as small as a world and as large as alone

8:13am 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.

I just had a long conversation with my second case manager about nearly this exact thing. I’ve been learning things lately. Which has resulted in a weird combination of expectation to learn more things that everyone things are related to the skills I just learned, but aren’t, to use skills that I have but are only intermittently available or would drain spoons I need for the parts of the day I’m alone, and in response to “I’ve been asking for skills training in vitally needed safety areas since 2005 and never got it, yet people are willing to train me in things I can’t learn and/ or can’t use while overlooking repeated requests to learn things that I can learn that might save my life one day” I at first got nothing but weird excuses as to why much simpler training was somehow infeasible for ten years straight. Fortunately she got the message better than most (once she realized we are both kinesthetic learners she went “…..OHHHHHH” and related it to problems she has learning from verbal explanations) but wow I was nervous until she did.

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