7:05am November 6, 2014

PSA:

versatilequeen:

Also, if you are going to date someone with a mental illness (or any illness) make sure you have accepted that they might not get better for a very long time, if ever.

Do not enter the relationship thinking that you can fix them or that they will be fine in a few months. Never do that.

Movies really give us a false sense of what happens in these cases.

this is important

I once knew someone who… well as soon as she met me she decided we were already friends and that she knew everything about me because she’d seen me on TV. So then she started asking me to go play extremely strenuous sports with her. This was at a time when even getting out of bed was nearly impossible, due to myasthenia gravis and adrenal insufficiency, both undiagnosed at the time. I’d try to explain this to her, and then she’d say something like, “Well, when you’re better… say in a month… then can we go play sports?” I tried really hard to explain to her that I had a chronic illness and that you don’t just randomly “get better” from chronic illness in a month. Then she freaked out and started talking about how most people would kill themselves in my place and that she certainly would, because she “had to” be active, and that “not everyone can cope with being bedridden like you can, you must be really really strong”.

And then “I’m worried about you, I want you start getting out of bed again, otherwise you’ll end up 400 pounds like my sister.” As if I could just snap my fingers and get out of bed, as if I hadn’t tried that already. And thanks for the fatphobia thrown in, like the worst danger of being bedridden is getting fat. The greatest danger is actually life-threatening blood clots, but oh well, who needs facts?

Then she started saying things like “I finally understand, you’re one of those people who was always content to stay around the house and not do much of anything, and that’s why you’re able to tolerate this so well.” It blew her mind to tell her that I was actually quite athletic in the past and went on long walks and bike rides, climbed trees, and just about anything else that I was able to do at the time. Which completely baffled her. (She spent a lot of time and effort trying to work out why it was that other people could cope with things better than she thought she could, mostly by ascribing it to the person being less severely disabled than her in some way, because she was one of those people who always has to be the most severely disabled person in the room. Another of her “sudden insights” about me was “I came here expecting that you were a profoundly autistic person who had carved out a life for yourself, but then I realized you’re just a very high functioning autistic person with health problems.” She, of course, was “severe/profound” – and her “realization” was brought on by the fact that I wouldn’t let her do this thing she did to anyone else labeled “severe/profound”, which was to ciaim to be able to know what was going on in our heads, so that she could claim to be “good with” us. I was having none of that, so she had to move me out of the category of severe/profound to save face.

At any rate, one of the most annoying things about her was her expectation that I’d suddenly get better one day and then we’d be able to do all this stuff she wanted to do together. Of course…. I did eventually get diagnosis and treatment for the adrenal insufficiency and myasthenia gravis. And I’m no longer bedridden (although I still need quite a lot of time in bed for other reasons), and I’m much more active, but I’m still not physically functioning at the level she wanted me to be functioning at. And it was really aggravating, among many other aggravating things about her, to have her sitting there coming up with ideas about fixing me, half of which seemed to involve “just get out of bed more” (what, and fall flat on my face and be unable to get back up again? sounds fun).

Notes: