as small as a world and as large as alone, i'm sorry, but you are clearly criticizing the...

10:36pm August 24, 2014

Anonymous asked: i'm sorry, but you are clearly criticizing the staffs behaviour, which i get, but you use this picture as some sort of evidence. and it's just really unjust to criticize someone without giving them an idea what to do differently? if i put myself in the position of the staff i would feel absolutely helpless given this situation.

I’m actually not criticizing their behavior as much as I’m criticizing the entire attitude that they went into the picture with. That is not something that can be solved by giving advice over a tumblr ask. But I actually find what you’re doing here pretty offensive.

Basically… I asked for help explaining something I can’t name, or explain, myself, very well. I did my best to explain and then let other people chime in trying to help me find the ideas and the words that I wanted – just to describe what was happening, not even to fix it, just to describe it.

You’re saying I shouldn’t be able to do that, unless I’m willing and able to fix the entire problem.

That is offensive to me.

It has always been offensive to me.

When you have a bunch of people working on a problem, you have…

People who are trying to simply figure out what the problem is
People who are trying to articulate what the problem is
People who are trying to understand the social dynamics behind the problem
People who are trying to put this all into a broader context of power relations and the like
People who are trying to solve the problem

And much, much more.

You’re saying that if we don’t have people who are actively willing, able, and trying to solve the problem, then the rest of what we’re doing to work on the problem is useless. You’re also saying that the most important person in this situation is the staff person, and that the most important thing we can do is tell the staff person how to behave so that they don’t look like that, superficially, in a photograph. Even though the problem was never how they looked in the photograph. The problem was the attitude they carried into the photograph with them.

I have a really skeevy picture of a guy who molested me, with his arm around me. Most people who’ve seen the picture agree it looks seriously skeevy. And most people who’ve seen the picture would agree that the problem is not the way he looks in the picture, the problem is that he was a child molester who was actively molesting me during the time period the picture was taken, and that his attitude as a child molester spilled over into the photograph making it look really creepy.

Now I’m not saying that what this staff person did was as bad as a child molester. I’m just trying to draw a comparison to something that is so far beyond the pale that hopefully anyone would understand why “giving child molesters tips on how not to look like child molesters in photos” is not an answer to anything.

If I did want to fix the problem, I would embark on a serious educational campaign aimed at the staff person.

I would lend her two of my favorite books by Dave Hingsburger, Power Tools and First Contact. Then I would lend her I Witness: History And a Person with a Developmental Disability, as well as A Real Nice But and A Little Behind. All by Dave Hingsburger. I would show her a video called The Ethics of Touch, also by Dave Hingsburger. I would point her at davehingsburger.blogspot.com.

Why Hingsburger? Because he’s been that staff person. I’m sure he has photos like that. But he has grown and learned and changed in ways that most staff of that type don’t. He has done some of the worst atrocities that have been done to disabled people, and he has managed to grow and change and become a truly better person as a result of relentless and ruthless self-examination. He has examined the power he wields over his clients – even now that he is disabled himself. He has examined it in depth. And he has done so in a way that is easily accessible to other staff – in a way that a client would have a lot harder time getting the ideas into their heads, because of defensiveness and the like.

All of which is why my Hingsburger books have a horrible habit of walking away from my apartment and needing to be replaced, sometimes at great expense if they are out of print.

Reading a bunch of Hingsburger books won’t transform anyone overnight, but it’s a start. It helps people begin to wake up. Even if the first feeling they get as they awake is this niggling feeling that’s uncomfortable and that they want to put away somewhere.

Understand something here… I am not one of those people who says “I’m a member of a marginalized group, it is not my job to educate you, go find Google and educate yourself.” I know full well that Google is not easy to use in that manner. I know full well that some marginalized people – people who are willing and able at the time, of course – need to be among the ones doing the educating. I am willing to do the educating myself, at times.

But I don’t put up with this bullcrap about how if I don’t educate you right now in exactly the way you want at exactly the time you want then I’m doing something horribly wrong and unfair. And I don’t put up with the bullcrap that says that the experience of the staff person here trumps my experience as the client.

Remember, I am one of the people in this photograph. I feel dehumanized and neglected and treated like dirt because of this photograph, and I don’t believe the woman in the photograph has any idea that I feel this way at all. I don’t think she has the self-knowledge to understand what she was doing during the photograph, or during any of our interactions with each other.

But because I am one of the people in the photograph.

And because I find the photograph a traumatic reminder of what it means to be a client of the mental health/developmental disability system.

It is not my fucking job to track her down with a stack of Hingsburger books and hope she doesn’t slam the door in my face.

You say it’s unfair of me not to educate her, or at least not to educate those like her, right here, right now, the moment that I’m trying to make sense of my own trauma. And you’re not even remotely aware of the fact that this is traumatic, that it is not just some neutral photograph that was taken one happy day, that it has stuck in my mind for eighteen years for a reason. That I have kept it in my house, always hidden behind sometime, for the sole purpose of reminding myself what it means to be a client and what it means to have staff. The same way, for a long time, I kept an old restraint cuff stolen from a mental institution, and kept it in the back of my closet. Just to remind myself the meaning of captivity.

For me, this picture is the meaning of community-based captivity rather than institution-based captivity. It’s about having a keeper following me around. It’s about the way my keeper feels good about herself. It’s about so many things I can’t even name them. And it’s about something awful that happened to me that you’re not willing to acknowledge because you’re too busy worrying how she feels.

If you’re truly interested in freeing your mind from staffishness, read everything Hingsburger ever wrote and engage with it as carefully and critically as you can, applying it to your own life. He’ll be wrong about somethings but spectacularly right about others. He is not a normal disability rights writer. He doesn’t follow the party line on anything. But he knows things that very few disability rights writers are willing to even acknowledge the existence of. And he exists outside of the realm of mental widgets, those constraints people put on their ideologies to keep from having to think too hard about anything. I will take him over twenty bog-standard disability rights advocates any day.

But other than that? Stop bothering me about this. I knew from the beginning that your request for help in what not to do to look like this in photographs was not a request but a demand. That’s what being highly sensing will do to you. I’m glad you’ve basically admitted it, though. That makes everything else a lot easier.

I’m fucking recovering from meningitis. I have aspiration pneumonia that I’m barely recovering from. Last time I tried to write this letter to you, I had to stop several times in the middle because I was literally hallucinating from delirium. My father is still dying and I still haven’t spent as much time with him as I’d like to. All of these things are things that matter a lot more to me than whether you or anyone else wants to avoid looking staffish in photographs. If you want to not look staffish, you have to not be staffish, and that’s a lifelong, difficult lesson that will take everything you have to unlearn. You won’t get it from me or anyone else.

Maybe someone would be willing to hold your hand through this process. I am neither willing nor able. I think it’s great that some people are willing and able to do those things. There are times when I have done it for others, although usually they have been my own staff who I wanted to get some things straight with about power relations before they started working for me. But the demanding way you have come into this conversation pretty much ensures that a lot of people are going to be turned off and not want to deal with you.

Because this conversation was originally about a bunch of developmentally disabled and mentally ill people trying to articulate what was going wrong in a picture. Then you jumped into the middle and made it all about the staff person, all about how not to look like the staff person in that picture, as if the looks were the problem. And people aren’t going to take kindly to that.

And OH BOY AM I THE GRUMPY STICK RIGHT NOW I AM THE FUCKING GRUMPIEST OF GRUMPY STICKS WHO’VE EVER GRUMPED.

Also, for those not following this discussion, this is the original post that started the whole thing off.

Shortly thereafter I started getting anon (of course) “requests” to show people how not to be like the staff person in the picture, and when I indicated my dissatisfaction with this way of looking at it… all of this happened. I’m not sure if I’m satisfied with my reply or not. Understand that most of the reply is not for the benefit of the person I’m replying to, it’s for the benefit of bystanders. I don’t know who I’m replying to, they could be a very good person overall, but holy crap I don’t need this at this point in my life, and I’m not going to just sit here and go “Yes, it was unfair of me to judge the staff person and I need to give you a cosmetic solution or I’ll be even more unfair.” No. Life doesn’t work that way.

Signed,

The Grumpiest Grumpy Stick to Ever Grump and Grouch and Growl its Way Out of the Woods