theconcealedweapon:

Imagine that a group of people are running a mile. Most of them can do it in 6 minutes, but one of them can only run half as fast.

Those who can run it in 6 minutes know that their time is considered acceptable, so they’re allowed to run at their own pace. They’re not expected to run at top speed.

If the slower runner is allowed to run at their own pace, they’ll eventually finish in 12 minutes. Sure, it will take much longer, but at least they’ll eventually finish.

But if the slower runner is bullied for running too slow, they’ll try to sprint in order to keep up with the other runners. Maybe they’ll be able to at first, since the other runners are not running at top speed, but they’ll eventually be exhausted and unable to continue.

This is a post about disabled people and the expectation to “always try your best”.

Question: you ever see someone with a disfigurement that activates ur MTS and you don't want to seem ableist by looking away while talking to them but it causes you physical pain and now you feel awful? yeah me neither
Answer:

I haven’t really had that situation arise, but when it does, I’ll probably just tell them about my mts and that it’s nothing personal

heartemojie :

lesbiangender :

lesbiangender :

lesbiangender :

lesbiangender :

I’m gonna say something….. controversial

if you’re writing a story and your villain has (or is) dissociative identity disorder then your art is bad and you should feel bad.

you know how straight people are really terrible at telling gay jokes because they don’t understand what the actual funny parts of being gay are?

Yeah people without DID who try to use the disorder for horror/thriller purposes fail at it because they don’t understand how DID actually effects people and their lives and behavior and relationships

In fact every piece of dramatic media I can think of that depicts DID kinda relies on the audience not understanding how DID actually works

And if the audience being educated ruins their suspension of disbelief, you’ve fucked up

And if you have to demonize highly vulnerable abuse survivors to create drama, you might not have any business writing fiction to begin with

Fictional DID is always depicted as dangerous to everyone but the person with the disorder and it makes me wonder what amount of research is acceptable in Hollywood and TV these days

like in Split they’re all “different alters have different biological realities” as some kind of edgy “what if the hulk but real” thing, and as far as I know, the idea that different alters have different physiologies is not accepted by modern psychology, and was likely falsified by an extremely abusive, immoral, and sadistic psychologist who gave his patients dangerous experimental drugs just to see how they would react, and then when the patients complained of trouble breathing or heart problems, this doctor told the nurses that it was all part of ~multiple personality disorder~ so that they wouldn’t like. I don’t know. Tell someone that this doctor was poisoning his patients in a wholly unscientific manner for apparent shits and giggles.

So yeah, that such a good sign for that movie huh?? //sarc

Look I don’t have DID, but I did live with someone who did for a year. It barely affected me. The person told me because they assumed I would notice something odd if we were living together, but tbh if he hadn’t I probably wouldn’t have thought anything except maybe that he was forgetful and disorganized.

I only ever knowingly interacted with one alter, who a psychologist might describe as an “angry part”, as sometimes alters experience limited emotions and are classified as “emotional parts”. This is the kind of alter that movies like Split want you to think is a rage-crazy murder monster with no impulse control.

The real-life “angry alter” my roommate had? I mean he was kind of a dick. He always seemed generally pissed off but he wasn’t a threat to me. I think he maybe wasn’t very nice to my roommate but since that happened internally I never saw, I could only guess. Hardly a hulk-like sex murderer.

And actually the majority times I talked to this alter I didn’t even know it. Because usually he made a point of acting like my roommate so that no one would give the system any trouble. Because DID is a highly specialized, involuntary coping mechanism created to protect a victim of trauma or abuse. Alters form so that the victim can continue with their life and grow and develop. If all alters were dangerous volatile monsters that you could easily tell the difference between at a glance, they wouldn’t be a very effective defense mechanism.

So I would talk to my roommate as usual, and then like an hour later he would be like “whoa how long have I been gone, what was my body doing all day” and I would be like uhhh I literally don’t know dude if you hadn’t said that I wouldn’t have realized you weren’t the one fronting all day.

