as small as a world and as large as alone, realsocialskills: chrisss89: Learning self...

3:44pm June 28, 2014

chrisss89:

Learning self respect

realsocialskills:

Anonymous said to realsocialskills:

I’m twenty years old and I can’t help but think that everyone thinks I’m stupid. I stutter, I feel slow, I say dumb things, and I sometimes catch people giving me judging looks. No one’s ever said that to me except maybe once or twice when I…

chrisss89 said:

“there probably are a lot of people in your life who think you are stupid.” i don’t know, this doesn’t really sound like a helpful piece of advice to me :/ other than that, i like the responses to this submission.

realsocialskills said:

This is why I said that, and why I stand by it:

I face cognitive ableism on a regular basis.

I once had a friend tell me, “You know, it’s surprising to hear you say intelligent things. You give them impression of not being all there.” He didn’t mean it as an insult.

I get a lot of looks that I think I pretty accurately interpret as people reading me as having a cognitive impairment, and thinking that means I’m either stupid or dangerous and wondering what I’m doing in a place for real people.

I used to worry a lot about whether I was around people who saw me as stupid. Now that I’ve accepted that yes, I am around people who see me this way, because that’s the kind of world we live in. That’s what many people think cognitive impairment means. It doesn’t. Ever. Not any kind of cognitive impairment (including intellectual disability). People who think that cognitive impairment means stupidity are wrong, and mean.

I’m ok; they’re mean.

When other people tell me that people don’t think I’m stupid, it doesn’t help. Because it’s obvious to me that some people see me that way. That’s part of life; it’s something I have to deal with; pretending it isn’t so won’t make it go away.

People who are willing to acknowledge that people do in fact see me that way can join me in objecting. They can join me and say in solidarity “you’re ok; they’re mean.”

But in order to do that, they have to be willing to acknowledge the reality of what I’m facing. I wanted to do the same for others who are facing this reality.