3:18pm October 20, 2014

Maybe it will post this as a text post even if it won’t let me post it as a reblog.

I’ve just had two reblogs go right past me. This was in response to someone’s post about how their apartment wasn’t “cute messy”, like some things scattered on the floor, it was really awful disgusting messy with garbage everywhere and stuff. I could relate, and it brought up some memories, so I wrote about it:

I once knew someone who was one of those people who couldn’t stand not to be the most severely disabled person in the room. Which was a real problem, because she was pretty mildly disabled in reality. But anyway she’d do these weird twisted-logic things like “The reason your apartment became too filthy to live in after a few weeks on your own, and mine is immaculate after a year on my own, is because I’m just so much more autistic than you, that I need things to be orderly in order to function.”

I made the mistake of telling her “I need things to be orderly in order to function, too. I just have autistic catatonia and can’t initiate all the motions it takes to clean things, okay?”

Next time I saw her, she had dumped her laundry basket on the floor and let her trash cans fill up past half full. She told me that she was now so severely disabled that she couldn’t clean her own apartment, and that this meant she was more severely disabled than me, and blah blah blah what the fuck seriously what the fuck, lady? It was really, extremely, offensive to me that she would pull that kind of shit. And I’m not normally easily offended by people doing things like that. I usually figure they have a good reason. But she didn’t. She just had this drive to be the lowest functioning person in the room, and she put me in actual physical danger more than once entirely because of that drive. But I had a hard time not exploding at her when I saw her attempt at a “messy apartment”. It was literally just that she’d overturned her dirty clothes hamper and not taken out the trash yet. That’s all. All. And that was deliberate – normally her place was immaculate even after a year on her own claiming that she had “no daily living skills at all” and that her daily living skills were so much worse than mine but “it’s not hard to be better than me at this so don’t worry about it”. Except that she could do everything that I couldn’t do, and it felt insulting when she pretended she couldn’t for the sake of her weird lower-functioning-than-thou games.

For what it’s worth, after a few weeks on my own, there was mold everywhere, a mess that took up every square inch of floor space on the apartment, overflowing trash, I’d gone to the bathroom on the floor more than once, and… by the time I got services, a woman from the services agency walked into my apartment, took one look around, said “Oh my god, I am not authorized for this level of cleaning, let me call the office and get them to send you someone who is.” I can guarantee you she’d never let her apartment get that bad no matter how much she wanted to be the lowest functioning person in the room.

Oh also that other thing? I really hate it when someone says “I’m doing better than you at (task) because I’m actually more severely disabled than you.” Like “My apartment is clean because I’m so autistic that I can’t tolerate a mess.” That implies that I could tolerate a mess, and that if I had been mess-intolerant enough, autistic enough, I would’ve been able to clean up my apartment on my own. Now some autistic people can clean their apartments, and that’s fine. But I couldn’t. I can’t. Because of autism. And “I can clean my apartment because I’m more autistic than you” is really effing insulting.

Notes: