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11:31pm July 28, 2014
fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton asked: 23 (age meme)

So this is a meme where you can give me any age under 34 (I’ll be 34 in a few weeks) and I will tell you what I would have been blogging about at the time.

I think that may be the age at which I started blogging, or I started blogging very soon afterwards.  I think I would have blogged about:

  • Institutions.  Mostly disability institutions like nursing homes, group homes, state hospitals, developmental centers, private mental institutions, and other sorts of institutions that disabled people were put into.  I was obsessed at that age, to the point that it was really difficult for me because I was writing and thinking about institutions all the time, which put me in full PTSD mode 24/7, which made life hard for me and also for anyone around me.
  • Assisted suicide and euthanasia.  I was 100% against them at the time, purely on disability rights grounds, and was terrified of and angry at anyone who was in any way for them for any reason.  I’m still against them being legalized, but my views have matured a lot since then and become far more complex.  Back then it was just “this is bad, this is evil, nobody could possibly have any good reason for supporting it, get it the fuck away from me”.  And I talked about it to a lot of people.
  • Selective abortion of disabled fetuses.  My views on the matter haven’t actually changed much, although again they have matured and become more complex.  I’m still 100% against it, but I don’t want to see it outlawed anymore, because I understand better the effect this would have on the right to choose in general.  Back then I just wanted it gone.
  • Disability rights activism in general.  I’d have posted links to and quotes from Mouth Magazine and Ragged Edge a lot.  And any books I could find on any part of the disability community, be it the mainstream phys-dis community or the DD self-advocacy community or the autistic community.  I remember being very angry that in the book No Pity, about disabled people forming our own movements, the only people in the book who were portrayed in terms of our parents rather than ourselves, were autistic people.  We weren’t portrayed as participating in self-advocacy, it was all parent-advocacy.  In a book that celebrated the independence of other disabled groups from such things.   I could not finish the book I felt so betrayed.

All of these issues, in addition to being things I was obsessed with talking to people about, were hair-trigger issues for me.  Meeting people who disagreed with me on any of these matters sent me into a panic so bad that I sometimes slammed my head into things or ran out of the room, or started screaming.  I felt like any support of any of these things was an immediate threat to my life and my person – directly, not indirectly – and so I responded as if people were trying to kill me.  And this bewildered a lot of people.

I’m guessing on the age, though.  I don’t remember exactly what age I was when I was really obsessed with that stuff, but I know it was around age 23.  

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this