8:55pm September 21, 2014

Envy and Jealousy across Disability Lines — I want to hear people’s experiences of all kinds

I’ve been struggling with how to write this post, because the subject is so much of a minefield and so many of us have deep, mostly unexplored feelings about the matter. I think this crops up in every oppressed community, and someone sent me an ask (I’m keeping them anonymous) that brought up a lot of questions for me about it, and made me do a lot of soul-searching about my own role in these sorts of matters.

Basically the thing is jealousy. Envy. Whatever you want to call it. And this is not envy of one oppressed group for another. This is envy within one oppressed group, between its members. And one of the things that interests me about this envy is that it goes both ways. The other thing that interests me about it, is that it’s usually totally unrealistic. Although sometimes there’s a grain of truth in it.

Unfortunately whenever anyone gives voice to the envy, people have knee-jerk defensive reactions. And those reactions end up shutting down discussion before it can begin. So I’d like to ask if, during this discussion at least, people can talk about this weird kind of envy without being jumped on or dogpiled by people who see it as a threat.

When I say the envy runs both ways, it’s like this:

Someone else who is disabled envies me because I don’t “have to” have a job, and I don’t “have to” pass for normal, and I can “get away with” being visibly gender-atypical. And their knee-jerk response when I come up with another marginalized identity is like “Not another one, why does sie get to get away with being so different in so many ways?” This is someone who has a job and has to pass and has to work for a living etc.

My knee-jerk reaction to such confessions is generally to explain to the person, angrily and in great depth, exactly why having no job is nothing to envy. I go into great detail about how poverty and living on the system has affected and indeed endangered my life. I explain how being gender-atypical (genderless, with visible traits that make me look ambiguous to a lot of people) may not affect employment for me, but it does affect healthcare in ways that are life and death. “It’s not that simple, the grass is not always greener on my side of the fence,” is what I want to tell people.

But I also have envy. I envy autistic people who can put together words easily, who live in words, who have always been good at words. I envy autistic people who can have jobs, especially blue-collar jobs, but even sometimes jobs in academia. I envy autistic people who can speak most of the time. I envy autistic people who can pass for neurotypical most of the time.

And I am sure they have their own knee-jerk responses to my envy. And while the content of the knee-jerk responses may be absolutely accurate, they don’t solve the problem of the envy that each of us feels towards the other. They don’t solve this extremely deep-seated feeling that the other kind of disabled person — whatever that other kind may be — has it better.

In the autistic community, even those of us who don’t believe in functioning labels, will often divide our envy along exactly those lines. The ‘high functioning’ envy the ‘low functioning’, the ‘low functioning’ envy the ‘high functioning’.

I never heard a starker example than from a dad I used to know on the support groups, Mike. Mike’s son was diagnosed with either Asperger’s or HFA, I forget which. And he decided that he wanted to be LFA. He wanted to be LFA because he believed that people who were LFA were unaware of being autistic. Which is usually inaccurate, but he believed it and that’s all that matters. So at the stroke of midnight one night, he told Mike, “I’m going to become LFA.” And at midnight he started rocking, stopped talking, and did his best to imitate what he thought LFA looked like. His father was able to entice him out of that mode pretty quickly, but it left a strong impression on all of us: He was so unhappy with his life that he believed turning LFA would solve his problems.

And believe me, there are people labeled LFA who are so full of envy for those labeled HFA that it poisons them and makes them very cruel people. They believe if you’re high functioning you have no real problems, they would give their eye teeth to be high functioning, they believe if they were high functioning then all their problems would go away.

And I really think that this unexpressed envy in the disability community poisons all of us. It makes us think things of each other that are not true. It makes us draw lines in the sand — between those who speak and those who can’t, those who hold jobs and those who can’t, those who walk and those who can’t, it really can be anything. And what gets me is no matter the division, the envy runs both ways.

So I’d like — if I could — to open up a discussion of this envy. Where people can talk about it openly. Even when we know it’s illogical. Even when we know it’s based on ideas about others that aren’t true. Just to have it named, just to have it out there, would be a first step towards getting rid of it. When it’s brought out into the light of day, we can make more sense of it, and see what’s real about it and what’s not.

Because sometimes there are real things about it. Not having a job does mean there are things I don’t have to do, that people with jobs often have to do. And I can see why someone with a job would envy what they see as my freedom, even if other facts make it clear that I don’t have as much freedom as they imagine I do. But there are real things. But those real things get inflated out of all proportion, because that’s what envy does.

Anyway, I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been on a side considered higher functioning than another side, and envied people I was told were lower functioning. And I’ve been on a side considered lower functioning than another side, and envied people I was told were higher functioning. I’ve been envied by both people who saw themselves as lower functioning than me, and people who saw themselves as higher functioning than me. So I’ve seen this from pretty much every side.

And I’m curious what other people’s experiences have been. I won’t judge you. I can’t promise nobody will. But I won’t. And if I had control over the whole thread, I would not tolerate people just doing the knee-jerk “how dare you envy me when there’s nothing to envy” response. Because it’s fine pointing out that “Hey, some of what you’re envying is all in your imagination.” And I won’t get mad about that, either.

I just don’t want this to devolve into personal attacks, because it can so easily, and that won’t help anyone.

But I would love to hear people’s experiences of envy, and being envied, and what they think about it, when it comes to disability. I guess I’m specifically focusing on autism, because that’s what I’m most familiar with, but any disability will do. I know this happens with every oppressed group, but I feel like disability is enough to start with.

When I say the envy runs both ways, it’s like this:

I just don’t want this to devolve into personal attacks, because it can so easily, and that won’t help anyone.

TL;DR: In the disability community, a lot of people envy each other. People who are considered higher functioning envy those they see as lower functioning, and people who are considered lower functioning envy those they see as higher functioning. I’d like to start a conversation about envy and jealousy in the autistic community and other disability communities, without people judging each other, just getting the envy and stuff out into the light of day where it can be examined instead of hidden the way we all normally do it.