9:06pm August 13, 2013

if you think a kid in your care is an angel

youneedacat:

josiahd:

Either you’re ignoring how they actually act, or they’ve been trained to be dangerously compliant.

Real people are pains in the ass sometimes, no matter their age.

The angel thing makes me want to throw up on them.

Seriously.

Especially when it’s combined with the idea that their disability makes them incapable of being other-than-angelic.

I used to be on a mailing list with a woman that believed all severely disabled people are angelic.

She also believed institutions are wonderful and caring places.

I didn’t fit her idea of angelic innocents, so she started in on attacking me. She questioned whether I was really disabled, acted like if I hadn’t spent my entire life in institutions then I’d never been in one, and attacked anything I did.

I started messing around with the flute, which I hadn’t done since I took lessons as a kid for a year or less. She responded with “Oh so there are flute lessons in institutions, huh? There are some total innocents who would EAT a flute!”

Which was about as much sense as she ever made. But she would go to posts that weren’t even about her, and pester me like that.

I finally told her we came from different worlds, there was no possibility of fruitful communication between us, and I was no longer going to respond to her posts.

This infuriated her. She started trying to bait me into responding. She kept escalating it and it all felt weird, like I was being pelted and tugged on.

And then. When I still continued not to respond. She told the entire forum that I was a horribly dangerous person who had launched a psychic attack on her.

Yeah because frigging IGNORING someone while they later and bait and attack you is an attack. It was really weird. Fortunately everyone else told her she out of line.

But I’ve gotten that kind of intensely hostile response a lot by the" severely disabled people are angels" folks.

Either I’m unable to communicate and they brand me an angel.

Or I am able to communicate and I’m the devil incarnate. And because in the devil incarnate, I am not an angel, and therefore must not really have whichever disability turns people into angels.

It’s a really toxic belief system and there’s a lot of ugly assumptions hiding under it.

Notes: