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2:18am
August 4, 2015
it is hard to express…
just how much you can break someone…
…if what you think you’re doing..
..is making them into someone who might someday become a real person worthy of respect…
I had a psychologist once who openly told me that his goal was to kill the person I was, and replace that person, inside me, with a person who was more functional and better adapted to living in the world and less psychotic.
Note that ‘psychotic’, for him, encompassed ‘autistic’. (He was part of a team who had diagnosed me, among other things, as having been ‘psychotic since infancy’. Which can only ever mean autism, because there’s no way to diagnose actual psychosis in an infant. They were taking their ideas straight out of Frances Tustin’s books from the seventies, that differentiated some forms of autism from others, and called some of it autism and some of it childhood schizophrenia or childhood psychosis. I was supposedly psychotic since infancy and schizophrenic since adolescence, although what the difference was, I was never exactly told.)
He did not succeed.
But he did succeed in doing some incredibly scary stuff to the inside of my head. I was unable to defend myself against the things he did, because I was heavily drugged and he was an accomplished manipulator.
I have been told since – by strangers online who know nothing about my life, mind you – that I should’ve known it was impossible for someone to kill who you are and make you into someone else. That if I actually believed him that it was possible, then there was something clearly wrong with me that needed to be fixed, possibly by the very guy who was abusing me in this fashion.
Of all of the abuse I encountered in the psychiatric system, this man’s abuse was the longest-lasting and most damaging in terms of consequences for my mind. I remember going into appointments with him and feeling like I was an entirely different person. Like I’d walk in the door myself, immediately turn into someone else the moment I saw him, and leave the door someone else again. Often I wouldn’t be able to remember our sessions later.
He once let it slip that he’d been trained by a certain school of hypnotherapy. Then he refused to name it again when I and my family asked about it, and got evasive whenever we brought up the subject. I eventually found some stuff by the person, and it was someone who was considered highly unethical by a lot of hypnotherapists, because he believed in lying to patients if he thought lying would bring them around to healing in some manner, and he also believed in involuntary trance induction. When I read about the ‘confusion induction’, it was exactly what this therapist did sometimes.
And being on a very high dose of antipsychotics made it impossible for me to psychologically defend myself. Antipsychotics can have an effect where they basically shatter your cognitive abilities, including your defenses against having your mind invaded. By which I don’t mean like sci-fi telepathy sort of mind invasion, but more like extremely skilled manipulation. If you can’t think straight, you can’t defend yourself well against people who are hell-bent on manipulating you.
But he was incredibly up front about the idea that he was going to kill the person I was inside, and replace that person. He said also that he was going to get inside my mind and never leave. And that if I ever had an original thought, I should bring it to him, because I would probably die if I ever thought for myself for very long.
I remember when a friend first taught me to repeat “I am allowed to think for myself.” She said I needed to repeat it to myself over and over until I really believed it, and that it was very important that I do so. I thought she was trying to kill me. And at first, even beginning to try to repeat it to myself, resulted in this torrent of confusing brain noise that felt like I was drowning. It was like he’d set booby traps all over my mind.
People don’t think this kind of thing is possible.
People are wrong.
I was first able to begin resisting this stuff when I found a book about cults, by a person who had been a cult member and had indoctrinated other people, and he talked in depth about how indoctrination works and how to resist it and remove it from yourself. I had never been in a religious cult, or even in any of the other types of cults in the book, but the residential facility I lived at when all this went down, had a power structure that resembled a cult enough that the book was very useful for me.
I actually confronted him about it once, after I started reading about cults. He told me that anything he did was warranted because if it wasn’t for him I’d have been in a state institution for at minimum the rest of my childhood. Mind you, when given a choice between the residential facility and the state institution, I chose the state institution. I was overruled both because people didn’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the choice I made, and because there were no beds open in the state institution.
But having now talked to people who’ve been in similar residential facilities and in the exact state institution I almost ended up in, I have been told that the state institution was definitely better. Not good, not good by a long shot. In fact, terrible. But better. State institutions don’t usually have the money to throw around for intensive one-on-one 24/7 brainwashing. Which is why many actual patients prefer them to private institutions. Not all patients, and not all institutions, but it’s a preference that occurs often enough, and goes against what most people consider common sense, that it’s been explicitly noted a lot in the psychiatric ex-patient movement. Unfortunately, that preference (and, in general, preferences for places seen as “worse” from the outside for reasons that are largely aesthetic) is often seen as evidence that we lack sanity and should not have control over our lives.
Of course, most of us would prefer no institutions, but when given a choice between different types of institutions, we’ll often choose ones considered “more restrictive” or “worse”. Because our definition of what makes a place worse – as patients, who understand certain things instinctively that other people don’t understand – is often very different from what staff or family members consider worse.
So this idea that he was keeping me out of a state institution doesn’t hold water to me at all.
The idea that he did this for any reason other than his own amusement and power tripping, doesn’t hold water to me at all. He was someone who got off on power and control. Not someone who inadvertently misused power, but someone who craved power and misused it to do harm to people, and often enjoyed doing so.
He also told me that he really enjoyed being able to treat me, because normally people like me were stuck in state institutions and out of his reach, so he didn’t normally get to “work on” anyone like me.
Which was a creepy-ass thing to say.
I learned later that even in psychotherapy that is not deliberately sadistic, there’s a frequent idea that you have to destroy who someone is and replace them with someone more functional.
So I was not imagining that he said this, and the fact that I believed him capable of doing something he kept threatening to do (when he controlled every aspect of my life, too, which can undermine anyone’s sense of reality), does not mean that I “had to have been crazy” and therefore that what he did was somehow okay. (Why is it okay to do that to crazy people but not to sane people, anyway? It shouldn’t be. And why is it okay to imply that I’m crazy – and therefore apparently not worth listening to – because I was horribly abused by a psychologist on a power trip?)
TL;DR: I had a psychologist once who told me that he wanted to kill the person I was and replace me with someone who could function better in the world and generally be a happier and better person or something along those lines. He told me this, explicitly, many times. His abuse did more damage to my mind than the rest of the psychiatric system combined. And the one time I confronted him about the matter, he told me that it was all okay because he was doing it to keep me out of a state institution. Except he was actually doing it because he got off on power and control. Everything else was just an excuse. It was horrible in ways I can’t even describe.
133 notes
5:58am
August 2, 2015
Whenever my parrot flips out and gets angry, I say, “Hey,” in this soft, comforting voice and then talk to him gently. He calms down within seconds.
I just got frustrated enough at something that I went, “ARGH.” My parrot said, “Hey,” all softly and sweetly like a dozen times over the next minute. It made me feel better instantly.
My parrot is better at conflict de-escalation than most people.
Whoa, shit. I guess this would be the post. This had like, 400 notes when it was clogging my activity the other day. I figured all the new followers were because it had reached a couple thousand or something.
Please don’t get a parrot; read this. The reason my parrot is like this is because I drop everything all day to make sure he is emotionally well. He treats me like I treat him. I treat him as if he’s as important and nearly as cognitively and emotionally complex as a human. I put myself in his shoes psychologically and make some adjustments for the kinds of urges and social behavior birds have. Doing anything other than that – underestimating his needs, underestimating his ability to think about the world around him and reach logical conclusions, underestimating his ability to recognize the inherent unfairness of our complete control over him – worked out VERY poorly. Following the advice of bird training books worked out very poorly.
The first five years or so that we had him, I did not do a good job of ensuring he was emotionally stable because I didn’t understand his needs or behavior as well as I thought I would after over a decade of owning smaller birds. I gave him food and water and toys and played with him, so I didn’t understand why he would act crazy. His personality was MUCH less gentle and my misunderstanding of him drove me to tears many times.
He only became the gentle bird he is because I quit thinking of him as inherently lesser and respected his cognitive abilities more. Parrots didn’t evolve to be intelligent just so they can solve puzzles in the wild, they evolved to be intelligent because social animals have to make inferences about the motives and feelings of other creatures around them. If you try to force them to do too much, or are impatient when you need them to go in their cage, or don’t let them out of their cage when they don’t perceive any good reason for it, or punish them for natural behavior, they recognize how unfair it is. They mistrust you, and dislike you, and they hold grudges. They start to perceive your behavior as petty and unreasonable, and when there’s some complicated human context they don’t understand, they think you’re unpredictable and are on-edge around you. They don’t care if they’re mean to you because you deserve it, and they’re right.
He only got to be this nice because I started asking myself questions: Would I want someone to do this to me? Would I feel comfortable going in my cage for no reason, or would I think that was bullshit and want an explanation first? Would I feel safe willingly going into a cage when a scary human is angry and too aggressive with me, or would that be the LAST thing that would make me feel safe? Would I like someone who talks whenever they want, but then screams at me when I make noise? Would I cooperate with someone who puts a blanket over my cage when I was just trying to socialize with them? Or would I be intensely depressed all the time and scream with anxiety and sadness and hate the very sight of them?
Those are things people do to parrots every day, and wonder why their parrots don’t like them or act difficult.
Now we are almost always very gentle in tone and demeanor with our parrot. We give him explanations when he has to go in his cage, and we apologize for it and tell him we don’t like to do it but it’s for his own safety, and we praise him effusively for cooperating. It doesn’t matter if he understands the content of what we’re saying, he understands that we respect him and we’re not putting him in his cage to be mean or controlling. He feels like he has some choice. And sometimes if he doesn’t want to go, we just let him stay out a little longer.
Please please please do not get a parrot. It is very hard to try to work out what conclusions a parrot has drawn from an interaction because it’s hard to erase all the human context we take for granted. Very few people have the patience to do that for an animal.
This post is a great example because my parrot used to be vicious toward me when I was frustrated. For years I didn’t understand why my parrot would get angry at me and try to bite me when I cried. Only last year I realized it was because years ago, I would start crying when he wouldn’t go in his cage and I had to force him. Naturally, his response to being handled more roughly was to bite, because put yourself in that position. You’d fight back too! So my crying was associated with those struggles.
