as small as a world and as large as alone

8:06am July 1, 2015

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

I’m reading about people’s low expectations holding disabled people back from doing things they are interested in doing.

And I wasn’t told ‘you can’t do that’ directly, throughout my life. I was told, mostly, ‘you can do this easily and the fact that you aren’t doing it means you’re just not trying.’

But… hidden in all of that denial is ‘you can’t do that.’

Because I would work towards things at a slower pace than expected, and whatever progress I made was absolutely invisible. So it was, ‘Unless you do it like this, by this time, then you aren’t doing anything worth noting.’

And if all of my efforts = NOTHING, then I still learned I can’t do anything, and that there’s no point in trying, because getting a little farther today than yesterday means absolutely NOTHING when people expected it done yesterday.

And there’s also the continual sabotage from people who would get enthusiastic about me trying or doing something, but if I was the one who suggested something I was interested in myself, they would be skeptical and disinterested. Wtf? How can you spend all that time saying, “You should get involved in X, I think you’d be good at it!” and then turn around and be like, “I don’t know…” when I start saying, “I want to get involved in X, I think I’d be good at it”? It clearly shows that you don’t believe in me unless you think you can push me yourself.

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