differently is utterly paralyzing.  And for people who can’t write about every topic perfectly.  And in general people who can’t do these fucking social displays for any of a huge number of reasons.

To illustrate this… I once posted a link to a friend’s post called On Language Dickery to try to explain, and one person replied just to say because apparently they just had to frigging say it that they would’ve liked it a lot more if my friend had used a different word than “Dickery” in the title.  (headdesk)

And cognitive ableism is always low on people’s priority list.  Always.   Especially when it comes to this.  It’s almost like it doesn’t exist to them, probably because really inconvenient to everything they’re doing…

ETA: To illustrate a common kind of language problem I have, that I just edited for clarity:  I wrote before, “a total lack of tolerance of variance in opinion among people who disagree,” when I actually meant “a total lack of tolerance of variance in opinion among people who agree on the basic principles”.  That’s a very common kind of language mistake that utterly alters the meaning and it’s not easily picked up by proofreading.  Also I often can’t read my own posts, my receptive language is much poorer than my expressive language most of the time and expending all the effort on writing makes it hard to read.  Also I find it hard to read long things but I find it hard to write short things.  This is just a small snippet of how things get for me with writing.