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1:13pm August 18, 2014

Disability and power

realsocialskills:

A group of people with disabilities is not always a group in which everyone has equal power. 

Some examples (by no means an exhaustive list, and not all of these examples apply all the time):

People who are better at asserting power can have more power.

People who speak more easily can have more power.

People who think more quickly can have more power.

People with the most common disability in the group can have more power.

People used to being ok with their disability can have more power.

Power dynamics in a group always need to be monitored and taken seriously.

Restricting the group membership to people with disabilities can be part of the solution, (because it can eliminate the part of the problem involving nondisabled allies and parents taking over), but it can never be the whole solution. Power dynamics exist in all groups, even with members of the same marginalized group.

2:29pm July 24, 2013

You have to understand. (Written in 2005, largely about a woman who later used her power in a DD agency to falsely accuse me of hitting her (I didn’t touch her, there were witnesses), as well as trespassing (I wasn’t, my movement disorder made me walk until I hit a fence), and going AWOL (I was an adult, allowed to leave whenever I wanted), all because I tried to stand up to her. My staff became “renegade staff” for defending me.)

[This is written to expose the real message behind the words of some of the patronizing and controlling people — mostly non-disabled ‘advisors’ — I have met in my experiences with ‘self-advocacy’. Dave Hingsburger wrote about this dynamic in Cutting the Strings: Suggestions for Self-Advocacy Groups, and Phil Schwarz gave it brief mention in his discussion of ‘pseudo-allies’ in Identifying, Educating, and Empowering Allies. If you are a self-advocate who finds these words useful, please use them, but keep my name and this note on them. If you are an ‘advisor’ who sees yourself in these words somehow, please do something about it. And by do something, I don’t mean make excuses and scapegoats. We know perfectly well what you’re doing to us.]

You don’t understand how we do things here. Here, please let me show you. You have to understand these things.

Hear this sing-song voice? That means that I’m trying to explain something to you. It’s for your own good. It will help me oppress you.
You have to understand that I am going to oppress you and use my power and privilege against you, but you’re not allowed to say anything about it. Once you actually say something, the power of my mild sing-song tone will cause you to look positively combative in comparison. I will use my perfect voice and all the correct buzzwords — the right words sometimes, but in the wrong context — and you will look crass next to me.

And see these people around here? You have to understand that they process information differently. (Forget that you do. That’s not important here. Because you’re being bad right now and it’s my job to give corrections.) That’s why I have to assist them (that actually means control them but you’re not allowed to say so, because you do acknowledge that people need assistance, and you wouldn’t want to look like you were denying that). We’ve accomplished a lot.

Truly taking the time to listen to you or anyone else in the group is out of the question. I have a schedule to keep, after all. I will spend a good deal of time on topics that have nothing to do with your rights, and then I will rush you through any discussion of real issues.

If this bothers you, I will make it your problem, and point out to you that it’s just not possible to hold a discussion with people with slow processing. Heaven forbid I slow things down so that you can understand and give meaningful input. After all, I let you people interrupt me during other times, so long as the interruption doesn’t bother me too much. That’s all that can be done for you. You couldn’t possibly have an interaction style of your own that takes more time. I couldn’t wait for the words to come out. I’ll put them in your mouth if you want, though, and then you can repeat my words. Isn’t that revolutionary?

I’d let you have your voice if it were meek and compliant. But since your voice is different, since you’ve had a taste of living as a free human being with rights, I am going to have to do something about this. But I won’t say so. And if you say so, nobody will believe you. After all, you’re just a client, and I can make up an excuse for your input not to count.

But no, you’re not a client. We’re all individuals. I am just as individual as the rest of you. You are each individual from each other. In this way, I can teach you to ignore oppression by acting as if we are on equal ground to begin with.

When I want you to be smart, I’ll treat you like you’re smart, because it’s convenient to me. When I want you to be dumb, I’ll treat you like you’re dumb, because it’s convenient to me. None of it will have to do with anything about how you process information or think about things. It’s all about me and my ability to dominate you. But you’re not allowed to say so, that would be wrong.

I am going to do this all in the name of protecting everyone else from what you have to say, but really you threaten my position of authority. You not only understand what’s going on, but you say something about it. The others understand how patronizing and controlling I am, and some even take steps against it, but I am going to shove that to the back of my mind and put my focus on you. That way I won’t have to think about the fact that in all my lectures about the proper modes of self-advocacy, I have never given anyone the tools to stand up to me. If people don’t stand up to me, it’s obviously because I’ve never done anything wrong.

If I single you out, I won’t have to think about what I am doing to everyone, I can just understand that there is this one person. Should I decide that you are critical and antagonistic, or should I just decide that you don’t understand because you’re disabled and need me to explain everything to you in the same voice that I speak to two-year-olds with? Maybe I’ll combine both, that will confuse you enough that you can’t come up with a quick response.

I am going to refuse to acknowledge the fact that you’re disabled, for the duration of this conversation. I may pay it lip-service, but I won’t take into account that when you listen to me you hear “You have to understand, blah-blah-blah, you have to understand, blah-blah-blah…" and miss almost everything but the patronizing tone and repetitive words. I’ll rush you so that you have to come up with quick, ineffective responses. And then I’ll tell you that you don’t understand the time some people need, and I’ll use your own words against you. But I won’t acknowledge that I’m running roughshod over your receptive and expressive language patterns, because that would be acknowledging that I’m doing something wrong, and that doesn’t fit my self-image as a wonderful helper to disabled people.

You’re not allowed to say anything about any of this. It’s all subtext. You are supposed to listen to this and be terrified and shamed into obedience. But anyone who voices the fact that they notice this subtext, whether they do it in words or behavior, well we can just hurry by them.

It’s all supposed to go unsaid. If you say anything, you’re ruining the wonderful bond we’ve all built up. And if you say anything, it shows you truly don’t understand how much I help you people.

It’s “you people" if I want to dominate you in one particular way. It’s “those people" if for some reason my dominance requires distancing you from the others. But don’t ever attempt to say that you have a common bond with them that none of you share with me. That would be divisive, and we can’t have that while I’m trying to control you. It would bring the power realities of the situation into such sharp focus that it would make it difficult for me to be dominant.

I say this with a smile on my face and in my voice, the very picture of cheerfulness. This means that if you are anything less, it’s clear which one of us is being nice. Never mind if you don’t have the cognitive or motor skills to do all this social pretending bullshit. With this cheerful attitude, I will erase all evidence of privilege, power, and dominance. While at the same time remaining at the top of all three. You have to understand, this is the way we do things, and you don’t fit. And if you don’t fit, it’s your fault, you need to learn to fit. You need to learn to be my kind of self-advocate, my kind of everything.

You have to understand, you have three choices: Shut up, agree with me, or disagree with me on a point so minor it’s not worth anything to me. Me, me, me, me, me. I do so much for all of you. Me, me, me, me, me. You have to understand. Me, me, me. Isn’t it empowering to allow me to speak my words using your hands or vocal cords?

If you keep coming back, I’ll have the chance to mold you into my image of a proper self-advocate, working within ineffective systems to get things done. Don’t you want that kind of recognition? Then you will understand what’s so important about us. But before you came to us, you knew nothing of self-advocacy. You knew nothing of the real ways to stand up for yourself. We need to teach you the real ways. Or I will teach you, through what I have imparted to others, who know how to do things the real way and don’t like the way you do things. But it’s not about me. Me, me, me, me, me.

You have to understand.

You have to understand.

You have to understand.

You have to understand.

You have to understand.

You have to understand.

(You have to obey.)

2:04pm July 24, 2013

The physical disability community is not “the disability community” no matter how much they think they are.

When people say the disability rights movement, most people think of the mainstream disability movement. It’s dominated by white men with physical disabilities, especially paras and quads. And very very white and middle class in general.

But it’s not the whole disability movement or disability community. It’s just the one that had claimed the title “the disability movement” because most people think physical disability when they think disability.

But there is also a bunch of psychiatric disability movements. Consumers, survivors, ex patients, mad pride, hearing voices. And there is the developmental disability movement. And the autistic movement. And the Deaf community. And on and on and on. Then there’s the cross disability movement, but as a friend of mine says, lots of people think cross disability just means both Quickie and Invacare". (Two different wheelchair manufacturers. Wonder where that leaves me as a Permobil.)

I’m very leery of the “coming home” experience many disabled people have with disability communities. It seems to create an intense and unreasoning loyalty to the group in question, which renders self examination difficult to impossible, something to become defensive about rather than embrace.

But if I have a home in any disability community, it’s the developmental disability self-advocacy community.

One thing I like about it is that we are not united by any type of disability, except that it started in childhood. The main disabilities involved are cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, autism, epilepsy, and brain injury. We have footholds in the domain of physical disability, cognitive disability, psychiatric disability, sensory disability, chronic pain, chronic illness, and learning disability. They always claim in medicalized contexts that learning disabilities such as dyslexia, and psychiatric disabilities, don’t count. But the reality is that even within the six main disabilities represented, psychiatric and learning disabilities can be closely linked to some of them. So in practice it happens.

We have been brought together, not by a common diagnosis or experience of our bodies, but by which people ended up put together in developmental disability institutions when they began forming. Developmental disability is not just another word for intellectual disability, it covers an extremely wide range of people. It’s similar to psychiatric disability, in that neither one is a classification that makes medical or experiential sense, it’s an accident of history.

But being an accident of history gives us our diverse disability experiences. It prevents us from uniting through common experiences of how our bodies function. Which is a good thing when you’re trying to unite for social change. The more diversity the better.

We are also diverse in other ways. We come from every possible economic background. Many of us are poor and working class as adults, because that’s what happens to a lot of disabled people. But our childhood could have been any mix of classes. We are also racially and ethnically diverse. People of color trend to shy away from the physical disability movement because of how white it is, and same with the autistic community. But that doesn’t happen so often with the DD community.  I get the impression that developmental disability tends to be such an intense common experience, especially for people who were in special ed and the adult DD system, that the community involves everyone. Plus people of color are more likely to be misdiagnosed with intellectual disabilities and grow up in this system. Whatever it is, the DD community seems to be the most diverse disability community I’ve ever encountered. In every possible way.

There also isn’t a lot of fuss about who belongs and who doesn’t. I’m sure it must happen occasionally, but I’ve never encountered people in the DD community gossiping about whether this or that person is truly disabled. In my experience that’s more common the more specifically a community revolves around a medical diagnosis. It’s also fairly common in the phys dis community. But I’ve never once seen it in the DD community. We gossip about plenty of other things. My favorite is to gossip about who the worst and best staff is and why. But we don’t tend to gossip about “this person doesn’t belong here”. Which creates a much healthier environment.

The main problems in the DD community involve staff taking over, and disabled people passively following. And staff setting the agenda because they believe we are not capable of setting our own. This happens more easily with us, because we often need staff to help us with cognitive tasks such as organizing. This leaves them in a position where instead of helping us do what’s important to us, they insist on taking over and making us do what is important to them.

I once attended a “self advocacy” meeting run by an incredibly condescending facilitator. She told the “leader” everything to say. She taught everyone to basically recite things she told them. She told me my means of communication took too long and I shouldn’t say anything, even though there were people who talked slower than I type.  And she controlled people by gestures. Eye gestures, hand gestures, face gestures, she used to tell people when to speak and when to stop speaking. This was very cunning of her. Because there was a man with cerebral palsy, put there to make sure she couldn’t take over too much. But he was blind. So she did most of her controlling through a means of communication he was literally incapable of detecting.

And she controlled that man in another way, very common when they choose a DD person to represent us in a services agency and supposedly protect us and speak up when abuses of power happen. I told the man what she was doing to control people without his knowledge. This is what he said, more or less:

“Oh god. You have to understand… I really love my job. I have never made this much money in my life. That woman is my boss. I can’t risk getting fired. Please just… never speak to me about this again, I can’t handle it, and I don’t like confrontation.”

That from the guy they supposedly hired to protect us from abuses of power. And they had him under their thumb in a thousand ways.

I tried to talk to the woman running the group, and she became very condescending and controlling. I sort of lunged towards her and ran out of the room. I walked across the street and due to my movement disorder I couldn’t stop walking until I hit a fence.

I came back in with my staff person. And I tried to apologize to the woman for running out. And she started screaming over the top of my communication device. I was so overloaded that the only words I caught, over and over, were “YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND!!!"  My staff person tried to reason with her but there was no reasoning.

My staff and I both got in serious trouble. That woman made sure the agency wrote me up for all sorts of things that didn’t even make sense.

She claimed that I punched her really hard on her upper arm. There were witnesses. All I did was my hand came near her sleeve – at the wrist – as I ran out of the room. I didn’t touch her and I sure as hell didn’t punch her or even swing at her. Everyone who saw it agreed. But she didn’t like me criticizing her, and she had a lot of power in the agency,  so she tried to have me written up for assault.

But the rest was even more ludicrous. I "went AWOL”. And I was “trespassing”. I am an adult. I am allowed to leave any building I want to leave, at any time. I am not required to get anyone’s permission. Also, in California, walking into sometimes driveway until you hit the fence is not trespassing, and it’s especially not trespassing when it’s caused by a movement disorder. So it’s impossible for me to be AWOL, absent without leave. And I wasn’t trespassing. And I never hit her or even touched her, let alone punched her really hard on the upper arm. The lack of any mark or bruise should’ve been a major clue. So should the fact that she reported me to the agency, not the cops. All three of these accusations were her revenge, as a powerful staff person, against me for speaking out about how she used power. It happens in the worst parts of the DD system constantly. It’s a way of keeping us under control, and a kind of slander.

Meanwhile, for standing up for me when I was being screamed at, my staff person was labeled a “dangerous, renegade staff”. And she got a lecture from the higher ups at the agency as well. We both had to go in and get talked to by someone in the agency about our “bad behavior”. So staff who stick up for us get in trouble too.

That’s what happens when self advocacy groups get taken over by agencies and institutions. Often self advocacy just gets turned into a word for a recreation group (recreation and self advocacy should never be mixed, even if it’s the same people involved in both), or the “group facilitator” takes over the agenda. And anyone who speaks out gets written up for bad behavior. But fortunately a huge amount of the community is not like that at all.

I wrote the following after attending that group:

http://archive.autistics.org/library/understand.html

But anyway. While that’s the really nasty underside of the DD community. The part that’s run by staff, not by us. The rest of it can be some of the most amazing communities I’ve ever been a part of. (And yes, that includes many, many people who want to use person first language. They are not brainwashed. They are not stupid or out of touch. They are not doing it for the same reasons as condescending nondisabled people. Please respect their choices.)

I’ve been part of the DD system for pretty much my whole adult life, and a little bit before that. Yet most people would never think of it being part of the disability community.

11:20pm June 1, 2013

Does anyone have good autism cards?

They have to be for use by actual autistic people, not “my child has autism” stuff. I’m an adult so it can’t be a child thing. I don’t have Asperger’s so the card needs to specifically mention autism – I’d hate to contribute to the myth that the only autistic people who can use words to communicate have AS, and that’s what using a card focused specifically on AS would do if I used it

They have to cover the fact that I might appear rude without intending to. Possibly including things like body language, bluntness, lack of conversational rhythm (interrupting), lack of understanding of social hierarchies, appearance of disrespect that isn’t really there, being overly wordy or unable to use words at all, not responding, startle response, appearance of emotions that aren’t actually there, saying or doing things that would be rude if a nonautistic person said them but aren’t at all intended that way when I say them, etc.

It would be best if it came from somewhere official, but it’s okay if it doesn’t, or if it’s just words for me to print out and laminate myself.

I badly need this. I keep encountering people in the healthcare system who think of me as rude when I’m not, think I’m being hostile or argumentative when I am not, think I’m angry when I’m not, etc.

Some of them are honestly confused, some of them are hostile themselves with a chip on their shoulder about having to treat me, and probably beyond hope. I hope that a card would help the confused ones understand. And for the genuinely hostile ones, a card would be documentation for any bystanders that I informed them about the effects of being autistic and that they are refusing to treat me right because of a disability.

These situations happen the most often when I am highly overloaded and struggling just to string words together and understand their words, and have no energy left over to modulate social interaction. The worst one recently happened just after I began to be able to type again rather than just use the picture symbols on Proloquo2go. (I had been under anesthesia and a lot of strong medications that addled my brain.) I got accused of interrupting, hostility, and disrespect, when I intended none of the above. He told me that I wasn’t treating him like a human being – when he was the one not treating me as human when I was just struggling to communicate at all. I even got told that my computer’s tone of voice sounded rude (I type to communicate). I have little hope that this particular man will ever see the light, but if I had handed him a card explaining things, he would have no excuse to treat me that way anymore, and any observers would understand that something was going very wrong with the way he was treating me.

These are genuine problems that I have had all my life. My body language and facial expressions are very hard for nonautistic people to read. I have a good deal of trouble putting things into words in real time, and can become overly wordy or underly wordy as a result, or choose words that seem rude to other
people. I have trouble following the rhythm of conversations and can seem to interrupt people because of that. I don’t understand social hierarchies and get in trouble for not showing deference to people who believe me to be beneath them. Sometimes I can’t respond to people at all, or can only respond in ways that appear hostile if you don’t know me well.

I know there are autistic people who think that autism can’t cause the appearance of rudeness, and that autistic people who talk about these things are just using autism as an excuse to be nasty to people. They couldn’t be more wrong. I try to respect people, I try to be nice, but my language and body language differences frequently result in horrible misunderstandings. Sometimes even misunderstandings with other autistic people! Some of these misunderstandings can be life threatening, because I have complex and severe medical conditions and doctors often want deference and other social signals that I’m incapable of. I sometimes get substandard treatment because of that, when it’s not just because they think my life isn’t worth anything because I’m disabled (which also happens frequently).

So I need some way of documenting and responding to people who treat me as if I’m being rude on purpose. I don’t need things that refer to me as having bad behavior or misbehavior. I need things that explain that any appearance of rudeness and disrespect is not intentional, with a brief explanation of some reasons why I can appear rude. This documentation will at minimum help bystanders understand when I’m being treated unfairly, and at maximum help the person I’m talking to understand that I’m not trying to be rude to them.

But I’m having real trouble writing such a card. I used to have a whole collection of cards for different social situations regarding autism, that I carried on a key ring attached to my belt loops. But I no longer have such a thing.

It would be ideal if I could find multiple cards, not just ones about rudeness. Also ones about difficulty communicating in general. Ones about my reactions to sensory input, and movement differences, and things like that. Things that explain why I may appear unresponsive or agitated but may understand everything around me. Things that explain that I may have difficulty understanding basic things around me. Each one for a different situation.

Possibly pointing back to a website with decent information about autism. By decent information I mean stuff that goes beyond calling it a social disability. Because to me autism is primarily sensory, cognitive, and motor. Social difficulties are an unfortunate but very peripheral outgrowth of those things. And social difficulties are not just on the part of the autistic person, they are a product of the interaction between two people with very different neurologies. So websites with descriptions of autism that focus primarily on social deficiencies would miss the point entirely, even when the card I’m using is for specific social interaction difficulties.

I’ve thought of ordering the card from the National Autistic Society in the UK, but it’s very long and I’m not sure people would read it. I’d prefer information broken up into separate cards for separate situations. I am so heartily sick of pouring every ounce of energy into communication and getting nothing but hostility and disbelief in return. It’s exhausting and also dangerous given the situations it often happens in for me. Most of my interactions are with medical professionals who are making decisions that could be life and death, and medical professionals are profoundly affected by their own assumptions about the personalities of their patients. I don’t have a personality defect, I have communication problems, and it’s very frustrating when I give everything I have and get nothing but gross misunderstanding in return. Sometimes it’s beyond frustrating, it’s genuinely traumatic to have this repeated over and over again. And there’s nothing I can do to change my language or body language differences, they are too rooted in sensory, motor, and cognitive differences that go down to my core. Also sometimes I appear agitated because I’m very overloaded and people mistake it for anger at them. Or I use a sort of agitated energy in order to force my body to obey me and move the way I want and get words out, and people take it personally (it’s actually a thing, lots of people with parkinsonlike movement disorders have to do things like that, I was so happy to hear of it in a lecture by an autistic guy with atypical Parkinson’s).

Also it would be nice to have a card for etiquette when talking to people who can’t speak. Because I get into a lot of situations where people don’t know how to deal with talking to someone who uses a keyboard to communicate, sometimes by typing and sometimes by pressing on picture symbols. I’ve even had doctors refuse to treat me because communication took too long. Which is bad when the doctor is a urologist who is supposed to be preventing constant UTIs caused by a spastic urethra. You get the idea.

It’s bad enough to face disability discrimination in medical care. I recently had doctors actually decide I would be better off dead than getting a feeding tube that saved my life. That wasn’t because I seemed rude, it’s because they look at me and only see “retard”, either consciously or subconsciously. (When I use that word I am not referring to a diagnosis or a real thing, but a malicious stereotype in people’s heads of a sort of unperson.) But when I seem rude or have other communication difficulties, that only gives them more excuse to deny me care. It’s not fair but it happens to autistic people all the time – it also happens to people who really genuinely are rude or hostile. But I am not rude or hostile and I need ways to document and communicate what is really happening in these interactions. The interactions always happen too fast for me to explain everything. And I end up feeling trapped and cornered and terrified. And somehow my terror gets interpreted as more disrespect. It’s a vicious cycle and I need a way to break it with those willing to listen, and document what is going on for people unwilling to listen.

Oh also I need to probably have an explanation for why my communication can be really repetitive. When I was in the emergency room recently with a clogged feeding tube, one doctor started complaining to another doctor about how I “went on and on and on and on and on” about my medical needs in the situation. The reality is that repetitive behavior and repetitive communication is a normal part of autism. I can’t control it. At all. For a wide variety of reasons. No more than I can control stimming when it happens. And again doctors opinions about my personality profoundly affect the care I receive, or don’t receive. This hospitalization I was actually (in my opinion and in the opinions of observers) probably punished for my communication style. In ways that increased my pain and overload and communication problems and muscle weakness. People don’t take me seriously. They do things to me they wouldn’t do to a nondisabled person, or even to many disabled people with more standard social skills.

I know it’s impossible to control the behavior of these people, especially the ones who think of me as a worthless unperson who deserves to die. But I need a way to show people that what is happening is actually discrimination, not a natural response to a rude disrespectful person. And having cards would be a start.

And as I said, cards for other situations besides misperceived rudeness would be a bonus too. There are lots of situations I could use cards for. I’ve just lost all my cards and am not good at writings short summaries of things like this. And I’m nearing the end of my rope in dealing with people who become hostile to me because they assume I am being hostile to them when I’m just being autistic.

And no. This is not about excuses to be a jerk. Don’t even go there. I do everything I can to be good to people but for some people everything I can do isn’t enough. These are genuine communication problems.

Also I’ve noticed something odd over the years. There is a specific group of people who, when reading my writing (and my word communication is almost entirely typing at this point in my life, with extremely rare exceptions), automatically see me as angry and hostile. Even if I’m feeling happy and friendly and calm. No matter what I am writing about. Some of them are just bullies looking for a fight, but some of them seem to genuinely misread my intentions. And I can never figure out what to do about that. Often they know I’m autistic, some are autistic themselves. They just see a tone in my writing that doesn’t actually exist, and that nobody else seems to perceive. They’re not the majority of people by any means, but interactions with them are always needlessly stressful.

I know that I can’t change how people think of me, and that for the most part people can think what they want. But I need something to do in situations where there’s actually a chance that what they do will affect my life greatly.

I’m so exhausted from typing this that I’m seeing double. My body is still messed up from transitioning back and forth to different seizure meds, going off lorazepam, the anesthetic they gave me a couple days ago, being taken off Mestinon while in the hospital for no good reason at all, and the stress of being in the hospital. But I need to figure out what I can do. This post is a good example of how when I get language problems, one possible response my brain has is actually to become extremely repetitive and verbose. Which is not good for writing autism alert cards.

I want the cards to have sufficient information to explain things in a basic way to people, while at the same time being succinct enough to fit on a card. The card can be around 5 by 7 inches or smaller, possibly slightly larger if necessary. But short enough that a person will actually read it when handed to them.

Other situations for cards include overload and shutdown and oh geez lots of things I can’t think of because fuzzy brain is fuzzy.

11:44pm April 11, 2013

I want to write something.

And writing it would be one of the most important writings I could contribute to autistic advocacy in the past several years.

It’s very important. And I’m in a fairly unique position to write it.

And I’m in too much pain. And my brain is fuzzy from all the medication I’m getting. And I can’t stay awake through a sentence.

And even if none of those were true, I’d have a hell of a time even beginning to write it.

But writing it is very important to me. It deals in life and death stuff, and often stuff that people either aren’t quite looking at in that way, or they’re looking at it sort of in that way but they lack the huge clump of life experiences I have to bring to the conversation. Ones that, if I could just access the memories properly, would result in a whole lot of detail that isn’t there when other people fret rightly about the same issues. And I still haven’t seen another person put it all together in the way I would, although who knows what is happening unspoken in people’s heads who can’t write the damn thing either.

This is another reminder to self that when I’m better, I can maybe try again to write this. Maybe with help. I swear it’s very important and I can’t let myself put it off forever. If recent events have taught me anything it’s that there is no forever to wait. And some things need to be said.