He remembered that for years. Even though we’ve been great for the past couple years, as soon as I would start crying for some unrelated reason (usually writing something sad) his mood would change immediately. He thought, shit, here it comes, she’s gonna flip out on me and I haven’t even done anything wrong, I never did anything to deserve it before, she just does this! Because how could he possibly understand that I needed to go work on something all those times? And even if he could understand that, why would he think that justifies imprisoning him? Of course he wouldn’t. It isn’t fair. So of course his response to my crying was to get pre-emptively hostile; he wasn’t about to let me dick him around again.
The only reason I didn’t realize that for so many years was simply because it was so hard to get past how I thought about those things as a human. From my perspective, it had just been that I had to write and he was being too needy so I had to put him up. When he wouldn’t cooperate, I would focus on my frustration, on how irritating it was that I couldn’t even do a simple thing like write. But think about how good you feel when you’re needy and people shove you away, you know? It makes everything way worse.
After that realization, every time I cried around him I would stop and say, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, I’m not mad at you, you’re such a good bird, mommy’s okay,” and stroke his beak, even when he tried to bite my fingers because he was convinced I was going to start bossing him around. Only now can I cry around him without setting him off. I had to reassure him I’m not an unreasonable maniac who’s gonna start shit with him out of nowhere, because that’s exactly how he perceived me for so long.
And he wasn’t wrong to perceive me that way. He was accurate, and I was too ignorant and self-absorbed to recognize how tyrannical my behavior had been. Humans don’t usually label their own behavior as tyrannical. Every tyrant thinks it’s their right.
That stuff sticks with social creatures. And parrots are smart. They don’t have a the same sort of cortex like humans, but instead they developed an area of their brain that serves much the same purpose. Any higher intelligence that evolves from a different branch of life is going to have a brain that doesn’t look like a mammalian brain, but that doesn’t mean it can’t do the same things. It means it had to evolve from a different set-up, just like there are tons of different evolutionary models for eyes, or various organs. Different hardware can run the same sorts of software, and sometimes different hardware runs VERY similar software.
You can’t accept that parrots are cognitively advanced and separate that from its emotional applications. Yeah, my parrot can form new sentences that make sense and use them in context. My parrot sits around taking songs he knows, and making variations on them, and mashing them together where they sound similar. He works out spatial puzzles, and he figures out how to reach things he can’t.
BUT THEY ARE SOCIAL. THEY HAVE EMOTIONS. THERE IS NO FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN THOSE THINGS JUST BECAUSE HUMANS WOULD SURE FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE IF THERE WAS.
Parrots analyze you, they stew, they plot revenge if they’re angry. Back in the day, my parrot had some REALLY tricky ways of scoring a hit on me. For example, he would put on a nice demeanor, TOTALLY devoid of the usual parrot body language warning signs, ask for a kiss, then bite me. He would demurely put his head down to be preened, then bite me. He would drop a toy so I would pick it up, then he’d jump me while I was bending down, and bite me. And I was super sweet to my parrot 95% of the time, I even got frustrated less frequently than most people! Parrots, just like other intelligent social animals, sure as fuck use that intelligence for emotional reasons.
People underestimate parrots, not just cognitively but psychologically. As much as bird training books want to advise people to be more forceful, or use treats to train them to comply, that’s all cruel and manipulative and doesn’t foster a respectful relationship. They know they’re just doing something solely to avoid your anger, or to get food from you. They don’t mistake that for affection. They see that you can eat whatever you want and choose not to share things with them. They see that you make them jump through hoops the humans in the household don’t have to. They see that you (hopefully) don’t treat the other humans with the same impatience and hostility and forcefulness that’s directed at them. Those training methods only ever made my parrot worse. They’re not as stupid as we want to tell ourselves, and they won’t show empathy to someone who doesn’t have empathy for them, because why should they? At best, you can break their spirit. Many well-meaning decent people do not realize they have done this.
Which is one reason why so many parrots end up in rescues due to self-mutilation. Parrots literally kill themselves sometimes. Google it if you want to see horrifying pictures.
Seriously. You can’t get a parrot and expect it to behave the way mine does now. It almost certainly won’t. My parrot doesn’t behave this way because parrots are sweet and cool and want to love you, he behaves this way because I learned to be a less shitty human who respects that he has a rich inner life and does not exist to serve my happiness.
Parrots are very much not like other pets. They resemble children in the level of care and attention they need. I know, I know, everyone says their pets are “like their children” – but this isn’t an analogy of how much you love your pet, it’s about the actual cognitive and psychological structure of a parrot.
If a parrot does not get the same level of intellectual and social stimulation needed by a human child (and no, parrots are not just human children with feathers, and adult parrots are adult parrots, but it’s still an important analogy to make because no other analogy comes close to describing the reality), the parrot will suffer horribly, develop intense psychiatric problems, and may begin to self-harm or even, in extreme cases, commit suicide by pecking out their own organs. (Think about the level of torment it would take to get you to choose such a violent mode of death.)
If you are not ready to take care of a human child, you are not ready to take care of a parrot, end of story. They require the same kind and level of care, and planning for their future (because if taken care of properly, they will possibly outlive you). Parrots (aside from budgies) are also wild animals, with everything that entails.
Additionally, you have to learn a lot about their particular physiology, because otherwise you can inadvertently cause their deaths by doing something as simple as cooking with Teflon (this is why many people think birds “don’t last long”, because they’re so easy to kill in so many ways that people wouldn’t expect, that’s where the whole canary in the coal mine thing came from, they’re super-sensitive to bad things in the air because they’re designed to take as much oxygen out of the air as possible, for flight purposes, but that also means they take a lot of toxins out of the air too).
You have to stimulate them as much as you would a child, talk to them as much as you would a child, and try as hard as you can to learn the way they talk back as much as you would a child who had a communication disability that made understanding their speech extremely difficult (assuming you’re dealing with a species with at least a somewhat “squawky” voice – often the species with the clearest voices, like African Greys, are considered to have better language skills, even though all they have is clearer speech… there are other species like Quaker parrots, with just as good language skills, but you can barely understand a word they say because they have trouble duplicating certain human speech sounds).
And yes, if you talk to your parrot normally, instead of getting in their face and saying “PRETTY BIRD POLLY WANNA CRACKER?” or training them to repeat things by using treats, then they will almost always pick up the meaning of your words, and will generally learn to use at least some words appropriately in conversation. They will even recombine words when they don’t know the word for something, and use words in ways that reflect their understanding of the world. For instance, I have a friend whose parrot once said in a very clear voice, “Mommy, come here, help me!” And at first she didn’t understand. But then she realized that “help me” meant “pick me up”. My friend is in a wheelchair and when she needs help transferring she says “help me” and someone picks her up. So the bird learned that “help me” means “pick me up”.
My friend talks to her parrot all the time, explaining everything about the human world that might be confusing to her. This has helped the parrot deal with certain things, in a way that you couldn’t do with an animal that didn’t understand English. For instance, the parrot was afraid of firecrackers during the fourth of July, and she explained, “It’s not a big deal, humans just like to blow things up during some of our holidays, nothing’s going to hurt you.” And as soon as the parrot got the explanation, she calmed down. That doesn’t always work for everything she’s afraid of, but it works more often than most people would believe. I know cats who understand far more English than they’re given credit for (and some of them even try to repeat some English words), but even they don’t understand enough for that kind of thing to work for them.
Oh a cool fact about Quaker parrots that may be true of some other parrots: They choose their own names. In infancy, they experiment with a variety of sounds. At a certain point, they choose a certain sound as their personal name-sound, and after they’ve made that choice, every other bird in the flock calls them that for the rest of their lives. I think it’s really cool there’s a species that names themselves in infancy and that’s an actual thing. I’m pretty sure that eventually it’ll be found that many parrots have language of their own. If prairie dogs have been found to have a large vocabulary, then surely a group of birds now increasingly known for being able to speak and understand and answer multiple novel questions in actual English have those abilities because they have languages of their own in the wild. Maybe not languages as complex as human languages, but maybe as complex, we just don’t know yet. I just can’t see them having the ability to learn English and other human languages, without them using that ability among themselves.
Don’t believe me about the language skills being real? Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzPiTwDE0bE
That’s a parrot who was chosen at random from a pet store, and who learned to answer multiple novel questions about the same groups of objects with a high level of accuracy (although he’d also eventually get bored and refuse to cooperate on purpose, giving wrong answers almost as a way of saying “fuck you I’m sick of this, let’s do something less boring” to the scientists, so they had to find ways of keeping his interest). Which simply can’t be done if you have no ability to actually use and comprehend language on a high level. Parrots don’t just “parrot” unless all you do is teach them to “parrot”. There are some human beings with fewer language skills than most parrots have – that’s the level of actual skill overlap they have with our species, and it’s not just language, it’s also many other cognitive traits as well that they share with humans. Also some of their social skills are often better than those of adult humans, which means, among many other things, they can end up figuring out how to get you to do whatever they want without you even realizing they’re doing it until later.
I get very angry when I hear people say my friend “spoils” her parrot because of the amount of toys she has on her cage. If you leave your parrot in a mostly-bare cage all day, you’re doing the equivalent of locking a five-year-old child in a bare playpen by themselves all day long (and then wondering why they don’t act all friendly when you come home). Providing the amount of stimulation they actually need in order to be emotionally healthy is not spoiling them, it’s doing the bare minimum they require in order to be happy! She did once have a rather spoiled parrot (because she didn’t know at first how to take care of one, and made a lot of rookie mistakes), but this particular parrot is a rescue parrot who’s been to hell and back and almost didn’t survive, she’s tough as nails, and she’s anything but spoiled. And my friend is now experienced enough to know when and how to say no to a bird, and when to give the bird what the bird wants and needs.
