10:19am May 27, 2014

I think I’ve figured something out, although I don’t know what it means.

It’s about which disability communities I tend to gravitate towards and which ones I don’t.

I definitely gravitate less towards disability communities where everyone shares a single diagnosis.

And I’m not sure why, at all.

That’s one thing about the autistic community that makes me acutely uncomfortable, despite the diversity that actually exists among autistic people.  (And I guess I consider all autism diagnoses to be ‘one diagnosis’ even though technically people in the autistic community include people with diagnoses of autistic disorder, AS, PDDNOS, Rett’s, and very occasionally CDD.  But I don’t consider most of those besides Rett’s to actually denote anything about the person being different from any other kind of autistic person, so.. yeah.)  

I don’t feel comfortable in support groups for people with a single diagnosis either.

I do wonder if part of this is because I have so many types of disability that being in a community for people with one diagnosis pretty much means leaving part of me at the door.

And this would also explain to me why the developmental disability community is the one that fits me the best.  Because there is no disability category that I’m asked to leave at the door, in that community.  Even things like psychiatric disability and specific learning disabilities, which are technically left out of the definition of developmental disability, are far more common in people with developmental disabilities, so it’s not like they’re outside the realm of normal there.

Sometime I should write about how I find each of the major disability communities in relation to my life.

But for now, I’m realizing that the more specific to one type of disability a community is, the less I feel like I can fit in there.  Not that I totally reject such communities, I’m just always conscious of a distance.

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