Category: Uncategorized

argumate:

when you put your sensitive posts behind a ~read more~ link the tags still show up, so it ends up looking like this:

~read more~

#i just can’t deal #his *whole* ass #collapse of austria-hungary #never been fucked that hard before #econometrics #do not reblog #doctor who #eminem

madlori:

When I was in high school, I dated a guy who had been born without legs. He used a wheelchair to get around (actually he used a skateboard inside the school building, it was easier). He was awesome. He had a great, humorous manner of dealing with people who were uncomfortable with him. And sometimes just to be snarky.

He’s now a motivational speaker, and he once appeared on Penn Jillette’s podcast. I’m not really in active contact with him (we’re FB friends in that way you are with people from the past you’re not really in touch with) but I listened to the episode after seeing him post about it on FB, just to hear what he had to say.

The thing that struck me the most was to hear him talk about how perception of his disability has changed. In the past decade or so, he gets a lot more people who assume he’s a veteran.  He travels a lot so he’s constantly in highly visible situations like airports. So a lot of people will approach him, wanting to address him with the assumption that he lost his legs in combat.

This has forced him to develop ways to deal with this. The first time it happened, he had to decide – if someone thanks him for his service, does he just let it go? Let the person go on their merry way, feeling good that they’d thanked an injured veteran? That would certainly be more expedient. But ultimately he decided that he wasn’t willing to accept credit for service he never rendered. So now, when someone thanks him for his service, he politely corrects them and informs them that he was born without legs. What happens next is what surprised him.

Often? The person gets angry with him.

He said he can sometimes see it coming. He sees the person glancing at him, fidgeting, working up their courage, wondering if they should Do The Thing. But they’re very much enamored of this opportunity to thank a veteran, to be a good patriot, so they muster their guts and approach him.

But when he informs them that he’s not a veteran? He’s just robbed them of their feel-good moment. All that nerve-building was for naught. He isn’t a veteran who lost his legs to an IED, he’s just a normal person who’s lived with the difficulty and stigma of his disability his entire life. It’s an awkward position to be in, both for him and the person who approached him.

I don’t know what made me think about that this morning.

Not that surprised by now that ongoing circumstances have really got the OCD crap kicking into overdrive too. It doesn’t always take that much, and I was already pretty deep in a burnout.

Glad I do also have enough perspective by now, though, to step back from it a little and try not to engage with the looping bullshit. Or so I try to tell myself 🙄

OK, I am just about ready to say “fuck it, we’re getting delivery tonight”.

Standing up and busting my ass to put food together is not a reasonable expectation of myself today. Even if I didn’t also need to gimp out to the store after subpar pain relief.

I don’t need to put myself into more of a state by trying to push through and do that.

At this point, I would rather deal with the persistent scripts telling me that I’m lazy and (probably deliberately) making things harder on everyone else than keep pushing myself tonight.