So having a parrot is like having a human around, in terms of their needs. It’s true that just about every animal needs more respect and stimulation than they’re generally given by humans, because humans are often kind of shitty towards animals. But some animals need so much intellectual and social stimulation that it’s really on a different order than the average pet, and more like having a human around. Not because they’re in any way human, but because they have some of the same needs at the same level that humans do, whereas other animals don’t always. Like, all animals need to be loved, respected, and stimulated. But you can have, say, a very psychologically healthy cat, in a situation where if you put a parrot (or a human) in the same situation they would develop severe emotional problems or even become suicidally depressed.
And that’s what people mean when they say having a parrot is like having a child. They’re not talking about attachment or love, they’re talking about the actual needs of the animal as compared to some other animals that are more tolerant of being given less intense social and intellectual stimulation from humans. And most parrots in most places get a bad name as pets specifically because most parrots are grossly neglected by their humans and develop intense emotional problems as a result, and then humans assume that’s just their normal personalities. So don’t get a parrot unless you want to put the amount of time and effort you’d put into a kid, it’s not fair to the parrot and many end up in parrot sanctuaries (if they’re lucky!) after people can’t deal with them anymore, often after years of severe neglect or even abuse. (And, as one shelter owner put it on a video I saw “…and then the guilt sets in, and then they end up here.”)
I once heard a description of a parrot sanctuary at night when the humans had turned off the lights and left the parrots to talk among themselves… and a lot of the parrots were saying horrible things that had clearly been said to them, and that they took completely to heart because they actually understood the fucking words, not just the tone behind them.
I know people who think it’s funny to say awful things to dogs in a “loving” tone of voice because the dogs (sometimes, but not always! never underestimate them entirely, because sometimes some dogs do understand some words as actual words, that’s how sheepdogs learn dozens of commands after all) don’t understand the actual words being used. I think that’s a fairly twisted and mean-spirited thing to do, even when people think they don’t mean anything by it, it just has this air of condescension to it that makes my stomach turn. (Especially since I’ve had people do the same thing to me when they thought I couldn’t understand them. And I’ve seen people do the same to other autistic people. Not cool. Ever.)
If you were to say awful things to a parrot in a “loving” tone of voice, and the parrot has had any normal exposure to the language you’re speaking since the parrot was little? Then they probably understand exactly what you’re saying to them, and they will decide you’re a jackass, unless they decide you’re right. Either way it can have tragic consequences, so just don’t? Ever? With any animal? No matter how little you think they understand you? Humans with presumed comprehension problems included in this?
FFS, just don’t, ever, underestimate the needs of a parrot. It’s hard to say this without making it sound like other animals don’t have needs. And that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that what parrots need is so intense that it’s on a completely different order than, say, what a cat needs. A cat still needs more than most humans will ever give a cat. But a cat can be healthy and happy in a situation that would destroy your average parrot, or human, or dolphin, or ape, or other animal that has an extremely active and complex mind of a certain very particular type that requires a very particular type of stimulation, combined with an equally intense and complex level of social needs. Cats are far more complex intellectually and socially than they’re given credit for, and they need more than they are generally ever given, but they still don’t have the same needs from their humans as parrots do. It’s a completely different ball game for a wide variety of reasons. No matter what pet you get, they need more respect and stimulation than most humans will give them, but parrots need roughly no less than what humans need, and that’s a lot.
I also agree completely about people mistaking the relationship you have with an animal, for the animal themselves. I wrote a post recently about how people are always telling me they “wish they had a cat like Fey”, when I know that if they took Fey home with them they would be probably more unsatisfied with her than they are with their cats. (Because Fey expects, and therefore demands, a certain level of respect, and will not hesitate to lash out if you cross certain boundaries with her. I know that these same people would call such a cat “mean”.) What they really mean is that they wish they had the relationship with their cat that I have with Fey. But they don’t know they mean that, so they blame the cat, instead of the way they relate to cats in general. I wrote an entire post about this recently, you can read it here: Fey is not an unusual cat.
That post is probably worth reading if you have that reaction about any type of animal, because the same pitfalls apply with regard to respecting any kind of animal.
But I can see why the OP is extremely wary of people reading about their relationship with their parrot and saying “Oh I want a parrot then!” Without having any idea what a parrot entails, and without having any idea that the reason this person has such an amazing parrot is not the parrot, but the fact that they have forged a relationship with a particular bird through intense respect and getting to know each other over time. Wanting “a parrot” because you see someone who has a good relationship with their parrot is sort of like “wanting a cat like Fey” – it’s not going to happen unless you change how you relate to the person in question, whether that person is human, cat, bird, or some other animal. You can’t have a good relationship with someone without respecting that person.(1) And you can’t respect a parrot without at least making your best effort to provide that parrot with the level of stimulation a parrot needs, which is a whole whole whole lot more than most pets need.
(1) Although some people – both with humans and with animals, but
especially with animals and with especially some types of humans (who aren’t for whatever reason,
such as age-related or disability-related reasons, able to talk back or
contradict them in any way) – manage to forge entirely fake and imaginary
relationships with someone and then pretend the person’s protestations
don’t even exist. This is a horrible thing to do to anyone. Don’t.
Ever. This is not respect no matter how much you sugar-coat it to
yourself and pretend it’s different than it is. You can do more damage
to a relationship this way than with some forms of outright abuse,
depending on the situation.
See Ashley X and the whole “pillow angel” thing for an extreme example of what can happen to a human this is done to with impunity because of a disability that prevents her talking back. What her parents have done to her is not love, but they’re convinced it is, because they have an imaginary version of her in their heads and she can’t tell them it’s imaginary, at least not in any way they’re willing to listen to (she’s probably telling them all the time through subtle actions, such as eye movements, that they ignore or willfully misinterpret). I pick that as an example because it has all the hallmarks of how some people (whose actions seriously disturb me but who aren’t doing anything legally considered abuse or neglect) treat their pets, but it’s being done to a human being because she can’t talk back or escape the situation. It can also be done to humans who are too young, too scared, or too passive to talk back, in addition to humans who have disabilities that make talking back (or being listened to when we do) difficult. And it can even be done to people who talk back very vociferously, as long as the person lives in enough of a fantasy world to totally ignore what the person they’re doing it to is saying, or to attribute it to everything but what it actually is.
All of this is often unintentional on the part of the person doing it, but it’s no less damaging for all that. I know so many cats whose humans pick them up and make coochy-coo noises and blow into their stomachs and stuff like that, while the cat has learned to go limp and let their eyes glaze over, and the human mistakes this reaction for affection, and it turns my stomach every time I see that dynamic happening. Sometimes the worst offenders are people who think they’re “good with cats” but are rather simply good at making cats submit to their wills for the duration of their interaction. Which reminds me – if I tell you that Fey doesn’t like being touched on a particular body part (she has nerve damage) and you instantly try to touch that body part to prove that you’re a special person who can get away with touching it (and on a good day she’ll let you, it doesn’t make it right)? I’ll just decide you’re a total asshole, I will not decide you’re a person with a ~special way with cats~. Because I can actually read Fey’s body language, unlike you, and that means I know when she’s deliberately restraining herself from clawing your face off, because she actually does try to be at least somewhat polite to clueless hairless apes. You’re meanwhile ignoring Fey’s body language because she’s telling you something you don’t want to hear, and that does not equal being “good with cats” in any way shape or form.
There was a wonderful episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic that explored the dark side of being “good with animals” when Fluttershy tries to force her companionship and “love” for animals on animals that don’t want it, with utterly horrifying results. I loved that scene, not because I don’t like Fluttershy, but because it shows how even someone who seems meek and “good with animals” can get an ego about it and do horrible violating things in the name of “love” (she gets to the point where she starts setting traps for animals and then trying to befriend them right after she’s scared the shit out of them, and doesn’t seem to notice this isn’t love in any way shape or form). Unfortunately the Youtube video has been taken down for copyright infringement, but it’s the gala episode, if you can find that anywhere. It’s well worth watching, although it’s pretty horrifying and potentially triggering if you’ve ever seen it in action in real life. It has the exact right sickeningly cloyingly nauseatingly sweet quality that the whole “pillow angel” mentality has, too. (And no, I’m not saying animals can’t be cute or that people shouldn’t ever react to them as if they’re cute, but there’s an entire… mentality… that goes well beyond “cute” into “horrifying”.)
1:38am
July 27, 2015
When a doctor didn’t believe me but then test results proved I was right…
whatshouldwecallchronicillness:
[animated GIF deleted because it was giving me a headache, even though it was half the point of the post, sorry I just couldn’t reblog it… it was basically a guy looking satisfied with himself, but his head jerking over and over was messing iwth my brain functioning]
This happens to me ALWAYS.
ALWAYS.
I have so many test results proving myself right, and yet some doctors refuse to learn to trust me despite my rather extreme track record in this regard.
Just recently I said I was bleeding out of my stoma to a ridiculous degree. Showed the guy replacing my tube that the toilet was full of blood, told him there was at least ten times as much blood as was in the picture. He told me the blood was actually bile and that I was not bleeding. A week later I got an endoscopy that showed an ulcer with a giant blood vessel right in the middle of it, spewing blood and blood clots. But I know that even if I go back to this doctor and tell him this happened, he’ll laugh at me at best. Because he does that. He laughed at me when I said I knew the difference betwee bile and blood, and then he literally refused to respond to anything I said the entire rest of the time we were in a room together. Literally just ignored eery word I said as if I wasn’t talking. It was incredible rudeness. But it seems like everyone around him goes “well that’s just what he’s like” so it’s supposed to be okay, there’s like this culture of excusing it because he’s a doctor or something. IDK. I’m always afraid of running into him because I just get sick of his bullshit attitude towards me, which has always varied between condescending, contemptuous, and hostile.
Does your hospital have Code/Condition H/HELP? (It varies in terminology?) Basically, if you can’t get your doctor to listen to your concerns, you (or your family) dial the in-hospital hotline and report the code, and you’re seen by designated responders who address your concerns immediately and investigate why your doctor was ignoring/dismissing you. I’ve never had to use it, but I was made aware of it last time I was an inpatient.
It has Patient Relations, which I’ve had to use multiple times, usually when I was far too out of it to actually call them myself, so my DPA ended up doing it. It was sometimes an extreme struggle even then. Luckily my main doctors all believe me about stuff – they’d be stupid not to at this point, as I said I have so many tests backing up so much stuff I’ve said that they no longer doubt anything I say. But when I end up in different departments of the hospital, I often run into trouble of various kinds. And sometimes it’s trouble that would not be worth calling Patient Relations over. But sometimes it’s life and death stuff. And I never know which it’s going to be. But I have never been able to successfully contact them myself, it’s always been done for me.
One example was the time they said that because I had a developmental disability, I would need an outside staff person with me 24/7 before they’d agree to admit me, even though I’d been hospitalized there many times before and had never caused any trouble or needed anything that different from any other patient because of being DD. My DPA called Patient Relations and I was admitted immediately. But then they immediately started trying to throw me out, and it took the combined efforts of several of my regular doctors to keep me there. And then it was a fight to get life-saving medical treatment, where even Patient Relations couldn’t help us and we had to turn to the Internet and the threat of bad publicity. (They conceded, when pressed, that I needed the treatment in order to survive. They just kept coming into my room every day, several times a day, trying to persuade me not to accept the treatment. Once people started calling the hospital, they suddenly said “You’re getting your feeding tube tomorrow.” And I only got one more bizarre visit trying to dissuade me, and even that was half-hearted on the part of the doctor.)
Then when I got the feeding tube and there were complications, they ignored my pain levels (because a part of the tube was lodged in the wrong part of my body, causing excruciating pain any time I moved at all) and ignored the fact that something could be wrong, and treated me like I was just complaining too much and that if heart patients could stand up then I could surely stand up even though I couldn’t roll over in bed without sobbing my eyes out. Meanwhile my roommate got tons of pain meds thrown at every twinge she had no matter how minor, and told stories of a procedure similar to the one I’d had, and talked about how wonderful it was that any time she squeezed their hand they’d give her more anesthesia so she wouldn’t feel the pain. (I had my procedure screaming in pain due to non-working anesthesia and was simply told “hold on” for the entire hour or so the procedure took. I was also told “You won’t remember this later so it doesn’t matter that it hurts.” I still remember that, all of it. Nobody gently held my hand and told me to squeeze if I felt pain so they could adjust the anesthetic. They just treated me like my yelling and squirming was bad behavior.)
And that was all in one hospital stay, a couple years ago. So Patient Relations was helpful for parts of it but couldn’t do anything about other parts. And this is far from the only time I’ve had to involve Patient Relations. There was the time they decided that I could eat just fine, gave me a giant fish dinner, and I puked it all up of course, but they said I was good to go home even though I couldn’t keep down any of my meds and needed IV replacements so I wouldn’t die. And then when I refused a med that was on my chart as something I was allergic to, threatened to stick it up my butt if I “refused” it. My DPA called Patient Relations and suddenly I was given a week to recover and start eating on my own, given new nausea meds, etc. (That was my first gastroparesis hospitalization, but we didn’t know back then that I had gastroparesis. They just thought I was randomly extremely nauseated.)
And there was the time I belonged in the ICU – one of many times probably – but my doctor said he would only treat pneumonia, not any of the other conditions I had, because pneumonia was what I was brought in for, therefore… none of my other conditions mattered. (Those conditions were eventually found to be gastroparesis, myasthenia gravis, and adrenal insufficiency, all of which were messed up either by the pneumonia or by the treatments for pneumonia or both.) Nobody put me in the ICU, although they did transfer me to a better ward after someone kicked up a fuss about them ignoring my needs when I was on the cardiac ward (as overflow, not as a cardiac patient – they didn’t like the fact that I was violently ill and making their quiet, sedate ward too noisy – so they simply closed my door and pretended I didn’t exist and that my call bell didn’t exist either). I was severely delirious and in no state to explain everything that was happening to anyone, and I’m lucky I didn’t die. (I know what death looks like, and it was sitting patiently next to my bed for weeks.)
And on, and on, and on. I could tell so many stories, and Patient Relations only helps sometimes, in some situations, to some degree.
10:47pm
July 26, 2015
slashmarks replied to your post:“slashmarks replied to your post: “slashmarks replied to your…”:
yeah. on the other hand past a certain point of triggered I just start screaming and crying and can’t stop (this happened a few times w/ ex-partner) so, like, it is hard to misinterpret that as consentyeah I am doctor trained so I automatically agree to be touched so it has already been mistaken as consent 2x and I have just been lucky things didn’t go very far :/
Yeah consent can look very weird when one of the people involved is the sort of disabled person who has to get naked and/or be touched in private regions by medical professionals on a regular basis. I literally have people touching my vulva and my butt every single day of the week except Sundays. This absolutely shapes how I respond to people seeing me naked and touching me there or anywhere else. It is extremely difficult to teach myself things like body modesty but I try really really hard to remember those things because I know it will protect me from abuse if I can. But it’s hard, when no part of your body is truly private in practice, to remember that there are private parts, when in sexual situations.
7:51pm
July 22, 2015
Transcript of Sandra Bland arrest video [8:40-15:25]
Cop: Ok, Ma’am. You ok?
SB: I’m waitin’ on you. This is your job. I’m waitin’ on you…
Cop: You seem very irritated.
SB: I am. I really am because I feel like what I’m getting a ticket for, I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over, and you stop me. So, yeah, I am a little irritated, but that doesn’t stop you from giving me a ticket.
Cop: Are you done?
SB: You asked me what was wrong and I told you. So now I’m done, yeah.
Cop: Ok. You mind putting out your cigarette, please?
SB: I’m in my car. Why do I have to put out my cigarette?
Cop: Well you can step on out now.
SB: I don’t have to step out of my car.
Cop: Step out of the car. [Cop opens the car door] Step out.
SB: No, you don’t have the right-
Cop: Step out of the car!
SB: You do not have the right to do that.
Cop: I do have the right. Now, step out or I will remove you.
SB: I refuse to talk to you other than to identify myself-
Cop: Step out or I will remove you.
SB: I am getting removed for a failure to-
Cop: Step out or I will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order. Get out of the car now or I’m gonna remove you.
SB: I’m calling my-
Cop:[Cop reaches into the car] I’m gonna yank you out of here.
SB: Okay, you gonna yank me out of my car?
Cop: Get out.
SB: Ok. Alright. Let’s do this. Don’t touch me.
Cop: Get out of the car!
SB: Don’t touch me! I’m not under arrest. You don’t have the right to-
Cop: You ARE under arrest.
SB: I’m under arrest for what? For what? For what?
Cop: Get out of the car. Get out of the car! Now!
SB: Why am I being apprehended? Because you’re trying to give me a ticket for a failure-
Cop: I said get out of the car.
SB: Why am I being apprehended? You opened my car door-
Cop: I am gonna drag you outta here.
SB: So you’re threatening to drag me out of my own car?
Cop: Get out of the car!!
SB: And then you-
Cop: [Cop points his taser at her.] I will light you up!!
SB: Wow.
Cop: NOW!!
SB: Wow. [Sandra steps out of the car.]
Cop: Get out of the car!
SB: For a failure to signal, you’re doing all this. You’re doing all this for a failure to signal.
Cop: Get over there. [Cop points her over to the sidewalk, while pointing his taser at her.]
SB: Right. Yeah. Let’s take this to court. [Sandra continues to walk toward the sidewalk.] Let’s do this for a failure to signal. Yep, for a failure to signal. [Sandra is led out of the view of the dashcam video.]
Cop: Get off the phone.
SB: I’m not on the phone. I have a right to record-
Cop: Put your phone down.
SB: This is my property.
Cop: Put your phone down.
SB: Sir?
Cop: Put your phone down. Right now! Put your phone down.
SB: [Sandra puts her phone down on the trunk of her car.] For a fucking failure to signal, my goodness.
Cop: Come over here!
SB: Y’all are interesting. You feelin’ good about this whole thing?
Cop: Stand right here.
SB: You feelin’ good about yourself? For my failure to signal, you feel real good about yourself, don’t you?
Cop: Turn around.
SB: You feel good about yourself, don’t you?
Cop: Turn around. Turn around now. Put your hands-
SB: Why am I being arrested?
Cop: I’m giving you a lawful order. I will tell you-
SB: Why am I being arrested? Why can’t you tell me that part?
Cop: I’m giving you a lawful order. Turn around.
SB: Why will you not tell me what’s going on?
Cop: You are not compliant.
SB: I’m not compliant ‘cause you just pulled me outta my car.
Cop: Turn around!!
SB: Are you fucking kidding me? This is some bullshit.
Cop: Put your hands behind your back.
SB: Cause you know this is straight bullshit, and you full a shit. Full a straight shit. That’s why y’all are some scary fucking cops. South Carolina got all y’all bitch asses scared. That’s all it is. Fucking scared of a female.
Cop: If you would have just listened-
SB: I was tryin’ sign the fucking ticket. Whatever.
Cop: Stop movin’!
SB: Are you fucking serious?
Cop: Stop movin’.
SB: Oh, I can’t wait till we go to court. OH, I can’t wait! I cannot WAIT ‘till we go to court! I can’t wait. OH, I can’t wait. You want me to sit down now?
Cop: No.
SB: Oh, you gonna throw me to the floor? That’ll make you feel better about yourself?
Cop: Knock it off.
SB: Ah, that’ll make you feel better about yourself? That make you feel real good, won’t it? Fucking ass. Fucking pussy. For a failure to signal, you doin’ all of this. In little ass Prairie View, Texas. My god. They must-
Cop: You were getting a warning, and now you’re going to jail.
SB: For what??
Cop: You can come read right- [Cop leads Sandra back over to the trunk of the car.]
SB: I’m getting a warning for what?
Cop: Stay right here.
SB: You just pointed me over there!
Cop: I said stay right here.
SB: Get your fucking mind right. OH, I swear on my life, y’all some pussies. A pussy ass cop pulls for a fucking signal, you’re takin’ me to jail. What a pussy. What a pussy. What a- you about to break my fucking wrist.
Cop: Stop movin’!
SB: I’m standin’ still! You keep movin’ me, goddamn it!
Cop: Stay right there.
SB: Don’t touch me. Fucking pussy, for a traffic ticket.
Cop: [Goes around the car and closes the front door. Walks back off screen to where Sandra is on the sidewalk.] Come read right over here. [He stands by the trunk of the car and shows her the written warning.] This right here says a warning. YOU started creating a problem. [Cop walks out of shot, toward Sandra.]
SB: You asked me what was wrong!
Cop: Do you have anything in your purse that’s illegal?
SB: Do I look like I have anything on me? This a fuckin’ maxi dress!
Cop: I’m removing your glasses.
SB: This a maxi dress.
Cop: Come on over here.
SB: Fucking assholes. For a- you about to break my wrist! Can you STOP!? You are mother fuckin’ about to break my wrist! [Sandra makes sounds of pain.] STOOOPP!
Cop: [Sounds of struggle.] Stop! Now! Stop it!
Cop 2: Stop resisting, ma’am.
Cop: If you would stop then I would tell you!
SB: [In pain.] For a fucking traffic ticket.
Cop: Now stop!
SB: [In pain.] You are such a pussy. You are such a pussy.
Cop 2: No, you are.
Cop: You were yankin’ around.
SB: [In pain.] For a traffic signal.
Cop: You were yankin’ around. When you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.
SB: This make you feel real good. This make you feel real good, don’t it? A female for a traffic signal. For a traffic signal. I know that makes you feel good, officer.
Cop 2: I got her. I got her.
SB: I know it make you feel real good. You a real man now. You slam me, knock my head into the ground, I got epilepsy, you mother fucker.
Cop: Good. Good.
SB: I hope I-
Cop 2: You should have thought of that before you start resisting!
SB: Yeah, this is real good. Real good for a female. Yeah. Y’all strong, ooh. Y’all real strong.
Cop: I want you to wait right here. Wait right here.
SB: I can’t go nowhere with your fucking knee on my back. Duh.
Cop: [To Cop 2] I’m gonna open your door. [To man recording the brutality.] You need to leave. You need to leave. You need to leave.
SB: [inaudible] For a fucking traffic ticket.
Cop: For a warning. For a warning. You’re going to jail for resisting arrest. Stand up.
SB: If I could!
Cop: Roll over.
SB: I can’t even fuckin’ feel my arm!
Cop: Tuck your knee in.
SB: I can’t-
Cop: Listen, listen, you’re gonna sit up on your butt.
SB: You just slammed my head into the ground. Do you not even care about that?
Cop 2: He’s telling you to getup.
SB: I can’t even hear!
Cop 2: Yes you can.
Cop: Sit on your butt.
SB: You slammed my head into the ground.
Cop: Sit up on your butt.
SB: He threw my fucking head to the ground. What the hell?
Cop: Now stand up.
SB: All this for a traffic signal. I swear to god. All of this for a traffic signal. [To witness.] Thank you for recording! Thank you! For a traffic signal. Slammed me into the ground and everything. Everything. I hope y’all feel good.
Remember when we kept telling y'all, white tumblr, that “know your rights” and all those videos of y'all talking to cops however you please was only for y'all? That it was white privilege? Yeah.
7:27pm
July 21, 2015
Beware of folks who trigger others on purpose
There are people who like other people to be intensely emotionally dependent on them. They like to control people through this emotional dependence. And they like to think of this control and forced dependence as understanding the target on a deep level, rescuing them, and helping them to heal.
One way this happens is that the controller will deliberately trigger the target over and over. And then get really good at triggering them and then comforting them. And this can – in the short term, make the target feel safe and understood. Because having someone react in a way that feels comforting when you’re triggered can be really reassuring, especially when people have reacted with fear or contempt in the past.
And it can be really hard to figure out that someone is intentionally and repeatedly triggering you. It can be *especially* hard to realize they’re doing this if they also have some actual insight about the issues you’re struggling with. And it can also be harder to understand what’s going on if they’re also supporting you in other ways, like offering a place to stay or help finding a job.
And the longer this goes on, the more they know about you. And the more they know, the more power they have to trigger you at will. And when you show independence, or do something they don’t want, or do something on your own initiative rather than relying on their help, or say no to help they’re offering – then they don’t react reasonably. They use your triggers to disorient you. They convince you that you don’t really understand anything that’s going on, and that you are just reacting to past traumas. And that in order to approximate being a real person, you have to rely on their judgement rather than yours.
A wide range of people do this. Sometimes it’s a friend. Sometimes it’s a licensed therapist with a good professional reputation. Someone’s it’s a coworker. Sometimes it’s a social worker. Sometimes it’s a partner. It can arise out of a lot of different kinds of relationships. It’s always wrong, no matter what someone thinks their intentions are.
And it’s not your fault. If you’re in that situation, someone’s probably got you half-convinced that this is only happening because you’re broken and need help. But that’s not what’s going on; this is something someone is doing to you, not something that inherently happens to people like you. No one, no matter what problems they have, should ever be treated like this.
This has happened to me many times. Sucks every time.
6:18am
July 5, 2015
I love this. Its in all the toilets at the local birth centre and basically if your in a domestic violence relationship and cant speak out about it you take one of the stickers and place it on the urine pot and the midwife will speak to you after about it and get you the help needed to flee the violence. So upsetting how many stickers have already gone tho :(
Wow this is an amazing idea.
3:35am
June 15, 2015
Here’s a shoutout to the people who have gotten more sick or injured because of doctor’s error. Society puts doctors on a huge pedestal because they save lives but they’re human and they make mistakes. It’s okay that’s you don’t trust doctors. It’s okay if you get scared when someone tells you that you need to go. Your feelings are absolutely valid.
Also shout out to all the people who are suffering or have suffered without treatment because doctors didn’t even believe your symptoms are real, let alone that they have a real medical cause. It’s okay to not trust doctors’ opinions and think they’re just gonna gaslight you or right you off as a drug seeker. Your feelings are absolutely valid.
If your doctor won’t listen or you don’t feel comfortable around them, get a new doctor! Doctors are supposed to work FOR you to get you the help and care you need. If they aren’t then you have every right to be upset and find a new one. You always have a right to a second opinion. What you feel is real.
Shoutout to those of us who have been cycled through dozens of doctors because they consistently refuse to treat you.
Shoutout to everyone who has spent months waiting for an appointment with their new specialist only to get to the visit and be told they can’t help you.
Shoutout to everyone who calls a new doctor every month to ask if they will take you on as a patient, only to be told they are full, don’t take your insurance, or don’t treat People Like You and then get told you are not trying by your other doctors or family because you’ve failed to get in anywhere.
Shoutout to the chronically ill who have been abused by their doctors or therapists consistently their whole lives and still have to go and see them because opting out of medical care all together could kill you.
Shoutout to people who have been raped by gynocologists and forced into invasive exams and reliving trauma because if you try to get out of it you can’t get your medication.
Shoutout to everyone who’s only available support systems believe doctors can do no wrong and get yelled at if you try to talk about your trauma, because you are clearly an outlier, and speaking out gets you accused of hurting other patients by discouraging them from seeing anyone.
Shoutout to everyone who has been accused of faking things despite having a longer list of positive medical test results for the conditions they’re supposedly faking, than the people accusing them of doing the faking – and much of this accusation coming from the fact that you don’t automatically trust medical professionals, and say so publicly a lot, which annoys people who have some weird vested interest in making medical professionals seem infallible.
Shoutout to everyone who has been told that you shouldn’t be allowed to take part in self-advocacy/disability rights unless you show everyone proof of your diagnoses – and then if you do, having even that proof used against you somehow.
Shoutout to everyone who has referred to any doctor as less than perfect, who has then been told something like “You only dislike doctors who don’t tell you everything you want to hear” – by complete strangers who know nothing of your actual medical history or history with the doctors in question. (For instance, I referred to a particular doctor as a jerk because he had tried his hardest to convince me that I wasn’t a real adult, and tried to manipulate my parents into controlling my life in a quasi-guardianship type way, until both me and my parents got sick of his BS, at which point he actually threw a massive tantrum on the telephone when my parents wouldn’t automatically do what he told them to do to me. But apparently the only reason I didn’t like him, according to people on the Internet who knew nothing of this history, is because he preferred using -NOS diagnoses to actual diagnoses (because -NOS “avoided labeling people”…how!?!), even when you met the criteria for the actual diagnosis in question. Which is something I disagreed with him on, but is hardly grounds I’d use to call a doctor a jerk. The best psychiatrist I ever saw had similar biases about “labeling”, and was not ever what I’d call a jerk, even when he was wrong about a lot of things.)
Shoutout to anyone who has ever posted something even passingly negative about a doctor, only to have people online respond in any context with the phrase “the good doctor” (like “Given that you’re probably lying about all this, I think we should hear from the good doctor about this matter before dismissing what he has to say”), used unironically, and entirely to piss you off.
(For context, I got that response when I mentioned that a psychiatrist had unilaterally decided what I was thinking and what motivated me and then written it into my record as fact. In particular, he said that the reason I was upset at a certain point in time was because I wanted to be out on romantic adventures like other teenagers instead of stuck at home with my parents. Which was completely false, but made it into my permanent record as true, because he had a habit of declaring what I was thinking, and then painting it as “We figured this out in the course of therapy,” regardless of whether I had agreed with him at any point in the course of said therapy or not. But apparently I’m not even competent to know whether I was upset about being stuck at home with my parents or not. According to bizarre Internet trolls anyway. But using the phrase “the good doctor” in this kind of context is pretty much always manipulative and nasty.)
Shoutout to anyone who’s been considered a bad patient entirely because a sufficient number of doctors have not gotten along with you for reasons that have nothing to do with what kind of a patient you are or aren’t. Even when you followed their directions to the letter and were as submissive as is humanly possible to be, in an attempt not to be labeled a “bad patient” again. Because there exist doctors out there for whom nothing you can do, save for dying and/or moving away and not being under their care anymore, will ever be good enough, but you have to go back to them anyway because you have literally no other choices to get survival-level care. And for every doctor you don’t get along with, you get a reputation for being “difficult”, even if you have done less to be considered difficult than most patients otherwise demographically similar to you.
Shoutout to anyone who’s ever literally been told, by one of their better doctors, that they were a difficult patient because they were delirious when sick and hospitalized. (For anyone who doesn’t know, both illness and hospitalization are risk factors for delirium, as is previous delirium. So like, hospitalizing someone with a long and well-known history of delirium for being sick and then calling them difficult because of delirium-related problems is a very bizarre thing to do.)
5:01am
June 3, 2015
Oh and on the topic of cyberbullying…
…one thing I get a lot of at times, and not at all other times, but it always irritates the crap out of me, is people asking me personal questions about my personal life based on things I wrote between 5 and 15 years ago. Particularly the people who page through everything I’ve ever written looking for “discrepancies” and then ask supposedly innocent questions that are clearly intended to “expose discrepancies” at worst and satisfy their curiosity about supposed discrepancies at best.
Like the person who basically said, in an ask that may or may not have been anon I don’t remember, but it’s a good example: “On your old website it said you cut your hair short because you wouldn’t be able to rip it out that way, and now you have long hair. Do you still pull your hair out? What made you decide to grow your hair out again? Why is it not a problem for you now if it was a problem for you back then?”
More about cyberbullying and my history with it and why this question is more than a question, under the cut:
8:36am
June 2, 2015
Part of my actual official recording (behavior) sheet from Judge Rotenberg Center. Just some of the things I was shocked or it in trouble for. There is much more too. Under MDIS2 is I get shocked for having “5 IVB1 in an hour” at bottom shows what IVB is- talking to self, laughing etc. JRC claims they only shock major behaviors. Liars. See MDIS1- I also got shocked for “touching telephone, tic like body movements (I have Tourettes), hand movements in front of face, jumping up and down etc and much much more. This is only part of my sheet
8:34am
June 2, 2015
The Day I Spoke Up
One of the last houses I lived in before I finally got out of that place was one I hated the most. The supervisor of that house had a really bad mean streak. I did my best to stay on her good side because if she didn’t like you she made sure your life was hell. Mostly I got along with her and bit my tongue when she tested me. But I was always stressed at that house, especially when she was in charge. I remember one day one of the other girls commented that we were being tortured. She got angry and said that we didn’t know what torture was, referring to her home country. But she was wrong, We knew torture very well. She had no empathy towards what we went through every day mentally and physically. She had the nerve to try and make us feel guilty for commenting on our own abuse.
It was a Saturday or Sunday. We were all sitting in the living room having some free time. One of the other residences called saying that a certain girl in our was on the list to go on a field trip with them. So the staff had to get her ready to go. She needed help dressing and stuff and she didn’t have any socks on. Staff didn’t feel like going upstairs to get the girls own clothes so they dug through the laundry that was downstairs with us. When they were giving her the socks I noticed they had another girls name on them. She was kind of my friend, and not even thinking I said, “hey —- aren’t those yours?” She said “yes”. Now I just want to say I didn’t do anything wrong. It was against the rules for staff to give our clothes or property to other students, although they did it all the time. And it was free time so I didn’t need permission to speak to my friend. But the supervisor got really mad that I said that. Her face turned nasty and my stomach dropped. She told me “No talking out!” I tried to hold it in, but the oppression, the fucking oppression, the power tripping staff who saw us as less-than. The policies and the “program” that stripped us of our basic rights to freedom of speech and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. The program that denied my intelligence and personhood. I couldn’t take it another day. I came right back at her, saying “I was just helping my friend”. She says “no arguing with staff”, and it went back and forth from there. I knew I was going to lose all my privaleges by this point so I just kept talking. There was nothing I was doing on my program that she could shock me for. But she searched and searched my sheet. Finally she stopped and called the monitor from next door over. They had to call the monitor over to shock us ever since the prank phone call fiasco, so I knew what was coming. And I knew it was for a lie she made up. She lied and told the monitor I was tensing up, and they shocked me.
I was so incredibly frustrated. I was at my breaking point. Staff did whatever they wanted and got away with it. And we weren’t even allowed to defend ourselves or speak up. At JRC, even if a staff is pinpointing you wrong, you are expected to accept it and the punishment, and then later write a “business letter” to your case manager telling them what happened. They teach us that we are punching bags and must accept all the shit done to us with out so much as a peep. That is teaching us to be victims that don’t matter. I was sick to my stomach. I had to get away. I requested to call my legal guardian but was denied. I felt so unsafe there, with her. I knew she could make up any lie she wanted to hurt and shock me.
I gathered the strength, and ran up the steps and out the front door. As soon as I hit the cold winter air, my lungs tightened up from my asthma and I barley could make it across the icy front yard. I just crossed the street and I got grabbed from behind. It was the supervisor, and I felt like I was in a fight for my life. I couldn’t let her take me back inside, because now that we were outside, she could say I did anything and there was no camera to prove I didn’t. I knew she would. She tackled me into a snowbank and was sitting on me. I was trying so hard to get up. Cars were going by, and one finally stopped. A man got out, and told her to get off of me. I was yelling “help help”. She told him she had a right to do what was because I was in a “group home” and she was in charge. I kept asking him for help, and he got between us and made her get off of me. I remember I hugged that man, and I felt safer with that stranger then these staff I had been stuck with for years. He had called the police and when they came she kept arguing that she had a right to take me back to the house. But thankfully they wouldn’t let her. The police called an ambulance which took me to a nearby hospital. I felt so relieved to be away from her, like the world off of my shoulders, I had been so scared. They put me in an empty room at the hospital, and soon after, the supervisor arrived. She tried to come in the room with me and I freaked out. the security guard told the doctors that I was calm until she came near me, and they made her get out. After a while the weekend administrator came. She told me because of what I did I had to move to another residence with more staff. I actually felt relieved. I would be away from her.
I am so thankful to that stranger who stopped to help me. If he hadn’t pulled her off of me and called the police, she would have gotten me back in that house and shocked the hell out of me. It is amazing to me how all those strangers had more common sense and compassion then the staff and JRC program. It shows that what society considers wrong, is excused at JRC. Strangers saw me as more human the staff did. I was lucky that day, but there were many other days when I wasn’t.
Okay the following is not meant to take away from the impact of the story above at all, it’s just a reminder because of the symbolic super-importance the JRC has taken on in the minds of many people who have never been there or never been anywhere like it. This should not detract at all from the horribleness of the JRC or the experiences of the people who have lived there or have been at risk of living there. (I’m glad I didn’t have different parents, I would’ve easily been a candidate as a teen and young adult.)
So this is for everyone who wasn’t at the JRC:
Just a reminder that no matter where you are, these things are happening in your backyard, right now. You probably don’t even know how to recognize half the institutions in your area (many of them look almost like ordinary houses, these days), and your eyes may even glide over some of the more obvious ones as background scenery. And things just as bad or worse are happening there, too. The JRC sucks but there’s very little unique about it. Focus on its uniqueness only contributes to the torture of others at other places. Closing it may not even help some of its inmates: Many will be sent to other institutions, and those institutions may do more damage than the JRC did for all anyone knows (and that can happen whether or not the person is consciously aware that the place is worse: it’s very common to be in a Stockholm Syndrome situation or one where you think a place is better because it lacks one specific thing that happened to you at another place, meanwhile it’s actually worse than the other place and you only realize it ten or twenty years after the fact when you look at the impact both actually had on your life – the worst place I was at had no locks on the doors, no bars on the windows, the windows were regular glass, no restraints, but it was utterly diabolical in ways that are far worse than things that other people would think are “objectively” worse… similarly many people I know who’ve been in both private and state institutions would take the state institutions any day, which causes surprise and disbelief among people who’ve only been to one or the other or neither – there’s no measuring stick you can easily use to say “this one is the worst” and I worry when JRC is singled out as the worst place anyone could possibly be… it’s an utterly horrible place, but unfortunately for disabled people everywhere, it’s one among many thousands, probably (I am not good at numbers but I think thousands at least)… so if you care about shutting down the JRC, please care about shutting down all the other places too, including the ones that are deceptively beautiful-looking but sometimes the most awful of all).
9:33pm
June 1, 2015
This is about cyberbullying. Really important points made – she really got to the heart of what it feels like to be targeted online vs. offline. I was deliberately set up for cyberbullying in a similar but less drastic way than she was, many years ago, and there are still consequences for me in terms of lost friends, lost communities, lost sense of having any privacy at all for the stupid things I said as a teenager, lost a lot of things.
Although I think it ultimately made me a stronger person, nobody should have to go through that and the stress levels were unbelievable and possibly triggered the near-total collapse of my health that same year. (Autoimmune diseases can be made worse or even triggered into existence by extreme stress.) A collapse of my health that I hid for over a year, telling only close friends how bad it had gotten, allowing people to believe I’d just chosen to disappear from a lot of online places, while frantically trying to post enough online to make it look like I was still healthy, even when I could not get out of bed on my own I was still making an effort to post on at least one webforum so people would think nothing was wrong, because I was so afraid of showing vulnerability, and so afraid of yet again being accused of “faking diseases habitually” since I had no clear diagnosis at the time.