In Split it’s like “if I lose control of my alters they kidnap and murder people!!!” and meanwhile in reality it’s more like….. System needed to go to class today but Alter B was fronting when it was time to leave for class and they didn’t feel like going, so the whole system missed out on class and that sucks.

And when alters do hurt people its…. pretty much always the body of the system. There are suicidal and self-harming alters for sure. But I’ve never found a medically or scientifically valid article or study about homicidal alters. And certainly not alters who carry out complex kidnapping plots of multiple people.

And obviously fiction that demonizes any mental illness makes the world a more dangerous place for people with that mental illness, and I’ve even met mental health workers who believed the horror movie depiction of DID and thought my roommate was going to kill me. That is a serious problem. It’s one thing for Average Joe to think Split is a legit portrayal of DID, but when the people whose job it is to help mentally ill people believe this?? At best it’s going to be harder for systems to find the help they need. At worst, the mental health system becomes hostile and dangerous to those with DID.

Oh, let’s all get into this post

itsborderlinebitch:

okay everyone here is a hot take. using disabled people, especially their photos and videos, as a tool to signify why abled people should be more “grateful” for their health is actually extremely exploitative, demeaning and othering. stop

ultrastamp:

it’s national disability day! here are some things to remember if you’re able-bodied:

• disabled people don’t have to hate themselves for being disabled
• please leave accessible parking spots, ramps, etc alone if you don’t need them
• you shouldn’t have standards for what “counts” as disabled. it’s not for you to judge and a lot of us experience disability in different ways - in fact, you can’t always tell if someone is disabled just by looking at them
• asking about our disabilities, illnesses, etc is usually really rude and invasive. if we want to explain, we’ll do it ourselves
• you can offer us help without being patronizing (e.g. offering us a place to sit), but also don’t ignore our boundaries and try to “help” us because you automatically assume we need it (e.g. pushing someone’s wheelchair without asking).

and finally:

• we’re human beings, don’t treat us like charity cases!

actualmythicalcreature:

Friendly tip for communicating with your autistic (and other neurodiverse) friends; dont ask open ended questions!

When you ask me “where do you want to go for lunch”, my brain begins to compile a list of ALL the possible places we COULD go, which is like… hundreds of options. I then have to weigh mental pro’s and cons and access all the data I have on those places. Answering your question will take up significant amounts of my mental energy, and if I dont get overwhelmed immediately I will take FOREVER to answer because it’s a BIG question. It might also lead me to ask you a million data modifiers such as - how far are you comfortable traveling, what amount of money would you like to spend, sit down or take out, fancy or fast, are there any foods you cannot eat, etc. A question like that is EXHAUSTING, so much so that it can induce fear and paralysis and then I cannot answer at all!

Instead of an open ended question - try something more specific. “Would you rather have lunch at X, or Y?” - this will give me a clear response path. I only have to weigh data for two outcomes- and it answers some of those modifiers I mentioned before because I can infer data about what kind of lunch you’re looking to have based upon what options you gave me so that even if I dont like one of those two options I can easily find something comparable.

🖤 just some advice friendo’s!

mentallyillmlm:

yo professors need to stop calling their classes disability friendly and then requiring like 100% attendance

genericdubstep :

Remember when Trump said autism is an epidemic caused by vaccines that ruins beautiful children?

Remember when Trump mocked a disabled reporter on live-television by mimicking his hand movement and pretending to be mentally challenged?

Remember when Trump lit the White House up in blue lights to support Autism Speaks, the organization that demonizes autistic people and spends the majority of their money on prenatal autism screenings (AKA eugenics)?

Remember when Trump wanted to save money by shutting down Meals On Wheels, an organization that brings food to disabled and elderly people that can’t go outside?

Remember when Trump blamed all non-ISIS related shootings on the mentally ill?

Trump understandably gets a lot of crap for being racist, homophobic and sexist, but we need to acknowledge his blatant ableism too. This man is seriously harmful to us.

theiazo :

meowgebra :

disabilityuserboxes :

this user has synesthesia

it isn’t a fucking disability jfc

to everyone in the notes arguing on whether or not synesthesia is a mental illness/disability: 

depending on what type of synesthesia a person has, it can be very damaging to their physical or mental health. for example, i have personality-color synesthesia. on it’s own, it’s not that bad. just seeing colors around people dependent on who it is/how i view them.

however, the bad part- and the part that makes it a disability- is how i literally cannot step into crowds without going into sensory overloads and headaches. these last for hours and it hinders my ability to meet other people, locate others, and be in public spaces for too long at all.

adding onto that, i involuntarily attach the colors of a person to how i know them so much that it makes it hard for me to relate to people with colors i don’t like/have had bad experiences with.

i’m working towards solutions to both of these problems, but my synesthesia is at the root of it, and while i love having it and it’s fun and pretty and blah blah blah, please don’t speak for disabled people when you don’t know what they go through.

mellopetitone :

qjusttheletter :

make posts about disability accessible

[ID: collection of tweets from Amanda Hackwith @ajhackwith reading

“If you’re fuzzy on why changes to the ADA is such a big deal, I get it. I’m keenly aware of what being abled blinds you to. I’m here to introduce you to the thing that dominates my husband and I’s life: Logistics.
Hey. Abled friends.
This thread is for you. #HR620

Disclaimer: I am not physically disabled. My husband is. He has used a wheelchair since birth. I’m using ‘we’ in here because that’s how we’ve experienced it, and this is shared with his permission. OK? Ok.

The reality of living with a disability is Logistics. We don’t just do something. You figure out if we CAN do something. And then try to chase down the secret hidden puzzle of how WE do it. Because, I guarantee you, we are the exception. 
We are always the Exception.

So: join us. We leave home. We don’t call for an accessible taxi because that will take an hour. We can’t take a zipcar because there’s no hand controls. Walking through the door is Logistics.

We take a bus, praying that no one else with a wheelchair, walker, baby carriage, grocery bag, or big-ass backpack has already taken up the two accessible spots on the entire bus. Two. If so, we’re out of luck.

Or we take a hip, tech-will-set-us-free rideshare. There is no accessible option in the app. We pray that the ride that comes won’t drive off when they see a chair. That the folding chair will fit.

Maybe we walk home. We fought city hall for neighborhood curb cuts last year! Only fancy condo construction has torn them out again. For months. So we walk in the gutter of a busy industrial street.

We see a show. We can’t buy tickets online. We have to call to see if one of the five accessible seats in the theatre is available. There’s only one ‘companion’ seat. We aren’t expected to have friends.

We book a hotel. We have to investigate how crappy the accessible room is. (It’s usually a less desirable retrofitted room.) How a ‘normal’ room is laid out. If we can ‘get away’ with being treated as normal. For once.

We fly. We introduce ourselves to the attendants. We PROMISE we won’t be a bother. That we won’t need assistance. That we won’t need to rely on the rickety chair they want to strap him to, Hannibal-style. We make the attendants nervous.

We fly. We successfully board, but the bathroom is twenty feet to the back of the plane. We don’t have our chair. We hope we don’t need to pee for the next nine hours.

We want to do a fun tour of a new city/country/landmark. We spend hours calling tour companies, emphasizing how low fuss we are, how independent we are, how we’re one of the ‘cool’ disableds, if only they have room to fold his chair with the luggage. We promise to be good.

We want to eat at a special restaurant. It’s in a historical building. We crawl on our knees and throw the chair up the stairs to eat there anyway. There are stairs and there are stares. We are everyone’s free entertainment.

We eat at a restaurant. It’s accessible, sure! Just call ahead and Jimbob will throw a board across the steps for you to roll up. Or there’s an accessible entrance! It’s the loading ramp, out back. Through the pee-soaked alley and trash cans. Can’t miss it.

We eat it a restaurant. It’s totally accessible! Except for the bathroom upstairs. You can hold it until we get home, right honey?

Work has a social event. It’s held at one of the above ‘trendy’ restaurants. But HR totally apologizes, okay? Be cool. We can be cool.

We want to go home. We become invisible to taxis. He hangs back until I flag one down and glare the driver into submission.

W apartment hunt. All the cute ground floor dog-friendly units are lofts with stairs. All the accessible units have been rented out to able-bodied people because ‘no one wants them’.

We apartment hunt. The ‘large’ bedroom doesn’t leave enough room to either side of the bed for a wheelchair to sit. The glitzy new apartments have bathroom doors too small to get through.

We apartment hunt. The building is totally accessible! Except for that one tiny step. In the common room. To all the amenities you’re paying for.

And this is important: We are white, educated, financially secure, fairly young and healthy aside from the wheelchair. In other words: BEST CASE SCENARIO. We literally are operating and interacting with the ADA on every privilege we can manage.

If you’re surprised by what I’ve said, keep in mind the majority of the disabled community has it so much worse. With so much less resources. Even WITH the existing ADA. #HR620

No imagine how much worse, more hostile, the world will be if every target of discrimination had to ask each business, in writing, one at a time, to please not break the law. And they have 90 days to ignore them. And another 180 after that.
Every restaurant. Every store. #HR620

Imagine you had to beg every business to allow you to exist. Imagine people complaining about ‘nuisance lawsuits’ and ‘support peacocks’ to you. Your existence is a nuisance. Your existence is over legislated. Your existence is unnecessary.
Now call your damn senators. #HR620 “

/end ID]

To add, you live in a city with trains. You go to the closest station and hope the elevator works. It does. You’re in luck. The next nearest station this far out on the line is a mile and a half away. It smells like pee. It always smells like pee. It may be the slowest elevator you’ve ever taken. It takes you one level and you get to the platform with no problems.

The train arrives. You roll into the wheelchair area and hope that unattended pile of suitcases and bikes don’t hit you when the train moves.

The train arrives. The wheelchair area is full of suitcases. There’s a business convention. You hope you can make it to the next car with an empty area before the train pulls away. You hope this driver watches the platform for stragglers or disabled people trying to get access.

The train arrives. There’s a game. There’s a con. There’s a march. There’s a business convention. There are all of these at the same time and more have this weekend. You forgot or you didn’t know. You leave. There won’t be room for you for hours. You waste a ticket.

You use crutches. The train arrives. The disability seats are full. You stare at the people. Everyone finds the floor fascinating. No one gets up. You grab a rail and flop around until someone gets off finally. You hurt and you’re exhausted. If you’re lucky, you can rest where you’re going and will be there soon

The train arrives. The wheelchair area is completely empty and everyone is sitting in a seat, out of the space you need to cross. You settle in.

You get off at the station closest to your destination. The elevator on your side is broken. There was no notice on the website, the app, or the announcements (if you can understand them. You don’t have to have hearing loss to struggle with understanding what sounds like Charlie Brown adults making the announcements). You’re lucky. This station has another elevator. You wait for the next train, roll through (if you’re lucky and there’s room for you or people listen when you yell and make a scene to clear space), and go find the other elevator. It’s broken.

You wait for the next train. You ride it to the next closest station (luckily this part of town has stops closer together. It’s only an extra half mile onto your trip. You hope.) You try the elevators there and hope you don’t have to go several miles or deal with calling a taxi just to get there.

You wish you’d stayed home. But you know isolation can be a problem and you’ve gone to meet friends for a fun night. They’ve been to the restaurant before and know there are no steps, so you psych yourself up for the fun part.

Everything is great. There are no stairs, the table seating isn’t a problem, and staff treat you like a normal human being. You excuse yourself to the bathroom. The “accessible” stall door opens about a foot and a half. You feel boxes piled up. You go back out, ready to make a scene. You’re tired of having to fight for every little thing. You can’t even go to the toilet! Your friends listen and one of them talks to the manager, abled to abled. You’re furious, but also glad you don’t have to be the angry crip in a wheelchair again. By the time the manager comes back over to tell you you can get into the bathroom they are legally required to leave open for exactly this situation, you’re about to pop, so you squash your seething feelings in service of your bladder. As an apology, you get a free dessert. You try not to snark. This is a fun night out.

