as small as a world and as large as alone

11:20pm June 18, 2014

dendriforming:

There was a thing I didn’t mention in my response on the thread, because I was afraid it would just add fuel to the opposition.

I hear about financial burden. And I remember being ten years old, and staring at the paper that came with my digestive enzymes, and the price before and after insurance. I understood perfectly well that I’d be taking them my whole life. I sat there in terror, calculating in my head the odds that I’d ever be able to work, and if so, for how many decades. I was absolutely certain it would never be enough to justify the expense to my parents, or the insurance company. And I was exactly as certain that the most ethical thing for me to do would be to commit suicide, and that the only thing stopping me was selfishness.

And I wonder how many other kids there were (are) like me.

I remember a similar moment for very different reasons when I was a child.  And it did fuel suicide attempts.  In my case it was my movement disorder/autistic catatonia/psychiatric problems (which were not being differentiated from each other at all) bankrupting the family, causing my father to actually retire to get his retirement benefits and then get another job, just to pay for my treatment, among many other things.  And I felt like the lowest of the low beings that could possibly exist on the planet, and I felt like if I died then the burden would be over.

I can’t imagine how many disabled people kill themselves so as “not to be a burden” and it terrifies me.  When I’ve expressed my desire to remain alive, I’ve had people tell me I’m selfish because of the medical expenses that cost either my family or the taxpayers huge amounts of money.  That the best thing for me would be to stop treatment and die.  I can’t explain the fury, the rage, the “I deserve life just as much as you do, damn it.”  I can’t explain the terror knowing all the people who don’t have enough rage in them to resist such arguments.  It scares me so much.  How many of us commit suicide every year, applauded by those around us?  And this figures heavily into ‘death with dignity’, it’s also the terror of being a burden.

Because nondisabled people use up tons of money too, but it’s okay when they do it.  When disabled people do it, we’re burdens, better off dead, holding society back.  And they can’t see this, they’re so oblivious, they can’t see it at all.

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