But they did get diagnosed: Myasthenia gravis, gastroparesis and associated aspiration pneumonia, and severe adrenal insufficiency, all confirmed by tests and scans that literally can’t be faked. And yet people online still accuse me of faking even those, because that was the content of the cyberbullying, accusations of faking conditions that were not faked at all, just because they were pointing out parts of my past that I’d never actually hidden, I’d been talking about them all along, but few people had read enough of my writing to know that before people started claiming I was faking things.
And they used the fact that I’d gone along with conditions I didn’t have to survive the psychiatric system as a teenager, as “proof” that I like faking things. Seriosly WTF, that’s just not okay, especially since some of these bullies were the same bullies who convinced me I had some of htese conditions in the first place and urged me to act as if I did, so they could watch me. They’re actually mentioned in my psych records as people I should have no contact with because of the things they were doing to my head – somehow they didn’t like it when I posted that information.
Anyway, this is a really important video, it says that the antidote to cyberbullying is compassion, and that posting compassionate comments can turn around the potentially life-threatening level of humiliation that people experience when cyberbullied. And she also makes the point, much forgotten on tumblr, that everyone does stupid shit when they’re young, but only some people are dragged into the public eye either online or offline because of it, and that’s gotten more frequent as social media have gotten bigger. There’s entire cultures of bullying online now. Lots of them. Lots of places. Including right here on tumblr. And someone has to stand up to it, to counteract what she refers to as the bystander effect, where people think everyone else is going to do something about it so nobody does anything about it. And seriously she’s right about compassionate comments helping.
Unfortunately sometimes bullies – the really sadistic ones usually, the ones who plan it out in cold blood — will claim to be the victim of their targets. That’s what my cyberbully did to me. Before I even understood what was happening, she claimed I’d been stalking her and stealing her life story, probably to make money from and get famous by. It turned out she had a long track record in the autistic community of picking out autistic people, almost all women or DFAB, and targeting them with such accusations. She was basically run out of the community on a rail back around 2000, and laid low for 8 years before popping up at random claiming to hae changed and become a better person, and constantly wanting to talk to me more and more, asking lots of detailed personal questions that in retrospect showed way too much knowledge of my life already (even at the time she put my teeth on edge the moment she came into the chatroom, it was like getting blasted with hatred), and then using it all against me in the end, including going to the lengths of deliberately contacting former bullies I’d mentioned online, in order to involve them in this project.
These are people who used to utterly and totally endorse the idea that I was autistic, back when it was just another way to say I was broken in some way, crazy, whatever. But when it became more fun to say I wasn’t autistic, afer talking to this woman, they suddenly started telling people I’d never shown the slightest sign of autism. Even though one of them used to host my autism website and post articles of mine all over the web without permission, talking about how insightful they were into autistic thinking, just to annoy me. I haven’t actually talked to these bullies in over 15 years, haven’t seen them in closer to 20 years, and yet they still have this desire to be involved in cyberbullying me. I’ve moved on with my life since I knew them, they apparently haven’t since they knew me, because I rarely think about them except when writing articleslike this, but they think about me an awful lot given the amount they’ve tried to fuck up my life. One of them even impersonated a reporter to try to get people to give them private information about me. (The reporter was Not Amused. Pissing off reporters is generally not a good move, either.)
Anyway… I’ve never been the subject of a TV scandal, but I’ve certainly been the subject of a manufactured Internet scandal, and it really fucking sucks, and it sucks worse when your bully is claiming to be your victim and playing up her vulnerability, while you can’t show any vulnerability for fear of being targeted worse. She posted my address online and told people what she thought my staff hours were, so that they could come and kill me outside of staff hours. We instituted all kinds of security at that point, but I was still scared for my life, especially when I became too physically weak to call for help or fight off an attacker. So I couldn’t say that I was that weak, and I had to pretend everything was fine as my life fell apart around me. I had to pretend i was eating enough, sleeping enough, able to move properly, etc. People knew I was now in a powerchair when I stated showing up to events in one, but they didn’t know how bad it had gotten, I didn’t let them. Not until I determined it was safe.
Meanwhile my bully was whining about how every single thing I did – and she would delineate them all in great detail on a blog she started for this purpose - was supposedly in imitation of her, and how thin she had gotten as a result of how I supposedly made her stop eating (she probably went on a diet or something… she used the fact that I was fat against me so many times it was horrible, but when this started there was only 20 pounds difference between us – she always added about 100 pounds to my weight and many inches to my height when she described me, claiming I was even lying when I said I was 5′2″, like how could I lie about that, you just… can’t).. And weirdly enough some people actually believed what looked to me like transparent bullshitting and deliberate histrionics designed to make people feel sorry for her (she even bragged, in private, about how she could evoke that reaction in people on purpose and how good it made her feel to do so, because she could get away with anything, including attacking people, by being “the poor little severely retarded multi-handicapped woman”). Some people I wouldn’t expect to believe a stranger over someone they’d known for years. That was the hardest part was not having the ability to be in the autistic community without some people harassing me “on behalf” of my bully. Being in that community is a thing most people take for granted, most of them are not targeted for major cyberbullying campaigns within the community, and most of them can enter and leave it freely at will without being stalked and harassed everywhere they go except for places that deliberately shut out bullies.
And that was my life for many years, it’s gotten better, but being a target sucks and we have to do something about it on a larger scale or people who don’t manage to salvage their lives will commit suicide in large numbers. And she’s right that humiliation is a more strongly felt emotion than either happiness or anger. I felt like there was giant eyeball trained o me and I was this tiny animal huddling in a corner. But I couldn’t show weakness, meanwhile my bully was making a pastime out of showing fake weakness to get sympathy about nonexistent actions on my part. This is why I loved that book Rilla of Ingleside, where there’s a woman who makes a huge public display of emotions she isn’t really feeling that strongly, while Rilla is hiding her emotions about the exact same situation (so that she won’t cause worry to her relatives who are at war by publicly freaking out about them being at war) – and because Rilla is hiding her emotions, this other person spreads gossip throughout the town that Rilla is cold-hearted and has no feelings at all for the people she knows, including her boyfriend and brothers, who are fighting in World War I.
But that’s the thing. She spread that news throughout the town. As Monica Lewinsky points out, cyberbullying spreads malicious gossip throughout the planet and then makes it so it is forever on the Internet and anyone can find it, potentially forever. So people who have never known me can google me and find out that I’m supposedly a big fraud, and some of them will believe it, and this will influence their behavior towards me, which influences my life. I’ve llearned to live with it but the bottom line is nobody should have to live with this. Nobody. I’ve seen people fall in to the trap of thinking some people do deserve it, and that “deserving” people deserve whatever they/we (if they put me in that category and they sometimes do) get.
And yes, love and compassion are the only answer in the end, as in so many other areas of life. Love and compassion not just felt as feelings, not even necessarily feelings at all, but rather acted on as fundamental aspects of how we interact with the world.
4:30pm
June 1, 2015
As an indication of what a garbage nightmare in general the school system I spent 10 years in was, in side by side middle and high schools with about 600-700 students total? There was one kid who was out as gay the whole time I was there.
ONE. Who couldn’t have hidden worth a damn, if they had tried. Things were about as bad for that person as you might expect.
I mean, a lot of the rest of us who were indeed not cishet and getting a lot of harassment did group together. But, it was bad enough without being openly out in that environment.
(And I think I heard that C. who was out then, is actually trans. Not totally sure, thus the generic they. Not to degender, but I don’t want to misgender people even if they don’t know about it and probably don’t even remember who I am after all this time.)
Yeah there was only one out gay kid in my high school too. I was gay and so was the guy everyone thought I should be dating (and yes I did eventually date a guy, but he wasn’t gay, I was just heavily closeted and confused about my attraction to women and nonbinary people at that point in my life) and he said he’d been bullied a lot for being fat and for being gay (possibly without the gay part being explicit), but he’d never seen anyone bullied the amount I was.
I don’t know how much the out gay guy was bullied, but he ended up transferring to a famous elite east coast prep school (yes I went to a high school where everyone but me and my friend seemed to be rich people who could do things like that, they were always talking about flying to Paris and shit like it was just something you do, and it was awkward and weird class-wise), and then he had to leave because of “stress”, which I wonder if it was a code word for being mercilessly bullied. The only thing I remember of how he was treated when he was still at my school, was someone saying something like “He only reads that gay magazine in public because he wants to flaunt how out he is so everyone can see he’s gay every minute of the day.” When there was an openly gay guy in Junior Statesmen of America (don’t even ask why I joined) I heard everyone saying similar things, like “He only gets the attention he gets because he’s gay, not because he’s a good debater. He just uses it to get attention and fame and stuff.” Like I wonder if these people knew what it was like to even be a deeply closeted gay or trans person.
Oh and the JSA guy? Amazing speaker, amazing charisma, totally not because he was gay. Yes he was in the gay marriage debate. Yes he talked about how he wanted to meet a beautiful man and then marry him. And his speech was amazing with or without a personal connection, not that the personal connection didn’t help, but… not the way these people meant. It just made it more compelling because he wasn’t talking about abstract theories, he was talking about real people’s lives.
The guy in my high school was also an amazing public speaker and had been student body president of my junior high, but I don’t remember if he was in JSA or not. My only involvement in JSA was a totally embarrassing moment where I got accused yet again of being on drugs (everyone’s go-to answer for my more flagrantly autistic moments) for showing up at a marijuana legalization debate with my entire speech planned out in my head… but I had neglected to translate it into words and found myself going nonverbal during a marijuana debate in front of hundreds of people. I had those weird social-awkwardness-flashback things for over a decade after that, in which I’d find myself repetitively blurting out things I’d meant to say but couldn’t at the time, or things other people did say at the time.
Wow, high school memories. For only being in mainstream high school for all of three months (but being allowed back for JSA and JCL – Junior Classical League, basically Latin club, just like JSA was a glorified debate club with a pretentious name, but JCL was less pretentious too and more fun) I got a lot of bullying in, and a lot of it was for being autistic (even if they didn’t know to call it that – someone who knew me back then, when I told him I’d been diagnosed, had a three-word answer – “that explains everything”), but a lot of it was also a gender thing that manifested as both transphobic and homophobic remarks
(And sometimes transmisogynistic remarks, because some people were constantly implying I was something like a “boy in disguise as a girl”, possibly because of a “sex change”, and those phrases I just used should tell you how little they know about what being trans means. For the record I’m FAAB and genderless, but just like I was mistaken for other kinds of disabled than I am sometimes, I’ve also been mistaken for other kinds of trans than I am. Especially by people almost totally ignorant of what trans means beyond this idea of “sex change operations”…)
(Since even trans people who aren’t genderless sometimes don’t get genderlessness, I can’t imagine these people would, or would even care to. I didn’t even get it at the time, though I worried that inside I might be male, because I had strong feelings of female not fitting ever since I fully discovered that gender existed at the age of seven or so, and it got worse at puberty. It wasn’t until my twenties that, probably reinventing the wheel, I came up with the idea of genderlessness to describe what I was, and that was after a lot of soul-searching after noticing differences between me and other people who identified as FTM at the time – some of whom still do and some of whom, like me, discovered that there were other categories that fit us better. And at the time I remember trying to come up with a word to describe my lack of gender identity, and settling on nongendered, which at the time I contrasted with both transgendered (which I thought always meant “identifying with some kind of gender, just not the one you were assigned at birth”, but which can also mean “not identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth”, it just depends on who you ask) and cisgendered (which by definition always means identifying with a gender – the one you were assigned at birth). I now strongly prefer genderless, a word which I had read in an article by Jane Meyerding but forgotten about until later. As a word, it rolls off the tongue, or fingers, easier than any of the alternatives (nongendered feels slightly awkward, agender feels very awkward, and neutrois feels French).)
5:37am
May 27, 2015
Age that women first noticed men were looking at them sexually
by Teelo888
Girls don’t get childhood. They get girlhood.
Because I don’t want to see any comments after this reblog on how it’s perfectly normal for boys to start noticing girls when they’re all going through puberty – this graph is based on women’s responses to an /r/AskReddit thread that specifically mention grown, adult men.
I remember doing a shift at my work experience placement in a bookstore and some grown man (he was starting to grey around the beard) came up to me while I was stocking the shelves. He was asking if I always worked in the History section and I said no, I stock all over the store (duh?) and suddenly went from zero to a hundred by asking “What time do you get off work? Can I take you for coffee?”
The feeling was instantaneous - hot and cold at the same time. Your stomach curdles and chills while your skin heats and feels like it’s melting away. My whole face turned red and all I wanted to do was vomit. “I am fourteen years old.”
He looked embarrassed as hell.
… And yet …
“What? No, you can’t be.”
“… BUT I AM. I AM FOURTEEN YEARS OLD.”
“Bullshit, where’s your ID?”
“SIR, the only ID she has is from her JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL.” My (male) manager had walked up behind me (he later said he heard me say my age the first time around and came running over). “She’s a minor. She doesn’t have to show you anything. Can I help you with something? Do you need help with a purchase?”
The word ‘minor’ set this guy off and he started ranting about how I was leading him on. Another customer (probably in his 20s) overheard it all, looked at me and back at the guy, obviously determined that I was not in my twenties, sneered and went “Gross, dude” - which, yeah, but that set this creep off even more. My manager and another male employee ended up walking him out.
I will fucking love that manager until the end of days for stepping in like that - but unfortunately nothing will take away that cold, gut wrenching feeling a young girl gets hit on by a man twice her age.
I was fourteen, in the Bahamas on vacation, and a full-grown man tried to lure me away from the table where I was waiting for my mother who was in the washroom. I was timid and shy and had absolutely no idea what his motives were, but in retrospect, best case scenario, he wanted me to have sex with him. Don’t want to think about the worst case scenario. I looked mature for my age, but he ASKED ME MY AGE AND I TOLD HIM AND HE CONTINUED TO PURSUE IT.
Thank the fucking lord my mother returned a minute later and had a fucking meltdown when she saw what was going on.
If men want to complain about how they’re always seen as predators, this graph is a good fucking example of why most women do. I guarantee you that most women have one or two stories like this.
When I was on vacation at the beach with my mother, probably seven or eight years old, a man came around and apparently wanted to photograph me. My mom told me I did the right thing by “totally ignoring him”. The reality was (due to autistic sensory processing issues – meaning-deafness and meaning-blindness) I never saw him and never heard him talking to me, so “ignoring” him came naturally. My mom saw and heard the whole thing though. I wasn’t sure what the big deal was because I didn’t understand his intentions even after my mother was upset.
The first time I was totally aware of a grown man approaching me sexually was age eleven when my grandfather was more than explicit about his intentions towards me. (I would have probably remained clueless if he’d just groped me, but he groped me and talked to me about how he loved touching “little girls” like that because it made him feel good.) I didn’t understand the word “molest” at that age, though – that much I remember because someone used it in front of me at an older age, I asked what they meant, and they treated me like I was kidding because nobody could be that old and not know the word “molest”. (I also got a high IQ score at the age of 5 without knowing the meaning of the word “test”, so… long history there.)
9:12pm
February 4, 2015
Another reason I usually stay away from LGBTQ Community Centers
CW: Racism, ableism, child molesters, police, when “your” community isn’t.
So there was this guy who was on the board, and always seemed to be at every activity. The man was an asshole. Everyone knew itbut nobody stood up to him. I remember him talking about how the KKK was just about having picnics and get-togethers for white people.
And there was a woman, she had a psychiatric disability and could not pass for neurotypical if she tried. And she didn’t try. And this guy would engage her in pointless cruel arguments over whether she had a “motorcycle” or just a “moped”. Anyway one night he was bragging about how he was going to look charitable by buying her a TV, bu that his real purpose was to keep her out oof the community center. He talked about how it should be legal for parents to murder their severely disabled children or something along those lines. And whiel we were reeilng from that, he told us that pedophiles were just another misunderstood sexual orientation and our society wasn’t ready to handle that.
My friend who took me to the community center wasn’t sure whether she was straight or bi, and this becomes important in a minute.
So when he says the pedophile thing, I ran across the roojm and crouched behind a shelf so I didn’t h ave to look at him. My heart was pounding and I think i was having a panic attack if not a flashback.
He said “See, society isn’t ready to handle pedophiles.”
And my friend was like, “Mel was molested, you asshole” or something along those lines.
He said, “See, she’s too close to the issue to be objective about it. And this isn’t even your commuity center, you said you didn’t feel like you could label yourself. This place is for gay people.”
At the end, I was showing off a button I had bought there. I bought it not knowing its history. It said, “Riots not Diets, Fat Dykes are Revolting, Expect Something Big.” I loved it and bought it on the spot. At the time I was definitely, as now, in the Death Fats category. But even a thin person could wear that button, it’s not like it declared a size-based identity, it just made a lot of hilarious size acceptance puns.
Anyway, I’d found out that a friend had designed it in the seventies or eighties. I wore it to keep something of her close. Like the dad-shirtss, I related to people through objects. And Mr. Gay Asshole Dude starts criticizing me for wearing it when I’m “not THAT fat”. (I weighed as much as I did when I started getting fat anon hate. I assure I was that fat, this guy was just fatter than most fat people and judged us against his standard.“
I experienced the criticism as an attack on my friendship with the woman who designed it – my second mother, as we call her in my family, because when I grew up she took up a lot of parenting duties my parents didn’t have the knowledge to prepare me for the world as a severely disabled adult who needed services and SSI/DAC to survive.
So I said "But she is that fat, the woman who made the button.”
He also said he’d seen an autistic boy on TV and I didn’t look like him. I had half a mind to tell him he didn’t look like Dame Edna so he couldn’t be gay. (Yes, I know Dame Edna wasn’t gay – know because I know a woman he apparently molested, in a long string of others – but the point is television caricatures are not reality.)
And I left.
And I got so upset I had a meltdown on the bus for home: Two drivers (one in training) asked me two separate contradictory questions, and I started screaming and banging my head and finally froze and couldn’t move . The cops were called, and they spent a long time trying to work out if I wss male or female. That was their top concern. Then they started wondering if I was beeathing or not. After they determined that I was, they found my Medic-Alert bracelet, who connected them to my dad, who said take me home, don’ take me to the station, don’t take me to the ER. So they closed off the whole bus and drove me home in ii, making me feel like a waste of resources. This was after they called my home number a zilliion times expecting it to be a group home, not an apartment.
I kept myself amused by thinking about Cal Montgomery’s “Critic of the Dawn” because it never would occur to them I would be able to think about Bruce and Mary, and how they were treating me like Bruce, and my place in disability history.
The only upside to this was I’d had enough bus incidents, and this was the final straw, that the county just automatically let me use paratransit from then on. Which had its own problems, but it worked.
But seriously between that guy and some others… I reported him to the board, and they said everything he did was out of line except the comments about disabled children, because that was a “matter of personal opinion”. That’s always the way with disability discrimination, even when it’s identical in all but name to other kinds of discriminatio, it’s somehow okay when we’re disabled.
With all that, I stopped going to that place very often, and only when I had kava spray on me. (An herbal anti-anxiety med that came in a form you could spray under your tongue. That stuff helped me survive some brutally traumatic situations.)