5:36pm July 8, 2014

I… just can’t get behind it.

And I don’t know if this makes me a horrible person or not.

But when I read people saying things like “My disability prevents me from having a [childhood]/[adolescence]/[young adulthood]/[etc.] like I deserve…”

I just keep wondering, why does anyone feel like they deserve a certain time in their life to go a certain way?  Because almost nobody in the world actually has “a childhood” the way people talk about when they talk about “not getting to have a childhood”.  Almost nobody has these points in their life go the way they’re “supposed to” go.  The way they’re “supposed to” go is generally something decided upon by well-off white nondisabled Westerners.  Not something that the world in general takes for granted, even in the West.

But it’s like we’re bombarded with all these images of how our lives “should” look at a certain age.  So then if we don’t have that life, we decide there’s something wrong.

And I hate it.  I hate watching people do that.  I hate watching people think they’re entitled to their life stages going in a certain way that virtually nobody’s life stages actually go.  And then acting like it’s incredibly unusual and tragic that their life stages aren’t that way.

I just … it pisses me off, it doesn’t make me feel for the person, it just makes me mad, and I can’t even explain why.

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