I feel like when people say “the world doesn’t care about your disability” they often forget the flipside of “my disability doesn’t care about the world”

thehoh-society :

Reblog if you have ever been scolded as a child (and as an adult) for not realizing that someone was talking to you.

beemblebu:

There’s really nothing you can do when someone repeatedly abuses your MTS. Talk to them? Buddy, they know it annoys you, they don’t care. Make other more influential people talk to them? They learn to do it when nobody’s around, or in subtle ways that nobody will think anything of. Fight them physically? Guess what you can’t do because of MTS. Talking to someone about it? It doesn’t make them stop. Really your only hope is to hope they see the error of their ways and not do it anymore but that’s really wishful thinking. I don’t know where I was going with this but if you have any tips please share them with me

cowboyslovingboys:

calling someone a psycho/psychotic, a sociopath, or a psychopath to insult them makes you ableist even if they are the worst person in the world idk what your excuse is

cowboyslovingboys:

2020 is the year we stop saying someone has no empathy in a negative way or demands someone ‘learns empathy’ and instead criticizes someone for having no compassion. people with mental illness who lack empathy exist and instead of painting them as bad people let’s shit on people without any compassion for other human beings

overrunwithchickens :

So, I read some version of the “6 afraid of 7″ joke that was pretty mediocre and I almost glossed over it, but for some reason I suddenly remembered learning that there is a variation of synesthesia (apologies if I spelt this wrong or have the wrong word) where people perceive numbers as actually having personalities.

And it got me thinking, this is such a normal and over-used joke, but imagine hearing it or any variation on it for the first time if you actually think there’s an answer to be had like, “Obviously the rambunctious 7 would frighten the shy little 6,” or, “What? 6 and 7 are best friends. That makes no sense.” And then the punchline would hit you out of nowhere, especially since you’re now bringing 9 into it.

At first, I kind of laughed at the idea of someone having a strong, genuine opinion about the validity of the “6 afraid of 7″ joke, but then I thought, if you replaced the numbers in the joke with people I know, I’d have a strong opinion about it too.

meatswitch:

daily-rage-comics :

*feels ok for 1 second* amazing. i was faking my mental illness all along

Person: sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me :)

Me, with mts: lmao can’t relate

olderthanchristianity:

When people say the way u think is really weird and it’s just like…. Sorry??

lampstudies :

white-aster :

liquidstar :

anyone else get the constant fear that there are unspoken social rules you dont know about (especially in new situations, like when i first started taking the bus, i was afraid i was doing it wrong lol) so youre just always on edge and kind of… watching how other people act so you can copy the “correct” thing to do

It took me a long time to realize that this wasn’t something that happened to everyone.

….. this doesn’t happen to everyone??

i-am-a-fish:

please speak up if you’re a victim of abuse, even if it seems like no big deal at the time. please reach out to people

teambuckaroo :

[ID: Is this a pigeon meme format. Butterfly is replaced with “Disabled people’s entire medical history”. Man replaced with “Non disabled people”. Man is asking “Is this my business?”]

tulpa2-deactivated20191122:

beemblebu:

Please read this post in its entirety before interacting. I am conducting a survey.

Like this post if you believe that synesthesia should not, under any circumstances, be considered a disability or disorder.

Comment on this post if you believe that synesthesia can and/or should be considered a disability or disorder.

Please reblog once you have interacted with the post so that other people can see this and vote. Any comments in the tags or in the reblogs will not be considered comments.

Thanks!💖

realitydaytrip :

support the mentally ill people who cant hide their illness

i-am-a-fish:

me: I sure love music *pops in my earbuds*

my brain .00001 seconds later: heeheehoohoo.. i think someone….. someone is trying to get your ATTENTION!!!!!! YOU CAN’T HEAR THEM THOUGH OH GOD YOU’D BETTER TAKE OFF THE EARBUDS DO IT NOW DO IT NOW NO IT N

aspergersissues :

animeshittalk:

me charging tf up behind the register when a boomer starts giving me attitude

animeshittalk:

food service and retail workers should be legally allowed to slap one (1) customer across the face as hard as they can every year. slaps do roll over at the end of year so you can really come unglued if you’ve been saving em up like vacation days.